Welsh Journals

with a detailed biographical study of the author, a critical introduction on the significance of the book, together with some explanatory notes and appendices. The text itself is rather slight, and has little of the historical or topographical detail one finds in contemporary tours of Wales. Hucks was interested in the human foreground rather than historical background, and his text is thus more interesting as a reflection of an able but fairly conven- tional late-eighteenth-century mind than for any factual information on Wales. It is roughly contemporary with John Byng's Torrington Diaries, but more carefully finished for the press and, as a consequence, more artificial. Some of the radicalism and liveliness of mind of his companion Coleridge must have rubbed off, and Hucks expresses trenchant opinions on contemporary affairs, shows considerable sympathy for the poor natives of north Wales, but is still pre-romantic in his inability to like the wild and solitary mountains of Wales. The book seeks for general truths and broad observations on human nature, and only rarely communicates that thrill of discovery and shared delight which one has come to expect of a modern travel book. In its own way, however, it is quite revealing. It is nicely produced and beautifully edited, but one feels that there would be little chance of its being reprinted were it not for the sidelight it gives on the life of S. T. Coleridge. PRYS MORGAN Swansea HISTORIC INDUSTRIAL SCENES IN WALES. By D. Morgan Rees. Moorland Publishing, 1979. Pp. 140. £ 5.50. This book is a co-operative venture in more than one sense: it is the fruit of consultation by Morgan Rees of his colleagues in the Department of Industry at the National Museum of Wales and it was, sadly, their task after his untimely death to see it through the press. Nonetheless, Morgan Rees's own particular contribution to the study of industry in Wales shines through in his brief but lucid introduction and the informative explanatory paragraphs that accompany each illustration. There are 140 of these, ranging through sections on Ironmaking, Coalmining, Steel and Tinplate to Ports, Transport, Quarries and other industrial ancillaries. Amongst the photographs there are scattered reproductions of watercolours, pen-and- ink drawings, oil-paintings and lithographs so that neither the chronology or the type of illustration is limited. Naturally, the Crawshays, whose eagerness to put their impress over a whole landscape in north Glamorgan was only matched by an impulse to record their own achievements and deceptively lugubrious features, are met with again, as are numerous pit- head scenes and shipping-crammed docks. However, more concern is shown with geographical and industrial spread than importance or size. Coalmining, therefore, has only 17 plates but some are less expected than usual, such as views of the Hook Colliery in Dyfed and of Point of Ayr in the small north Wales field. One that is especially intriguing is that of the River Level Colliery in Aberdare, whose winding gear, overseen by women whose labour in Welsh industry still, to our shame, requires historical study, is raising coal in the 1860s amidst the (as yet) undemolished ruins of the Abernant Ironworks. Nothing, amidst the electrically operated