Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

than a sneaking suspicion, however, that he would have dismissed that truly fascinating coterie of auto-didacts and Baptist ministers who led the radical charge in Wales itself as just another bunch of Celtic chiliasts, like those damned Bretons who caused him so much trouble in the Vendee. For those who ponder upon such matters and who seek a primer on the Welsh response to the Revolution-Painite and Burkeian-one could start with Ymateb I Chwyldro. It consists of a brief introduction, in Welsh and English, followed by potted biographies of some of the leading Welshmen of the revolutionary day, pride of place, predictably, going to Richard Price and David Williams. One could treat it as a tasty little hors d'oeuvre, before sampling the meatier works by Whitney Jones, David Williams: the Anvil and the Hammer, and Gwyn Williams, In Search of Madoc. It will, at least, provoke you into wanting to know about the extraordinary Morgan Rhys who emigrated to America (following a year in France distributing, amongst other things, bibles and Sunday schools), barnstorming his way through the southern states denouncing papists and slave-owners with Ian Paisley-like fervour and rhetoric. Rhys was also partly responsible for the foundation of that physical, but very short-lived, haven for radical Welshmen and women who endured the ghastly Atlantic crossings in the mid- and late- 1790s— the town of Beulah in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, he never found that mythical tribe of 'Welsh Indians' on the river Missouri, descendants of the equally mythical Welsh prince, Madoc, who-Rhys was firmly convinced- discovered America three centuries before Colombus. 'Thank God, we are a mythical nation! to paraphrase another Welshman who lost his way in America. For Gwyn Williams, millenarianists like Rhys and Iolo were early fathers of later Welsh radicalism and socialism. I just wonder whether or not the rupture-to use a word Professor Williams will understand-of the 1790s was not too severe to make a reality of any firm link between a Morgan Rhys and a Dic Penderyn. Perhaps the character of nineteenth-century radical socialism was shaped more by what it rejected of the 'utopian' past than by what it accepted. We also need to assess with greater clarity the consequences upon the post-revolutionary generation, not only of the transforming power of the Methodist cross but the equally transforming power of Pitt's cudgel. All this does not mean that we should turn our backs or minds against those brave and original Welsh souls who set 'Off to Pennsylvania' in the 1790s. GWYNNE LEWIS Warwick ARTISANS AND SANS-CULOTTES, by G. A. Williams. 2nd ed., Libris, London, 1989. Pp. xliv, 132. £ 7.95 paper. I read this explosive little book as an undergraduate, on its first appearance in 1968, at a moment when it was indeed 'bliss to be alive'. Even twenty years on, in a political atmosphere totally permeated by what Professor Williams calls a 'Thermidor of the