Welsh Journals

biographical articles of the volume by Hywel Davies and E. G. Millward respectively. Neither the enthusiastic radical Baptist Morgan John Rhys, or the fiery nationalist Dr. Pan Jones, who readily used the language of insurrection, succeeded in appealing to a majority of their fellow Welshmen, despite their stand against all forms of oppression. As with previous volumes, the style and format of Volume IX is designed to appeal to a wider readership, outside of that of the 'professional' historians. For students and others interested in Welsh history, here is a useful addition to a series which will, hopefully, soon celebrate the publication of a tenth volume.] SIAN RHIANNON WILLIAMS Cardiff LLYFRYDDIAETH CYLCHGRONAU CYMREIG, 1735-1850/A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WELSH PERIODICALS, 1735-1850. By Huw Walters. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 1993. Pp. lvii, 109. n.p In this long-awaited and authoritative survey of Welsh periodicals published between 1735 and 1850, Dr. Walters unearths a wealth of important new information about the Welsh press in its emergent phase. Based on a minute examination of 195 full sets of journals and magazines lodged in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, the bibliography richly documents the fortunes and misfortunes of those early serials. More than 80 per cent of the titles listed here were published in the Welsh language, most being associated with a variety of religious organizations, temperance movements and friendly societies. A minority were issued in both Welsh and English, among them the intriguingly entitled Duoglott Medical Adviser, printed bilingually by John Evans in Carmarthen in 1829. Knowledge of the ebb and flow of owners, printers and editors of Welsh periodical literature is notoriously difficult to acquire even where the titles concerned were manifestly not ephemeral in nature. Lewis Edwards and Roger Edwards, for example, are known to have jointly edited Y Traethodydd (The Essayist) from 1845 to 1854, but their names do not appear in any issue of this major journal in this period. Such information very often needs to be sought for and verified outside the pages of the periodical itself, in biographies, correspondence and various miscellaneous manu- scripts that have survived, often accidentally, in our archives. The search for this material can present the bibliographer with enormous, in some cases insuperable, difficulties. It is when this is borne in mind that we fully appreciate the extent of Dr. Walters's achievement. Consider, for instance, the case of Yr Haul (The Sun). Unlike many periodicals, including some very short-lived ones, it has obligingly retained the same title from its launch in 1835 to the present day. However, in the intervening period, it has sported three different subtitles, has undergone no less than nineteen changes of series, carried two addenda, been issued as both a monthly and a quarterly, has seen fifteen changes of editors, six sub-editors, five publishers and eleven printers. It has changed its price thirteen times. We learn also that it leavened its format with engravings in 1885, but with cartoons only in 1960. When printers misnumbered their