Welsh Journals

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(Radnorshire) was about new schoolrooms 'and other matters of improve- ment of the condition of the poor'. Romilly was a philanthropic conservat- ive but his direct encounters with the poor were few and the working class rarely make an appearance in Romilly's journal except as servants, who were sometimes included at family prayers. Romilly records without comment being shown the place near Cyfarthfa where soldiers were ambushed during the Merthyr rising. The Romillys enjoyed a reputation as benevolent landlords and Joseph was faintly amused to find at Porthkerry a 'ludicrous' print depicting his uncle Samuel as a radical lawyer, brief in hand, declaring to a poor family, 'I have gained your cause'. Manuscript tours and travel diaries are a largely undervalued historical source with many different strands and this is a welcome addition to the small number of journals available in print. Canon Morris's extensive editorial notes and references usefully amplify Romilly's observations on people and places, and the book is all the more valuable for its numerous illustrations, some of which are published for the first time, and the excellent index. Readers who enjoy Romilly's Visit to Wales will be pleased to know that further extracts from his journals have recently been published by Cambridge Records Society, continuing selections first published by Cambridge University Press in 1967. RICHARD SUGGETT Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales, Aberystwyth THE Mid- Victorian GENERATION, 1846-1886. By K. T. Hoppen, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997. Pp. xx, 787. £ 30.00. The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846-1886, is the latest addition to the new Oxford History of England series. Vast in its scope, and based, as the foot- notes reveal, upon a dazzling amount of reading, the book offers a pan- oramic view of mid-Victorian society. Beginning with a chapter on the countryside, it moves on to consider the middle classes, the nature of the state, politics, the economy (in its macro and micro manifestations), culture, religion, science, evolution and the place of Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The author, K. T. Hoppen, admits in his introduction that his book is 'quite deliberately, not constructed around a single overarching thesis' (p.3). Instead, the book bears three broad themes in mind as it unfolds its story before the reader: first, that this was the generation when men and women recognized that the factory and industrial life had come to stay, and