Welsh Journals

years ago) of writing in a triumphalist whiggish way, with 'urbanisation' seen as the catch-all explanation of progressive causes. Any such view is in fact neatly rebutted in Paul Glennie's and Ian Whyte's splendid chapter on 'towns in the agrarian economy', in John Langton's sophisticated interpretation of economic change, 1700-1841, with its emphasis on rural development, and in the map showing the geographically wide range of attenders at illegal nonconformist meetings in the small towns of Cheshunt and Hoddesdon in 1684. This is an urban history of Britain, not the British Isles. It excludes Ireland with the result that Scotland (which, after all, had its own political and social structure, especially in the first half of the period) tends to be tagged on as a rather awkward postscript to many chapters, often by a specialist author. Philip Jenkins's chapter on Wales is extremely useful, the more so as 'disappointingly few studies' exist on Welsh towns in the period. Wales makes a poor showing in the league tables of urbanisation which recur in the book, only Merthyr (40,000) and Swansea (24,000) making it to the category of 'large towns' by 1840 (Merthyr coming twenty-ninth on the British scale). Of course this is because the political-administrative division which was 'Wales' did not reflect economic realities; Wales, as Jenkins emphasises, was not a single economic region, but three, depending on Chester, Shrewsbury, and Bristol. This was still largely true in 1840, although Philip Jenkins is at pains to point out that improved transport 'ensured that for the first time it was possible to travel and trade within Wales itself, with consequent changes in 'national self- consciousness which would become apparent in Victorian times'. The volume echoes strongly that accent by recent historians (including very notably Peter Clark himself) on 'politeness', on the emergence in the eighteenth century of organized sociability: coffee-houses, masonic lodges, assembly-rooms, the possibility of 'public space' open to respectable women. The accounts of spas and seaside resorts (Llandrindod, Aberystwyth, and Tenby feature strongly) are in the same vein. I wonder if this does not produce a rather complacent view of developments. Where, one might crudely ask, are the workers? They are there in Joyce Ellis's chapter on 'regional and county centres' and in Barrie Trinder's on 'industrialising towns', but conspicuously absent elsewhere. Augustus Pugin, amongst many others, had, after all, a rather different view of the respective sociability of medieval and mid-nineteenth- century towns. The modern insistence on the greater opportunities for social participation available to eighteenth-century bourgeois women may be a trifle patronising to their predecessors. One minor grouse: the map of Welsh towns labels Uandeilo as 'Tregaron'. C. S. L. DAVIES Wadham College, Oxford