Welsh Journals

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of communities which were core areas for preserving the culture and language, from as early as the 1860s migration patterns were dominated by an ever swelling pool of English-speaking workers The authors adopt a common pattern of analysis for each community and this facilitates the identification of common social characteristics. For example, the ability to speak both languages was clearest among occupations in the public services and professions, as might be expected, and there was also a tendency for children from such households to be brought up as monolingual English speakers. Occupations associated with the railway industry invariably stressed English instead of bilingualism, and similarly academe, as the study of Aberystwyth reveals. Cardiff presents a stark pattern of rapid cultural and linguistic trans- formation. An earlier volume in this series set out just how Welsh-speaking an environment could be found at Cardiff even by the mid-nineteenth century. By 1891, it was the most English-speaking, or non-Welsh both socially and culturally, of any settlement in Wales. Across all the occupation groups, English predominated to the order of four out of five of the population, and language erosion was particularly marked among the young. It explains a lot about the confidence of Alderman Robert Bird and his like among south Wales Liberals in rejecting Lloyd George's Cymru Fydd approaches in 1896. However, it is all the odder that, a decade later, its leading residents were claiming city (and quasi-capital city) status for Cardiff. In sum, this is a major and substantial study of the state of the Welsh language at the end of the nineteenth century. The authors and their associated contributors have succeeded not only in establishing an effective pattern for further local or regional investigations to test the findings here, but, very commendably, have also accumulated a fund of wider contextual information about the communities they have examined. W. P. GRIFFITH Bangor GLADSTONE. By Eugenio F. Biagini. Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2000. Pp ix, 138. £ 13.50. This brief but absorbing biography of W E. Gladstone, four times prime minister and 'the most influential chancellor of the exchequer of the nineteenth century', is one of the more accomplished offerings in Macmillan's 'British History in Perspective' series. With the publication of his fascinating diaries, and some excellent modern studies by Colin Matthew, Richard Shannon and