Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

those of Methodists. Comparison with other wills in the relevant parishes yields a very similar median figure for possessions. She concludes that Society members tended to be drawn not from the lowliest ranks but from the middling sort. In addition to this analysis, however, a great deal of useful information is brought to light; notable use is made of Howel Harris's diaries.] Glyn Tegai Hughes Edwin Welch, Spiritual Pilgrim: A Reassessment of the Life of the Countess of Huntingdon [University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1995], illus., xvi + 233pp. £ 30. ISBN 0-7083-1280-2. In her will, Selina, Countess of Huntingdon [1707-91] asked her executors "so far as they can [to] prevent any publication of my life." To a remarkable degree, her wishes have [up to now] been satisfied. In the 204 years between her death and the appearance of Dr Welch's book, there has been no accessible and reliable account of the life of this remarkable woman. This has not been for want of attempts to tell the story most notably in the two volume Life and Times of the Countess of Huntingdon, which appeared in 1839. That account dubbed by Henry Rack as "inaccurate, irritating but indispensable" is crowded with details and anecdotes that follow one another in such unstructured confusion that it serves more to conceal the subject than to reveal her. Worse, Dr Welch argues, it contains so many identifiable inaccuracies [even unacknowledged changes to the texts of quoted original sources] that no reliance can be placed upon it at all. Unlike the subsequent 19th and early 20th century attempts at a life of Lady Huntingdon which seek to disentangle a clear narrative from the morass of the Life and Times, Dr Welch has abandoned that work altogether, and has told his story entirely from manuscript or contemporary printed sources. In the process, he has tracked down correspondence of the Countess from around the world, including the magnificent collection belonging to the Cheshunt Foundation in Cambridge, of which he remains the honorary archivist. It is a remarkable story he has to tell even when shorn of some of the accretions of popular [but unsubstantiated] myth. With painstaking skill, Dr Welch traces both Selina's own family, the Shirley's, in the early decades of the 18th century [including the quarrels and the lawsuits which left their mark on Selina's own future financial affairs] and that of the 9th earl of