Welsh Journals

According to Evan Griffiths7 in July 1827 the Swansea printer John Williams, in partnership with one John Jones, took on the incomplete work, with Evan Griffiths himself as translator. He started on the translation on the 13th November of that year. John Williams had already published (between 1823 and 1827) a duoglott (English-Welsh) Bible. He appears to have acquired Richard Jones' unissued sheets: at some stage these were reprinted.8 John Williams printed a further 25 parts, taking the translation to the end of II Samuel and completing the first of four projected volumes. Early in 1829 the preliminary matter for the first volume, including a new title page dated 'the last day of 1828' and a portrait of Matthew Henry, dated 1829, was issued. The title page claims that the original was 'carefully translated by the Rev. Simon Llwyd, MA, Bala, the Rev. Michael Jones, Llanuwchllyn, Mr. J. Llwyd, Meirion, and the Rev. E. Griffith, Gower.' The title became DEHONGLIAD/AR/Y BIBL SANCTAIDD. Thereafter, once again, publication faltered. John Williams printed twelve more parts;9 But then he 'failed' and ceased trading early in 1830. Evan Griffiths himself records that he took over the printing shop he is said to have bought it in order to carry on the work to which he was now committed; he had resigned his full-time ministry on the 4th August 1828 and had married on the 26th May 1829; Took (to) the Printing Office, March 22, 1830 (to carry on Matthew's Esboniad). Over the next five years Evan Griffiths achieved the translation10 of the rest of the Commentary on the Old and New Testaments and its printing in 99 further parts (of 16 pages), making up 3 volumes. Thus the four volumes came to some 2,300 (unnumbered) folio pages. The title pages of the three volumes dated 1831, 1833 and 1835 make no mention of Simon Lloyd, Michael Jones or J. Llwyd. The fourth volume, the New Testament, contains a dedication (in English) to the Duchess of Kent. The foreword (in Welsh) to this volume, dated November 18, 1835 outlines the history of the translation and its printing. This had taken 14 years no longer, Evan Griffiths observes, than it had taken Matthew Henry, and his continuator after his death to complete the original. He bids farewell to his great work in words which echo Edward Gibbon's celebrated leave-taking of the 'Decline and Fall'; (in translation) After finishing it I have a strangely mixed feeling of joy and sorrow joy, that such a great enterprise, and one likely to be of benefit to ages to come, has come to an end; sorrow, that I shall no longer be able to follow a task which has fixed my thoughts for so long on holy things and that has kept me, in great measure, from escaping to other things with a tendency to corrupt.