Notes Towards a History of the English
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People, Politics, and Print: Notes Towards a History of the English-Language Book in Industrial South Wales up to 1900 Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD at Cardiff University July 2010 Jonathan Evans UMI Number: U517037 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U517037 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 WE SHALL RISE AGAIN. iv Summary In Wales the histories of book production and industry started following the sixteenth century Acts of Union. In 1586 print production in Wales was a collateral victim of the Star Chamber ban on regional printing. When the printing press finally arrived in Wales in the eighteenth century it was closely associated with the iron trade. The Industrial Revolution started in Wales in 1759 on the undeveloped northern rim of the South Wales coalfield basin. The iron industry had two phases of development, when the second phase started in the 1780s South Wales was the largest iron producing region in the UK. At this time Edmund Jones wrote An Account of the Parish of Abervstruth (1779) and Apparitions of Spirits (1780), both of which document the narratives of a pre-industrial community. At the end of this period the Welsh print-trade was dominated by Nonconformist printers who were particularly hostile to the novel. Despite this opposition Twm Shon Catti. the first Welsh novel, was printed in 1828. In the 1840s John Nixon started to sell Welsh steam-coal to the French market. The steam-coal export trade was so successful that it rapidly changed the technology and science of mining, and in consequence a number of institutions grew around the industry. Meanwhile the miners themselves were organising and they established well-stocked miners’ libraries which they used to educate themselves. In this period the centre of the Welsh print-trade moved to the industrial coalfield, and as it did so the newspaper became the dominant literary form. In the 1880s Joseph Keating worked in a number of collieries in the Aberdare valley. While Keating is justly famous for being the first Welsh industrial novelist of the twentieth century, he wrote in the older literary tradition which has been outlined in this thesis. Table of Contents List of Illustrations .................................................................................................................. 7 List of Tables ...........................................................................................................................8 Preface.....................................................................................................................................9 Chapter One - The Question Stated ............................................................................ ............1 Chapter Two - A Late Beginning: The Print Culture of pre-industrial Wales, 1536-1759 .....8 2.1 The Welsh Book Before 1718 .....................................................................................11 2.2 The Development of the Printing Press in Eighteenth-Century Wales ...................... 18 2.3 The English Print Industry in the Eighteenth-Century ..............................................22 2.4 An Entire New Work on the Eve of the Revolution: Edmund Jones and the Trevecka Press..................................................................................................................................30 2.4.1 Hen Deulu Trevecka: The Religious-Industrial Community of Howell Harris at Trevecka.......................................................................................................................32 2.4.2 An Entire New Work: Edmund Jones’s Aberystruth and Apparitions ............... 41 2.5 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................64 Chapter Three - The Print Culture of the Industrial Revolution in Wales, 1757-1840 ........ 66 3.1 The Revolution Begins ...............................................................................................67 3.2 The Industrial Revolution in the British Print Industry, 1800-1830 ..........................81 3.3 The Print Industry in Revolutionary Wales ............................................................... 85 3.4 The History of Zechariah Morris’s Press .................................................... 89 3.4.1 A Brief Bibliography of the Shon Shincyn Press ............................................ 95 3.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 104 Chapter Four - Twm Shon Catti, a Wild Welsh Wag? ........................................................ 108 4.1 The End of the Industrial Revolution in Wales ........................................................110 4.2 The Origins of Twm Shon Catti ................................................................................118 4.3 Thomas Jeffery Llewelyn Prichard .......................................................................... 124 4.4 The First Edition of Twm Shon Catti: Aberystwyth, 1828 ...................................... 133 4.5 The Second Edition of Twm Shon Catti: Cowbridge, 1839 .....................................138 4.6 The Third Edition of Twm Shon Catti: Llanidloes, 1871.........................................140 4.7 The Pirates of Twm Shon Catty ...............................................................................146 4.8 Reading Wales through an English Lens: Inclosure ................................................ 150 4.9 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 159 Chapter Five - The Age of Coal .......................................................................................... 161 5.1 The South Wales Coal Industry, 1840-1900 .............................................................163 5.2 The Politics of Coal .................................................................................................. 179 5.3 Discourses of Knowledge and Power in the Coalfield ...................................... 192 5.4 The Victorian Print Industry .....................................................................................206 5.5 The Print Culture ofVictorian Wales .......................................................................213 5.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................235 Chapter Six - Joseph Keating: Hybridity and the Literature of Labour ............................. 237 6.1 Keating and his World ..............................................................................................242 6.2 Hybridity and the Novel in Wales: Son of Judith (1900) .........................................255 6.3 The Hybrid Literature of Labour: Adventures in the Dark (1906) .......................... 274 6.4 The Beginning of a Whole New Literary Genre ......................................................289 Chapter Seven - Conclusions..... ............................................................................ 294 vi Appendix One - A Bibliography of the Work of T.J. LI. Prichard ......................................305 Appendix Two - A Bibliography of the Printer John Cox .................................................. 309 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................313 vii List of Illustrations Figure Page 2.1 Title Page of Isaac Carter’s Gaiechism hvrraf v gvmanfa... (Trefhedvn. 1719).. 19 2.2 A Comparison of Eighteenth Century Book Production in England and Wales.. 29 2.3 ‘Printer’s Recommendations. ’ from An Account of the Parish Abervstruth 30 3.1 Western Trade Routes for Iron, 1650-1750 ......................................................... 70 3.2 Esponiad ar v Bibl Santaidd vol. II (1828J ........................................................... 96 3.3 Sale Catalogue for Blaenavon Iron and Coal Mines (1833J ................................. 98 3.4 Y Silliadur Brvtanaidd (18281 ............................................................................... 99 3.5 Hanes. Cvffes. Achwvniad. Anerchiad. a I>vnminiad Y Negroes f1830-3471 ....... 100 3.6 Ymweliad v Cholera (18321 ................................................................................. 101 3.7 Can Newvdd. o annogaeth i’r Cvmrv (18321 ...................................................... 102 4.1 D. Davies’s 1st edition of Surprising Adventures of Twm Shon Catti [1890?].... 148 4.2 D. Davies’s 2nd edition of Surprising Adventures of Twm Shon Catti [1890?]... 149 4.3 Map of the Parliamentary Inclosures of the Common Fields .............................. 156 5.1 The Reading Rooms at Ebbw Vale, 1949 ............................................................ 202 6.1 Joseph Keating, Obituary, The Times. 9 July 1934 .............................................. 239 6.2 Joseph