Welsh Periodicals in English 1882-2012

Malcolm Ballin

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781783165612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria inglese

Welsh Periodicals in English celebrates the contribution of English-language periodicals to the careers of Welsh writers (from Lewis Morris to Owen Sheers) and to the practice of their editors (from Charles Wilkins (1882) to Emily Trahair (2012)). These periodicals have helped to create an active Anglophone public sphere in Wales and continue to stimulate discussion on a wide range of topics: tensions between tradition and continuity; the role of magazines in developing new writers; gender issues; relations with Welsh-language journals; the involvement of the periodicals in social and political issues, and their contribution to cultural developments in Wales. A detailed study of the design, content and editorial practice of the periodicals is illuminated by discussions with living editors, and the book concludes with a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary productions and a comparison with their successful equivalents in Ireland.

1

The Liberal Miscellanies: 1882–1914

The Red Dragon: The National Magazine of Wales (1882–1887)

Some of the contradictions and key oppositions in the periodical literature of late nineteenth-century Wales are brought out by the opening paragraph of the very first contribution in The Red Dragon. A series of articles, ‘Notable Men of Wales’, begins in February 1882 with an account by the magazine’s editor, Charles Wilkins, of the life of Thomas Stephens, citizen of Merthyr Tydfil, literary critic and author of The Literature of the Kymry:

From Pontneddfechan to Merthyr. From fairyland to the furnaces. From scenes where nature revelled in pine woods and mountain streams to a vast hive of labour, where there was a Babel of nationalities and fullest scope for undisciplined physical vigour and unrestrained human passion, with only a valley constable and a justice of the peace to enforce the law – such was the transition of Thomas Stephens. (1)

Editing Welsh periodicals in English often involves intimate connections. Charles Wilkins, also a literary historian and a fellow citizen of Merthyr Tydfil, had lived next door to Thomas Stephens in his youth.¹ Here he immediately invokes his firsthand awareness of the challenge of nineteenth-century industrial development to the traditional culture of Wales, bringing with it the clash of different languages, the dilution of Nonconformist restraint, the dangers of lawlessness, indeed all the shock of the new. Gwyn A.Williams observes that, in the aftermath of the controversy about the 1847 ‘Blue Books’, Welsh-language culture had ‘broken decisively with its own past’, and had adopted ‘a largely middle-class-cum-populist culture’ inflected by a particular emphasis on distinguishing Welsh from the English of business and success. Williams sees the ‘Merthyr Circle’ around Thomas Stephens and Charles Wilkins as a significant ‘regional variation on English literature’.²

Crises of industrial development were not confined to Wales. The 1880s in Britain, leading up to Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, were marked by persistent concerns about the ‘grinding degradation’ of the poor. It was the era simultaneously of W. T. Stead’s ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ and of the influence of Marx on thinkers like Bernard Shaw and William Morris.³ Kenneth Morgan notes that Wales in the 1880s was still thought of by many British people as ‘a semi-civilised picturesque survival’ while actually facing the upheavals of industrial development and the uncertainties of rural decline, together with the challenges of massive inward migration. At the same time the dominance of Anglicised Tory landowners was being challenged by electoral shifts to the Liberal Party, and education was becoming a national passion. The decade came to be characterised in retrospect as, more than elsewhere in Britain, ‘a major turning-point’ and ‘an epoch of extraordinary achievement in politics’.⁴

Charles Wilkins would have been aware, as he planned his new magazine, of the development of ‘articulate and powerful groups of business and professional Welshmen who congregated in London’.⁵ An autodidact who left school at the age of fourteen, he had become ‘the most learned literary figure in Merthyr – and indeed in Wales’.⁶ He became a member of the Cymmrodorion and was currently in 1882 working on his History of the Literature of Wales (published in 1884).⁷

London Welshmen were an important part of the ‘counter public sphere’ that provided an audience for The Red Dragon. These potential metropolitan readers, as well as their equivalents throughout Wales itself, would have had access to the prolific periodical press available in England since the eighteenth century. According to John Davies, ‘London periodicals such as The Spectator and The Gentleman’s Magazine were eagerly read; the most recent novels were bought and gossip from London was avidly discussed.’⁸ In 1882, magazines like The Cornhill, The Fortnightly or Blackwood’s, were all selling over ten thousand copies.⁹ These miscellany periodicals were intent upon becoming ever more commercial. This process links with Habermas’s perception that the role of literary periodicals was changing – not necessarily for the better – as ‘the disintegration of the public sphere in the world of letters’ created a new public made up of consumers who were more inclined to uncritical reception.¹⁰

The 1880s also saw the introduction of compulsory education and the mass printing of popular classics.¹¹ When William Blackwood became head of his firm at the end of 1879, he mounted a ‘root and branch revaluation’ of Blackwood’s, leading eventually to more space being given to women’s fiction and to colonial themes.¹² In retrospect, T. H. S. Escott, writing in Blackwood’s in 1894, concluded that ‘the province of Bohemia has no longer a place on the map of socio-literary London.’ As a result, he declares, ‘journalism of the Metropolis at this close of the nineteenth century is essentially of the bourgeois kind, and is in fact identical with that for which country editors have long found it advantageous to cater.’¹³

As a ‘country editor’ in Wales, Charles Wilkins provides an example of the kind of editorial practice that Escott describes. However, Wilkins also took up a particular stance derived from his unique position in south Welsh society at this juncture. As Roland Mathias suggests, The Red Dragon is a ‘calculated attempt to reach out to a new public literate in English but unschooled in a knowledge of Wales’.¹⁴ In a society where, throughout the 1880s three-quarters of the population spoke Welsh – though few of them exclusively so – this project carried a significant risk.

The first issue of The Red Dragon presents itself as a respectable quarterly journal, ninety-six pages long, published from Cardiff by Daniel Owen and Company. It bears the subtitle ‘The National Magazine of Wales’, with a crest showing two shields bound together and the royal motto ‘Dieu-et-Mon-Droit’, clearly signifying its unionist stance. There are a few pages of advertisements, for items such as gentlemen’s hair oil, Quinine Bitters, Debrett’s Peerage and the London-based magazine, The Squire: A Monthly Magazine for Country Gentlemen.¹⁵ These paratextual indicators confirm its appeal to a prosperous readership, partly London-based, with a conventional range of middle-class interests. They reflect the desire of Welshmen in the nineteenth century to ‘take advantage of the British context to construct a highly respectable Welsh identity that could nevertheless be contrasted to Englishness’.¹⁶

This impression is reinforced when Wilkins introduces the first episode of Frederick Talbot’s One of the Firm, a serialised novel of manners. The opening scene is set in ‘extreme quietude ... a fine spacious dining room, blazing with light, a noble fire burning at either end’ (19). It would be difficult to imagine a more bourgeois setting, though the novel later deals with intrigues about life and love below stairs as well as between members of the gentry. The next piece is John Foster’s article about the Sunday Closing Act of 1881, contrasting the flashy ‘beer-houses, long bars, buffets and gin palaces’ of the developing towns of the day with more traditional rural ale houses; this is immediately followed by Cadwallader Griffiths, praising the noisy merriment of a seaside eisteddfod held in the Gauntlet and Scissors (49–56; 57–61). The divisive contemporary issue of Temperance meets a touch of national pride in the first Act of Parliament since the seventeenth century to provide separate legislation for Wales.¹⁷

Wilkins then brings in the first of a number of articles in The Red Dragon about science: Thomas Jones Dyke’s account of infectious fevers, drawing on international sources in France, Italy, India and the USA (62–5). It is followed, a dozen pages on, by ‘Half Hours with the Microscope’, under the pseudonym of ‘Our Artist’, marvelling at the ‘rainbow hue’ of a butterfly’s down (76–8). The didactic and political content of this first issue is substantial, embracing for example material about the Irish Land Act, expressing frank doubts about whether the ‘present notions of public honesty and morality’ in Wales would allow similar benefits to be obtained (67–76). There are three articles about the possible siting of the Welsh University, one arguing for Merthyr’s pure water, good drainage and ‘bracing mountain air’ while others praise the ‘healthy and beautiful surroundings’ of Swansea or the ‘social status’ of Cardiff (83–5; 85–9; 89–94).

But, in the manner of miscellanies, the first issue of The Red Dragon also provides lighter fare, including social observation: a ‘Welsh Character Sketch’, about an old huntsman – ‘indescribably comic and grotesque were his attitudes and his utterances (79–82).’ There is the first of a series of ‘Draconigae’ containing various ‘notes and queries’: anecdotes, after-dinner stories, brief obituaries, and antiquarian items (95–6). The only poetry in this first issue is titled ‘Welsh Poetry in English Dress: The Shake of the Hand’, a translation from Welsh, taken from a conventional piece of occasional verse:

When I offer my hand to a friend,
Should he take it with icy disdain,
Our fellowship quickly should be at an end For he never should take it again.
The touch of the cold-fingered few
My friendship should never command
But give me the man who is honest and true
And I’ll give you my heart with my hand. (66)

This series of translations becomes a regular feature, featuring a wide range of ballads and romantic verse, paying tribute to the tradition of writing in Welsh.

This first issue clearly aims at an educated readership, predominantly male – the sole exception is Amy Dillwyn, who writes the ‘Marginal Notes on Library Books’ – providing a mix of entertainment and instruction with a moderate political position. Roughly half the articles in The Red Dragon are either anonymous or pseudonymous, a rather higher proportion for the 1880s than in equivalent English and Scottish miscellanies such as Blackwood’s. Laurel Brake points out how anonymity often gives a journal an ‘illusion of unity’, conferring additional authority on the editorial role.¹⁸ Brynley Roberts places The Red Dragon in the context of Wilkins’s need to overcome the resistance of ‘the Welsh consciousness of English speakers’ to exploring ‘the Welsh dimension to society, politics and economics’.¹⁹ The immediately subsequent issues follow a similar pattern to the first, continuing the series initiated at the outset, but also giving space to land issues, as in John Howell’s ‘The Land Question’, emphasising the ‘high social position, political and country influence conferred by possession of property’ (August 1882, 76–86). The Red Dragon introduces weighty articles on education and regularly reports on the activities of Welsh members at Westminster.²⁰ Dillwyn’s ‘Marginal Notes on Library Books’ provides reviews, for example, ‘Journals and Letters of Caroline Fox’ in April 1882, with its glimpses of John Stuart Mill, the Carlyles and Coleridge (475–7). Her successor as reviewer for the series, Arthur Hamilton, expatiates at length on Froude’s controversial biography of Carlyle (19 November 1882, 377–82). But most reviews in The Red Dragon are of novels, such as Trollope’s The Fixed Period (May 1882, 559),’an amusing satire on the folly of being too theoretical’.

By the March 1883 issue Wilkins has achieved his mature style, mixing social and political comment with substantial literary material. The issue makes some sharp points about recent Welsh economic history, from both extremes of the social scale. The ‘Notable Men of Wales’ article about Dr Oliphant, bishop of Llandaff (former Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge) reminds readers that, at the date of his inauguration in 1849, ‘not a ton of coal had been exported from our harbour.’ The population had doubled since then (193–211). Wilkins himself has an article on ‘The Shipping of Wales’, describing Cardiff’s growth to pre-eminence over Swansea (242–5). The interest in science and technology continues with John Howell’s reminiscences about the first locomotive in Dowlais, and a highly technical article on geological strata. ‘Alpha’ (a former School Board Member) contributes ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’, a fierce denunciation of the ‘forcing’ system going on in elementary schools, said to impact especially harshly on the ‘poorly nourished and ill clad’. However, the broadly conservative social stance of The Red Dragon is regularly reinforced. ‘Hunting in Wales’ is celebrated in an article about the two hundred years of the Llantarnam pack (252–6). In similar traditional vein, the series of ‘Welsh Character Sketches’ continues with ‘Ap Adda’s’ account of ‘The Old Welsh Gentleman: One of the Olden Time’. He traces his lineage back to the mingling of Danes, Saxons and Flemings in the ‘British race’ and displays not ‘the slightest trace of la-de-dawdism’ but instead a ‘cheery heartiness’ as he deals on the bench ‘somewhat rigidly’ with poaching and trespass. At his funeral there is ‘not a bought tear or a purchased sadness in the whole crowd’ (257–60). Throughout the issue, Wilkins takes care to preserve a balance between a range of constituencies: town and country, rich and poor. The parliamentary sketch, ‘Our Dragons at Westminster’, takes a sceptical tone about Westminster where ‘Ministers are more exacting, Whips more tyrannical, the sittings more protracted, the discussions more dreary.’ Meanwhile it is suggested that Welsh members appear ‘satisfied to bear the yoke’ and ‘nothing but downright personal frailty or grave embarrassment of their affairs would cause them voluntarily to throw it off’ (272–4).

The series ‘Gossip from the Welsh Colleges’ gives further clues to the potential readership of The Red Dragon (266–71). This issue has a note from Jesus College, Oxford including a complaint that the Oxford Union Society has preferred ‘by a large majority’ to take in the Unitarian magazine Yr Ymofynydd (The Inquirer) in preference to The Red Dragon. The Oxford correspondent is also disappointed by the proposed programme for the Cardiff Eisteddfod, particularly because ‘so few subjects are not at all English in character ... in a South Wales meeting ... in fact the character of the syllabus is more clannish than national.’ This hints at some growing assertiveness within the culture of the Anglophone Welsh community. Owen M. Edwards’s contribution from Aberystwyth is pleased that ‘the good people of Aberystwyth seem to be determined to keep [the College] here . . . despite the battle of the sites’, while the note from Lampeter, on the other hand, recognises ‘the current of Higher Education towards larger towns’. Working at these collegiate links is clearly important to The Red Dragon.

The literary content of this issue is substantial. It includes another episode of the serial novel Of High Degree and some etymological speculation about the Welsh origins of Latin place-names. The unsigned ‘Marginal Notes on Library Books’ has an attack on the self-importance of ‘Journalistic London’, claiming that ‘while it thinks itself en rapport with St Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and New York [it] is often as ignorant as the man in the moon of the state of feeling existing under its very nose’ (277). The ‘country editors’ are asserting themselves against the centre.

The selections of poetry in this issue of The Red Dragon and the commentaries on it display some uncertainties of taste. There is an example of moralising Victorian verse:

Though low my lot my wish is won
My hopes are few and staid;
All I thought life would do, is done,
My last request is made.
If I have foes, no foes I fear,
To fate I live resigned
I have a friend I value here
And that’...