Abstract

Hope and Heartbreak: A Social History of Wales and the Welsh, 1776–1871. By RUSSELL DAVIES. (Cardiff: U. of Wales P., 2005; pp. 559. £30; pb. £15.99).

RUSSELL DAVIES begins his new social history of nineteenth-century Wales by criticising previous accounts for their overly narrow outlook. Both ‘nationalist’ and ‘socialist’ approaches, he suggests, have left untold the stories of countless Welsh men and women whose lives did not fit the chosen paradigm: ‘People who worshipped in church, or nowhere, those who did not speak Welsh, soldiers, industrialists, landowners with their ‘claret and Havana Tory voices’, indeed many who were prosperous and successful in the nineteenth century, were excluded from the Welsh nation and their histories forgotten (p. 4). In setting out to remedy this deficiency, Davies declares his determination to get at ‘the history of the emotions and passions of the Welsh’ (p. 21), and his willingness to use sources hitherto under-used by historians of Wales, such as ballads, ceramics, diaries, folksongs, furniture, gravestones, hymns, letters, paintings, photographs, poems and songs.