Wales and the French Revolution – Serie

Welsh Ballads of the French Revolution provides for the first time an edition, with parallel English translations, of Welsh-language ballads composed in reaction to the momentous events of the Revolution in France and the two decades of war which followed. Ballad writers were first spurred to respond in 1793, when the French monarchs were executed, France declared war upon Britain, and paranoia regarding the possible threat of internal revolt in Britain reached a crisis point. As the decade proceeded, ballads were sung in thanks for the victory of British forces and local people against an invasion of Pembrokeshire by French troops, and in reaction to key naval battles and to the extensive mobilization of militia and volunteer forces. Scholars working on the British response to the Revolution have showed increasing interest in exploring the contents of ballads and songs. The ballad in particular is seen as a vital source of information, since it represents ordinary people's awareness of the developments of the period. Balladry is also subject to continued research within Welsh scholarship, and this volume, with its focus on a clearly defined historical period and its revelation of new voices within the canon of Welsh ballad writers, will drive this field of study forwards. Regional reactions to the Revolution within the British Isles are also now seen as crucially important, but Wales, partly because of the inaccessibility of material composed in the Welsh language, has repeatedly been omitted from the general picture. This volume aids in rectifying this situation, ensuring (by use of translation, copious contextualizing notes, and a lengthy introduction) that both the ballad genre and Welsh reactions receive the attention they deserve from the wider scholarly community.

The serial literature current in Wales between 1789 and 1802 is the most important public repository of radical, loyalist and patriotic Welsh responses to the French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars. This anthology presents a selection of poetry and prose published in the annual Welsh almanacs, the English provincial newspapers published close to Wales's border and the three radical Welsh periodicals of the mid-1790s, together with translations of the Welsh texts. An extended introduction sketches out the printing culture of Wales, analyses its public discourse and interprets the Welsh voices in their British political context.

This anthology presents a selection of the poems with which Welsh writers living in Wales and London participated, through the medium of Welsh, to the controversy in Britain surrounding the French Revolution. These Welsh poems have been edited and translated into English for the first time ever. It also considers the cultural inheritance of the French Revolution in eisteddfodic poetry and poems to national heroes in which the competing notions of Welshness and Britishness come to the fore.

In July 1789 George Cadogan Morgan, born in Bridgend, Wales, and the nephew of the celebrated radical dissenter Richard Price (1723-91), found himself caught up in the opening events of the French Revolution and its consequences. In 1808, his family left Britain for America where his son, Richard Price Morgan, travelled extensively, made a descent of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers by raft and helped build some of the early American railroads. The adventures of both men are related here via letters George sent home to his family from France and through the autobiography written by his son in America.

Edward Pugh (1763-1813) was a Ruthin-born, Welsh-speaking artist and writer who produced compelling landscapes images of Denbighshire in particular and, more widely of North Wales, Monmouthshire and London. He also wrote what is probably the best account of a tour in Wales ever written: it is far superior to Borrow's. This book, the first to consider Pugh's work in detail, shows how his landscapes reveal a wealth of local knowledge, and dramatise some issues of great importance to Wales in his time: the effects of the enclosure of common land; the effects of the war with France on industry and the condition of the poor; the need to develop and modernise the Welsh economy; the power of the great landowners. Apart from Pugh's, almost all the pictures and tours we have of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century North Wales were made by English artists and writers. None of these can tell us about life in North Wales with the same insight as Pugh.

Edward Pugh (1763-1813) was a Ruthin-born, Welsh-speaking artist and writer who produced compelling landscapes images of Denbighshire in particular and, more widely of North Wales, Monmouthshire and London. He also wrote what is probably the best account of a tour in Wales ever written: it is far superior to Borrow's. This book, the first to consider Pugh's work in detail, shows how his landscapes reveal a wealth of local knowledge, and dramatise some issues of great importance to Wales in his time: the effects of the enclosure of common land; the effects of the war with France on industry and the condition of the poor; the need to develop and modernise the Welsh economy; the power of the great landowners. Apart from Pugh's, almost all the pictures and tours we have of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century North Wales were made by English artists and writers. None of these can tell us about life in North Wales with the same insight as Pugh.

In the period following the French revolution in 1789, Welsh poets continually reflected on the extraordinary new era in which they lived through their writing. Effortlessly ranging from Wales's deep and distant history to accounts of the most topical and urgent current affairs, their poems on war, Welshness, druids, parted lovers and sublime landscapes encompass the beautiful, the brutal and the mysterious. Facing a future that often seemed agonisingly uncertain, poets in Wales used their verses to voice their thoughts and feelings about events that had rocked the whole of Europe, and whose effects continued to be felt long after 1789. This new selection of poetry from Wales sets recently-discovered manuscript texts alongside little-known early printed poems, offering a full and accessible introduction to Welsh poetry in English in the period 1780-1820.

The late eighteenth century was one of the most exciting and unsettling periods in European history, with the shock-waves of the French Revolution rippling around the world. As this collection of essays by leading scholars shows, Wales was no exception. From political pamphlets to a Denbighshire folk-play, from bardic poetry to the remodelling of the Welsh landscape itself, responses to the revolutionary ferment of ideas took many forms. We see how Welsh poets and preachers negotiated complex London - Wales networks of patronage and even more complex issues of national and cultural loyalty; and how the landscape itself is reimagined in fiction, remodelled a la Rousseau, while it rapidly emptied as impoverished farming families emigrated to the New World. Drawing on a wealth of vibrant material in both Welsh and English, much of it unpublished, this collection marks another important contribution to 'four nations' criticism, and offers new insights into the tensions and flashpoints of Romantic-period Wales.

A new edition of a Welsh interlude which shows strong support for the French Revolution, and which has not received any critical attention since the end of the eighteenth century.

Pamphleteering was a vital component of the popular political discussion opened up by the French Revolution of 1789, but while the English pamphlet wars have been exhaustively explored, Welsh pamphlet literature has been ignored. During the fifteen years following the French Revolution of 1789, over 100 Welsh pamphlets and sermons engaged in a public discourse which discussed the larger issues raised by the Revolution and the war against the French Republic. This pioneering volume seeks to capture the excitement of the period by demonstrating how radicals and loyalists, Dissenters, Methodists and Churchmen, pacifists and warmongers engaged in a lively argument in their published works. An in-depth essay reviews and interprets texts written by artisans, Dissenting ministers, country curates and Anglican bishops, who all used religion as politics; promoted war or peace; argued over republicanism and loyalism, and utilized the law as a stage for political ideas. All texts are fully translated and thus made accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time.