Welsh History

Lesson 6: An Era of Change

In this lesson you will learn how the culture of Wales benefited from the chapels and the university, how a new political consciousness came into being - eventually leading to the formation of a new political party - and how industry fostered a new sense of belonging.

Recommended reading: Struggle pp. 107-132; Wales A to Y relevant entries; Intro to Lit. pp. 66-80.

Cultural Survival

In 1872, Aberystwyth University accepted its first students in an impressive, but vacant hotel on the seafront. It was to attract many who would come to have profound influence on the culture and consciousness of the Welsh nation.

In the meantime, the Chapel helped continue the tradition of a literate working class eager for reading material and highly supportive of the nation's poets, especially those who competed at the eisteddfodau. The first truly national eisteddfod was held at Aberdare in 1861. Its success soon led to the institution becoming an integral and much-loved part of Welsh culture.

Because of their complete lack of knowledge of the Welsh language, many English critics are unable to appreciate such poets as John Ceiriog Hughes, whose publication of five volumes of his poetry in the 1860's brought him enormous fame in Wales, if not elsewhere.

Hughes specialized in expressing the feeling of nostalgia for the rural scenes, characters and music of one's childhood, a feeling known in Welsh as hiraeth. In the 1860's Ceiriog's Oriau'r Hwyr (Late Hours) was the best selling Welsh language book next to the Bible, over 30,000 copies being sold in 12 years.

It is no wonder that Ceiriog is so revered in Welsh schools today, for the following century saw the most rapid decline in the percentages of people speaking Welsh. Not so well known, yet paradoxically an important figure in Welsh literature, is novelist Daniel Owen, from Mold, a town in Flintshire. Molf had managed to keep much of its Welsh identity despite the rapid Anglicization of much of the county by the end of the century.

It was in the next century, however, that the true Welsh novel, written in Welsh or in English, came into being. It is also in the next century that the literary renaissance of Wales began to include writers who used the English language--the school of the Anglo-Welsh. The next century also saw the growth of a new political consciousness in Wales that had enormous effects both within and without its borders. The struggle was intensified; the dream continued.

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