Cambrian Tales

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Dyma gyfrol rhif 35 yn y gyfres nodedig 'Cambrian Tales' a ymddangosodd fel cyfres yn yr 'Ainsworth's Magazine' o fis Mawrth 1849 hyd fis Mawrth 1850, ac nas cyhoeddwyd erioed fel nofel. Yn union fel y pamffledyn gwleidyddol 'Artegall', a gynhwysir yn y gyfrol bresennol, mae'n ffurfio rhan o ymdrechion Jane Williams i amddiffyn Cymru yn erbyn 'Brad y Llyfrau Gleision'.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

This 35th volume in the Welsh Women's Classic series 'Cambrian Tales' appeared in serialized form in 'Ainsworth's Magazine' from March 1849 to March 1850 and has not previously been published as a novel. Like the political pamphlet 'Artegall', also included in this volume, it constitutes part of Jane Williams' attempts to defend Wales against the notorious 'Blue Books.'

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Born in Chelsea in 1806, Jane Williams' first publication, Miscellaneous Poems, appeared in 1824 when she was only eighteen. At the time her family was in dire financial straits, and she was compelled to find employment as a lady's companion. In the 1840s, however, she become the protegee of Lady Llanover, and with her financial help and free access to the Llanover library, published ten further innovative volumes before her death in 1885. Earlier publications by Gwyneth Tyson Roberts (1943 – 2022) include The Language of the Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Empire (1998), reprinted in 2011 as The Language of the Blue Books: Wales and Colonial Prejudice, and the critical biography Jane Williams (Ysgafell) (2020). A brief account of her life and work is appended as a preface to this volume.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

Jane Williams (1806-85) is best known for Betsy Cadwalydyr: A Balaclava Nurse which is also available in Honno’s Welsh Women’s Classics. She was, however, a prolific writer across several genres, and this volume offers a welcome selection of her political prose, fiction, and poetry. It opens with ‘Artegall’, which is a spirited response to the English government report on the state of education in Wales, the notorious Blue Books/ Y Llyfrau Gleision . It provides an interesting window on how contemporaries in Wales reacted to the report. Jane Williams examines its claims in minute detail, revealing the prejudice of the commissioners and many of their informants, who were often English incomers, ignorant of, and antagonistic toward, the Welsh language and its culture. The centrepiece is the work which gives the anthology its title. Cambrian Tales was published serially in Ainsworth’s Magazine between 1849 and 1850, and is collected here for the first time. The setting is a country house, Nantmawr, loosely based on Llanover Court and Augusta Hall’s circle. A house party of Welsh and English guests chat around the hearth, and go on sight-seeing expeditions to Llanthony Priory, Llangorse Lake, and other beauty spots, where the English among the party are instructed in aspects of Welsh folklore, customs, and history, often at some length. The characters are cursorily developed—they are cyphers used to articulate and relay positive information about the Welsh to the English readers of Ainsworth’s , and in this sense Cambrian Tales may be said to be an extension of the task Jane Williams set herself in ‘Artegall’. For modern readers it is a period piece which provides fascinating glimpses of Victorian sensibility—Reverend Evans’ horror at a train journey he once took to London—the speed! the speed!—never again! And a glimpse perhaps, though in comic form, of what it might have been like at Llanover Court in Lady Llanover’s day, a cultural circle of which Jane Willams formed a part. The anthology ends with two poems from Celtic Fables (1862), ‘The Grasshopper and the Ant’ and ‘The Ancients of the World’, and a previously unpublished poem, ‘A Petition from the Old Women’s Night Cap Maker addressed to the Ladies who supply the Poor Women with Needlework’. Written in rhyming couplets, they are pleasant enough examples of mid-Victorian verse, ‘A Petition’ having the added interest of the light it throws on the precarious position of women who contrived to earn a living from their needle. Cambrian Tales and Other Writings is a welcome addition to Welsh Women’s Classics, which if for nothing else, is well worth reading for Jane Williams’s demolition of Y Llyfrau Gleision .