‘A Contemptible Mimic of the Irish’: The Land Question in Victorian Wales

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The ‘Welsh Land Question’ became an important factor in British politics in the last 20 years of the nineteenth century.1 The campaign orchestrated by the young Tom Ellis, Liberal MP for Merioneth — often designated ‘the Member for Wales’ by his many admirers — to secure for Wales the famous ‘three Fs’ granted to Ireland in 1881— Fair rents, Fixity of tenure and Free sale — has an established place in the history books. Yet Ellis’s activities represented the culmination of a much longer agitation by Welsh radicals, and in this chapter, the ways in which the land question came to be politicized in Wales will be explored. In particular, the radicals’ frequent invocation of the Irish experience as a way of explaining what was going in the Welsh countryside will be examined. For all that the parallel outraged landowners of all political persuasions — one Gladstonian supporter condemned the Welsh radicals’ land campaign as ‘a contemptible mimic of the Irish … like a poor travesty of a tragedy’2 — its persistent use is suggestive.