‘I was not know for sure what be the Queen, Evan; was you?’: Fictions of Development in Amy Dillwyn’s <i>The Rebecca Rioter</i>

Abstract

Amy Dillwyn’s The Rebecca Rioter (1880) combines attention to a historical contest over infrastructure with a narrative of personal development defined by infrastructural lack. Dillwyn thus uses the capaciousness of the novel form to offer a distinctly Welsh perspective on the connections between three intersecting nineteenth-century discourses of development: infrastructural improvement, education, and national civilization. The article begins by situating Dillwyn’s novel within the infrastructural imagination of ‘Victorian Britain’, examining how contrasting images of absent and intrusive infrastructure frame Evan’s recollections. I place the novel in dialogue with a central document in the political and cultural life of modern Wales: the 1847 Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales, which castigated the Welsh for their failure to develop in step with modern British civilization, citing linguistic and religious differences as key obstacles to advancement. On the surface, Dillwyn’s narrative reflects the report’s assumptions, depicting its rural Welsh setting as a wilderness, where modern infrastructures are only tenuously established. The second part of the article, however, explores how the novel complicates these initial impressions, revealing a text that is finely attuned to the complexities of Wales’s status in Britain. Overall, this article seeks to demonstrate that, while the novel’s form, especially Evan’s retrospective narrative, foregrounds the power of infrastructures to shape individual, communal, and national futures, the text continually modulates between the project of imagining shared, collective foundations of individual development and the expression of anxieties about infrastructures’ potential to suppress cultural heterogeneity and political dissent.