Pain, Piety and Politics: Welsh Mining Communities in Pre-First World War Fiction

Abstract

Raymond Williams has famously but erroneously claimed that ‘through almost the whole of the nineteenth century, the Welsh industrial novels did not come’. This article challenges Williams’s assumption using three novels set in Welsh mining villages: John Saunders’s Israel Mort, Overman (1873), Harry Lindsay’s Rhoda Roberts (1895) and Joseph Keating’s Maurice (1905). Due to the prevalence of deep mining, the Welsh coalfield was particularly dangerous. Novelists struggled to make sense of the arbitrary and cruel nature of injury and death in the mines – events that were increasingly understood to be not due to individual sin but due to structural social callousness. Expanding on the critical ground opened up by M. Wynn Thomas’s In the Shadow of the Pulpit, this article shows how authors used mining accidents to redefine the nature of faith from a passive trust in God’s plan to an active engagement in social justice. The religious imagery of Israel Mort, Overman, Rhoda Roberts and Maurice provides a structure for understanding Welsh working-class experience that was not replaced by the later industrial novel, but rather adapted and continued.