Wales

Abstract

Wales was a Welsh‐speaking country with a significant English‐speaking minority, including an anglicized gentry. Historical novels, short tales or “sketches,” and romances were important forms throughout the Victorian period. Toward the end of the century, a nascent industrial fiction emerged depicting life in the coal and iron industries. Translations from medieval Welsh manuscripts of Celtic myths bred new life into contemporary literature in English, within and beyond Wales. An 1847 government report into the state of education, and the opportunities to learn English – itself a response to widespread social unrest in the 1830s and 1840s – caused uproar in Wales as it depicted the Welsh as unruly, drunken, and immoral, and the women as sexually licentious. These stereotypes of an unruly but backward people were often perpetuated in English literature. Riots were used by native writers to make anti‐colonial or unionist statements in their fiction. When the home rule movement emerged in the 1880s, the periodical press became an important outlet for fiction and other writing along nationalist themes.