Words with Pictures: Welsh Images and Images of Wales in the Popular Press, 1640-1860

Words with Pictures: Welsh Images and Images of Wales in the Popular Press, 1640-1860. By Peter Lord. Aberystwyth: Plant, 1995. 167pp. 19.95 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0 9505188 2 4

It is good to have, at last, a survey of the Welsh in art in the Early Modern and Modern eras, as seen by friend and foe alike: the casual reader might have been excused hitherto for thinking the Welsh peculiarly aniconic! The author is himself a former practising artist, and is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies of the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, from where he leads The Welsh Visual Culture Research Project which has the aim of writing "a history of the visual culture of Wales"--this book, though it does not say so specifically, is presumably a part of that laudable and astoundingly overdue project.

The date-bracket for the present volume is 1640-1860, the terminus post quem chosen to coincide with the appearance of the earliest known "Popular Press" images of the Welshman (i.e. broadside ballads published in London), and the mid-nineteenth century cut-off date coinciding with the (wholly understandable) demise of the satirical Punch Cymraeg; it would not be unfair to say that the author becomes increasingly authoritative the closer he approaches the later terminus.

To begin at the beginning ... it is unfortunate that the first historical chapter should open with an image captioned "A Welsh man and woman published in the Fyrst boke of the Introduction of Knowledge by Andrew Boorde, 1547," for, with the exception of the names of the author and the title of the book, everything else in this caption is mistaken! Firstly, the book is now dated somewhat later--1555? being STC2's suggested date (though the author dates his preface 1542)--and secondly, both figures in the woodcut are male! More seriously--though, to be fair, Lord does suggest in the text that "the block may be an old one, put to new use"--the cut certainly did not start life as a portrait of the Welsh, but as the righthand half of those born under the sign of the sun in Verard's (English-language) Shepherd's Calendar (Paris, 1503), reprinted by Pynson (London, 1506--and later) [= Hodnett, 1539]. But worse still, the reproduction--wherever it is from (probably some "facsimile" publication)--is not from the sixteenth-century book!

The very next image of "The head of Llywelyn carried through the streets of London," is captioned as "date uncertain," though it should rather illustrate a much later chapter, being most probably a nineteenth-century production. The following illustration, the title-page of The Pleasant History of Taffy's Progress to London ... is said to have been "printed by T. Thom, London, late 17th century," yet Thom's initial, plainly visible in the reproduction, is F.; the next illustration is Pistol eating Fluellens Leek, but despite Bunbury's authentically Shakespearian spelling of Llywelyn's name, he is referred to in the text as Fluellin--in itself, this is trivial enough, of course, but when set alongside the other similar errors, it weakens one's confidence in the author's competence--at least, in the earlier period. The prose broadside, The Welch Man's Inventory, which follows, is captioned "printed by W.O., London, 1641"; but William Onley is a late-seventeenth-century printer, and Wing dates this edition [W1325A], 1700 (uniquely in the British Library); there is a 1641 edition uniquely in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries, though, in fact, it can be traced earlier still, for it appears as the Welch Infectory [sic] of the Coods in the Stationer's Register entry for 6 December 1633.

There is still more work to be done in tracking down the origins and development of the image of the stereotypical Welshman (as seen through English eyes, of course), the "Poor Taff" of Lord's second chapter. For all its "Wenglish" text, the eponymous Welch Man of the burlesque Inventory, who also appears in The Welch Mans Life, Teath and Periall (London, 1641) is merely portrayed as an elderly man in cap and fur-trimmed gown, with a staff in one hand and a hat in the other--the "humour" resides almost wholly in the text, not in the image, and the man himself could just as well be English. It seems it is not until the late-seventeenth century that the Welshman is identified as such visually, and then principally by virtue of the leek in his hat: in broadside ballads printed in the late 1680s we first come across Taffy walking beside his goats wearing the leek in his hat, carrying a pike over his shoulder and in the other hand a slice of cheese-on-toast skewered on the end of a knife. He appears, for example, in 1689 in The Welsh Fortune Teller (satirising the Welsh penchant for prophecies, as Shakespeare had already done in the person of Owen Glendower, at the end of the previous century), by which date the block has already suffered from woodworm, for four wormholes decorate his hat; in The Welch Wedding, however, which Wing (W1345) dates 1685X8 there are only three worm-holes, thus enabling us to narrow down the date-bracket Wing gives for The Trappan'd Welsh-man (T2051A), who also has only three holes in his hat, from 1685X95, to 1685X8--a small enough addition to the sum of human knowledge, admittedly, but the sort of detail which bibliographers neglect at their peril!