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  • In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales by M. Wynn Thomas
  • Dale A. Johnson (bio)
In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales, by M. Wynn Thomas; pp. x + 372. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010, £18.99, $35.00.

Part of the series Writing Wales in English, this volume explores a largely unexamined body of writing in English by Welsh authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concerning the power of the country’s Nonconformist religious tradition. In his introduction M. Wynn Thomas notes that his grandmother was an active participant in the famous Welsh revival of 1904 and 1905 led by the charismatic preacher Evan Roberts. But he also notes that this religious world is closed to most of the present generation, as Wales has moved from a predominantly religious to a predominantly secular culture. In short, Thomas proposes to examine “the rise and fall of the influential cultural, social and political ‘myth’ of the Welsh as a ‘Nonconformist nation’” (15).

How did Wales become a Nonconformist nation? For his largely uninformed readers, Thomas provides a “bluffer’s guide,” which covers the beginnings of Protestantism through the evangelical fervor of the eighteenth century, with its special Welsh Presbyterian form, which was still within its Anglican umbrella. This Calvinistic Methodism, as it was called, was characterized by powerful preachers, the dramatic narrative struggle between sin and salvation, and the hymns of William Williams Pantycelyn and Ann Griffiths. But the English government’s response to the French Revolution, fearing any form of dissent as a social and political threat, led to the creation of a separate [End Page 135] denomination, and a chapel culture (not church) grew apace over the course of the nineteenth century. In the first half of the century, the number of chapels tripled as the industrial population grew, fed by many great revivals with lengthy sermons, Sunday schools, periodicals, academies, singing festivals, and a welfare system that enabled the chapels to become “self-governing republics” (39). Nonconformity became what Kenneth Morgan called a “kind of unofficial established religion” of Wales (qtd. in Thomas 42).

All this came apart in the early years of the twentieth century through a complex of causes, including the rise of biblical criticism and a more liberal theological worldview, the emergence of the labor movement, the decline of the Welsh language, and World War I. Thomas focuses on the struggle with this heritage that Welsh writers in English brought to their fiction. He emphasizes “the totalitarian theological and social character of Welsh Methodism, how it produced a theocratic culture and resulted in lives lived with rigid reference to its fearsome tenets and codes” (84–85). Of course, there were utopian visions of Nonconformist culture as well; these countered the English perception that the Welsh were backward, ignorant, and violent by emphasizing the devout, morally upright, and culturally sophisticated chapel folk. Alas, that was a myth, an ideological construct that masked what Thomas, following the authors he discusses, considers the hard truths: the religion was ugly, patriarchal, superstitious, hateful (especially of Catholics and socialists), dictatorial, bigoted, hegemonic, socially and sexually repressive, prone to schism, rigidly sabbatarian, and grim. That, too, was surely mythic and a caricature, but it was popularized by a new generation of writers who challenged the authority of the preachers, constructed an alternate discourse, and engaged in “numerous acts of cultural parricide” (121). Caradoc Evans led the way (“We are what we have been made by our preachers and politicians, and thus we remain,” he wrote [qtd. in Thomas 128]), followed by Rhys Davies, Idris Davies, Gwyn Thomas, Thomas Harri Jones, and others. A large part of the issue was linguistic: writing in English was not just convenient and commercial, but also enabled these writers to distance themselves from chapel culture and participate in the modern world—certainly an ironic stance from the perspective of a century later. They had been preceded, however, by Welsh-language authors such as Daniel Owen (credited with being the first great Welsh novelist), who brought their own critique of Nonconformist faith and practice.

In the course of this psychic-cultural conflict, these writers became “spoiled preachers,” drawn...

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