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  • Secret Sins: Sex, Violence and Society in Carmarthenshire 1870–1920
  • Mari A. Williams (bio)
Secret Sins: Sex, Violence and Society in Carmarthenshire 1870–1920, by Russell Davies; pp. x + 327. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996, £14.99 paper, $29.95 paper.

This fascinating study of the “secret sins” of the inhabitants of late-Victorian and Edwardian Carmarthenshire is a splendid contribution to our understanding of the social history of modern Wales. As the title suggests, the book concerns itself with the private lives of [End Page 343] individuals and with aspects of the human experience which have often been neglected or regarded as beyond the reach and understanding of the historian. One of the great strengths of this work is the way in which the author deals with his evidence, most of which has been gleaned from newspaper reports, hospital, police, and court records. Far from presenting a one-sided, anecdotal account of the crimes and misdemeanours committed by individuals in southwest Wales during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the author has skillfully pieced together the life stories of those people who lived on the margins of society—vagrants, the mentally ill, prostitutes, and felons—to offer new insights on the social dynamics and general experience of the community.

As the largest administrative county in nineteenth-century Wales, and one which contained within its boundaries both small, impoverished agricultural communities and rapidly developing industrial settlements, Carmarthenshire provides the social historian with an abundant source of research material. The author makes good use of this wealth of evidence in the first chapter where he paints an extremely detailed picture of the demographic, social, economic, and political structure of the county between 1870 and 1920. Profound changes took place in Carmarthenshire society during this fifty-year period, largely as a result of industrialization. In the southeastern parishes, where the industrial activity was centred, the population grew rapidly. The town of Llanelli, home to just 4,173 people in 1831, became an important centre for tinplate production and boasted a population of 36,520 by 1921. Important developments in the mining of anthracite coal also took place. In the Aman and Gwendraeth valleys, new industrial towns and villages sprang up almost overnight to accommodate the mining workforce, the vast majority of whom were natives of the surrounding agricultural districts. The redistribution of the local population had a devastating impact on the rural hamlets and old market towns of north and west Carmarthenshire. Indeed, their declining fortunes were in stark contrast to the prosperity of the southeast.

Yet, despite their obvious differences, it would be wrong to suggest that the industrial and agricultural communities of Carmarthenshire were two separate entities, for strong ties existed between them. As Davies graphically illustrates, their inhabitants were subject to the same social, economic, and psychological pressures, and members of their “marginal twilight world[s]” (9) shared many characteristics and experiences. This reality was one which many nineteenth-century Welsh commentators chose to ignore. Indeed, great pains were taken to present an idyllic portrait of the Welsh rural working class or gwerin, and to contrast their reputedly superior religious and moral values with those of the new urban proletariat. Central to this mythologized image of Welsh rural society was the belief that its inhabitants were honest, trustworthy, and law-abiding. Wales itself was often referred to as Hen Wlad y Menig Gwynion—“The Land of the White Gloves” —a description which derived from the custom of presenting judges at the Welsh Assize Courts with a pair of white gloves when the Calendar before them contained no criminal business.

In 1915, Caradoc Evans (1878–1945), a Cardiganshire-born journalist and writer, dared to challenge this myth and met with a hostile reception. It was Evans who once described Wales as “a country of secret sins” and in his volume of short stories, My People (1915), he presented a scathing attack on the religious and sexual mores of the Welsh, portraying the peasantry as a brutal and backward people whose disenchanted lives were controlled by a corrupt Liberal-Nonconformist elite. Eighty years later, Russell Davies’s enthralling examination of the real-life stories of the inhabitants...

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