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English Money and Welsh Rocks: Divisions of Language and Divisions of Labor in Nineteenth-Century Welsh Slate Quarries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2002

H. Paul Manning
H. Paul Manning
Affiliation:
American Councils for International Education, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia
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Extract

In 1893 a Welsh poet with the bardic name Glan Elsi uttered a remarkable vaticination that seemed to unite the fate of the Welsh language and the Welsh slate quarrier:

Dearest old Welsh, if ever it dies,

From the lips of a quarrier, I think, will come the final word.John Owen (Glan Elsi), “Y Chwarelwr” [The quarrier]. Cymru 5, 1893, p. 112.

What is immediately remarkable is that such an identification of a modern proletariat (as opposed, for example, to a vanishing traditional peasantry, as would be so common elsewhere in Europe), as a linguistic kulturträger of the Welsh language was by this time so unremarkable. Even more extraordinary, perhaps, is that this was a by-product of the slate-quarriers' own self-mythologizing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , July 2002 , pp. 481 - 510
Copyright
© 2002 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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