Nineteenth Century
The rapid industrialisation of parts of Wales, especially Merthyr Tydfil and adjoining areas, gave rise to strong and radical Welsh working class movements which led to the Merthyr Rising of 1831, the widespread support for Chartism, and the Newport Rising of 1839.
With the establishment of the Presbyterian Church of Wales nonconformism triumphed in Wales, and gradually the previously majority of conservative voices within it allied themselves with the more radical and liberal voices within the older dissenting churches of the Baptists and Congregationalists. This radicalism was exemplified by the Congregationalist minister David Rees of Llanelli who edited the radical magazine Y Diwygiwr (The Reformer) from 1835 until 1865. But he was not a lone voice: William Rees (also known as Gwilym Hiraethog) established the radical Yr Amserau (The Times) in 1843, and in the same year Samuel Roberts also established another radical magazine, Y Cronicl (The Chronicle). Both were Congregationalist pastors.
The growth of radicalism and the gradual politicisation of Welsh life did not see any successful attempt to establish a separate political vehicle for promoting Welsh nationalism. But voices did appear within the Liberal Party, which made great gains in Wales in the nineteenth century with the extension of the franchise and the tacit support of Welsh nonconformity. An intended independence movement established on the pattern of Young Ireland, Cymru Fydd, was established in 1886 but was short lived.
For the majority in Wales, however, the important question was not one of independence or self-government, but of the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales. Nevertheless, their non-political nationalism was strong enough to establish national institutions such as the University of Wales in 1893, and the National Library of Wales and the National Museum of Wales in 1907.
Read more about this topic: Welsh Nationalism
Famous quotes related to nineteenth century:
“Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
“The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)