From Planet 171

"In a Very Deranged State"

by Mary-Ann Constantine

In the first of two articles Mary-Ann Constantine explores the contradictions in the life and work of Iolo Morganwg as revealed in the huge archive of his papers at the National Library of Wales.

Intensive research on anything makes researchers obsessive; they develop exegetical tendencies, see precursors and parallels everywhere, and cannot resist making connections that lead, like so many spider-webs, back to the object of their research. It must be said that the huge archive of papers and letters produced by Iolo Morganwg, now held in the National Library of Wales, is dangerously conducive to this tendency. As endless calls for papers for Romantic-period conferences drop into the inbox, it is hard to resist the mildly intoxicating feeling that it would be possible to knock out twenty minutes on virtually anything. Science? There’s the medicinal visit in 1792 to one “Mr Long Opperator in Electricity in Compton Street, Soho, who electrified me, drawing sparks repeatedly from my hands, arms, breast, knees.” Geology? The cliffs of Glamorgan yielded “the head of a small horned animal petrified in a quarry of limerock, I suppose that it must have been a fish.” Urban versus pastoral? “Let those that abide in the filth of a town/Deride, if they please, the meek life of a clown.” The French revolution? The idea of Britishness? Tea-merchants, druids, lime-kilns, folksongs, marmalade? There will be a note or a poem on it somewhere, scribbled on the back of an advertisement, or developed in an essay-draft or in a letter to a friend or a literary journal. In a period fizzing with eclecticism Iolo Morganwg is more eclectic than most.

A research project at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, funded by the AHRB and University of Wales, is busy mining this archive, adding to fundamental work carried out half a century ago by Gruffydd John Williams, and more recently by Ceri Lewis, Prys Morgan, Gwyneth Lewis and others. The aim of the project, currently employing five researchers, is to make more of the unpublished material accessible, and, especially, to bring it to the attention of an English-language audience. Much of the archive is in fact in English, but has been very little used by those working on this period, particularly outside Wales. A series of books is planned: Iolo’s correspondence, over three thousand letters, will be published in three volumes, and books on bardism, romantic forgery, politics and Iolo’s legacy are also underway. A composite volume of essays on many different aspects of his life and work should be out by the end of this year.

He was born Edward Williams in the parish of Llancarfan, Glamorgan, in 1747. He had little formal education, being “so very unhealthy while a child (and I have continued so), that it was thought useless to put me to school”; but his mother encouraged him to read in Welsh and English, and he received an excellent training in Welsh poetry and letters from local scholars and poets. He learned his father’s trade, stonecutting, and claimed to be carving professionally “at the age of 8 or 9”; he was still working with his hands in his seventies. His mother’s death in 1770 affected him deeply, and he began a restless decade, travelling to north Wales to copy manuscripts and visiting the “Druidic monuments” in Anglesey. He also started to write as an English poet, composing many of the pastoral pieces that would appear in his published collection some twenty years later. At twenty-six he took laudanum for “a troublesome cough”, and he remained addicted to it in varying degrees throughout his life. He worked at his trade in London, seeing at the Welsh School there the papers of Lewis Morris, and manuscripts containing poems by the fourteenth-century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. They had a powerful effect on him: he became a disciple, a passionate imitator and finally a forger of Dafydd’s poetry. He also worked down in Kent, writing poems about his exile and enduring an exceptionally bad winter: “the snow was 40, or 50, feet deep here abouts, and they have been oblidged to dig ways under the snow, like ye ways under ground in coal mines, to go out to the country for necessaries.” Returning across Salisbury plain he visited Avebury and Stonehenge, and gave a short account of recent excavations at Silbury Hill.

In 1781, back in Glamorgan, he married Peggy Roberts. They had four children, over whom he fussed and worried all his life: the death of a four-year-old daughter in 1793 was a nightmare realised. During the 1780s the family lived in various places in Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan, and Iolo tried his hand unsuccessfully at many ways of making a living: “I am in this Country a piece of a marble and freestone mason, a piece of a builder, a piece of a Farmer, a lime burner for the use of the public, I have a small sloop trading in the Severn, in short I am a Jack of all trades, and, if the old proverb is true, I shall never be rich.” Sure enough, he spent a year in Cardiff prison for debt. By the late 1780s his antiquarian interest in the history of the Ancient British Druids and his local interest in Welsh poetic or bardic tradition converged: like many at this period he believed that the Druids were the ancestors of the medieval Welsh bards, and he set out to show that some areas (principally his beloved Glamorgan) had preserved the ancient traditions rather better than others. Many of the “proofs” are subtle forgeries involving texts copied from missing or vaguely identified manuscripts. In 1789, the London Welsh, sponsored by Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr), brought out an edition of the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym which included a dozen of Iolo’s own creations. In the same year he introduced himself to readers of the Gentleman’s Magazine as a self-taught “journeyman mason [...] never seen in liquor”, who, “about the age of twenty [...] was admitted a Bard in the ancient manner; a custom still retained in Glamorgan, but, I believe, in no other part of Wales.” He began to sign himself “Iolo Morganwg”.