The Nineteenth-Century Media and Welsh Identity

Abstract

The idea of Welsh nationality has long been characterized by ambiguity. The devolution referendum in 1979 exposed the indeterminacy of the sense of nationhood in Wales and led to a prolonged crisis of identity which the narrow majority in favour of a devolved Welsh Assembly in 1997 only partially resolved. To be sure, both tests of the public mood distinguished Wales from the far more self-confident and consensual national political culture of Scotland. But, at the same time, this elusive, often fragmented and sometimes contradictory sense of nationality in Wales offers some distinctive insights into the differing processes of identity-making and the problem of media construction and representation of identities which have occurred elsewhere in the United Kingdom and beyond. This chapter will focus on one element of that process, namely the role played by the print media in generating and elaborating concepts of ‘Wales’ in the years between the Crimean and the First World wars.