Special Collections
Book of the Month, November 2006
In 1772 and 1774-6 the naturalist and antiquary Thomas Pennant (1762-1798) published descriptions of his tours to Scotland made in 1769 and 1772 respectively. The books met with wide acclaim and prompted his Tour in Wales – actually the result of several trips made in the early 1770s – in three quarto volumes of nearly 1,000 pages between 1778 and 1784. Pennant had collected information from various sources, from personal application and from a circular letter printed in a Chester newspaper, and relied especially heavily on the Welsh-speaking Rev. John Lloyd of Caerwys, “my right hand in Welsh antiquities, my constant friend and companion in travel”. Pennant’s Tour in Wales is decidedly partisan, beginning with the paragraph:
I now speak of my native country, celebrated in our earliest history for its valour and tenaciousness of liberty; for the stand it made against the Romans; for its slaughter of their legions, and for its subjection by Agricola, who did not dare to attempt his Caledonian expedition, and leave behind him unconquered so tremendous an enemy.
I naturally begin my journey from the place of my nativity, Downing, in the township of Eden-Owain …
The Tour described sights, antiquities, and the landscape, and related anecdotes. Welshmen welcomed it enthusiastically, Francis Leighton of Shrewsbury congratulating Pennant on being “the first writer who has honoured our country with particular notice”, and promoter of the Welsh language Richard Morris (1703-1779) writing to him: “Long may you live a Pattern to your Country-men and an Ornament to your Country”.
This folio edition by the modern Welsh private press Gwasg Gregynog abridges the original, with less detail on such matters as castles, the life of the medieval rebel leader Owain Glyn Dŵr, the origins of the eisteddfod, and the geology and economy of mineral tracts of North Wales; the aim is to provide the flavour, not the entire detail, of Pennant’s work. In place of the eighteenth-century black and white engravings are coloured woodcuts by the Manchester-born artist Rigby Graham (b. 1931), who wrote that the book would need to “rely on the woodcuts for the wit, humour, & entertainment however crude & ham-fisted”.
This is copy no. 60 of 170 numbered copies for sale. It joins several other titles by Gwasg Gregynog and its predecessor, the Gregynog Press (founded by Gwendoline and Margaret Davies in 1922) in the private press section of the Sterling Library, the collection of first and fine editions of English literature based on the collection donated to the University of London in 1956 by Sir Louis Sterling.
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