David J. V. Jones, The Last Rising. The Newport Insurrection of 1839. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. 273 pp. 4 maps. 9 illustrations. £12.50.

Abstract

This is a splendid book about one of the most remarkable episodes in modern British history. The central events, at least in outline, are familiar. During the night of 3-4 November 1839, several thousand workmen led by the foremost Welsh Chartist leader, John Frost, marched down from the valleys of the South Wales coalfield into the town of Newport. When an armed column reached the Westgate Hotel, where the local authorities had established their headquarters, there was a gun battle lasting perhaps twenty-five minutes. Over twenty Chartists were killed and over fifty wounded. Although the Newport Rising is one of the landmarks of nineteenth-century British history it has remained a mysterious event. Quite different accounts of even those central events appear in general works, and die assessments by historians of the aims and nature of the Chartist action have been rather tentative and frequently contradictory. In this very solidly researched and well-organized book, David Jones provides an authoritative account of the events at Newport. But more importantly he sets them in the context of developments in the new industrial society of South Wales, and in the first Chartist campaign of 1838-9. He reveals very clearly that those events at the Westgate, although ultimately crucial to the whole story, were only the wellknown tip of a lesser known iceberg. For what was being attempted by those Welsh Chartists was a genuinely insurrectionary move, a very widely supported attempt to mount a regional revolt intended to precipitate a national uprising. David Jones pays generous tribute to the pioneering work of Professor David Williams on John Frost, but fully demonstrates the utter inadequacy of Williams's judgment that the 'Newport riot' arose out of what was merely 'intended as a monster demonstration'. The study by Ivor Wilks, South Wales and the Rising of 1839 (Chicago, 1984), which appeared just before Jones's book, has also provided a detailed account based upon wide research. However Wilks, who is openly partisan in his approach, runs beyond his evidence in imputing a strongly Welsh nationalist character to a movement he sees as aiming at the 'creation of a workers' republic'. Jones is more hesitant in his assessments, but that is a more realistic response to the difficult and often contradictory nature of the evidence. For much of it has survived in the heavily slanted form of cases for the prosecution and defence in a treason trial, and is about events shrouded in secrecy. Jones has provided a more rounded and ultimately plausible interpretation, which still conveys the seriousness, scale and ambition of the rising. Both studies correctly emphasize the crucial importance of the effects of the very rapid industrialization of South Wales in conditioning class attitudes and forms of action, including ultimately the rising itself. Jones, in a wide survey, describes how a resilient working-class solidarity was forged around the informal networks of family, chapel, pub and neighbourhood, and increasingly in formal orga...