ABSTRACT
Introduction Recent research on the history of British urban elites has produced some important studies of the character, activities and connections of urban, social and cultural actors.1 The geographical spread of these studies has been uneven, however, with the midlands, the north of England and Scotland providing the primary focus for this scholarship.2 Wales has fared less well. On the face of it Welsh towns, with their relatively small populations and their apparently minute middle-class presence, have little to offer the historian of elites and urban power structures in the nineteenth century. From a wider, British perspective, urbanisation in Wales has been seen as lagging behind developments in other parts of the country.3 Despite some pioneering studies in the 1960s and 1970s, Welsh urban history has also, to some extent, fallen behind.4
