ABSTRACT
The level of contemporary chartist comment on the events of 1839 in Wales was regrettably low, seldom moving beyond a search for scapegoats. Bussey betrayed Frost, O’Connor betrayed Frost, Ashton betrayed Frost, Frost betrayed the workers - the permutations were seemingly inexhaustible. The text was originally written in Welsh and much of it probably before the rising, for the author intended to publicise the view of Alexander Somerville that an armed citizenry could not combat regular soldiers. The confidence of the rebel leaders was misplaced, the author of the Address argued, because it rested upon the assumption that the workers of England and Scotland were similarly united and similarly well organised. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the great ironworks had sprung up where previously there had been no more than the occasional farm. The extent of the development of the productive forces, the intensity of the class struggle, and the level of class consciousness are linked phenomena.
