ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the aspect of Welsh cultural history explored in some detail is the way the shift from rural to urban living was articulated and scrutinised in the popular press. The main trope which links articles taken from newspapers and other sketches of Wales and the Welsh' is the figure of the participant-observer narrator, the data-gatherer of ethnographic studies, who is both inside and yet subtly removed from the action he or she describes. From the mid-nineteenth century, these aspects of Welsh life and traditions were under particular scrutiny, not least because of the Chartist rising in Newport in 1839, and the Rebecca Riots of the early 1840s, which stemmed from high rises in toll gate taxes. In a particularly venomous yet witty regular column, which concentrates mainly on the urban areas around Barry in south Wales, a superficially light-hearted impression of Welsh life is depicted in comparison to the sorrow and loss evoked by Rural Life'.
