Review
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Title: On Trial in the Welsh Press
Editor and Translator: Ronald D. Dennis
Publisher: BYU Religious Studies Center
Genre: History
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 928
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781950304479
Price: 36.99
Reviewed by Ivan Wolfe for the Association of Mormon Letters
On Trial in the Welsh Press is a very thick, heavy book – over 900 pages, and quite thick pages at that. This is a book meant to endure a lot of punishment and use.
Also, for full disclosure, I took a semester of Welsh from Ronald D. Dennis when I was at BYU.
Other than that, the best I can do is describe its overall contents and format.
The book is, for the most part, a collection of quotes from, or entire translations of, pamphlets, news articles, books, and the like that were part of the LDS missionary experience in Wales from 1840 – 1860.
After a brief introduction and chapter covering historical methods used, the historical background of the Church in Wales, and a general overview of the entire historical period covered by the book, the book has three main divisions.
The first is the longest, taking up approximately half of the book. These chapters (2 – 16) cover the overall chronology of publications dealing with the Church in Wales, with a focus on various “episodes” (centered around a single person or event), in a roughly chronological order, with brief historical commentary and copious relevant quotations from and summaries of articles, pamphlets, and other printed material. For two examples, episode 2.1 deals with a woman who drowned during her baptism into the Church (“the person performing the baptism lost his grip . . . and she went down the river”). Episode 12.2 deals with a debate between missionary Dan Jones and two anti-Mormon preachers.
The second includes “facsimile translations” of various pamphlets, where the translation is rendered in the same style and formatting as the original pamphlets (as well as the title pages for pamphlets published in Wales in English only). In a few cases, only the parts of the pamphlets that dealt directly with the Church are translated.
The third and briefest, includes “nonpoetic” translations of “oppositional” poems and a facsimile reproduction of an English language “oppositional” poem.
In the end, if you like large books of documentary history, you will love On Trial in the Welsh Press. However, while there are interesting events and narratives contained within (and the poems are fun even when hostile), overall it is mainly a way to access primary documents for those who don’t know Welsh but are interested in the history of the Church in Wales (or 19th Century LDS missionary work and how it dealt with opposition).