Studies in Romanticism

This essay explores the relationship between song, political radicalism, and religious dissent through the case of Iolo Morganwg (1747–1826), stonemason-poet, London showman, and self-proclaimed preserver of the Welsh bardic tradition. In recent years, our understanding of Iolo Morganwg (the bardic name of Edward Williams; literally, "Ned of Glamorgan") has been transformed by the work of scholars including Mary-Ann Constantine, Ffion Mair Jones, Damian Walford Davies, Cathryn Charnell-White, and Geraint Jenkins.¹ Through a landmark series of publications from the University of Wales Press, Iolo has become a prominent voice within a re-configured, archipelagic, or "four nations" Romanticism. The present essay aims to build on this work by focusing on the role of song—a category used here to encompass political ballads, traditional melodies, and dissenting hymns—in Iolo's career as it unfolded between London and South Wales. In doing so, it joins with other essays in this issue in suggesting the complexities of the transmission and circulation of song within and beyond national boundaries, in a way that complicates any straightforward center-periphery model. My particular interest in Iolo is as a figure who inhabits the intersections and contradictions between [End Page 481] popular song and the culture of dissent, illuminating the contested place of music within the formation defined by Daniel White as the "Dissenting public sphere."² The significance of song represents a thread that runs through Iolo's life, from the first book he remembered from his childhood—The Vocal Miscellany (1733), a two-volume collection "of above four hundred celebrated songs"—to the Unitarian hymns he wrote in his final years.³ Song connects his apparently disparate activities in London and Glamorgan, forming a vehicle for his political and religious radicalism. For Iolo, song could buttress the authority of his antiquarian discoveries, affirm his bardic persona, and spread the cause of Welsh Unitarianism, recovering a lost oral culture while forging new forms of identity.

Before focusing on Iolo's own work, the first section of the essay outlines the equivocal place of music within the dissenting imagination, as at once central to nonconformist identities and a continual source of anxiety. While the Church of England banned congregational hymn-singing—as opposed to the chanting of psalms or the choral performance of hymns and sacred music—until 1820, dissenters and Methodists celebrated singing as an affective expression of faith and community.⁴ By the late eighteenth century, congregational singing had assumed an important role for the many and various Protestant groups united by little more than their shared refusal to conform to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. The suspicion directed toward this form of communal worship intensified during the 1790s, with hymn-singing becoming one of a range of somatic practices tainted with enthusiasm in the eyes of conservative and Anglican commentators. As Jon Mee writes, "from Locke onwards enthusiasm had been presented as a contagious disease capable of rapidly infecting the lower orders. To many the Methodist revival seemed to be corroborating evidence of this weakness in the popular mind." Hymn-singing played a prominent role within the "psychopathology of enthusiasm," drawing believers together in a heightened emotional state: a symptom—their detractors claimed—of disturbed minds and bodies.⁵

It was not only their Anglican critics, however, who agonized over the status of music in dissenting culture. Dissenting writers themselves worried about the apparently irrational nature of music, its anti-mimetic qualities, [End Page 482] or lack of semantic coding, as well as its vaunted power over the emotions and associations with both 'popish' superstition and the rituals of what William Blake decried as "State Religion."⁶ For many nonconformists the sensuousness of music was indisputably at odds with dissenting austerity. As William Hazlitt, among the most merciless self-analysts of the dissenting character, wrote in 1815, the "distaste of the Puritans, Quakers, etc. to pictures, music, poetry, and the fine arts in general" was part of the inheritance of rational dissent, a consequence (or so Hazlitt thought) of a dogmatic habit of mind and an "affected disdain...