Tag: class and respectability

• The Treachery of 1847: How the “Blue Books” Colonised the Welsh Mind

  

  In 1847 three substantial parliamentary reports were laid before Westminster under the unromantic title Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales. Their blue covers gave them their enduring popular name, the “Blue Books”, and their conclusions, or at least the spirit in which those conclusions were delivered, detonated across…

  Antony David Davies

  13/02/2026

  History

  19th-century-wales, anglicisation, Blue Books 1847, books, Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, British state and Wales, Chapel culture, class and respectability, cultural assimilation, cultural colonisation, cultural trauma, Cymraeg, education, education in Wales, gender and nationhood, heritage and identity, Historical memory, History, history of Wales, industrial Wales, internalised oppression, language shift, language suppression, Nonconformity, parliamentary inquiry, Politics, politics of language, postcolonial Wales, psychological colonisation, Rebecca Riots, Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry 1847, Rural Wales, social reform, Victorian morality, victorian-wales, Wales and England relations, Welsh Chapels, Welsh culture, Welsh devolution context, Welsh education history, Welsh history, Welsh identity, Welsh language, Welsh nationalism, Welsh women, writing