While the country was paralysed due to snow, book club met to discuss Rape of the Fairy Country by Alexander Cordell. This had been suggested by D who was introduced to AC’s books by her mother.
Rape of the Fair country is the first of a trilogy following the lives of the Mortymer Family. While the blurb on someone’s copy described the book as “lusty”, I would have used the words “grim” or “brutal.”
The book opens in 1826 when Iestyn, aged 8, starts work in the iron mines. The community the Mortymers live in is dominated by iron; “on the first night of full working I laid on my back beside Jethro and watched the room change from moonlight to red as Furnace One grew into blast”. Everyone works there, including very young children and pregnant women, tapping at the rock face, pulling trams or controlling the dangerous furnaces.
Although the books follow the domesticity and relationships (hence the “lusty” description) of the Mortymers, poverty and politics are strong forces. This is the time when oppressed workers were clamouring for unions and the Chartists were active. In the biography it describes how Alexander Cordell, injured in the British army, was convalescing in Wales when he discovered that “hand in hand with the tale of the mountain town of Blaenavon, went the last bloody revolution, in Britain, the Chartist Revolution.” Thus he found the climax of this book.
Book club members confessed to crying at sections of this book, some pages were almost unbearably difficult to read. Life was harsh. People suffered in a way most of us (in this country) now cannot comprehend. Everyone had to work. They were cold in winter (no-one stopped for a bit of snow!) When the town went out on strike, children died of hunger. Men fought brutally when they disagreed. AC describes workers drinking their pay packet, with children starving at home. One man forces his wife to quote bible passages before he beats her.
Chapel, church and religion, the aristocracy and politicians, corruption and the manipulation of the mine owners, desperate poverty and the extraordinary inequality between workers and upper classes are all mingled into the family story. Men were fighting for a system we would now consider ours by right – the six points of the charter being “universal manhood suffrage, annual parliaments, voting by ballot, equal electoral districts, no property qualifications for members of Parliament and payment of members…Behind this political formula there was the cry of millions suffering under a diseased condition of society.”*
We loved this book. It’s a powerful piece of social and political history. The characters are strong and you are drawn into the lives, loves and deaths of the Mortymers. It was also, for me, an interesting example of how being in a book club can successfully widen your reading horizons. We seemed hesitant when D suggested this book; it was obscure and completely unknown to us. But it gained the highest score of any book we’ve read, and many of us are planning to read the rest of the trilogy. This says to me that sometimes it’s good to be challenged and try something new and unknown.
If you love fiction based on historical fact, and don’t mind grappling with a few Welsh names, I can thoroughly recommend Rape of the Fair Country.
*quote from The Age of Improvement by Asa Briggs