Another AWWE annual conference, another paper delivered. This year’s topic explored the Underscapes of Welsh writing in English, exploring the things tucked out of sight, fallen below and palimpsested over (it *is* a verb now). We had a range of fantastic papers, critical and creative keynotes and, as a first, a fieldnote sent from Skomer in the shape of a little video. I gave a paper on Thomas Richards, Dolgellau, and traced some autobiographical traces in his works. Past me had ambitously proposed to look at a range of his writing, but in the end as time was scarce, I only focused on two of his short stories. The goal is to develop this paper into something more comprehensive that will also look at his non-fictional output, so try and uncover where the delineation between creative invention and non-fictional documentation lies. In the meantime, here is the paper as delivered this weekend, obvious traces of a first idea thrown on paper and all.
In March 1833, the Hobart Town Magazine published the description of a fishing excursion to the river Plenty by one ‘Piscator’. Tucked in between an enthusiastic apology in favour of angling and the description of the itinerary from Hobart along the river Derwent, the reader suddenly encounters the writer’s pipe-dream of a future, romantically situated cottage:
[W]e flatter ourselves, that in the course of a couple of years, the grounds and gardens at Bryntirion, (for so we have christened it) will be worthy of a visit from the curious in matters horticultural and botanical; at all events, they shall ever be accessible to their inspection; and, if we are at home, we shall be very happy to crack a bottle of our own grape or gooseberry wine, with a “brother of the angle,” as he passes by on his way to the Plenty.1
In 1848, the name Bryntirion resurfaces in another Hobart-based publication, namely the Colonial Times. An anonymous correspondent submitted the short-story ‘The Wanderer’s Return’ penned some twenty years earlier by a ‘departed friend’ calling himself ‘Peregrine’.2 The story tells the return of one Ellis Meredith to his ancestral town ‘Holmgrove’, the ‘rude capital of the wild county of Merioneth’, where he has just bought the Bryntirion estate. While the name Bryntirion can be traced across several parishes in Wales in the first half of the nineteenth century, its appearance in the popular press in a comparatively young colony is conspicuous. It should come therefore as no surprise that the anonymous correspondent, Peregrine and Piscator are one and the same person, namely Thomas Richards.
Thomas Richards was born in or near Dolgellau in 1800. He was the first son of Elizabeth, formerly Highway, and Thomas Richards, attorney. Young Thomas grew up with three younger siblings, Robert, Anne and Margaret, in relative comfort on the earnings of his father and the income from his small estate.3 Following the death of his father in 1809, Thomas was sent for his formal education to Christ’s Hospital until 1815. He was then apprenticed to a medical practitioner in London and received his apothecary license in 1823. For the following nine years, he practised medicine and supplemented his income with a number of publications in literary and antiquarian periodicals. He published a monograph on nervous diseases, two collections of his short stories and a novel, before eventually emigrating to Tasmania with his wife, Hannah Ellesmere, and their infant son in April 1832. He paid for their passage on the Princess Royal by hiring on as the ship’s surgeon. Settling at Hobart, Richards continued his double life as man of medicine and letters for at least another 25 years before eventually retiring. He was one of the first people to produce literary writing about life in Tasmania in addition to working as a court reporter, drama critic and newspaper editor. Thomas Richards died on 18 July 1877. He was survived by his wife Hannah and three of his children. While Richards harboured literary ambitions only for as little over a decade, together with his substantial body of non-fictional writing, his published works betray an astonishing amount of autobiographical content and clues to some of his early life and childhood. In fact, Richards’s fictional ‘Holmgrove’ is nothing more than an English pseudo-etymology of Dolgellau, whereas ‘Bryntirion’ was the name of his father’s house.4
It would be simplistic to undertake an excavation of Richards’s biography among his writings if all we did was scratch the surface of a handful of names and twist them into various shapes until they resemble something akin to the author’s life. Rather, we need to look for the shapes that lie beneath, the underscapes, if you will, in his writings. ‘[The] life story one tells of one’s self is a story that one needs to tell in order to make sense of him-/her-self,’ writes Vanja Polic.5 Rather than searching for recurring names and events in an attempt to identify biographical elements, it is the themes that give us a sense of the life story that Richards tells about himself. In fact, this conference’s underscapes metaphor offers a helpful tool in understanding how the real world and the world of the text, or what Juri Lotman calls the ‘semiosphere’, are linked and separated through stratification. In in my particular case this means excavating the layers of Thomas Richards’s various personas as author, narrator and fictionalised self-insertion in a work of fiction. While the layers are distinguishable from one another and stack up in a (hopefully) logical order that separates the real from the written world, fault lines can throw up curves that fold up and over against other layers, blurring these distinctions. At other times, traumatic events produce shifts of meaning and function, just as seismic events produce ruptures and dislocations of entire strata. Instead of understanding ‘author’ and ‘narrator’ as mutually exclusive and separate layers, the underscapes metaphor therefore suggests a co-occurrence. First, it offers up various degrees to which narrators may involve themselves in their story, whether they are heterodiegetic or homodiegetic in nature.6 And second, in terms of understanding authorial insertion, scholars of autofiction acknowledge that autobiography ‘shares a great deal with fiction, because it cannot but, to a large extent, be a fictive rendering of the self’.7 Gerard Genette counters that
Borges who signs his name to “El Aleph,” is not functionally identical with the Borges who is the narrator and hero of “EI Aleph,” even if they share many (not all) biographical features, just as Fielding-the-author-of-Tom-Jones is not functionally (enunciatively) Fielding-the-narrator, even if the same Hogarth is the friend and Charlotte the deceased wife of both.8
Applied to the Welsh writing in English domain this means that neither is Dylan Thomas the ‘young artist’, nor is Dannie Abse a young man with ash on his sleeve. In determining what function the autobiographical self is supposed to fulfil in the narrative, Hayden White’s emplotment of historiography as Romance, Tragedy, Comedy or Satire springs to mind.9 In other words, the (auto)biographer selects, interprets and presents characters and items with a narrative goal in mind that is not always congruent with dispassionate objectivity, and in so doing fictionalises the self to play the hero, villain or fool or a heightened, satirical version of either one of them. Returning to Thomas Richards then, the question therefore is: If Thomas Richards wrote the story of his life, what would it be and who would play his character?
Among Thomas Richards’s body of fiction, the incomplete ‘Life and Adventures of Timothy Templeton’ stands out as the work that contains the most obvious autobiographical elements. The story was serialised in the Hobart Town Magazine in 1833, but remained incomplete after just two chapters due to the unexpected termination of the magazine in early 1834. No subsequent chapters that might conclude the story have been identified at this point. According to his Tasmanian biographer E. Morris Miller, this short story contains ‘the main incidents of Richards’s early life’.10 For the congruence between known biographical aspects about Richards and the life of the fictional Timothy, it is therefore tempting to label it a ‘“hidden” autobiography’.11 Nevertheless, there are sufficient biographical differences that should caution the reader against taking everything at face value. Like Thomas, Timothy grew up on an estate in rural Merionethshire. Like Thomas’s father, Templeton senior was an attorney at law and a local landowner while the mother added some of her own modest wealth on the occasion of her marriage, and together they raised a small brood of children, with Timothy being the eldest. Richards paints a positively bucolic image of rural Welsh boyhood:
Much of my time was spent with my cousins—I mean the boys—in hunting, fishing, furze-firing, birds-nesting and similar amiable pastimes particularly well calculated ‘to teach the young idea’ how to do anything but what it ought.—Our education at this interesting period—that is, before we were ten years old—being carefully and most prudently entrusted to Twm, the lad of all work, and Robin Shone, the old shepherd.12
Richards is on message with other Romantics in drawing up an idealised vision of eternal childhood lived in rural seclusion and far from formal education, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kunstmärchen ‘Das fremde Kind’ from 1819. However, Timothy finds his blissful childhood overshadowed by the sudden death of his father and the subsequent removal to a charitable public school, Christ’s Hospital. In contrast to his habitual life outdoors and the informal education to which he had become accustomed, Timothy, like Thomas, drifts into the dark and unpromising underworld of a boys’ school populated by crones:
The nurses, too, presented an appearance which comported well with the gloomy old hall and the gloomier old wards—they were with but one exception fat, crummy, heavy old-fashioned dames looking as if they had been cut out of Holbein’s picture representing the Court of Edward VI.13
Far removed from his family and the familiar mountain landscape, it is here in his involuntary exile and in his dealings with the other school boys that Timothy discovers his cultural otherness as he becomes ‘an object of supreme ridicule and fun, as Taffy always is’.14 In the world of English education, Welshness marks the outsider. As an alumni of Christ’s Hospital and his later acquaintances with a London-based ‘little coterie of ‘lads’ and fellow literati, it is subsequently no surprise that Richards’s Welsh writings feature his homeland as a setting, but his literary idols, such as Southey and Scott, originate almost entirely from the Anglosphere.15 As a result, Richards’s, and by extension Timothy’s emotional underscapes and loyalties remain Welsh, but the outer layers have taken on an English garb.
The majority of the second chapter of the ‘Life and Adventures’ takes the reader through Timothy’s otherwise uneventful and scholarly average school life and early manhood as he becomes apprenticed to an apothecary and confesses contributing pieces to the magazines.16 However, it appears that Timothy in his role as the narrator is curiously disinterested in this part of his life and the mundane trajectory of his story—and it appears so is Thomas Richards. Towards the end of the second chapter, the first-person narrative is suddenly interrupted as the narrative frame shifts to a third-person perspective. In this caesura, a fault-line, if you will, Timothy is transformed into a character holding a conversation with another narrator about failing to provide any deep-cutting insights into his own life, even daring his audience to provide an explanation that he cannot deliver: ‘It is to me a matter perfectly inexplicable; but your superior penetration may, perhaps, suggest a solution’.17 This frame-shifting fault line appears at a crucial point as it careens the action back to Wales and intends to set Timothy on course to become the tragic hero of his own story. I say ‘intends’ because unfortunately, the chapter ends soon thereafter and no other instalment appeared at any later time. Thankfully, there are other, similar stories in Richards’s catalogue that hint at the unwritten future of Timothy, the strongest recurring element representing not only the loss of home and first love, but also the emotional trauma created by the loss of one’s parents through death or geographical separation:
Seven years had now elapsed since I had left home, and I had not seen my family during the whole of that period. […] I am very certain that in my case it was injurious to me as a son: that is, it removed from me—by depriving me of the control and solicitude of a mother—a great portion of affection and reverence for that mother: for how could it be supposed that I should love a person whom I had not once seen during the most important and plastic period of my boyhood?18
Timothy feels the same estrangement toward his siblings and cousins whom he fails to recognise as they have invariably aged into young adulthood during his absence. At this point only the ‘less changeable and more enduring works of Nature’ of the Welsh landscape is left to offer him a semblance of home.19 In this section, Richards appears to have re-worked the introduction from an earlier short story, ‘The Wanderer’s Return’, which I have already mentioned at the start of this paper.
In this story, Richards assumes the Peregrine persona who tells the return of yet another wanderer to their mutual home town, ‘Holmgrove’, i.e. Dolgellau. Peregrine is an elderly man of ‘nearly three score years’ and therefore considerably more advanced in age than the 26-year old author. Considering the repeated use of the ‘old wanderer returning home’ motif in several of his stories, it appears that Richards uses the elder persona to express his profound sense of alienation and loss:
I was now a stranger in my own land. I went into the churchyard, and the spot where I stood was full of beauty. I looked upon the white gravestones and read the names of many that I had known in my happiness and health.20
The past, along with his friends, is something that ends up underground, leaving Peregrine behind in the land of the living and marking him once more as an outsider, a lone survivor visiting the dead, the only consolation being offered by an unchanging landscape. Peregrine, however, is not the wanderer referred to in the title of the story. Instead, he tells the story of a friend, Ellis Meredith. Similar to Peregrine—and Richards—Ellis had left his home town according to parental wishes, moving to London with the aim of economic success. In contrast to narrator and author, Ellis’s fate returns him back to his roots just within the nick of time. Following his father’s death, he has purchased the estate Bryntirion, situated just outside Holmgrove, in the hope that his old love, Eliza Williams, has been faithful to him during his absence.
The wanderer paused, and then said in a tone of deep feeling, ‘Eliza! dear Eliza! have you, too, forgotten me?’ when in a moment the lovers were in each others’ arms—and in the sweet delight of that ecstatic embrace, buried days and months and years of despondency and sorrow.21
It appears there is no escaping the underscapes metaphor. Again, Richards consigns the past underground, burying grief and loneliness, putting them out of sight. Published originally in 1826 in the Christmas anthology Forget Me Not, this story comes before Richards’s own marriage two years later and his eventual emigration to Tasmania in the spring of 1832. It is tempting, therefore, to assume that with ‘The Wanderer’s Return’, Richards still hopes for a happy ending for himself, reclaiming the parental estate that had been sold in line with the stipulations his father’s will.22 Yet, by the time that Timothy Templeton graced the pages of the Hobart Town Magazine, this hope had once and for all been dashed and, in turn, Timothy, too, was destined to lose his childhood sweetheart and never to return home.
Thomas Richards’s published writing spans across three decades. His fictional works make up only a small section in comparison to his antiquarian essays, character studies of contemporaries, travel writing, theatre reviews, reports of court proceedings and newspaper editorials, to name just a few. Among all these, however, Wales, or more specifically Meirionydd looms large, either as the country of a lost childhood or as a familiar travel destination for a young man seeking respite from his life and work in London. Whatever the subject, there is always an excuse to mention Wales. Even his Treatise on Nervous Disorders (1829) contains a passionate footnote about the country of his childhood.23 It is therefore not surprising that in some cases E. Morris Miller over-interpreted the case and mistook a number of Richards’s short stories for non-fictional works.24 Unless a true autobiographical account in the hand of Thomas Richards materialises somewhere in Tasmania, it is unlikely that we will ever discover to what exact extent his Welsh short stories have been informed by his childhood spent in the vicinity of Dolgellau in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The story that Richards told about himself, but not about himself, is one of childhood trauma, the loss of home and wandering. It took two decades’ worth of life in Tasmania before this sense of being cast adrift disappeared from his writing. While Richards has been recognised as one of the pioneers of Tasmanian fiction, the picture is a little different in the country of his birth. Even though his personal literary heroes may have been English and Scottish writers and he was writing about home from a distance, his emotional attachments remained in Wales.
Sources
1Piscator (pseud., Thomas Richards, ‘A Day’s Fishing in the Plenty’, Hobart Town Magazine, 1.1 (1833), pp. 33–42.
2Peregrine (pseud., Thomas Richards), ‘To the Editor of the Colonial Times […] The Wanderer’s Return’, Colonial Times (Hobart, 25 February 1848), p. 4.
3‘Merionethshire Baptisms, Marriages and Burials’, 1994 1568, p. n.p., Archives and Records Council Wales.
4Thomas Richards (sr.), ‘Thomas Richards : Will, 1809’, National Library of Wales http://hdl.handle.net/10107/898912 [accessed 6 May 2025].
5Polic, ‘The Texture of Everyday Life’, p. 166.
6G. Genette, Fiction & Diction, Cornell Paperbacks (Cornell University Press, 1993).
7Milada Franková, ‘The Red Queen: Margaret Drabble’s (Auto)Biographical Pastiche’, Brno Studies in English, 37.2 (2011), pp. 79–86 (p. 80), https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/21703.
8Genette, Fiction & Diction, pp. 75–76.
9Hayden White, Metahistory : The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Repr (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), p. 7, WorldCat; see Vanja Polic, ‘The Texture of Everyday Life’, Brno Studies in English, 37.2 (2011), pp. 159–71 (p. 162), https://journals.phil.muni.cz/bse/article/view/21709.
10Edmund Morris Miller, Pressmen and Governors: Australian Editors and Writers in Early Tasmania. A Contribution to the History of the Australian Press and Literature with Notes Biographical and Bibliographical (Sydney : Sydney University Press, 1973), p. 94.
11Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, ‘The Vanished Land of Childhood Autobiographical Narration in Astrid Lindgren’s Work’, Barnboken, 30.1–2 (2007), p. 84, https://www.barnboken.net/index.php/clr/article/view/51.
12Thomas Richards, ‘The Life and Adventures of Timothy Templeton, a Turnkey in His Majesty’s Prison at Newgate’, in Rob the Red-Hand and Other Stories of Welsh Society and Scenery, ed. by Rita Singer (Llyfrau Cantre’r Gwaelod, 2017), pp. 209–28 (pp. 210–11).
13Richards, ‘The Life and Adventures of Timothy Templeton, a Turnkey in His Majesty’s Prison at Newgate’, p. 219.
14Richards, ‘The Life and Adventures of Timothy Templeton, a Turnkey in His Majesty’s Prison at Newgate’, p. 221.
15Anonymous (Richards, Thomas), ‘Fugitive Recollections of London Some Years Ago; No. 1’, Colonial Times (Hobart, 2 January 1838), pp. 6–7; 6.
16Richards, ‘The Life and Adventures of Timothy Templeton, a Turnkey in His Majesty’s Prison at Newgate’, p. 223.
17Richards, ‘The Life and Adventures of Timothy Templeton, a Turnkey in His Majesty’s Prison at Newgate’, p. 226.
18Richards, ‘The Life and Adventures of Timothy Templeton, a Turnkey in His Majesty’s Prison at Newgate’, p. 226.
19Richards, ‘The Life and Adventures of Timothy Templeton, a Turnkey in His Majesty’s Prison at Newgate’, p. 227.
20Thomas Richards, ‘The Wanderer’s Return’, in Rob the Red-Hand and Other Stories of Welsh Society and Scenery, ed. by Rita Singer (Llyfrau Cantre’r Gwaelod, 2017), pp. 33–43 (p. 34).
21Richards, ‘The Wanderer’s Return’, p. 43.
22Richards (sr.), ‘Thomas Richards : Will, 1809’.
23T. Richards, A Treatise on Nervous Disorders; Including Observations on Dietetic and Medicinal Remedies, 1829, p. 152.
24E. Morris Miller, ‘Thomas Richards (1800-77) : His Contributions to the Hobart Town Magazine (1833-4)’, Biblionews, 5.12 (1952), pp. 40–41.
