"Walking Conundrums": Masquerades, Riddles, and National Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Wales

This chapter aims to complicate existing narratives of the Anglicization of the late eighteenth-century Welsh gentry by focusing on one family from North Wales, the Griffiths of Garn in Denbighshire. It focuses on the influence of English literary material upon the expressions of national identity found in these unpublished artefacts. Jane Griffith and members of their social circle may be seen as walking conundrums'. The chapter explores the ways in which an array of influences from English texts circulating in Wales at the time impacted upon national identities of social group, ranging from references to Ancient Britons to markedly ambivalent feelings regarding contemporary Britain's neighbours across channel. The national local, regional, social identities' which Wilson suggests are reflected and strengthened by provincial newspapers are present within Simkin's poem, The Denbighshire Gazette Extraordinary and the archive as a whole. The Enigmatical Entertainment', Jane Griffith's letter and miscellaneous contents of The Denbighshire Gazette Extraordinary are the main archival sources for the chapter.