The Society for the Promotion of Victorian Wales

The dry humour of perfect despair was a familiar aspect of people’s lives. Jokes would even be cracked at death.When a lazy woman died, her epitaph claimed: ‘Os car hi’r bedd, fel y carai’r gwely / Hi fydd yr olaf yn Adgyfodi’. (If she loves the grave as she loved the bed / She’ll be the last at the Resurrection).

from: Davies, Russel. Hope and Heartbreak: A Social History of Wales and the Welsh, 1776-1871. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005. pg. 415

To-day I had a pair of drawers given me which I could not keep on. The rough waves stripped them off and tore them down my ankles. While thus faltered I was seized and flung by a heavy sea which retreating suddenly left me lying naked on the sharp shingle from which I rose streaming with blood. After this, I took the wretched and dangerous rag off and of course there were some ladies looking at me as I came up out of the water.

from: Davies, Russel. Hope and Heartbreak: A Social History of Wales and the Welsh, 1776-1871. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005. pg. 294

In a churchyard in the Elan valley, a wife buried in the early nineteenth century lies under a spiteful epitaph. On limestone quarried near the spot, these words were cut:

I plant these shrubs on your grave, dear wife,
That something on this spot may boast of life.
Shrubs may wither and all earth must rot,
Shrubs may revive but you, thank God, can not.

from: Davies, Russel. Hope and Heartbreak: A Social History of Wales and the Welsh, 1776-1871. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005. pg. 291

The member writing under the pseudonymn of 'Oswestry' provided this short but poignant comment in a series relating to the variety of books collected over the years by the late Queen Victoria:


Does Education Unfit Girls for Domestic Life?

Woman was created to be the "Help-Meet of Man." Her duties were not limited to mending socks or cooking dinners. In the days of the "grand old gardener and his wife" there were no socks to mend or dinners to cook, the Garden of Eden supplying all that was needed for food without any necessary preparation -- while the former point was, as yet, unconsidered.

The quote is taken from a scene in the first volume of the triple decker novel Country Landlords. The two protagonists just came to a mutual understanding and the young squire bursts out:


[Anarawd's] manner grew more excited. "Gertrude," he repeated, "can there be a greater joy upon earth than to feel we love and are beloved ? You know those lines of Goethe's —

'Und doch, welch Glück geliebt zu werden!
Und lieben, Götter, welch ein Glück!'

Shall I repeat the third line in that verse?" (167)


Anarawd quotes these lines from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's poem 'Willkommen und Abschied' -- which is a poem about the end of a love affair. Not quite what I'd call overly romantic...

"The dog wagged his tail approvingly as Jos reached down from the shelf a bottle of pink lollipops, for, though a wild country dog, he had depraved tastes in the matter of sweets." (10)

"What qualities had recommended them to his choice, it is difficult to say; certainly, not their outward appearance, for Bensha had lost one eye, a circumstance which seemed to compel him to keep the other one very wide open, and Madlen had but one tooth, whose size and length proclaimed it the survival of the fittest." (12)

Taken from the REPLIES section answering a query about curious epitaphs on Welsh tombstones: