During the winter months of 1887 the Times newspaper led a concerted campaign against the uses being made of Welsh in newspapers and periodicals. While there was little new in its disparagement of the language itself, having famously noted in 1866 that Welsh was a ‘dead’ tongue, the negative attention of 1887–8 specifically targeted the elision between radical conspiracies and their subversive forms of expression by means of a ‘secret’ language in the popular prints. Previous assaults had laid emphasis on integrating the Welsh into key areas of state control, including the judicial system, the Established Church and education, with lower-level concerns expressed around notions of ‘progress’, where monoglot Welsh-speakers were considered to have excluded themselves from, for example, beneficial forms of labour market mobility.

During the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1870s renewed political concerns emerged as a consequence of the growth of Irish and Indian separatism, trades union activism and incipient socialism. Metropolitan opinion-formers, and their ideological allies in the British state, once more looked with mounting unease at the rapidly expanding popular press, especially those titles published in languages they could not easily read. The use of the term ‘the vernacular press’ in relation to Welsh-language journalism was itself borrowed, most visibly after about 1879, from numerous British legislative efforts to suppress the ‘vernacular’ indigenous-language newspaper press in India. The notion of a dangerous ‘mass’, breaking free of mid-Victorian mechanisms of social control and operating effectively beyond the sphere of influence of the English language, was fundamental to the often fractious relationship between the ‘vernacular’ press and its English-language counterparts in both England and Wales. This tension was in part a manifestation of what Benedict Anderson termed ‘the explosive interaction between capitalism, technology and human linguistic diversity’ (Anderson 1983: 57) in the historical process of ‘assembling’ hegemonic national identities.