“At Any Future Time”

The magistrate’s penmanship is beginning to blotch. He’s setting down the events of a few nights ago, “while the whole of the transaction is fresh in [his] memory”: of hundreds of protestors destroying a turnpike and tollhouse, as he and ten men rush to confront them. Facing the protestors, he’s on his third attempt to get a pistol to fire — it’s dewy, after midnight, the powder too damp — and, once again, he’s about to be trampled by a rioter on horseback. A handful of hours ago, he was at a cricket match; his account keeps gesturing back to this match, like a timekeeper or a talisman. “We then went on with the Cricket match”; “my watch was 10 minutes too slow by Swansea time as I had put it back … after the Cricket match.”

But the cricket match is over. The horse is bolting straight at him. And he’s still struggling with his third pistol. 

*

The rioter sprints into the struggle at the blazing remains of the tollgate, after yanking his gun out of the hedge. He’s not yet tried to fire it — his prized possession, with his name and address newly “cut onto her stock” — but now he spots his friend, struggling between a man on horseback and a man on foot, bright in the bonfire and about to be taken. He doesn’t have trouble with the gun, and he doesn’t hesitate.

He aims, fires, and hits the rider. 

*

The turnpike and tollhouse were both real, located in Pontardulais, South Wales, just along the M4 from where I grew up on the Gower Peninsula. The first of the two gunmen is real, too: the local magistrate, Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn, writing an account of the previous Wednesday night on Sunday, September 10, 1843. He shot the horse on his third attempt, and his band of gentlemen (and the policemen and dragoons they mustered to follow them) broke up the riot. It was a Rebecca riot, part of a broader wave of Welsh popular protest (1839-43) caused in part by excessive tolls imposed on roads essential for Welsh farmers. The high tolls, enforced by numerous gates with the ostensible motive of maintaining the roads, exacerbated a time of poverty, unemployment, punitive Poor Laws, and sharp social divides between the English-speaking elite and their Welsh-speaking tenants. These tenants dressed in women’s clothes as the “daughters of Rebecca” — playing on a Bible verse in which Rebecca’s descendants “possess the gates of those who hate them” — and destroyed the tollgates, the tangible symbols of their oppression. The rioting was particularly intense in 1843, when Dillwyn the magistrate faced the Pontardulais fray. He lost one of his guns during the fight at the tollgate, finding it afterward in a nearby hedge.

The second gunman is the fictional hero of the 1880 historical novel The Rebecca Rioter, Evan Williams. He also loses his gun in the Pontardulais riot, but — unlike his real-life antagonist — he’s unable to retrieve it. Without spoiling the plot, this missing, monogrammed gun does not help Evan’s future prospects. His puckish sense of self, and the precarious bridges he has built across that social divide, are all thrown into chaos by the pivotal moment at the tollgate. The scene seals the fate of a character who, up until now, has slipped past the barriers of social spheres, gender expressions, local law enforcement, and romantic tensions with defiant and good-humored ease. 

The Rebecca Rioter was the debut novel of Elizabeth Amy Dillwyn, the magistrate’s daughter — she published her work as E.A. Dillwyn, although now she’s popularly known as Amy Dillwyn. I first learned about Dillwyn in Penllergare Valley Woods. This sprawling dip of woodland was the home of her uncle, John Dillwyn Llewellyn. (If you grow up near Swansea, or indeed continue reading this essay, you can hardly move for Dillwyns.) My father saw her name on the information board in the woods and snatched upon my adolescent enthusiasm: “You should look her up, Nat! You’d like her — she smoked cigars and wrote novels and wore men’s clothes!” Or, as I suspect in hindsight: You don’t yet have the words for your queerness, and neither do I, but we both know you’ll find this Deeply Interesting for Unspoken Reasons. 

At that age, I barely knew what queerness was — in words, at least — and yet I was desperately looking for what I’d now call “representation” in the 1880 novel, even several years before having words for my own identity or knowing which “representation” would be most akin to me. A copy of The Rebecca Rioter duly made its way home from Swansea University Library. The edition I first read, from the publisher Honno’s series of classic Welsh women’s literature, had a rather debutanteish cover, perhaps because the book was Dillwyn’s debut novel: a photograph of the author from August 1871 — almost a decade before she published her first book — depicting a respectable young lady, all chignon and gown, stare as severe as her center-part. That young lady was diarizing romantic fantasies about her “wife” Olive Talbot, the heiress who renovated one of my mother’s favourite Gower churches — in passionate phrases which, as scholar Kirsti Bohata has shown, subsequently turn up in The Rebecca Rioter — but I could hardly guess that from a photograph. The fabled “men’s clothes” (more accurately, masculine tailoring) were absent. The novel itself seemed to be about some perky Welshman smashing up gates. My teenage self, deep in the closet and promised cigars, was furious. 

(The image of my father’s recollection was from later in Dillwyn’s life. She stopped publishing novels with her father’s death in 1892, and swapped to rescuing the ruinous remains of the family business, whereupon the masculine tailoring came out in full force. I’m still glad he thought of it, though — I wonder how many other repressed Welsh youths flocked to E.A. Dillwyn because of some stray remark about dressing mannishly.)

For all that I floundered on my first read, The Rebecca Rioter is still a queer novel in weird and unexpected ways. I absolutely recommend Bohata’s 2018 Victorian Review article “A Queer-Looking Lot of Women,” if you want plot spoilers aplenty and a wonderful reading of Evan as a nonbinary icon in a queer love triangle. There’s also plentiful queerness in the Rebecca rioters themselves: as Bohata observes, the rioters’ queer gender expression is integral to their disruption of hostile, hardened categories — including, but not limited to, the ever-symbolic tollgates. 

But what I’m really intrigued by is how the novel queers the author’s own family history. “Queering” is an idea I had much to do with during my PhD studies. It basically means taking something that exists, and doing something to or with it, in a disruptive or destabilizing way. In my PhD, the art and poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite Elizabeth Siddal queered the iconography of medieval Books of Hours, by visually dismembering their illustrations into new shapes which unsettled their original meaning. Dillwyn’s novel makes new shapes out of old material too, distorting time and blurring boundaries to do so. 

The old material in question? Her father’s report. 

L.L. Dillwyn’s account of the Rebecca rioters’ attack on the Pontardulais turnpike is fairly normative. It’s the word of a magistrate, written from inside the establishment; he only writes it “in case at any future time [he] should be called upon to give evidence of it” in court. The account is hyper-precise, checking watches against cricket matches and numbering the yards of distances covered. His counter-riot band of 11 men are all listed by name, as are their various modes of travel to the turnpike. The means by which Dillwyn senior finds out about the impending riot are given so minutely, they nearly tip right over into imprecision in their eagerness to log every detail: 

Captain Napier called me aside and showed me a note that Young Rees (W. Rees’ son) had just brought him from Mr Atwood enclosing a letter he had received from Mr Nevill informing him that private information had been received by him that an attack on the Pontardulais gate was threatened by a Rebecca mob on that night…

I write epistolary novels about overzealous Victorian detectives, in which overcomplicated written communication happens on a regular basis, but the note-within-a-note-within-a-note-passing of the South Wales anti-Rebecca brigade is in a league of its own.

Dillwyn senior’s manuscript (which you can read online via Literary Atlas’ interactive Rebecca Rioter map) has a postscript in his daughter’s handwriting. It’s a dutiful sequel, quoting from a newspaper report of the captured rioters’ trial: 

The Solicitor General, who prosecuted, said that my father & uncle (W. Llewellyn) “were deserving of the thanks of the community for manfully coming forward & risking their lives in the attempt to restore tranquillity.” And the judge expressed his opinion that “the 2 magistrates (my father & uncle) Capt. Napier & the police, had behaved with great firmness, temper, & moderation, under the trying & unusual circumstances in which they were placed.” 

But these “trying & unusual circumstances” do not make such a neat appearance in E.A. Dillwyn’s novel, published nearly four decades after the incident. Nor do they fit into the normative category of the stressful situation against which the local manful brigade is triumphally opposed. In fiction, they take the orderly meticulousness of the magistrate’s account and tear it apart. 

Evan and his fictional rioters swell L.L. Dillwyn’s careful bureaucratic timekeeping. Instead of the one riot on a Wednesday night, Evan et al attack Pontardulais twice, on two successive Wednesdays, and are only intercepted the second time. The first Wednesday is a blaze of uninterrupted success, celebrated with a bonfire made of tollgate, yet there’s still more left to destroy — as Evan observes, “I do think there be near enough of us here now to burn the whole of Pontardulais, let alone one wretched little pike!” The anti-rioters still discover the Wednesday reprise at a cricket match, but the long chain of gentlemanly information-giving is decentered in favor of one fictional informer, a disaffected working-class man with a backstory and a motive. L.L.’s pistol gets swallowed by a hedge until after the riot, but the hedge in the novel gives Evan his gun, ready for the crucial moment. Where L.L. shoots and injures the horse of a riding rioter, Evan shoots and kills a gentleman on horseback. They’re both on foot, firing into the riot by the light of a bonfire and a strikingly bright moon. 

L.L. and Evan’s first-person testimonies tangle, as the latter upends details from the former’s experience. Boundaries break down and burn like the tollgate. The neat distinctions between riot and retaliation, and about who did what with whose gun and which horse, and who stood in the fray under the moon and raised their weapon — none of these divisions can hold when the magistrate’s testimony is pulled apart to imagine the rioter’s. In adding a postscript to her father’s manuscript, E.A. Dillwyn contributes to the archive of her family’s legacy; in writing this novel, she splits that archive into pieces, and turns half those pieces upside down, to try and tell the story from the crucial perspective that archive leaves out. 

*

Many critics have made much of Dillwyn’s decision not simply to decenter the voices of the establishment, but also to narrate the riots from Evan’s perspective. Her novel’s hero is a working-class, primarily Welsh-speaking Rebecca supporter, whose Welshness affects his English syntax. Making the Rebecca riots about Welshness was an increasing trend as the 19th century progressed; as historian Rhian E. Jones observes in her 2015 book Petticoat Heroes: Gender, Culture and Popular Protest in the Rebecca Riots, “Rebecca’s image” became entangled with “press editorials and letters which attempted publicly to disparage or defend the Welsh character.” Evan’s voice, in Dillwyn’s text, is both disparaged and defended. Though he controls the bulk of the narrative, the preface and epilogue involve an “editor” warning readers that they’re getting a transcribed version of his account, with the “Welshy, and sometimes uncouth, language” heavily toned down. 

But — crucially — Evan is a sympathetic character, both before and after that fateful night. His decision to shoot the gentleman is, again, given a backstory and a motive: he doesn’t want to “see an old friend taken prisoner without doing what [he] could to help him.” When — no spoilers — other characters hypothesize more sinister motivations for his shot, he risks his life to challenge these fabrications and set his story straight.

Dillwyn’s queering of family history thus serves another purpose: it’s not just tearing up the archive, but trying to repair its thinner ground. Her father’s account is simply not interested in sympathizing with the inner lives of the rioters. The 1844 Commission of Inquiry, a government investigation into the situation, was praised at the time for gathering evidence across social classes, but the working-class (and, indeed, rioters’) voices lacked space in comparison with magistrates’ and gentries’ testimonies. Jones notes that while those of higher social standing would testify as individuals, lower-class voices were often grouped together in chorus. But in Dillwyn’s novel, Evan’s voice does not melt into a group. He gives his account in singular first person. 

Thus, the novel could be seen as an act of fabulation, taking a hostile or biased record and using creative writing techniques to find within it — or through it — the deprioritized, or even unheard, voice. Critical fabulation, devised by Saidiya Hartman, is the “method” her 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments offers for “[e]very historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved” — everyone “forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor.” Hartman’s book, which focuses on the lives of Black women in early 20th-century America, “elaborates, augments, transposes, and breaks open archival documents so they might yield a richer picture.” When Dillwyn’s novel is set alongside her father’s record, I see a similar process at work: like Hartman, she “employ[s] a mode of close narration” to imagine the perspective her father leaves out, extending that perspective into a work of fiction. In 1880, as now, the line between history and fictionalization is about as sturdy as a tollgate left unattended within 150 yards of Evan Williams; in Dillwyn’s novel, as in historical fiction today, marginalized histories find a receptive form for their expression.

That entanglement — between history and fictionalization, between men and guns and horses and hedges, between the embodied and imagined experiences of Wednesday(s) in September 1843 — only continued within the novelist’s lifetime. Late-Victorian and Edwardian historians used The Rebecca Rioter as a source for their studies; Dillwyn’s account, like her father’s, proved instrumental in deciding the story for a “future time.” It’s important not to lose sight of the obvious here: that, though Dillwyn’s novel expresses sympathy with the Rebecca ideals, Dillwyn herself was neither working-class nor a Rebecca rioter. Even if she queers and fabulates and shifts the focus away from the authorities, it’s still the Dillwyn dynasty holding the pen. 

But neither should we reduce the Dillwyns to one “side” of another false binary between establishment and protest, nor imply that The Rebecca Rioter was a total departure from family history. L.L.’s grandfather William Dillwyn was American, a Quaker who moved to the UK rather than fight in the American War of Independence, and who played a crucial role in the abolitionist movement. Bohata has compellingly argued that Evan’s description of the successful Pontardulais bonfire — “the burning house, the strange figures with negro faces and women’s clothes, the fierce eyes glistening in the firelight, the smashed white gate, and the savage delight with which the broken pieces of wood were tossed onto the fire” — for all its problematic phrasing, might be a sincere and sympathetic attempt to align the Rebecca rioters with rebellions of enslaved people. There is a Dillwyn family history of social critique, of championing oppressed perspectives, tangled up in that same archive with the judges’ commendations and the dragoons summoned mid-cricket match.

So E.A. Dillwyn had a complicated inheritance to reckon with, when she decided to write a novel about the popular protests of the past. But what about the inheritance her book offers, beyond its afterlife as primary source for Rebecca historians? 

*

The Rebecca Rioter is not exactly “good LGBTQIA+ representation,” in the contemporary sense of being obvious and affirming. Some of Dillwyn’s other novels are more blatantly queer. (A Burglary is my favorite, and Jill is pure chaos.) But The Rebecca Rioter did smash one crucial tollgate for me, one more fallacious boundary. It pulled together the place I grew up in and the queer history I wanted to fictionalize. It introduced me to Gower’s queer past. And that introduction made me think about my own debut novel, Nettleblack, the way it queered history, and its place in the ongoing cycle of Gower novelists reimagining the past. It made me ask what if I admit — and commit to — the fact that my queer diarist-narrator can share my birthplace?

I don’t entirely know how to articulate the wonder of learning that queer identities, queer history, queerness, queering, fabulation — that none of it is incompatible with your home. Of learning that these things can be rural, can spring from my own local and family history. If the Dillwyns have taught me anything, it’s about just how powerful history can be for identity formation of all kinds: for entrenching a status quo and imagining beyond it. And my father — to whom I never truly got to come out, whose unexplained codes for my unspoken queerness were cigars, “men’s clothes,” and a local historical novelist — he knew that, too. Enough to spot a name on an information board in Penllergare Valley Woods, and bring home a bit of that history, to fire the imagination of his own strange child.