In 1841, William Jones, in The Character of the Welsh as a Nation in the Present Age, praised the perseverance of his people in the face of almost impossible odds:

To exist after so many and preserving attempts at their extinction, and to retain the vernacular use of their primitive, nervous, and enchanting language, after so many revolutions in their civil and religious circumstances, are facts in which they will ever glory; and no good reason appears why our English neighbours should deny us the consolation of these facts, or laugh at us, with so much sarcastic malevolence, when the matter is discussed in their society

Jones could not have foreseen the result of the coming of heavy industry to south Wales in the 19th century, especially its twofold effect on the language and social life of the area. First, with so many Welsh speakers moving into the area in search of jobs, bringing their language (and their chapels) with them, a Welsh culture survived in many fields of valley activity. Many historians have realized that without this immigration, Wales may have suffered a fate similar to that of Ireland where the lack of the raw materials for industry and the heavy reliance upon a single food crop (not to mention the benign neglect of the English Parliament) led to famine and massive emigration. Also unlike the Irish language (and to some extent Breton) the language of scattered, rural communities, Welsh thrived as the medium of everyday communication in large industrial communities (such as Merthyr). One writer in 1804, commenting on the fact that Merthyr Tydfil was now the largest town in Wales, marvelled that :

The workers of all descriptions at these immense works {Cyfarthfa, Merthyr Tydfil} are Welsh men. Their language is entirely Welsh. The number of English among them is very inconsiderable. (The Scenery, Antiquities, and Biography of South Wales

But change was inevitable. At the same time, another culture developed that owed just as much to its non-Welsh immigrants as it did to those who retained the language and culture of the Welsh-speaking areas from which they moved. In 1847 one writer had described the Rhondda Valley thus:

The people of this solitudinous and happy valley are a pastoral race, almost wholly dependent on their flocks and herds for support ...The air is aromatic with wild flowers and mountain plants, a sabbath stillness reigns

Only three years later, the celebrated English author Thomas Carlyle described the same scene in a letter to his wife:

Ah me! 'Tis like a vision of Hell, and will never leave me, that of these poor creatures broiling or in sweat and dirt, amid their furnaces, pits, and rolling mills . . The Town [Merthyr] might be, and will be, one of the prettiest places in the world. It is one of the sootiest, aqualidest and ugliest; all cinders and dust mounds and soot. . .Nobody thinks of gardening in such a locality--all devoted to metallic gambling

Such a heavy toll came to so many areas of the southern valleys. In the counties of Glamorgan and Monmouth, the long, verdant valleys quickly filled up with factories, mills, coal mines, iron smelting works (and later, steel works), roads, railways, canals, and above all, people. Houses began to spread along the narrow hillsides, filling every available space upon which a house could be set, small houses, crammed together in row after row, street after street, town after town all strung together on the valley floor. Houses separated only spasmodically by the grocery store, the somber, grey chapel, or the public house. Above them all loomed the blackened hillsides and the slag heaps of waste coal or industrial refuse. And all this brought about by the discovery of coal.

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