In a 1937 review of Rhys Davies's novel A Time to Laugh, the Welsh writer Glyn Jones found occasion to criticise the book thus:

Hiraeth is a word that is very familiar to Welsh speakers and describes what might be seen as an abidingly pastoral aspect of Welsh culture. Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru (The University of Wales Dictionary, 1979) defines the word as meaning ‘grief or sadness after the lost or departed, longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, homesickness, earnest desire for what might have been’. To an extent, the word points back to ancient histories, to the sense that Wales is one of the remaining outposts of what was once the wholly Celtic realm of Britain, but it also points towards the more recent Welsh experience of rapid industrialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries during which coal, iron, steel, slate and railways made their marks on a culture that nevertheless often maintained that it remained essentially an organic and rural community – and, for those very reasons, superior to English culture and society. This chapter will trace some of the ways in which the relationship between past and present, rural and urban, arises in quite specific (if often awkward) forms in Welsh culture and history, and is then (re)presented to English (and indeed other Anglophone) readers and audiences as an ambiguous, pastoral narrative about how the supplanting of the rural by the modern might offer stories of both loss and consolation.

The chapter will first explore the Welsh rural modernity constructed by Welsh writers in English and contrast its sense of community with that produced and consumed by metropolitan, modern England. The texts examined here will be the periodical Wales and the novel Rhondda Roundabout (1934) by Jack Jones. The chapter then examines the appeal of hiraeth, despite its specifically Welsh roots, among English readers and audiences during the interwar period and their fascination with popular texts that presented Wales's strong associations with both the rural past and the industrial modern.