On Thought, Silence, and Meaning

William James and the inner world behind the story

When I began to develop the character of Owain Morgan, I found myself drawing on a number of longstanding interests. One of the most enduring of these has been psychology.

In the late nineteenth century, it was still an emerging field. It had not yet settled into the form we would recognise today, but it was already beginning to ask serious questions about how the mind works and why we behave as we do.

I wanted Owain to stand at that point of transition, at the edge of a discipline that was just beginning to take shape.

It is within that moment that the work of William James becomes particularly important.

The Mind in Motion

In The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, James challenged the idea that thought proceeds in clear, ordered steps. Instead, he described consciousness as something continuous and fluid. A stream rather than a sequence.

Thought does not arrive in neat sentences. It moves, hesitates, returns, and reshapes itself. What we say aloud is often only a fragment of what is present in the mind.

James also described what he called the “fringe” of consciousness. The half-formed edges of thought where meaning exists before it is fully expressed, and sometimes never is.

It is a simple idea, but a profound one.

What Is Not Said

We tend to think of meaning as something contained within words. We listen for what is spoken, and we assume that understanding lies there.

But in practice, much of what matters lies elsewhere.

It appears in hesitation. In the pause before a sentence is completed. In the slight alteration of phrasing, or the moment when a thought is abandoned and replaced with something safer.

These are not absences of meaning. They are often where meaning resides most clearly.

Owain’s Method

This idea sits at the heart of how Owain understands people.

He does not listen only to what is said. He pays equal attention to what is not said, to the small breaks in rhythm, the inconsistencies, and the shifts in tone that suggest something unresolved beneath the surface.

Where others hear a statement, he hears a process.

In this sense, meaning does not reside solely in words, but in the spaces around them.

The Psychology of Motive

Owain’s thinking does not rest on any single system.

It emerges from a number of influences. From William Blake, he draws a sensitivity to the symbolic and imaginative dimensions of human life. From William James, an understanding of the fluid and continuous nature of thought. From figures such as George Henry Lewes and Alexander Bain, the belief that the workings of the mind may be approached through careful observation.

What begins to take shape is something more personal. What he comes to think of as a psychology of motive.

By this, he means the complex interaction of memory, emotion, conscience, and circumstance that precedes human action. The point at which thought becomes intention, and intention begins to move towards action.

It is here, rather than in the act itself, that he believes understanding lies.

Where It Becomes Visible

For Owain, the study of the mind is not an abstract exercise.

It becomes most visible in moments of tension. When an individual is confronted with guilt, fear, or shame. When what is said begins to diverge from what is felt.

In such moments, the movement of thought becomes more apparent. The hesitation, the shift in tone, the slight inconsistency in language. These are not incidental. They are the outward signs of an inner conflict.

It is this that draws him, at times, into investigation.

Not the act alone, but the state of mind that made it possible.

The Shape of Thought

What James recognised was something we all experience, though we rarely name it. Our thoughts are seldom complete. Our intentions are often uncertain. What we express is only part of a larger and more complex movement of mind.

To understand another person, then, is not simply to hear their words, but to attend to the way those words emerge.

It is in that movement, rather than in the statement itself, that something closer to the truth can be found.

From the research behind The Silence of the White Shadow

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The Sound of the Furnace

A working day in Dowlais

Unseen Souls is rooted in places I know, and in lives that are not recorded in any formal history

Dowlais, in particular, is not simply a setting. My grandmother was born there, and I visited as a child in the early 1960s, when the world it had once been had already begun to fade. By then, much had changed, but the presence of the ironworks still shaped the place. My great uncle had worked there, and stories of that life remained.

My father and grandfather were both coal miners. I grew up with a close understanding of what that kind of work demanded. It was hard, physical labour that left its mark, even on the strongest men.

In writing the novel, I have tried to remain as close as possible to accepted historical reality. But I have been less interested in events than in experience. Not simply what happened, but what it felt like to live and work in a place where labour shaped the rhythm of every day.

This note is an attempt to draw closer to that experience.

The working day at the Dowlais Ironworks in the mid-nineteenth century began before the light.

In Dowlais, the rhythm of life was not set by the rising of the sun, but by the demands of the ironworks. The first sound most people heard was not birdsong, but the distant bell or whistle calling men to their shift.

Work did not wait for comfort.

Men rose in darkness, often after only a few hours’ sleep, and made their way through narrow streets already marked by soot and ash. The air carried the smell of smoke long before they reached the furnaces themselves.

It was a world in motion before the day had properly begun.

Heat and Labour

Inside the works, the conditions were relentless.

Furnaces burned at temperatures that few could endure for long without consequence. The heat was constant, pressing in from all sides. Clothing offered little protection. Sweat mixed with soot and settled into the skin.

The work demanded strength, but more than that, it demanded endurance.

Iron had to be moved, shaped, and controlled at speed. There was little margin for error. A moment’s inattention could lead to injury, or worse.

And yet the work continued, hour after hour.

The Body at Work

Labour of this kind left its mark.

Hands hardened. Lungs strained against the dust and fumes. Backs bent under the weight of repeated effort. Injuries were common, and recovery was rarely complete.

There was no expectation of ease.

The body was part of the process, as much as the machinery. It was used, worn, and, when necessary, replaced.

Time and Survival

Time in the ironworks was measured differently.

A shift was not simply a number of hours, but a test of endurance. Meals were brief and functional. Bread, perhaps, or something carried from home. There was little space for rest.

Outside the works, life was organised around recovery.

Families adapted to the rhythm of labour. Women managed households under difficult conditions, often taking on additional work to supplement the family income. Children grew up quickly, drawn into the same cycle as soon as they were able.

Work shaped everything.

What Was Endured

It is easy, looking back, to reduce this world to statistics.

Production figures. Output. Expansion.

But those numbers tell only part of the story.

What mattered, day to day, was the experience of those who lived within it. The heat, the noise, the fatigue. The constant awareness that survival depended on continuing, regardless of discomfort or risk.

There was resilience here, but it was not romantic.

It was necessary.

A World Remembered

The Dowlais of Unseen Souls grows out of this reality.

It is not an exact reconstruction, but an attempt to remain faithful to the conditions that shaped the lives of those who worked there. The aim is not simply to describe the setting, but to convey something of what it felt like to inhabit it.

That world is not entirely distant to me.

I grew up in a mining village in South Wales, in a community where work was central to daily life. Many of those around me followed the same path into industrial labour. I worked in those environments myself, in coal yards and on production lines, where the demands of physical work were constant and unrelenting.

Those experiences inform the way I understand places like Dowlais.

What Remains

The furnaces of Dowlais no longer exist. They lie buried beneath car parks and supermarkets, their presence marked more by memory than by anything that can be seen.

And yet the past has not disappeared entirely.

It survives in fragments. In the old stables of the ironworks. In the Memorial Library and the Guest Reading Room, built as acts of paternal care and quiet control. In the lodge that once marked the entrance to Dowlais House. In the chapels that still stand, where communities gathered for solace, education, and a sense of belonging.

Even the streets retain something of their former shape. Rows of housing, altered but still recognisable, where generations lived within the orbit of the works.

These are not grand monuments. They are traces.

But taken together, they are enough to suggest what this place once was, and what it meant to those who lived here.

To write about such a place is not simply to describe it.

It is to recognise the people who endured it, and to acknowledge the reality of the world they helped to build.Not as abstractions, but as lived environments shaped by effort, necessity, and endurance.

From the research behind Unseen Souls

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The Weight of a Word

Middle Welsh, Latin, and the fragile art of translation in the world behind the story

Language is rarely as stable as we imagine it to be. That simple idea sits at the heart of my first Owain Morgan novel, The Silence of the White Shadow.

This piece draws on the real history that made that idea plausible.

In the medieval Welsh manuscripts that survive from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, meaning is often uncertain. It shifts with the hand of the scribe, the habits of the writer, and the expectations of the reader. A single word can carry more than one sense. A single phrase can tilt a passage in one direction or another.

This is the world of Middle Welsh, Cymraeg Canol, the language of the law codes attributed to Hywel Dda and of the prose later gathered under the name of the Mabinogion, a collection of medieval Welsh tales drawn from much earlier oral tradition, preserved in manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Hywel Dda, or Hywel ap Cadell, ruled much of Wales in the early tenth century, from around 920 until his death in 950. He is remembered not only as a king, but as a lawgiver. The legal traditions associated with his name, though compiled and written down in later centuries, reflect an attempt to order society through custom, judgement, and a shared understanding of justice.

These laws survive in Middle Welsh manuscripts, copied and recopied by generations of scribes. They do not present a single fixed text, but a living tradition, shaped by time, region, and interpretation. These texts don’t exist in a single original form. They were copied and changed over time, so what we read today reflects many different hands and moments, rather than just one.

It is within that shifting inheritance that the language must be understood.

Middle Welsh was the main form of the language used between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. More survives from this period than from any earlier stage of Welsh, and it developed directly from Old Welsh.

It is recognisably Welsh, but not the Welsh spoken today. Its spelling is inconsistent, its grammar less settled, and its vocabulary often dependent on context in ways that resist easy translation. In some manuscripts, even the smallest variation, an added consonant or a shifted ending, can alter the force of a sentence.

It is, in other words, a language in which certainty is hard won.

And that uncertainty matters.

Because in the world of my novel, it is within one such ambiguity that everything begins to unravel.

Victorian Certainty

By the nineteenth century, scholars had begun the serious work of editing and translating medieval Welsh texts. Their efforts were often remarkable. They were painstaking, detailed, and in many ways foundational.

But they were also limited.

They worked with incomplete dictionaries and inconsistent grammars. More importantly, they often approached Welsh material through the intellectual frameworks they already knew, shaped by Latin, classical tradition, and a broader Anglocentric understanding of history.

Where Welsh and Latin appeared side by side, there was a tendency to assume that the Welsh reflected the Latin. It was expected to confirm rather than challenge it.

Middle Welsh does not always allow for that kind of certainty.

Its spelling varies from manuscript to manuscript. Words shift in meaning depending on context, date, or the habits of a particular scribe. Mutations, the subtle changes to the beginnings of words, can alter not just grammar but emphasis and legal force. Bilingual texts, far from offering clarity, often demand interpretation rather than simple translation.

It is a language that resists being forced into neat alignment.

Rutherford’s Discovery

In the novel, it is within this instability that Dr Meirion Rutherford finds his way through.

He notices a small grammatical construction in the Dolwyddelan Codex, something his mentor Professor Arthur Cavendish had passed over. Not because he lacked the ability to see it, but because he had learned, over time, not to look for it.

Cavendish assumed the primacy of Latin. When the two languages appeared together, he expected the Welsh to follow.

Rutherford did not.

Reading the Welsh on its own terms, and with a closer familiarity with medieval law texts, he recognised that a key passage did not mirror the Latin at all. It modified it, quietly but decisively.

The phrase was:

a gwnaethpwyt gyttyn

(roughly pronounced “ah gwneth-poo-it guth-in”)

Usually rendered simply as ‘and it was agreed’.

But in Middle Welsh legal contexts, it carries a more specific weight. It refers to a mutual compact, an agreement between parties standing in parity, rather than an act of submission or grant.

It is a small distinction.

But it changes everything.

Two Readings, Two Histories

From that single phrase, two entirely different interpretations emerge.

Rutherford reads:

‘And a compact was made between them, in equal standing, with neither service nor subordination.’

Cavendish reads:

‘And a grant was made unto him, binding him to service and rightful obedience.’

The difference is not merely linguistic.

In one version, the Welsh acknowledge English supremacy.

In the other, they enter into a negotiated relationship, one that implies parity rather than fealty.

A single verb unsettles an entire historical framework.

There are real precedents for this kind of divergence. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, survives in both English and Māori versions. Yet the two do not say quite the same thing. Where the English text speaks of sovereignty, the Māori suggests something closer to governance. The difference is slight in wording, but profound in consequence, and it continues to shape interpretation to this day.

Even within older traditions, the same pattern appears. In the translation of biblical texts, a single Greek word, metanoia, originally meaning a change of mind or inner transformation, came to be rendered as repentance. The shift is subtle, but it alters the entire emphasis of the idea, from inward reflection to moral correction.

Meaning, once fixed in translation, begins to move.

What Could Not Be Seen

The error, then, is not simply linguistic. It is ideological.

For years, Cavendish’s scholarship has rested on a particular understanding of history, one in which hierarchy is assumed, and in which Welsh sources are expected to confirm English authority rather than complicate it.

He does not misread the text out of carelessness.

He misreads it because he cannot easily see beyond the structure of thought he has spent a lifetime building.

Rutherford approaches the text differently, with less certainty perhaps, but with greater openness to what it might contain.

That difference becomes the fault line between them.

Where Language and Life Meet

In the end, this is not only a question of translation.

It is a question of what we allow ourselves to see.

A small grammatical construction becomes the point at which:

• a reputation begins to fracture

• a body of work is quietly threatened

• a man is forced to confront the possibility that he has misunderstood the very thing he set out to explain

Middle Welsh, in this sense, is more than a linguistic medium.

It is the place where meaning shifts, where certainty falters, and where the past resists being made too simple.

And in that moment, when a single word begins to carry more weight than it should, the tragedy of Dolwyddelan begins.

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From the research behind The Silence of the White Shadow.

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Dolwyddelan Castle

Between history and imagination

Dolwyddelan Castle is close to my home. I pass it often, usually without thinking too much. Just that brief glance as the road bends and the tower comes into view.

I walked up to it properly last year. That was different. Being there, rather than passing by, stayed with me longer than I expected. It was that walk, I think, that led to the idea of setting a story there.

It later became the origin of Professor Owain Morgan, though that wasn’t clear at the time.

The castle has a history that is only partly visible, and I’ve found myself returning to it, trying to understand what it is that holds me there.

Dolwyddelan Castle stands in a narrow valley in Eryri, its surviving tower rising above the road that now runs through it. It is usually associated with Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, Llywelyn the Great, and is generally thought to have been built in the early thirteenth century, when control of the surrounding uplands carried both strategic and symbolic weight.

Its position is not accidental. The castle sits along a route that links the Conwy valley with the interior of Eryri, a landscape that, in the thirteenth century, was not remote in the modern sense, but politically central. Movement through these valleys seems to have mattered. Control wasn’t only a matter of holding ground, but of watching and shaping how people passed through it.

What remains today is fragmentary, but suggestive. The rectangular tower, with its thick stone walls and elevated entrance, reflects a style of fortification that is both practical and restrained. It lacks the scale of the later Edwardian castles, yet it carries a different kind of authority, one that feels closer to the ground it stands on.

Much of what we understand about the castle comes from later study rather than any continuous record. Archaeological work and architectural analysis, particularly in the twentieth century, have helped to clarify its phases of construction and use, though some uncertainty remains. Like many medieval sites in Wales, Dolwyddelan seems to exist partly in documentation, and partly in inference.

By the nineteenth century, the castle had fallen into significant disrepair. Travellers described it as a ruin, its walls broken and its interior exposed to the weather. At the same time, it began to attract a different kind of attention. Antiquarians and visitors, influenced by Romantic ideas of landscape and history, saw in such places not simply remnants of the past, but something closer to an expression of it.

The restoration that followed was undertaken by Lord Willoughby de Eresby, who carried out substantial repairs between the 1840s and 1860s. His work did not attempt a full reconstruction, but it did stabilise the structure and reshape parts of it according to the sensibilities of the period. As with many nineteenth-century interventions, the line between preservation and interpretation isn’t always easy to see.

It begins to matter, because what we see now isn’t a purely medieval object. It is the result of at least two moments of construction: the original building, and the later effort to recover and present it. Each reflects a different understanding of what the castle was, and what it might have been thought to be.

In the historical sources that remain, Dolwyddelan appears only intermittently. It is not a site that dominates the chronicles, nor one that features prominently in royal records. Yet its association with Llywelyn the Great has endured, supported by tradition and by its geographical logic within his sphere of influence. In this sense, it sits somewhere between certainty and belief, something known, but not entirely fixed.

That ambiguity seems to be part of what allows it to function within fiction.

In The Silence of the White Shadow, the castle is presented much as it stands, but with certain adjustments. Interior spaces are extended, domestic arrangements imagined, and connections between rooms clarified in ways that serve the movement of the narrative rather than the limits of the surviving structure. They aren’t there to mislead, only to make the space usable, somewhere events can unfold.

The figure of Baron de Haersbie, associated in the novel with the castle’s later history, is entirely fictional. In reality, there was no such ownership, nor any transfer to a private antiquarian of the kind described. The nineteenth-century restoration remains the most significant modern intervention, and its effects are still visible in the structure today.

What begins to emerge is a quieter distinction. The castle itself is real, its history partly recoverable, partly uncertain. The version that appears in the novel draws on that reality, but does not attempt to reproduce it exactly. It follows the same pattern that shapes our understanding of the site more broadly, a combination of material evidence, later interpretation, and the needs of the present.

Today, Dolwyddelan Castle is cared for by Cadw and remains open to visitors.

It hasn’t remained unchanged. What stands there now is a mixture of what was built, what was repaired, and what has been understood since.

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From the research behind The Silence of the White Shadow.

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The Making of Dowlais

What was life really like in Industrial Dowlais?

Unseen Souls is a novel rooted in real history. The places and events are authentic, but the central characters are imagined, shaped by the world they inhabit rather than drawn from any single life.

I have always been drawn less to kings and battles than to the lives of so-called ‘ordinary’ people, who are often anything but ordinary. The story of Eliza Turner reflects that instinct. Her life, though fictional, is grounded in the realities faced by thousands whose names were never recorded.

Before Iron

Before the coming of industry, Dowlais was a quiet upland community on the edge of the Brecon Beacons.

Life there had changed little for generations. The land was harsh, the soil poor, and the winters long. Most families survived through a mixture of small-scale farming, grazing, and seasonal labour. What little they produced might be traded locally, though travel itself was slow and difficult.

Homes were simple stone cottages, often shared with animals. Work was shaped by daylight and the seasons rather than by the clock.

At the centre of life stood the chapel. It provided not only spiritual guidance, but education and a sense of community. Sunday schools offered many their first access to reading, and the rhythms of the week were marked as much by worship as by labour.

This was not an easy life.

But it was a stable one.

The Fracture

By the mid-eighteenth century, that stability began to break.

The discovery of iron ore, coal, and limestone transformed the uplands with unexpected speed. What had been a scattered rural settlement became the focus of industrial ambition.

In 1759, the Dowlais Ironworks was established. At first modest in scale, it marked the beginning of a process that would reshape both the landscape and the lives of those who lived there.

Over the decades that followed, Dowlais grew into one of the most significant ironworks in the world.

The change was not gradual.

It was structural.

Industry and Expansion

As the works expanded, so too did the town.

Population increased rapidly. Housing spread across the hillsides. The demands of production began to determine the organisation of daily life.

Under figures such as John Guest, who took control of the works in the early nineteenth century, Dowlais became a major industrial force. New techniques were introduced. Output increased. The works supplied iron across Britain and beyond.

But this growth depended on labour.

And labour was constant.

A Different Kind of World

The transformation was not only economic. It altered the very nature of life.

Time was no longer governed by the seasons, but by the demands of industry. Work was measured in shifts rather than daylight. The landscape itself changed, marked by furnaces, slag heaps, and smoke.

What had once been a rural community became an industrial environment.

The change affected everything.

Families adapted to new patterns of work. Children entered employment at an early age. Women took on additional labour to sustain households. The distinction between home and work became less clear, as both were shaped by the same pressures.

Dowlais was no longer a place shaped by the land.

It was a place shaped by production.

The Human Dimension

History often records this transformation in terms of scale. Output, expansion, technological progress.

It tells us less about what it meant to live through it.

What did it mean to leave a way of life that had endured for generations?

What did it mean to grow up in a world where work defined not only survival, but identity?

These are the questions that lie behind Unseen Souls.

A World Reimagined

The novel does not attempt to recreate Dowlais exactly as it was. That is not possible.

Instead, it draws on the structure of that world, its transformation, its pressures, and its contradictions, to imagine the lives of those who moved within it.

Eliza Turner is fictional.

The forces that shape her life are not.

What Remains

The story of Dowlais is not only one of industry, but of transition.

A movement from one way of life to another, carried forward by necessity, ambition, and the demands of a changing world.

To look back at it now is to see both what was gained, and what was lost.

And to recognise that the lives lived within that transformation were as complex, as difficult, and as human as our own.

From the research behind Unseen Souls

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William Blake and the Inner World

In The Silence of the White Shadow, Blake’s work shapes the thinking of Owain Morgan. But the ideas behind it are rooted in something far older, and far less easily explained.

William Blake was not an incidental influence in The Silence of the White Shadow. His work helped shape the intellectual and emotional world of Owain Morgan.

That connection emerged during my research, particularly through reading Peter Ackroyd’s excellent biography of Blake. What I found there was not simply an artist or poet, but a way of thinking about the human mind that felt immediately relevant to the world I was creating.

Blake was, in many respects, ahead of his time; a visionary, engraver, painter, poet, and a thinker who resisted the limits of convention.

It was those qualities that first drew me to him and led me to see him as a powerful influence on my fictional Professor, Owain Morgan.

Blake was born in London in 1757, into a world that was beginning, quietly at first, to change.

The Industrial Revolution had not yet reached its full force, but its direction was already set. Systems were emerging, economic, social, and intellectual, that sought to organise, measure, and control. Reason was ascendant, order was prized, and progress increasingly defined in material terms.

Blake stood apart from all of this.

Not in the manner of a reformer or a political agitator, but as something more elusive, a man who seemed to inhabit a different layer of reality altogether.

He was, by trade, an engraver. This mattered more than is often acknowledged. Engraving is slow, exacting work. It requires patience, precision, and an eye for detail. Blake possessed all of these qualities.

But alongside them, he claimed something else.

He saw visions.

Not metaphorically, but literally: angels in trees, figures moving through space, a world alive with meaning that others could not perceive. Whether one takes these as spiritual experiences, imaginative expressions, or something in between is almost beside the point.

What matters is that Blake treated them as real.

Against ‘Single Vision’

Blake’s objection was not to reason itself, but to its dominance.

He believed that when reason becomes the only lens through which the world is viewed, something essential is lost. He described this narrowing as ‘single vision’, a flattening of experience into something manageable, but incomplete.

In its place, he proposed something far more difficult to grasp:

that truth is not singular, but layered

that contradiction is not a flaw, but a condition of being human

that imagination is not an escape from reality, but a means of perceiving it more fully

This is the foundation of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The title itself is a provocation. Heaven and Hell are not reconciled in the sense of being made harmonious. They remain in tension, and that tension is necessary. Energy and restraint, impulse and structure, desire and control all exist because of one another.

Remove one, and the whole system collapses.

The Human Mind as a Landscape

What makes Blake feel so modern is his instinctive understanding that human behaviour cannot be reduced to simple categories.

Long before psychology gave us its language, Blake was exploring:

• the fragmentation of identity

• the conflict between opposing impulses

• the way belief shapes perception

• the danger of mistaking one’s own worldview for objective truth

His figures, whether in Songs of Innocence and of Experience or in his later, more mythological works, are rarely stable. They shift, fracture, expand, and collapse. They inhabit states of mind rather than fixed identities.

Nebuchadnezzar, the image that first drew my attention, is perhaps the clearest example of this.

Nebuchadnezzar was a king of ancient Babylon, whose story is told in the Book of Daniel. In that account, pride gives way to collapse. He loses not only his kingdom, but his sense of himself, and lives like an animal until his reason returns.

It is not simply a king brought low.

It is a mind unravelling.

There is something deeply unsettling about the image.

The body is still recognisably human, but the posture is not. The limbs are held in tension, the fingers splayed against the ground as though searching for a stability that is no longer there. The eyes are wide and alert, but not with clarity. They suggest a mind that remains active, but no longer anchored.

This is not sleep, nor rest, nor even madness in the theatrical sense.

It is something quieter, and perhaps more troubling.

A loss of orientation.

Blake does not show us the moment of downfall. He shows us what comes after, when the structures that once held a person in place have already given way.

There is no crown, no symbol of former power, no trace of the world that once defined this figure. Only the man remains, and even that is uncertain.

What we are looking at is not simply punishment.

It is exposure.

The stripping away of identity, until what remains is something more elemental, more instinctive, and far less easily understood.

In this sense, Nebuchadnezzar is not just a biblical image.

It is a psychological one.

It asks a question that Blake returns to again and again:

What becomes of a person when the framework through which they understand themselves begins to collapse?

Why Blake Endures

Like many thinkers and artists who break the mould, Blake was not widely celebrated in his lifetime.

He was, if anything, regarded as eccentric, even obscure. His methods were unusual, his ideas difficult, and his work often self-published in forms that resisted easy distribution.

And yet, over time, his influence has grown rather than diminished.

Why?

Because Blake speaks to something that remains unresolved.

We continue to live in a world that values clarity, measurement, and control. These things have brought undeniable progress. But they have not resolved the deeper question of what it means to be human.

We are still, as Blake understood, divided.

Capable of reason, yet driven by forces we do not fully comprehend. Seeking order, yet drawn towards chaos. Constructing identities that feel stable, even as they shift beneath us.

Blake does not offer solutions.

He offers recognition.

Blake and Owain Morgan

It becomes clear why William Blake held such significance for Owain Morgan.

A man trained in logic, philosophy, and emerging psychological thought, Owain operates in a world that increasingly seeks explanation through reason. Evidence, structure, and method are his tools.

And yet, his work repeatedly brings him into contact with something less easily contained.

Human behaviour resists neat explanation. Motives are rarely singular. People act from inner worlds that are coherent to them, even when they appear contradictory from the outside.

Blake understood this instinctively.

In The Silence of the White Shadow, Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell travelled with Owain to Edinburgh, where it became a quiet source of strength during his bereavement. In Blake’s union of vision and critique, he found something that spoke directly to his own tension, between reason and imagination, order and insight.

A Final Reflection

There is a temptation, when encountering a figure like William Blake, to try to resolve him, to decide whether he was visionary or irrational, prophetic or eccentric.

But perhaps that misses the point.

Blake’s enduring power lies precisely in his refusal to be reduced.

He reminds us that the human mind is not a tidy place, and that any attempt to make it so will always come at a cost.

It is this recognition that places him so firmly at the heart of Owain Morgan’s world.

For all his training in logic and method, Owain understands that reason alone is never enough. Beneath every action lies a more complex landscape of belief, contradiction, memory, and imagination.

Blake did not solve that complexity.

He saw it clearly.

And in doing so, he gave it form.

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From the research behind The Silence of the White Shadow.

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The Dolwyddelan Codex

A fictional manuscript grounded in historical possibility

In my novel The Silence of the White Shadow, a codex is discovered at Dolwyddelan Castle in North Wales in 1896. It proposes a formal agreement between Welsh princes and the English Crown, suggesting a relationship that sits uneasily with accepted history and directly contradicts the scholarship of one of the novel’s central figures, Emeritus Professor Arthur Cavendish. Its implications are profound, and for him, deeply unsettling.

The codex is, of course, a figment of my imagination.

Yet the anxieties it provokes are not. They are rooted in the realities of medieval politics and in the uncertainties of nineteenth-century scholarship.

Within the logic of the novel, the Dolwyddelan Codex is imagined to have originated during the principality of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (Llywelyn the Great), who died in 1240. His authority rested not only on strength of arms, but on diplomacy, legal awareness, and a careful negotiation of power with the English Crown. In this period, power was rarely absolute. It was expressed through obligation, agreement, and language that allowed room for interpretation.

In that context, the document functions as a record of conditional arrangements. Its phrasing is deliberately measured, shaped by a political culture in which parity might still be asserted in form, even where it did not fully exist in practice. Agreements were typically recorded in Latin, the language of law, yet their meaning was never entirely fixed. It depended on how they were translated, understood, and remembered within Welsh legal and cultural traditions.

The danger emerges later, during the reign of Llywelyn ab Gruffudd.

In 1267, under the Treaty of Montgomery, Henry III recognised Llywelyn as Prince of Wales. The agreement appeared to formalise a delicate equilibrium. Llywelyn exercised authority within Wales while acknowledging the overlordship of the English Crown. Such arrangements were not unusual. Medieval sovereignty was layered, negotiated, and often deliberately imprecise.

When Edward I came to the throne in 1272, he initially confirmed this settlement. Relations soon deteriorated. Disputes over homage, tribute, and territorial authority intensified, and Llywelyn’s refusal to attend Edward’s court provided the pretext for intervention.

Following this breakdown, Edward initiated a campaign in 1277 that brought immediate pressure to bear on Welsh authority without yet extinguishing it. Advancing into North Wales with a combination of military force and logistical control, he compelled Llywelyn to submit. The resulting settlement, formalised in the Treaty of Aberconwy, reduced Llywelyn’s territorial power significantly, confining him largely to Gwynedd west of the Conwy, while allowing him to retain his title in a diminished and carefully defined sense.

At this stage, the underlying structure of negotiation remained intact, though increasingly constrained. Authority was no longer balanced, but it had not yet been entirely replaced. The language of agreement still held, even as its terms narrowed.

The events of 1282 marked a decisive change. What began as a regional uprising, led initially by Llywelyn’s brother Dafydd, developed into a broader conflict that drew Llywelyn himself into open resistance. Edward’s response was no longer one of pressure, but of conquest. English forces advanced systematically, and in December of that year Llywelyn was killed at the Battle of Orewin Bridge, near Builth Wells.

With his death, the political framework that had sustained Welsh autonomy collapsed. By 1283, resistance had been extinguished, and the remaining leadership eliminated. In the years that followed, Edward consolidated his control through both administration and architecture, embedding authority in stone as well as in law. The Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 formalised this transformation, converting a negotiated frontier into a governed territory.

This was most visibly expressed in the great programme of castle-building across North Wales, a network later described as a ‘ring of steel’, including strongholds such as Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech, and Beaumaris. These were not merely defensive structures, but instruments of domination, asserting control over landscape, movement, and population.

It is within this transition that the significance of ambiguity becomes clear. Before these campaigns, language could sustain a degree of flexibility, allowing competing interpretations to coexist. After them, interpretation itself came increasingly under the control of a single authority. What had once been negotiated could now be defined. In such a world, the survival of an older wording was not merely inconvenient. It was potentially subversive.

The idea of a supplementary manuscript preserving more favourable terms for the Welsh is therefore fictional, but not implausible. Medieval documentation was rarely singular or fixed. Charters were copied, glossed, and reinterpreted. Legal traditions evolved through use as much as through decree. In such a world, the survival of a document capable of sustaining an alternative reading of authority is entirely credible.

It is the nineteenth century that gives this idea its sharper edge.

During the Welsh antiquarian revival, manuscripts became objects of intense scrutiny and, at times, controversy. Collections such as The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (1801–1807) sought to gather and preserve the literary and historical record of Wales, while chronicles such as Brut y Tywysogion preserved narratives of medieval Welsh rule. Yet the boundary between preservation and invention was not always clear. Figures such as Iolo Morganwg produced materials later exposed as forgeries, but which nonetheless shaped perceptions of Welsh history and identity.

In such an environment, the meaning of a manuscript extended far beyond its text. Questions of authenticity, translation, and interpretation became entangled with questions of nationhood and legitimacy. As E. H. Carr later observed, historical facts do not speak for themselves. They are selected, arranged, and given meaning by those who interpret them. The past is not simply recovered. It is understood through the concerns of the present.

The Dolwyddelan Codex is invented. But the conditions that make it dangerous are not.

A document whose ambiguity once allowed coexistence could, under a different political order, become evidence of a lost claim. A record intended to stabilise relations could, centuries later, unsettle them.

That is the principle at the heart of this fiction.

The past does not change — but its meaning never stands still.

From the research behind The Silence of the White Shadow

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On Motive, Habit, and Self-Deception

The lesser-known influences behind Owain Morgan

In developing the character of Owain Morgan, I wanted his intellect to emerge from the intellectual world of his time, rather than to feel imposed upon it.

He is not an invention placed into history, but a figure shaped by it.

An academic educated at Oxford and later in Edinburgh, he would naturally have encountered many of the ideas that were beginning to reshape the study of the human mind in the late nineteenth century. He would have read widely, not as a specialist confined to a single discipline, but as a thinker moving across philosophy, psychology, and moral inquiry.

What interested me was not simply what he might have read, but what he would have done with it.

Ideas, after all, are rarely absorbed unchanged. They are tested, adapted, and, over time, made personal.

In that sense, Owain’s method is not borrowed. It is formed.

He draws on well-known figures such as William James, but also on thinkers who are less frequently read today, yet whose influence runs quietly beneath much of modern thought.

It is at that point, where historical ideas are internalised and reshaped, that the fictional and the factual begin to meet.

What connects these influences is a shared concern with what lies beneath outward behaviour. Not simply what is said, but the motive from which it arises.

Beneath the Surface

One of the most important of these influences is Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900).

Writing in the late nineteenth century, Sidgwick was concerned with the problem of moral reasoning. How we justify our actions to ourselves, and how easily that process can become distorted.

He was particularly interested in self-deception.

Not the deliberate lie, but the quieter process by which we come to believe our own explanations. We shape our account of events in a way that allows us to feel justified in what we have already, often unconsciously, decided to do.

This insight sits close to Owain’s way of thinking.

For him, the explanation offered is rarely the starting point. It is something that follows.

The Evidence of Behaviour

George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) approached the mind from a different direction.

Rather than focusing on abstract reasoning, he argued that mental life could be understood through observation. Not by asking what a person claims to think, but by attending to what they do.

In this sense, hesitation, omission, and pause are not empty moments.

They are actions.

Small, often unnoticed, but revealing. Traces of a thought process that has not fully resolved itself, or that is being quietly redirected.

Owain’s attention to silence owes much to this way of seeing.

Habit and the Shape of Action

Alexander Bain (1818–1903) extended this line of thought further.

He was interested in habit and repetition. The idea that patterns of behaviour reveal more about a person than any single statement.

What we do repeatedly acquires a kind of consistency that is difficult to disguise. Not because it is consciously chosen each time, but because it reflects something more deeply established. A tendency, a disposition, a way of responding to the world.

For Owain, this becomes an important principle.

A single statement may be constructed.

A pattern, sustained over time, is harder to control.

Contradiction and Truth

F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) approached the problem from yet another angle.

His concern was with contradiction. The points at which a system of thought begins to break down under its own weight.

For Bradley, contradiction revealed the limits of what we take to be reality.

Owain does not follow him into his broader metaphysical conclusions. But he recognises something important in the observation itself.

When an account contains contradiction, it is rarely accidental.

It marks a point of strain. A place where what is being said can no longer fully accommodate what is known, felt, or remembered.

In that moment, something closer to the truth begins to surface.

The Psychology of Motive

Taken together, these ideas begin to form a coherent approach.

For Owain, understanding a person is not a matter of collecting statements.

It is a matter of tracing the movement by which thought becomes action.

Memory, emotion, conscience, habit, and circumstance all play a part. What results is rarely simple, and rarely fully conscious.

But it is not arbitrary.

People act for reasons.

They are simply not always aware of what those reasons are.

What This Means

In the world of the novels, this way of thinking shapes how Owain approaches both his academic work and his occasional involvement in investigation.

He is less interested in what can be demonstrated immediately, and more in what can be understood over time.

Not the surface of an action, but the structure beneath it.

Because it is there, in the tension between what is said and what is meant, that the deeper truth most often lies.

From the research behind The Silence of the White Shadow.

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What is History?

What E. H. Carr can teach us about the stories we tell about the past.

I have recently completed my second historical fiction novel, The Silence of the White Shadow, set in Victorian Britain.

That means my desk, and my head, are cluttered with research. Industrial towns, social reformers, courtroom accounts, and the occasional ship’s manifest.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I found myself returning to What Is History? Not because I needed another list of dates or events, but because we are living through a moment when the past itself feels unsettled, contested, rewritten, and increasingly shaped by competing narratives.

Carr’s book was first published in 1961, yet its central argument still feels remarkably current. His warning is simple, but far-reaching. History is not a neutral record of facts, and pretending it is can mislead us.

A note on Carr

Carr was not a historian in the narrow, conventional sense. He trained as a diplomat, worked in the British Foreign Office, and later became a journalist and political thinker, best known for his work on Soviet history.

That background matters. He did not encounter history as a closed archive, but as something active and contested. Narratives, he understood, are not discovered in a pure state. They are shaped. Selected. Framed.

What Is History? grows out of that understanding.

Carr’s central insight

Carr’s most important claim is deceptively simple. There is no such thing as a purely objective historical fact, at least not in the way we often imagine.

Facts do not present themselves fully formed, waiting to be recorded. The historian chooses what to include, what to leave aside, and how to connect events into a meaningful account. Even deciding what counts as a “fact” already involves interpretation.

This does not mean that events did not occur. The Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 whether one approves of it or not. But the meaning of that event, its significance, and the story told about it are not fixed. They depend on perspective, context, and the questions being asked.

The historian as interpreter

Carr described history as ‘a continuous dialogue between the past and the present’.

It is a gentle phrase, but it carries weight.

History is not something we simply inherit. It is something we engage with. The past provides the material, but the historian shapes how that material is understood.

Rather than neutral recorders, historians are interpreters. The past offers the notes, but someone decides how they are arranged and heard.

The problem of objectivity

Carr was sceptical of the idea that historians could ever be fully objective.

For him, objectivity was not a fixed state, but something to be approached through discipline. It required awareness of one’s own assumptions, a willingness to test interpretation against evidence, and the humility to revise conclusions when necessary.

This matters beyond the study of history. In journalism, politics, and public debate, the idea of ‘just the facts’ is often presented as neutral. Yet someone still decides which facts are selected, and which remain unseen.

Beyond the individual

Carr also challenged the idea that history can be explained through the actions of a few exceptional individuals.

Instead, he emphasised the importance of wider forces. Economic conditions, social structures, political pressures, and historical context all shape what becomes possible.

The Industrial Revolution was not simply the result of a single invention. It emerged from a combination of resources, labour, capital, and circumstance. To focus only on individuals is to overlook the conditions that made their actions meaningful.

History and the present

Every historian writes from within their own time.

We decide which aspects of the past matter based on present concerns. That is why interpretations change. The British Empire, for example, is understood very differently today than it was a century ago, even though the underlying events remain the same.

This does not mean that anything can be said about the past. It means that history is never final. It is continually revisited as our questions, values, and perspectives evolve.

Why this matters

More than sixty years after its publication, What Is History? still feels relevant.

We live in a time when historical narratives are contested, when memory is shaped by competing interests, and when simplified versions of the past can spread quickly and widely. In such an environment, the idea of history as a fixed and neutral record becomes not just misleading, but limiting.

Carr’s insight encourages something more demanding. Not simply learning what happened, but asking how and why it is being told in a particular way.

An ongoing conversation

History is not a closed account. It is an ongoing process.

The question is whether we approach it passively, accepting what is presented, or actively, asking who is speaking, what is being emphasised, and what may have been left aside.

Carr’s answer resists easy summary, but it can be understood like this.

History is the interpretation of the past in the light of the present.

And if we do not pay attention to how that interpretation works, we risk accepting a version of the past that was never inevitable.

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Stories That Remain

Why I can’t let my characters go

When I retired from corporate life at seventy, I needed to fill the space it left behind.

I had dabbled in photography for decades and built up thousands of images from all over the world. I even produced a few coffee-table books. But in recent years it had lost its pull. I found myself short of inspiration, reluctant to go out and make the images at all.

Writing, on the other hand, had always been there. Proposals, sales documents, messages. Words had paid my way for more than forty years. So I began to wonder whether there might be a novel in me after all.

But what could I write about? What did I really know?

I’ve always been drawn to history, psychology and philosophy. To trying to make sense of life. And I grew up in a mining village in South Wales. My father and grandfather were miners, and as a student I worked in coal yards to support myself through university.

I once read the familiar advice: write about what you know. That was the spark that led me to write my first novel, Unseen Souls.

I immersed myself in memory and research and began writing every day. It felt organic, almost inevitable. I wanted to know what happened next, and that curiosity pulled me forward.

Unseen Souls eventually reached 530 pages. I loved writing it. I still dislike the business of promoting it.

What I didn’t expect was what came after.

I hadn’t planned to start the sequel just yet. There were other ideas waiting. Other projects that might have been more sensible.

But the truth is simpler than that. The characters wouldn’t leave me alone.

They stayed with me after I closed the document. They appeared while I was walking, reading, half-listening to the news. My wife would ask, ‘What have Eliza or Ned been up to today?’ We spoke about them as if they were real. In a way, they were.

I found myself wondering not what should happen next, but what did happen, as though their lives were unfolding somewhere beyond the page, and I was merely catching up.

That, I think, is one of the quiet truths of writing fiction. When it works, characters stop feeling like inventions and begin to feel like people. People shaped by forces larger than themselves. Poverty. Class. Labour. Illness. Belief.

You don’t control them so much as listen.

I write historical fiction grounded in real lives and real conditions. The scaffolding is real. The places existed. The industries existed. The suffering existed. But the inner lives must be imagined with care and humility.

Perhaps that is why the bond can feel so strong. You are not just telling a story. You are carrying something forward.

When a character feels alive, continuing the story does not feel like a creative decision. It feels like a responsibility. Not a burden, but something closer to obligation. As though stopping would be a kind of abandonment.

I suspect many writers recognise this, even if they rarely speak about it. The moment when a book ends, but the people in it do not.

So I have begun the sequel. Not because of a plan or a deadline, but because the characters were still there, waiting.

And that feels like reason enough.

Unseen Souls began as an attempt to understand the lives and histories I grew up alongside. I suspect it will not be the last time I return to that ground.

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The Human Thread

In 2026 I celebrated seventy-two years on this earth. Over time, I have come to describe the ideas that shape my writing as The Human Thread.Now seems like a good time to explain what I mean.

The most important lesson I have learned is simple: change is inevitable; how we respond to it is personal.

But we do not all respond in the same way. We are shaped by personality, upbringing and circumstance. Some hesitate. Some leap. Some quietly endure.

There is a saying that ‘nostalgia ain’t what it used to be’, and that is true. We smooth the rough edges of memory and bathe the past in a golden glow. What remain are curated fragments — bright scenes, first loves, old friendships — that feel purer in retrospect than they did at the time.

What interests me is not the recovery of the past — that is gone forever — but the continuity between past and present.

That continuity is what I call The Human Thread.

Growing up in a South Wales mining village gave me first-hand experience of how physically demanding and economically precarious life can be. Working as a labourer to support myself through university deepened that understanding.

My studies in history, economics and psychology enabled me to understand the forces that shape societies and the motives that drive individuals. Those early years of physical labour stayed with me. They taught me about strain, endurance and dignity — lessons no lecture hall could fully convey.

It is no surprise, then, that I became preoccupied with how the mind works — with why people act as they do, and how belief and temperament shape decisions. That curiosity lies at the heart of my writing.

In Unseen Souls, I explore the harsh working and living conditions of the Dowlais ironworks in the mid-nineteenth century. It follows the life of Eliza Turner, who breaks free from an apparently inevitable future. Her artistic ability becomes the means of her escape. There is, inevitably, something of my own history in that story. I know those valleys intimately, through family and friends, many of whom still live there.

Another of my fictional characters is Professor Owain Morgan, a late Victorian scholar of the mind who seeks not merely to solve crimes but to understand the motives behind them. His investigations are less about guilt than about response — how fear, pride, love or insecurity shape the choices people make. I see elements of my own development in Owain. His adventures are set in North Wales, where I now live and which I know intimately.

We live in an age of noise. Political spectacle dominates. Cultural arguments flare and vanish. The temptation is either to retreat into nostalgia or to surrender to cynicism. Both are evasions.

The Human Thread demands something steadier.

• It asks us to remember without romanticising.

• To criticise without contempt.

• To build without forgetting the cost.

In my fiction, I inhabit the inner lives of my characters because I have lived long enough to recognise the patterns that shape them — the weight of expectation, the strain of responsibility, the quiet calculations behind every choice. In my essays, I explore how ideas — philosophical, political and psychological — travel quietly through generations. These are not separate pursuits. They are part of the same inquiry.

• What does it feel like to live through change?

• What do we inherit without noticing?

• What are we responsible for passing on?

History is often marked by great declarations, laws and charters that appear to alter the course of events. But they endure only because of how people accept, resist or reinterpret them.

In the years ahead, my aim is simple: to add my own thread - carefully, honestly and with hope.

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