The Sound of the Furnace

Unseen Souls is rooted in places I know and in lives that rarely appear in formal histories. Dowlais, in particular, was never simply a convenient setting for the novel. My grandmother was born there, my great-uncle worked at the ironworks, and I visited as a child in the early 1960s, when the industrial world that had shaped the town was already beginning to disappear.

My father and grandfather were coal miners, and I grew up in Trethomas, another South Wales community in which heavy industry was part of ordinary life. As a student I worked in the coke yards there, so although I never experienced the nineteenth-century world I would eventually write about, I knew something of the noise, dirt, heat and physical demands of industrial labour.

That connection became important when I began writing Unseen Souls.

Dowlais had been one of the great centres of the nineteenth-century iron industry. At its height, the ironworks employed thousands of people and helped transform both the surrounding landscape and the communities that grew around it. Yet the larger the history becomes, the easier it is for individual lives to disappear within it. Production figures, technological change and industrial expansion tell us what happened to Dowlais, but rather less about what it was like to live there.

That was what interested me.

The working day was governed by the demands of industry. Men made their way to the works through streets built in the shadow of furnaces whose fires burned day and night, entering an environment of heat, smoke, noise and physical danger. The work required strength and skill, but also endurance. Iron had to be handled and controlled in conditions where mistakes could have serious consequences, while repeated physical labour inevitably left its mark upon the body.

The effects extended far beyond the gates of the works. Families organised their lives around patterns of employment, wages and shifts, while women carried much of the responsibility for maintaining households in difficult circumstances and often contributed economically themselves. Children grew up within communities whose rhythms, opportunities and limitations were inseparable from the industries around them.

That is easy to describe from a distance as industrialisation. Living through it was something else.

When I began imagining Eliza Turner and the other characters in Unseen Souls, I wanted the ironworks to be more than a backdrop. The people in the novel needed to inhabit Dowlais rather than merely stand in front of it. Their choices, expectations and understanding of what was possible in life would inevitably be shaped by the place in which they had grown up.

My own experience helped me understand something of that relationship. The South Wales of my childhood was very different from the Dowlais of the nineteenth century, but industrial work still had a physical presence. I knew men whose bodies bore the consequences of the work they had done, and communities in which the mine, works or factory were not simply employers but forces around which much of life was organised.

Perhaps that is why I have always been more interested in the people beneath industrial history than in industry itself.

The Dowlais Ironworks produced enormous quantities of iron and played an important part in Britain’s industrial development, but thousands of individual lives existed behind those achievements. People worked, married, raised children, attended chapel, argued, hoped for something better and endured disappointments that left no mark upon the historical record. Their lives mattered no less because their names have largely disappeared.

Much of the industrial Dowlais they knew has disappeared as well, although traces remain. Buildings, streets and fragments of the old works still offer glimpses of the community that once existed there, while the landscape itself retains the consequences of the industry that transformed it.

When I return to places like Dowlais, those traces interest me more than monuments. They remind me that history was not experienced as history by the people living through it. It was simply their life.

That became one of the starting points for Unseen Souls. I wasn’t trying merely to reconstruct an industrial town, but to imagine the individual lives taking place within it and to ask what that world required of the people who inhabited it.

The furnaces have gone, but the human story beneath them is what I wanted to recover.