New Left Review I/7, January-February 1961

Dennis Potter

Unknown Territory

Border Country, by Raymond Williams:

Bhatto & Windus. 18s.

“what is it really that I must measure?” asks Matthew Price, eight years a university lecturer in economic history, working on population movements in the Welsh mining valleys of the nineteenth century. The answer cannot come at once. “The techniques I have learned have the solidity and precision of icecubes, while a given temperature is maintained. But it’s a temperature I can’t really maintain; the door of the box keeps flying open.” He has himself moved from the Welsh village of Glynmawr to London, a change of gigantic proportions with many unrealised reverberations, “a change of substance as it must also have been for them, when they left their villages. And the ways of measuring this are not only outside my discipline. They are somewhere else altogether, that I can feel but not handle, touch but not grasp.”

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