Edgar Phillips’s short biography of Edmund Jones follows one of the weirder figures of eighteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity.

Jones was a preacher, pastor, itinerant, visionary and recorder of supernatural phenomena, remembered as much for prophecy and apparitions as for his religious work. Jones was neither simply about his eccentric folklore nor as a theological curiosity, but as a figure produced by a Wales in which revivalism, local legend and everyday belief in providence still occupied much the same terrain.

The book moves through Jones’s ministry and pastoral life alongside the stories that gathered around him: revelations, spirits, uncanny coincidences and the kind of anecdotes in which a bird landing on a shoulder can suddenly become divine instruction. Compact and distinctly mid-century in its biographical method, it is also an interesting secondary document of Welsh religious memory — an attempt to recover a local figure whose historical life had already begun turning into folklore.

Robert Hale Limited, London, 1959. First edition. Hardcover with dust jacket. Jacket toned and rubbed with some edge wear and marking; former Australian Broadcasting Commission library copy, with stamps to title and preliminary pages. Internally clean and sound.