Introduction

Rob the Red-Hand is a manslayer who spends his life hiding away in the rough mountain uplands of Merionethshire. When he witnesses a gang of smugglers brutally assaulting young Janet Meredith, Rob steps from the shadows and helps his estranged nephew Reginald to free her from her kidnappers. When Romantic literature fell in love with the Scottish Highlands, Thomas Richards championed writing about the people of the Cambrian Mountains. Time and again, he returns to the places and memories of his childhood as he portrays the lives of the wealthy and poor, the morally righteous and the corrupt, those who take lead from the fashions of London and those who uphold ancient Welsh traditions. Thomas Richards (1800‑1877), from Dolgellau, was educated in London after his father’s death. He was working as medical practitioner when he began publishing his first short-stories and novellas anonymously in English and Scottish literary magazines. For later publications, such as the novel Reginald Trevor (1829), he assumed the pseudonym Edward Trevor Anwyl. In 1832, he and his family left Britain for Tasmania. There, Richards took up work as journalist and editor and he continued to write stories about his native Wales. Today, he is regarded as one of the founders of the Australian short story.