Pictures of the mind: iron and charcoal, "ouzy" tides and "vagrant dwellers" at Tintern, 1798.

Rzepka, Charles J.

IT IS COMMON KNOWLEDGE AMONG THOSE INTERESTED IN THE COMPOSITION history of Wordsworth's "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour" that the village of Tintern, site of the Abbey featured in the poet's title but missing from his text, supported an ironworks. This industry consumed a great deal of charcoal, which was produced from oak trees growing in the surrounding hills and burned in "furnaces" on the banks of the Wye river. My purpose here is to add to our knowledge of this subject and to correct errors that have accrued in its transmission. By doing so, I hope to allay suspicions still entertained by many that Wordsworth deliberately excluded from his poem unmistakable signs of environmental and social degradation caused by the iron industry at Tintern in 1798.

According to Marjorie Levinson's influential account, "Insight and Oversight: Reading 'Tintern Abbey,'" (1) Wordsworth's "Lines" do not describe a site upstream from the Abbey, but industrialized Tintern itself, transformed into a reassuringly pastoral scene by acts of imaginative distortion and omission. Among the ugly details transfigured to the point of misrecognition by Wordsworth's text is the presence of beggars in and around the village. Levinson argues that the charcoal used by the ironworks was produced at the time of Wordsworth's visit in July 1798 by homeless "vagrants" seeking shelter in the Abbey ruins, and reduced to the "marginal livelihood" of charcoal-burning by "England's tottering economy and ... wartime displacement" (29). These vagrants, she says, are the otherwise unidentified "vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods" mentioned in the poet's opening verse paragraph (line 21). (2) Also according to Levinson's account, the ironworks all but deforested the banks of the Wye with its demand for charcoal (30) and filled the river with noisy boat traffic (29) and an "ouzy" tide of pollution (32). So shocked was Wordsworth at the "'urban' contamination (industry, poverty, crowds, noise, pollution)" (36) at Tintern, argues Levinson, that he tried to suppress every trace of it from his "Lines"--with only partial success--while announcing in his title that he was describing a scene "a few miles" away.

Levinson's depiction of the industrial and social "despoliation" (31) of Tintern in 1798 is probably the best-known of several contributions on the subject, beginning with John Bard McNulty's in 1945. (3) McNulty was the first to suggest that Wordsworth's "lofty cliffs, that ... connect / The landscape with the quiet of the sky" (5-8) and "wreathes of smoke / Sent up, in silence, from among the trees" (18-19) were partly inspired by William Gilpin's description of charcoal-burning in Observations on the River Wye, which records a boat tour undertaken in 1770. "Many of the furnaces, on the banks of the river, consume charcoal," writes Gilpin, "which is manufactured on the spot; and the smoke, issuing from the sides of the hills; and spreading its thin veil over a part of them, beautifully breaks their fines, and unites them with the sky" (12). (4)

Ever since the appearance of McNulty's essay, Gilpin's Observations has been the most often cited source of information on the subject of the natural and human environment at Tintern in the year of Wordsworth's "revisit." Mary Moorman, in 1957, cited Gilpin's description of charcoal smoke and added several other features he remarked upon: "the grass in the ruins was kept mown," she writes, "but it was a dwelling-place of beggars and the wretchedly poor. The river was then full of shipping, carrying coal and timber from the Forest of Dean." (5) Twenty-five years later, Kenneth Johnston also mentioned Gilpin's charcoal smoke, as well as "the heavily commercial aspect of the river at that point due to shipping traffic." To Gilpin's beggars in the Abbey he added "gipsies, and vagabonds." Publishing his essay in 1983, Johnston anticipated Levinson's identification of Wordsworth's "vagrant dwellers" with indigent charcoal burners and likewise suggested that "these unattractive associations--industrial smoke and social outcasts--might very well account for Wordsworth's insistently placing his poem 'a few miles above Tintern Abbey'" rather than at the site of the Abbey itself. (6)

Meanwhile, in 1977, David Erdman had published information about the ironworks provided by Julius Caesar Ibbetson, who toured Wales in 1792. Ibbetson describes "a number of smelting houses on the banks of the Wye, and much too near the abbey: clouds of thick black smoke, and an intolerable stench ... disgusting to the utmost degree, and entirely destroying the landscape." (7) Until 1986, when Levinson's essay first appeared, Ibbetson remained the only source besides Gilpin for literary historians researching industrial and social conditions near Tintern. Levinson dramatically augmented the evidence of her predecessors with passages from four additional sources, the first three excerpted from a guidebook published by Charles Heath, a Monmouth printer, in 1793. These excerpts comprise a few lines from a loco-descriptive poem by Edward Davies, passages from Wye tours attributed to Francis Grose and Stebbing Shaw, and a long passage from Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature, by Thomas Green, dating from 1799. (8) To these four and Gilpin's well-known description of the beggars living in the Abbey Levinson added another passage from the Observations, also printed in Heath, that had somehow escaped the notice of previous commentators. Here, Gilpin remarks the presence of an "ouzy, and discoloured ... tide" in the river as it flowed past Tintern, which Levinson (31-32) took to be evidence of industrial pollution.

The dismal portrait of Tintern that Levinson assembled from her sources played a vital role in her new historicist argument, an argument that remains one of the best-known applications of Jerome McGann's ground-breaking critique of "Romantic Ideology." (9) In order to reveal the full extent of Wordsworth's "negation" of "displacement" of the actual site of Tintern Abbey from his ideologically motivated "picture of the mind" (62), Levinson offered what she considered a more historically accurate "picture of the place" (5):

 The region showed prominent signs of industrial and commercial
 activity: coal mines, transport barges noisily plying the river,
 miners' hovels. The town of Tintern, a half mile from the Abbey, was
 an ironworking village of some note, and in 1798 with the war at
 full tilt, the works were unusually active. The forests around
 Tintern--town and abbey--were peopled with vagrants, the casualties
 of England's tottering economy and of wartime displacement. Many of
 these people lived by charcoal burning, obviously a marginal
 livelihood. The charcoal was used in the furnaces along the river
 banks. The Abbey grounds were crowded with the dispossessed and
 unemployed, who begged coins of the tourists anxious to exercise
 their aesthetic sensibilities. (29-30)

Levinson's "picture of the place" has, over the last seventeen years, become the standard picture of Tintern in the minds of English romanticists. James Heffernan's recent description of the scene, for instance, reads like a precis of Levinson's: "coal mines, miners' hovels, iron works, charcoal burning furnaces hugging the 'sludgy shore' of the river and transport barges plying its polluted stream." (10)

At the time they appeared, Johnston's and Levinson's essays provided an important corrective to the bucolic pastoralism often found in writings on "Tintern Abbey." However, many of the claims made in them are erroneous or misleading.

Consider, for instance, the "ouzy ... tide" of pollution supposedly flowing from Tintern's ironworks. As recently as three years ago, Jonathan Bate took for granted the presence of this "tide" of industrial "sludge and discoloration" contaminating the Wye in 1798, (11) and offered by way of evidence for it the same passage from Gilpin's Observations that Levinson (32) had offered a decade and half before. This passage is well worth re-examining. On departing from Tintern to continue his boat tour downriver, Gilpin writes: "Hitherto, the river had been clear, and splendid; reflecting the several objects on its banks. But its water now became ouzy, and discoloured. Sludgy banks too appeared, on each side, and other symptoms, which discovered the influence of a tide" (37-38).

Any standard map of Great Britain will show that the southern flowing Wye empties into the broad tidal expanse of the Severn estuary. Wordsworth himself remarked the tidal flow of the lower Wye in a footnote to the first printing of his "Lines," and it is a topographical datum easily confirmable on site today. Also easily confirmable is the fact that this tide washes mud from the banks of the river, making it turbid with silt. This recurrent natural event should give anyone reading Levinson's account of pollution in the Wye a moment's pause to ask, "Might not this 'ouzy, and discoloured' flow of mud be what Gilpin meant by 'the influence of a tide'?"

In fact, it was. One page beyond the passage Levinson quotes, Gilpin reports that, "the tide being at ebb," he and his party had to land at "an ouzy beach" below Persfield heights. He adds that the view from the heights had been somewhat spoiled, because "the river itself indeed, as we just observed, is charged with the impurities of the soil it washes; and when it ebbs, its verdant banks become slopes of mud" (39). Other Wye tours confirm Gilpin's observations. (12) The OED, which defines "ouzy" as "Of water: charged with ooze or mud; muddy," even cites Gilpin's "ouzy ... tide" as evidence. In short, Gilpin was describing a natural phenomenon that we can still see occurring at Tintern twice daily, without an ironworks located anywhere near the Wye valley.

If the Wye was polluted as early as 1770, when Gilpin visited Tintern, let alone twenty-eight years later, no one noticed it. In fact, counter-evidence against the "pollution" hypothesis appears in the 1831 "Abstract" of the British census, which noted, more than thirty years after Wordsworth's visit, that fishing remained a major source of income in and around Tintern. (13) Indeed, the area had long been celebrated by anglers and diners for its native salmon. Edward Darles, whose Chepstow: A Poem in Six Cantos, published in 1786, Levinson cites as one of her sources, assures us at the end of a circumstantial account of fishing on the Wye that "Few other rivers such fine salmon feed." (14) Moreover, Tintern was the furthest downriver of several industrial sites in the Wye valley, including ironworks at Redbrook, Lydbrook, and Whitebrook, as well as copper-works, a tin-plate works, paper mills, and tanneries. (15) If pollution had made its mark anywhere along the river by 1798, it would have been here. Nothing indicates that it did, and no one to my knowledge has offered any evidence to the contrary besides Gilpin's "ouzy ... tide."

Levinson is not the only one to have been led astray by presentist assumptions about the scale and impact of Tintern's early industrial development. In The Hidden Wordsworth, Kenneth Johnston focuses our attention on a visitor to Tintern named Richard Warner, who in August of 1797 spent the night at the Beaufort Arms hotel in the center of the village. (The hotel is located today near the Abbey ruins.) Unable to sleep, Warner rose from bed and looked out the window:

 Immediately opposite to [our] room stands a large iron-forge....
 This scene of bustle amidst smoke and fire, during the darkness and
 silence of midnight, which was only interrupted by the intonations
 of the bar-hammer, produced a most impressive effect on the mind.
 We saw Virgil's description realized, and the interior of Etna, the
 forges of the Cyclops, and their fearful employment, immediately
 occurred to us. (16)

Johnston considers such scenes among "the ugly" details of Tintern "that Wordsworth softens" or ignores in his poem. In fact, says Johnston, the forge was so noisy that it kept Warner awake. (17) This does not correspond to Warner's account:

 The extreme heat of the last night effectually prevented us from
 sleeping, and we passed the greater part of it at our window. This
 we were induced to do both for the sake of a balmy and refreshing
 breeze that gently whispered without, and in order to enjoy a scene
 perfectly new to us, highly gratifying to a warm imagination. (229)

What Johnston considers an "ugly" source of sleep-shattering noise, Warner thought a "gratifying" inducement to remain awake.

Over the last half-century, numerous misconceptions have arisen concerning industrialization and indigence at Tintern in 1798, creating a false impression of the scenery through which Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy traveled and of the poet's anxious suppression of its unsavory details. In what follows, I will focus on Levinson's "Insight and oversight" essay as exemplary of both the range and degree of misunderstanding on this subject. I have two reasons for doing so. First, Levinson not only embellishes what was there, but adds what was not. Second, her errors continue to provoke critical suspicions that, by July of 1798, Wordsworth had become blind and deaf to the plain evidence of "what man has made of man."

Take, for instance, Levinson's "coal mines" and "miner's hovels." We have no evidence of coal mines or miners in of near Tintern, whose ironworks did not consume mineral coal. Coal was mined in the Forest of Dean, several miles to the east, and loaded for transport from wharves at Lydbrook, many miles upstream, or at sites along the Severn River on the far eastern edge of the forest. The Forest of Dean also contained extensive iron reines. (18) By 1798, however, the works at Tintern were no longer using iron mined in the Forest of Dean. Instead, all their ore was shipped in from Lancashire, (19) presumably in what Levinson calls "transport barges noisily plying the river."

Like her misreading of Gilpin's "ouzy" tide, Levinson's attribution of "noise" to the boats on the Wye is based on presentist assumptions. It is unlikely that the river traffic floating past Tintern could have been "noisy" enough to bother anyone before the advent of steam navigation and steam whistles. In 1798, Wye river boats, known as "trows" or "hoys," were powered by wind, oars, tow-ropes, river currents, or tides. The latter two were used almost exclusively in the tidal stretch of river between Brockweir, located just above Tintern, where shallow-draft barges from upstream exchanged cargoes with larger vessels, and Chepstow, located downstream at the mouth of the Wye. Figure 1, a view of the Abbey by Samuel Ireland dating from 1797, shows a typical example of lower Wye river traffic on the left, and a canopied tour boat at the lower right. (20) Far from complaining about the "noise" they made, Gilpin says he and his party were "entertained" by the "light vessels gliding past," and even found them "picturesque" (30).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The Wye valley, with its ample supply of tributary water-power and extensive length of navigable river, certainly boasted more industrial sites and boat traffic than typical waterways its size. The scale of these operations would today strike us as minuscule, but it was undoubtedly impressive by the standards of the late eighteenth century. And yet, English tourists flocked to the Wye, and to Tintern in particular, leaving numerous records of their delight and wonder, not only at its natural and ancient attractions, but at its industrial and commercial features as well. Gilpin himself, the spiritual father of modern English tourism, discerned a "picturesque assemblage" in the loading of coals at Lydbrook (22), and Richard Warner, fascinated by the vision of Etna outside his hotel window, made a point of visiting the Tintern blast furnace before he left the village. (21) This was, after all, the period that saw the emergence of a taste for "the industrial picturesque" and "the industrial sublime." (22)

As a tourist, of course, Wordsworth was in a class by himself. His heart did not leap up when he beheld a smokestack in the sky. However, it is difficult to imagine that so many of his fellow tourists, despite their enthusiasm over any sign of Britain's industrial and commercial progress, would have persisted in their admiration for Tintern's Abbey ruins if the "despoliation" there was as appalling as Levinson and Johnston indicate. On first catching sight of Tintern, Warner expressed his delight "with the diversified scenery of the dale in which it stands, its glittering stream and dark woods, and the lofty ruins of its abbey, a beautiful Gothic pile rising in solemn majesty, spotted withmosses, and crowned with ivy" (Warner 227).

And Warner's response is typical. Here is an account offered by Gilpin himself, who was not squeamish about remarking signs of industrial development in the pages of the Observations:

 [The abbey] occupies a gentle eminence in the middle of a circular
 valley, beautifully screened on all sides by woody hills; through
 which the river winds its course: and the hills, dosing in on its
 entrance, and on its exit, leave no room for inclement blasts to
 enter. A more pleasing retreat could not easily be found. The woods,
 and glades intermixed; the winding of the river; the variety of the
 ground; the splendid ruin, contrasted with the objects of nature;
 and the elegant line formed by the summits of the hills, which
 include the whole; make all together a very inchanting piece of
 scenery. Every thing around breathes an air so calm, and tranquil;
 so sequestered from the commerce of life, that it is easy to
 conceive, a man of warm imagination, in monkish times, might have
 been allured by such a scene to become an inhabitant of it. (32, my
 emphases)

Are we to assume that these descriptions and others like them ate as riddled with mental erasures as Levinson believes Wordsworth's "picture of the mind" to be? Does it make sense to reject the obvious conclusion that the iron manufactory must have been almost invisible from any vantage point suitable for viewing Tintern Abbey, and insist instead that it was an obtrusive eyesore elided from descriptions of the Abbey itself for ideological reasons? I hope to show that it does not.

Levinson believes that "the forests around Tintern--town and abbey--were peopled with vagrants." Not one of sixteen surviving accounts (23) left by visitors to the Abbey, dating from Gilpin's tour in 1770 to Wordsworth's in 1798, mentions encounters with beggars of vagrants loitering in the woods, or, for that matter, in the village streets. As for the beggars at the Abbey, almost everything we now know about them comes (again) from two paragraphs of the Observations, which records a tour that predated Wordsworth's by almost three decades. Here is what Levinson quotes from Gilpin concerning these poor people:

 But were the building [Tintern Abbey] ever so beautiful, encompassed
 as it is with shabby houses, it could make no appearance from the
 river.... Among other things in this scene of desolation, the
 poverty and wretchedness of the inhabitants are remarkable. They
 occupy little huts, raised among the ruins of the monastery and
 seem to have no employment, but begging. (quoted in Levinson 31)

Beggars do not live in houses, "shabby" or otherwise, so Levinson's including them here is irrelevant. Nor were these wretched "inhabitants" living in the Abbey church, the doors to which were ordinarily kept locked. (24) As Gilpin indicates, they lived in "the monastery" ruins--what was left of the cloisters, refectory, library, and living quarters--located next door. An anonymous diary for the years 1782-84 containing illustrations by the painter Rose Sotheby, which is now in the collection of the National Library of Wales, confirms this: "Some part of the old Monastery is also remaining, & the adjacent cottages were probably part of the out offices. Some of these habitations are beyond description wretched ... indeed, the utmost extreme of Poverty and Misery was visible in almost every inhabitant of this Abbey, once the splendid abode of wealth and luxury." (25) Some of the "adjacent cottages" located in of near the ruins, however, were apparently quite livable. The respectable Mr. Richard Bowen, for instance, a stone mason, had resided in "a cottage at the West end of the Abbey" since before the grounds of the church were cleared of rubbish and debris in 1756, according to Charles Heath. (26)

We cannot even be sure that all the people Gilpin encountered were actually begging. He assumes they were, some openly, but some under what he calls the "pretence" (35) of showing visitors portions of the monastery ruins next to the church. With that understanding he even accompanies one poor, crippled woman to her "loathesome" dwelling (36). The "Sotheby" diarist, however, who apparently patronized the same old woman some twelve years later, says nothing about begging and accepts at face value the woman's offer to serve "as a guide" for a small remuneration (A Journal of a tour 19). Anyone who has visited tourist sites in relatively impoverished areas of the developing world will immediately recognize here the phenomenon of the local "volunteer guide." The ambiguous status of the people living in the monastery ruins may explain the otherwise baffling assertion of Henry Penruddocke Wynham when, having nearly completed a tour of Wales in 1775. that included a visit to Tintern, he encountered beggars outside his hotel in Conway:

 I don't recollect to have seen one beggar before in the whole tour;
 The common people were indeed poor enough, but they seemed contented
 with their lot, and were always willing to answer our enquiries,
 without the least expectation of any reward: they never asked for
 it. (157)

Whatever the location, number, status, or condition of the unfortunates living at the Abbey in 1770, 1775, and 1784, they all but vanish from Tintern's travel narratives between 1788 and 1797, and begging disappears entirely. Ibbetson, in 1792, refers to "the wretched inhabitants of some miserable hovels" who "presented themselves" on his approach to the Abbey, but he does not say they asked for money, only that they and their "hovels" were "not in harmony" with the scene (247). In the 1793 edition of his guidebook, Charles Heath reports that "many of the cloisters round the building," including that of "the old woman, which Mr. Gilpin mentions," are still occupied. He does not say whether or not the same old woman lives there, and, like Ibbetson the year before, he says nothing about begging. He does, however, note that "the poor people request permission to lead you" to features among the monastery ruins (55-56).

There is no denying that Tintern was not a prosperous locale compared to other industrial sites in England, such as Abraham Darby's enormous ironworks at Coalbrookdale. The "Sotheby" diarist judged that, as late as 1784, Tintern's ironworkers were in miserable shape compared to their counterparts at sites like Pontypool (A Journal of a tour 43). Within a few years, however, a new class of residents appears to have moved into the village, including the "shabby" neighborhood near the ruins. Figure 2, a 1788 view of the Abbey by John "Warwick" Smith, is, according to its caption, "interrupted by a Mean Modern House"--"mean"--that is, "vulgar"--but "modern"--that is, not "shabby" or old and worn, as Gilpin described Tintern's houses in 1770. Indeed, the new house in Smith's drawing looks as if it had been built for a rather well-off, middle-class family.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Many of Gilpin's "shabby houses" apparently remained, according to Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who visited the town in 1797, one year before Wordsworth:

 [T]he many shabby cottages which surround the abbey diminish much
 from the grand appearance which it would assume, if they, as well as
 other obstacles, were removed, and the building could be viewed at
 its proper distance.

In the same year, however, Samuel Ireland took particular exception to Gilpin's earlier description of this area. He found "in passing along the riverside ... many beautiful passages in landscape" (138), and even drew a picture of the scene (see Figure 1), declaring,

 Here every cottage appears as it really exists on the spot; and
 the petty, or if you please paltry accompaniments to which he
 [Gilpin] alludes, appear to us so far from diminishing the grandeur
 of the general effect, that they serve rather on the contrary as a
 scale, and give magnitude to the principal object. (133) (27)

Tintern and its ironworks seem to have enjoyed a period of relative prosperity beginning in the late 1780s, as indicated by Heath's reference, in 1793, to "the increase of commerce within these few years" and "the busy scene which the village now exhibits" (vi). Also, a local workhouse had been constructed since Gilpin's tour, to which some of the inhabitants of the monastery ruins had apparently been removed (see Clayden 199-200).

In short, there is little evidence to suggest that when Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy arrived at Tintern they found the Abbey "crowded with the dispossessed and unemployed," as Levinson puts it, let alone overrunning the place and "peopling" the town and forests. On the contrary, what evidence we have suggests that improvements in the local economy and the cruel impact of the workhouse had combined to reduce the number of poor people residing in the monastery ruins. This is not to say there were no beggars or vagrants living there, but their disappearance from accounts written between 1788 and 1797 at least suggests that they were no longer the obtrusive nuisances that Gilpin found them to be.

Levinson not only argues that beggars and vagrants "peopled" the surrounding region, but states that "many of these people lived by charcoal burning, obviously a marginal livelihood." She also states that "the charcoal was used in furnaces along the river bank" and that "in 1798 with the war at full tilt, the works were unusually active" (29). To assess the accuracy of these claims we need to know more about the technology of ironworking at Tintern when the Wordsworths visited.

By 1798 iron had been smelted and forged at Tintern for more than two centuries. According to Britain's 1800 census, 182 adults out of a total population of 638 in the two parishes comprising Tintern worked at "Trade, Manufacturing, and Handicrafts." (28) The village's blast and forge furnaces and its three-story wireworks (29) had employed a good portion of these laborers for decades. The ironworks also required an abundant and renewable source of charcoal, whose "fragility" required that it be produced near at hand to prevent its being pulverized into useless dust in transport. (30) The other essentials of ironmaking were a reliable source of water in almost constant flow; iron ore, either nearby or easily transported (before railroads and macadamizing, this usually meant by water); and access to the sea (for similarly convenient distribution of the finished product). Tintern satisfied all these conditions.

Figure 3, a British Ordinance Survey Landplan Map of the Tintern area (scale 1:10,000), shows the topography of the Wye valley near Tintern and the Abbey ruins. Here the river, flowing south, makes an extreme ox-bow turn to the west, while a smaller stream, the Angidy (flowing alongside the road that runs west from the Abbey Forge), enters the Wye just downriver from the farthest reach of this westward bend. (The highway running southwest along the right bank of the river did not exist in 1798.) As this map shows, the site of the blast furnace where ore was smelted, by far the largest consumer of charcoal in the ironworks complex, is located up the Angidy valley at least a mile from the Wye and the Abbey Forge (Warner's "Etna"), which is the nearest outbuilding of the complex to Tintern Abbey about 380 yards away. (31) The charcoal used in the blast furnace was produced from cultivated stands, or "coppices," of oak saplings in the surrounding hills. The coppices were set aside for the use of the ironworks by the Duke of Beaufort, who owned all the property in and around Tintern, including the Abbey. Knowing nothing about ironmaking himself, Beaufort leased the works (along with the coppices) to ironmasters like David Tanner, who tan the operation until just months before the Wordsworths' visit. (32)

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

The charring of oak wood ("charcoal burning") in earth-covered mounds or "furnaces" constructed amidst the hillside coppices was a vital part of the industrial process at Tintern, and at nearly every other British ironworks until the last few decades of the century, when mineral coal succeeded in replacing charcoal. (33) Charcoal burning for industrial purposes was something of a skilled occupation, often passed down from father to son, requiring constant attention and employing two of three men per burn over a period of several days. (34) It is highly unlikely that Tanner, or any other ironmaster, would have left so important a practice to beggars of vagrants seeking a "marginal" livelihood, let alone allowed them to trespass on land set aside by the Duke and leased to Tanner for this purpose. The wastage from an uncontrolled bum would have been reason enough to subcontract the work or to hire regular employees. (35) This is not to say that Wordsworth's phrase, "vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods," is not a fairly accurate description of charcoal-burners, who might "dwell" at a furnace site for several days at a time before moving on to the next. However, charcoal-burners in the Wye valley were not ordinarily, as far as we can tell, vagrants or beggars, and their families typically resided in the village. (36)

The care and tending of coppices helps us assess the significance of a piece of evidence that Levinson (30) mistakenly attributes to Francis Grose (it was actually written by Heath), suggesting that charcoal-burning was decimating hillsides up and down the valley: "Before the introduction of this Manufactory, the woods around must have been grand indeed; but the works requiring such quantities of charcoal, they are now fallen in the course of every 12 or 14 years." The "Manufactory" in question had been "introduced" to the region in the seventeenth century, and "12 or 14 years" was the standard time it took to grow coppice trees before harvesting. In that length of time, oak saplings can grow as high as twenty-five or thirty feet. (37) Clear-cutting the coppices made no sense, given the ironworks' need for a steady supply of fresh charcoal over time and the limited distance charcoal could be hauled (about three miles) without being pulverized (Hammersley 606, 608). Instead, different areas within the coppice were apparently culled or felled in rotation, depending on where previous furnace mounds had been constructed.

"Before the Manufactory," of course, the coppices or "woods around" the works must have been as "grand" as the unenclosed forests of the valley. These supplied timber for shipbuilding and the building trades, as well as oak bark for tanning, and by the 1790s they too were largely protected from clear-cutting by rudimentary forms of arboriculture dating back several decades. (38) Many Wye Tours from this period praise the lush forests along the river's banks, including the area around Tintern. Heath, for instance, describes Caswell Wood in 1806, located almost directly opposite the Abbey Forge, as follows: "a grand wood, spreading itself like the leaves of a fan, and richly adding to the beauty of the landscape." As for the coppices, Heath felt they "add[ed] so much to the beauty of the scenery," and Stebbing Shaw, in 1788, found their "livery of green" "beautiful." (39) Wordsworth too delighted in the "woods and copses" of the Wye, as we know from line 13 of his poem.

That charcoal was burned among the coppices on the hillsides above the Wye seems to contradict Levinson's statement that charcoal "furnaces" were located "along the river bank," if we take "river bank" to mean the immediate shores of the Wye. Gilpin, however, places the furnaces "on the banks of the river" (12). The difference in prepositions is significant, for in the Observations the word "bank" can refer to an area of land extending laterally from the river for a considerable distance in either direction, sometimes reaching as far as the rim of the valley itself, several miles away. Thus, on page 7 Gilpin refers to "the lofty banks of the river, and its mazy course." This extended sense of "bank" must be what Gilpin has in mind in his passage on charcoal smoke, for he says the smoke from the furnaces "on the banks of the river" is "frequently seen issuing from the sides of the hills." Similarly, William Coxe, who visited the Wye valley in 1799, distinguishes the "banks" of the Wye from "the edge of the water": "The banks for the most part rise abruptly from the edge of the water, and are clothed with forests, or broken into cliffs." (40) In light of the documentary and archaeological evidence concerning the ironworks' exact location, cited below, Ibbetson's use of the word "banks" in describing his encounter with "a number of smelting-houses on the banks of the Wye" in 1792 must be understood in the same sense, regardless of his opinion that they were "much too near the abbey." Since he was riding in a coach, Ibbetson must have approached Tintern by way of the road along the Angidy valley, not by way of the Abbey. (41)

Gilpin describes the ironworks as follows:

 The country about Tintern-abbey hath been described as a solitary,
 tranquil scene: but its immediate environs only ate meant. Within
 half a mile of it are carried on great iron-works; which introduce
 noise and bustle into these regions of tranquillity. (37)

To what extent the "noise and bustle" from an ironworks half a mile away would have disturbed visitors to the "immediate environs" of the Abbey must remain an open question when the writer himself has just stated that "A more pleasing retreat"--"so calm, and tranquil; so sequestered from the commerce of life"--"could not easily be found" (32). As we shall see, however, questions about the ironworks' "noise and bustle," not to mention smoke, turn out to be moot when we inquire closely into the actual state of industrial activity at Tintern in July 1798.

As with the "noisy" shipping on the Wye, Gilpin's "noise and bustle" could not have included the sound of steam engines. While charcoal was used to smelt iron in the blast furnace and to refine it at several forge furnaces, it was not used to power the works. The bellows, forge-hammers, and wire-drawing machinery were powered by water. This explains why all the structures comprising the works have been discovered by industrial archaeologists to lie, with one exception, not on the shores of the Wye, where water-flow was tidal and difficult to control, but along the steeper and narrower Angidy valley. Figure 4 shows the location of all the water-powered mills--oil-pressing, paper, copper, tin-plating, grist, as well as iron-smelting and forging--built in the lower Wye valley from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, as determined by excavations and on-site inspections that began in 1970. Sites 1 through 8 indicate the structures belonging to the ironworks. It is evident that only one of these structures, the Abbey Forge (Site I), was located near the shores of the Wye, where the Angidy emptied into the larger river. The largest building in the complex, the lower wire-works (Site 2), was located a couple of hundred yards or more up the Angidy at a site hidden from the Abbey by the tributary valley's steep sides, and the blast furnace, as we have seen, stood more than a thousand yards further on (Site 6). Figures 5, 6, and 7 give some idea of the scale of these operations (the image on the cover of SiR is Figure 7 and perhaps represents the Block House and Hammer Houses, Site 3 in Figure 4).

[FIGURES 4-7 OMITTED]

Levinson repeatedly identifies the poem's referential context with a single, perspectival point of view. (42) Even allowing for mobility in that point of view, given the fact that the only structure belonging to the ironworks that could possibly have been spotted by visitors to the Abbey was the Abbey Forge, what ate the chances that it and the Abbey could have been placed by Wordsworth in what Levinson calls "spatial juxtaposition" (35) in "the scene before his eyes" (41) in July of 1798? Figure 8, a portion of an estate map of the Tintern area made by John Aram for the Duke of Beaufort in 1763, shows the Abbey's location (A) relative to the Abbey Forge (B) a bit less than 400 yards away, and to the ferry-landing on the left bank of "The Passage" (C), where William and Dorothy would have stood and viewed the Abbey ruins when they first arrived from downriver, traveling on foot, the afternoon of 10 July 1798. More buildings--houses, stores, warehouses--may have been constructed in the village of Tintern in the space of 35 years, but none, as far as we can tell from the surviving evidence, belonged to the ironworks. (43)

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

As the Aram map shows, intervening orchards (indicated by diagonal lines) and buildings (outlined in black, filled in gray) would have blocked the Abbey Forge from the view of anyone visiting the ruins in 1798. Figure 9, a 1781 watercolor by John Byng painted from the window of his room at the Beaufort Arms (at D in Figure 8), along with Figure 10, a contemporary photograph taken from approximately the same site, show that the Forge (now a gift shop) sits in a depression, largely below street level. Figure 11 is a composite of two photographs taken in June 2000 at a spot across the Wye from the Abbey (at E, Figure 8), near the ferry landing. Together, they show the present-day position of the Abbey church relative to the stretch of riverbank leading upstream to the Forge, which is set back about 40 yards from the river and hidden by buildings and trees (at arrow) from the landing some 350 yards away. In 1798 the Forge would also have been blocked by buildings, and presumably trees and shrubs, from the view of passengers like the Wordsworths waiting to cross the river (C). Their view of the Abbey as they approached the landing would have appeared very much as it does today (Figure 12).

[FIGURES 9-12 OMITTED]

To judge from these virtual reconstructions, the possibility of the Wordsworths catching sight of both the Abbey Forge and the Abbey in a single prospect would have been remote, to say the least. They would have to have gone out of their way, in any case, to have done so. (44) McNulty's mapped itinerary for 10-14 July (292), which Levinson reproduces (54), suggests the Wordsworths may have passed the Forge on leaving town. If so, the Abbey would have been no more visible from that vantage point than the Forge had been from the Abbey itself. (45)

Moreover, William and Dorothy returned to Tintern at the end of the trip via a tour boat coming upriver on the tide from Chepstow, at the mouth of the Wye. To reach Chepstow they had hiked in a single day all the way from Goodrich Castle, the furthest upriver point of their tour, over a distance of about 21 miles. (46) That they would have walked so far out of their way to a point past Tintern to come back to the village one last time before departing for Bristol is difficult to conceive if we credit Levinson's belief that Wordsworth was appalled at the "despoliation" he had found there two days before.

Regardless of how the Wordsworths left town, or returned to it later, William would have had no reason to erase the ironworks from his "picture" of Tintern Abbey and pretend that he was describing a spot "a few miles" upriver, since the Abbey ruins could easily be viewed from nearly any spot along the downriver approach or from the opposite bank without a visible hint of their proximity to the ironworks. Indeed, had the poet composed verses entitled "Lines written at Tintern Abbey" and included the ironworks, we might more plausibly question their verisimilitude. (47)

In short, we have absolutely no evidence of industrial "despoliation" at or in the immediate vicinity of Tintern Abbey, either on shore or in the woods nearby or flowing past the ruins, that would be visible from any point of view that William and Dorothy were likely to assume when they arrived there. It is ironic that Levinson should deride Wordsworth because his "flying visits to the Abbey shielded him from local knowledge" (47). Wordsworth passed through Tintern on three occasions, while Levinson seems not to have visited the spot at all.

We have yet to examine one source quoted at considerable length in "Insight and oversight." In his Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature recording a visit to Tintern on 27 June 1799, almost a year after the Wordsworths' tour, Thomas Green remarks "thick enclosures and vile hovels," "houses in ruins, and the whole place exhibiting strong marks of poverty and wretchedness" (143). Levinson's excerpt from Green's diary includes these observations, but begins (as excerpted, including elisions), "Descended ... into a deep and sequestered hollow, formed by a sweeping recess of the Western banks of the Wye, and enclosing in its secluded bottom the village and abbey of Tintern: a delicious retreat, most felicitously chosen ... for the purposes of religious meditation and retirement" (Levinson 31). Clearly, like Ibbetson, Green had approached the town and Abbey via the road along the Angidy that would have led him through the "deep and sequestered hollow" of the ironworks complex. And yet he makes no mention of furnaces or forges, of "thick black smoke" or an "intolerable stench." In fact, the passage omitted by Levinson reads, "by a tortuous and rugged road, amidst a prodigality of shade and the refreshing murmur of gurgling rills" (143). Anyone traveling this route today will find the scenery very much as Green describes it. Of course there are no ironworks there now.

From Green's omission of the works we might conclude that he did not find them particularly interesting, or offensive. However, his reference to the "refreshing murmur of gurgling fills" and his finicky disgust at the "vile hovels" and "wretchedness" of the town itself, coupled with Ibbetson's report of the repulsive stink of the works when encountered close up (see also A Journal of a tour III), all make Green's silence on the subject puzzling, especially in light of Levinson's reasonable assumption that "in 1798 with the war at full tilt, the works were unusually active" (29).

As it happens, Thomas Green, like the Wordsworths a year before, had arrived in Tintern just as ironworks elsewhere in Britain were completing the shift from charcoal to prepared coal, or "coke," for smelting and forging iron, and from water to coal-fired steam as a power source. These important innovations never reached Tintern, whose one charcoal-fired blast furnace was to be shut down for good within another quarter-century. (48) Meanwhile, David Tanner, the ironmaster, had been investing heavily in the old charcoal-fired, water-powered technology. Green's description of Tintern's generally sad condition suggests that Tanner's investments were failing to pay off by 1799. Not long after Green's visit, mendicancy reappears in the tour books. That autumn Coxe reports "forcing our way through a crowd of importunate beggars ... to examine ... the west front," (49) and by 1803, begging is no longer confined to the Abbey. "In our ... walks between the inn and the abbey," writes J. T. Barber, "we were regularly beset with importunities for alms: the labouring man had abandoned his employment ... to obtain a few pence by debasing clamour. This system of begging we found to arise from the late distresses." (50)

Barber does not identify these "late distresses." Bad harvests (51) must count among them. But just as important would have been the fact that in November of 1798 Tanner was declared bankrupt. According to his biographer, John Evans, he had vacated the Tintern ironworks in March of that year (52) and the buildings were not re-tenanted until more than a year afterwards (Ridden, Gazetteer 49). Upriver as well, where Tanner had leased operations at Redbrook and Lydbrook, jobs vanished as the furnaces and forges went cold and silent (Hart 98). Economic hardship spread throughout the region, which never recovered fully from the tipple effects of Tanner's bankruptcy.

How soon these developments began to make an appreciable impact on Tintern's inhabitants we can only guess, but several factors may have delayed the immediate effects. Many of the ironworkers and their families would have left for other manufactories within a few weeks. (53) Shipping along the Wye of raw materials like coal, timber, and oak-bark and of finished goods like paper and cider (54) probably continued, but boat traffic in general was undoubtedly reduced. Beginning in April, spring bark-stripping would have kept villagers busily employed for about two months. (55) The ensuing tourist season directly benefited innkeepers, taverners, ostlers, tour-boat operators, and boatmen during the spring and summer, and indirectly helped to support victuallers and boatwrights, salmon-fishers and cider-makers, all of whose operations would have had an ancillary effect on the local economy.

Whatever the pace at which the "distresses" later observed by Green, Coxe, and Barber began to make themselves felt in the months following March 1798, we can be all but certain that when the Wordsworths arrived at Tintern Abbey on 10 July they saw no smoke "issuing from the sides of the hills," and heard no "noise and bustle" coming from the direction of the Angidy. Like the dawn-lit London of the poet's moving sonnet, "Composed on Westminster Bridge," Tintern was "silent," its air "smokeless," its "mighty heart ... lying still." Unlike the view from Westminster Bridge, however, this rare, picturesque opportunity inspired neither sonnets nor "Lines." We may never know why not. But as William walked on with his sister the next day to a spot "a few miles" upriver, one feature of the scene at Tintern, and probably at Redbrook and Lydbrook as well--a feature conspicuously absent from his first tour of the valley in 1793--seems to have stayed with him: a disturbing stillness, and a much sadder "murmur" (4) than the Wye's. Among his "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" he included the following:

 For I have learned
 To look on nature, not as in the hour
 Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
 The still, sad music of humanity.

 (89-92)

His readers will have to decide for themselves whether Wordsworth's last line reflects an act of empathy or erasure, of "insight" or "oversight."

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

I would like to thank industrial historians Philip Riden and John Evans; the Boston University Romantics Symposium; David Miall of the University of Alberta; Rhoda Bilansky of Boston University's Mugar Library; and the residents of Tintern, Gwent, especially John and Jean Bathgate, Elizabeth Craig, Jim Simpson, and Bob Medland, for their help with this article. My thanks go as well to Provost Dennis Berkey of Boston University, who approved funds for travel to Wales in the summer of 2000.

(1.) Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 14-57. All parenthetical citations are taken from this text.

(2.) All references to Wordsworth's poem are from Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge, eds. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London and New York: Methuen, (1986).

(3.) John McNulty, "Wordsworth's Tour of the Wye: 1798," Modern Language Notes 60 (1945): 291-95 (294).

(4.) William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and several parts of South Wales, & relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770 (London: R. Blamire, 1782). Citations in parentheses are taken from this, the first edition, but do not differ substantially from those in the third, cited by Levinson.

(5.) Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth, A Biography: The Early Years 1770-1803 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957) 402-3.

(6.) Kenneth Johnston, "The Politics of 'Tintern Abbey," The Wordsworth Circle 14 (1983): 6-14 (8).

(7.) As quoted in David Erdman, "A Note from David V. Erdman (Stony Brook) on a Guide to Tintern Abbey," The Wordsworth Circle 8 (1977): 95-96. For the original text, see Julius Caesar Ibbetson, La Porte, and J. Hassell, A Picturesque Guide to Bath, Bristol Hot-Wells, the River Avon, and the Adjacent Country; illustrated with a set of views, taken in the summer of 1792 (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1793) 246.

(8.) Charles Heath, A Descriptive Account of Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire (Monmouth: Charles Heath, 1793); Edward Davies, Chepstow: A Poem in Six Cantos, ed. Ivor Waters (1786; rpt. Chepstow: The Printing Club, 1972); Francis Grose, The Antiquities of England and Wales, 8 vols., 2nd ed. (London: S. Hooper, 1787); Stebbing Shaw, A Tour to the West of England, in 1788 (London: Robson and Clarke, 1789); Thomas Green, Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature (Ipswitch: John Raw, 1810).

(9.) Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 85-88.

(10.) James Heffernan, "Wordsworth's 'Leveling' Muse in 1798," in 1798: the Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin (New York: St. Martin's P, 1998) 237. The most plausible suggestion as to the real site described by Wordsworth has been made by David Miall, "Locating Wordsworth: 'Tintern Abbey' and the Community with Nature," Romanticism on the Net 20 (November 2000): http://users.ox.ac.uk/?scato385/20miall.html.

(11.) Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000) 143.

(12.) See, e.g., Shaw 214, and Richard Colt Hoare, The Journeys of Sir Richard Colt Hoare through Wales and England, 1793-1810, ed. M. W. Thompson (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983) 82-83.

(13.) "Abstract of Answers and Returns under the Population Act, II Geo. IV. c. 30," Enumeration Abstract, vol. I (House of Commons, 1833), unpaginated note to Chapel Hill parish statistics. Locals assure me that the Wye is still a prolific source of "elvers" or eel fry in season.

(14.) Davies 10-11. A 1781 account by John Byng (Viscount Torrington), The Torrington Diaries, ed. C. Bruyn Andrews, 4 vols. (London: Methuen, 1934) 1: 23-25, attests to the ubiquity of salmon on the local menu.

(15.) For a complete description, see S. D. Coates, The Water Powered Industries of the Lower Wye Valley: The River Wye from Tintern to Redbrook (Monmouth: Monmouth Borough Museums Service, 1992).

(16.) Richard Warner, A Walk through Wales, in August 1797 (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1798) 230.

(17.) Kenneth Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: Norton, 1998) 591-92.

(18.) See Cyril Hart, The Industrial History of Dean (David and Charles: Newton Abbot, 1971) 216-27, 265.

(19.) See, e.g., Shaw 204-5; also the anonymous A Journal of a tour through parts of Monmouthshire and Glamorgan made about 1809, illustrated by watercolour drawings and sketches by Rose Sotheby (National Library of Wales NLW, MS 6497 C) 105. According to Hart 225-26, iron mining in the Forest of Dean had become moribund by 1788, although it began to recover after 1795 as coke-fired works were introduced to the region.

(20.) From Samuel Ireland, Picturesque Views on the River Wye (London: R. Faulder and T. Egerton, 1797), facing 133. We do not have figures for the total number of boats navigating the Wye at this time, but no surviving prints of paintings that I have seen, including those in the National Library of Wales and the many reproduced by Robert Woof and Stephen Hebron in Toward Tintern Abbey: A Bicentenary Celebration of "Lyrical Ballads," 1798 (Grasmere: The Wordsworth Trust, 1998), show vessels more numerous or much larger than those in Ireland's picture. One or two boats traveling as far as Brockweir (or "Brook's Weir") could reach 100 tons carrying capacity by the end of the eighteenth century. Far more common were trows in the 40 to 60 ton range, and numerous lighter craft. The Joseph and Elizabeth at 64 tons was 52.5 feet long, which gives some idea of the maximum length of these mid-range boats. See Grahame E. Farr, Chepstow Ships (Chepstow: The Chepstow Society and the Newport and Monmouthshire Branch of the Historical Association, 1954) 11-14.

(21.) Warner 232. Warner was hardly exceptional. See, e.g., Ireland 138, and G. W. Manby, An Historic and Picturesque Guide from Clifton (Bristol: Fenley and Baylis, 1802) 264.

(22.) Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, ed. and rev. Arthur Elton (New York: Schocken Books, 1946) 83-103.

(23.) Besides Byng, Davies, Gilpin himself, Grose, Heath (1793), Hoare, Ibbetson, Ireland, Shaw, the anonymous diarist of A Journal of a tour, and Warner, all cited above, these include Samuel Rogers in 1791, cited in P. W. Clayden, The Early Life of Samuel Rogers (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1887); Henry Penruddocke Wynham, A Tour through Monmouthshire and Wales, in the months of June, and July, 1774 (London: E. Evans, 1775); Hannah More in 1789, as recorded in W. S. Lewis, Robert A. Smith, and Charles H. Bennett, Letters of Horace Walpole (New Haven: Yale UP, 1961), vol. 31, Horace Walpole's Correspondence with Hannah More 320; Charles Shepherd, Jr. in 1795, as recorded in "A Tour through Wales and the Central Parts of England," The Gentlemen's Magazine 69 (1799): 1036-41; and John Pridden in 1780, as recorded in his unpublished diary (National Library of Wales MS 15) 172.

(24.) Warner (232-33) records his frustration at being made to wait for Mr. Geffin, of the Beaufort Arms, to bring the key.

(25.) A Journal of a tour 19. Industrial historian John Evans informs me in a letter of 31 October 2000 that "The journal contains a painting by Rose Sotheby dated 1809 and this has been used by the [National Library of Wales] to date the volume. However there are three dates which have been partially erased at the start of the journal. Under ultra-violet light these appear to read 1782, 1783, and 1784."

(26.) Charles Heath, Historical and Descriptive Accounts of the Ancient and Present State of Tintern Abbey (Monmouth: Charles Heath, 1806), unpaginated, [63] after "Contents."

(27.) Smith's "mean, modern house," located behind the Abbey church, does not appear in Ireland's engraving.

(28.) Abstract of the Answers and Returns Made Pursuant to an Act, passed the Forty-first Year of His Majesty King George III (Parliament, 1801), unpaginated. Reports of the ironworks employing upwards of 1500 laborers, as stated by Woof and Hebron (106) and others, are thus highly exaggerated, based as they ate on Byng's statement that the ironmaster, David Tanner, "pays daily 1500 workmen" (1:24). Byng indicates, however, that this is Tanner's entire payroll for Tintern and "several neighboring mills" in the Wye valley. According to industrial historian John Evans, in a conversation on 23 June 2000, the blast furnace at Tintern would have employed about a dozen workmen, with similar figures for each of the other seven sites in the complex. This comes to about 100 men. General laborers, dock workers, drovers, maintenance men, and charcoal burners may also have appeared on Tanner's local payroll.

(29.) For a description of wire-making at Tintern, see H. W. Paar and D. G. Tucker, "The Technology of Wire-Making at Tintern, Gwent, 1566-c.1880," Journal of the Historical Metallurgy Society 11.1 (1977): 15-24.

(30.) G. Hammersley, "The Charcoal Iron Industry and Its Fuel, 1540-1750," Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 26.4: 593-613 (606).

(31.) For details, see H. W. Paar and D. G. Tucker, "The old wireworks and ironworks of the Angidy Valley at Tintern, Gwent," Journal of the Historical Metallurgy Society 9.1 (1975): 1-14 (1).

(32.) John Afwyn Huw Evans, David Tanner, 1743-1806, MA Thesis (Cardiff: U of Wales, 1993) 30.

(33.) See Hammersley 610-11; also Lawrence Ince, The South Wales Iron Industry, 1750-1885 (Merton: Merton Priory P, 1993) 1, 9, and Philip Riden, "The final phase of charcoal iron-smelting in Britain, 1660-1800," Historical Metallurgy 28.1 (1994): 14-26 (15).

(34.) See Malcolm Strafford, Charcoal Burning in the 17th Century: A Brief History and Practical Guide (Bristol: Stuart P, 1994) 9-23, 30-31; see also Hart 328-29. As long as the iron industry ran on charcoal, writes Stratford, that is, up to about 1800, it seems "the colliers were relatively wealthy men." With the passing of charcoal-processed smelting, however, "charcoal burners were often shown to be nomadic forest dwellers." This information confirms the surmise regarding "the considerable difference between a charcoal burner and a beggar," made by David Chandler, "Vagrancy Smoked Out: Wordsworth 'betwixt Severn and Wye,'" Romanticism On the Net 11 (August 1998): http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scato385/hermit.html.

(35.) This was the practice of Abraham Darby, at Coalbrookdale, who hired his own miners to procure mineral coal for his furnaces. See Arthur Young, Tours in England and Wales (1792; rpt. London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1932) 151. Stratford suggests that wealthier charcoal colliers, presumably under contract to an ironmaster, may have hired day-laborers to tend the furnaces (31).

(36.) Conversation with Jonathan Badham of Tintern, descendent of local charcoal burners, 21 June 2000.

(37.) I thank Professor Thomas Ranney, of North Carolina State University at Asheville, for providing this information.

(38.) See H. R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry from c. 450 B.C. to A.D. 1775 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957) 220-22, and Hammersley, passim.

(39.) Heath (1806), unpaginated, [48], [78] after "Contents"; Shaw 193.

(40.) William Coxe, An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire, illustrated with Views by Sir R. C. Hoare, Bart, 2 vols. (London: Cadell, 1801) 341.

(41.) That Ibbetson saw "smelting houses" in the Angidy valley and not on the Wye is indicated by his not arriving at the Beaufort Arms, near the river, until afterwards. See Ibbetson 246.

(42.) This is evidenced not only by her reiteration of the phrase "picture of the place" (5, 9, 24) but her use of related terms, like "the spatial juxtaposition of Tintern Abbey and town," the "actual impression made by Tintern" (35), "the scene of composition" (39), "the scene before [Wordsworth's] eyes" (41), and the "reconstruction of the place" (56).

(43.) Having poured money into the operation for more than two decades, Tanner must indeed have "greatly inlarged and improved the concern," as Heath states in 1806 [82]. However, surviving archaeological and documentary evidence shows no free-standing structures added to the complex during his tenure as ironmaster. The Abbey Forge, in any case, remained essentially unchanged. See Parr and Tucker, "Old Wireworks" 3-4, who indicate the extent of capital improvements apparently resulting from Tanner's investments.

(44.) Thus a view from further upriver, on the bank directly across from the Abbey Forge, might have included both structures, but would have required a deliberate detour to achieve. "The Devil's Pulpit," on a ridge southeast of Tintem, might also have provided a more inclusive prospect, but would have added an hour or more to the Wordsworths' journey.

(45.) All the evidence we have thus suggests that the watercolor sketch (not reproduced in his Observations) that Gilpin made of Tintern on his 1770 visit, entitled "Iron-works at Tintem" (Figure 13), is in fact a view of another structure or structures, perhaps warehouses near the dock or "Kay" in front of the Abbey Forge. Because Gilpin tended to alter views to make them more "picturesque," his illustrations are notoriously unreliable. Observes Jonathan Wordsworth, in his "Introduction" to the Woodstock edition of Gilpin's Observations (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1991), "Early readers ... were surprised how different the aquatints were from the scenes that were named. Gilpin was equally surprised that anyone might think him a mere topographer." In addition, we have little reason to expect that, on a stopover of only an hour or two that apparently did not include a visit to the ironworks, Gilpin would know just what he was looking at when he made this sketch.

(46.) Donald E. Hayden, Wordsworth's Travels in Wales and Ireland (Tulsa: U of Tulsa P, 1985) 30.

(47.) Not surprisingly, Wordsworth saw no reason to include the missing ironworks in his depiction of the Abbey in "The Tuft of Primroses," several years later: "the Piles that rose ... / And saw their pomp reflected in the stream, / As Tintern saw; and, to this day beholds / Her faded image in the depths of Wye; / Of solemn port smitten but unsubdued / She stands" (467-80). From John O. Hayden, ed., William Wordsworth: The Poems (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981) 1: 811-12.

(48.) Philip Riden, A Gazetteer of Charcoal-fired Blast Furnaces in Great Britain in use since 1660 (Cardiff: Merton Priory P, 1993) 49, 51.

(49.) Coxe 352. See also Manby 255.

(50.) J. T. Barber, A Tour throughout South Wales and Monmouthshire (London: J. Nichols and Son, 1803) 270-71.

(51.) These became particularly severe from early 1799 to mid-1800. See Arthur D. Gayer, W. W. Rostow, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, The Growth and Fluctuations of the British Economy, 1790-1850, 2 vols. (1953; rpt. Hassocks: Harvester P, 1975) 1: 27-29.

(52.) Evans 23-30. The Duke of Beaufort advertised the property for let in the Gloucester Journal, 21 May 1798.

(53.) Conversation with John Evans, 23 June 2000.

(54.) As Davies tells us (13): "No better cyder does the world supply, / Than grows along thy borders, gentle Wye."

(55.) According to Waters 13-14, oak bark-stripping for tanneries, a major industry, took place along the Wye from April to June. The men would cut the oak to size and the women would strip the bark for shipment downriver to Chepstow.

CHARLES J. RZEPKA, Professor of English at Boston University, is the author of Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quncey (1995) and The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (1986), as well as numerous articles on romanticism and popular culture. He is currently at work on a cultural history of detective fiction.