Tintern in the Romantic Age

The Reverend Dr. Syned Davies, poet and rector of Kingsland, Herefordshire, published occasional verse throughout his life. His work was admired by Anna Seward and his “Caratacus,”a poetical epic on the revolutionary Roman-era Welsh leader, was reprinted in Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales (1782). “A Voyage to Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire, from Whitminster in Glocestershire” first appeared in 1745 in A Collection of Original Poems and Translations edited by his friend John Whaley. The date of 1745 places the work at the very inception of the Wye tour. Davies’ “Voyage” had a long after-life in literary anthologies such as Bell’s Classical Arrangement of English Poetry.

Inspired by Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye, Jerningham also wrote a separate sonnet on Tintern Abbey.

Mason’s pencil sketch of his friend was engraved by James Basire (official engraver for the Society of Antiquaries and William Blake’s master) and used as the frontispiece for Mason’s The Poems of Mr. Gray.

The poet and antiquarian Thomas Gray, author of the famous “Elegy Written in a Country-Churchyard” and “The Bard,” an ode on Welsh resistance to Edward I, visited the Wye Valley in the summer of 1770. He describes his descent from Ross to Chepstow as the “principal light and capital feature of my journey” and the banks of the Wye as “a succession of nameless beauties.”

Although he left no verse commemorating this tour, his association with the region inspired many subsequent travelers. Gray listed Tintern Abbey and its "Views from Four Acre Meadow, beyond the Abbey Orchard" as “particularily worthy of notice” in the Traveller’s Companion.

Davis was rector of Whitechurch in Monmouth. Heath refers to him as a “native bard” and quotes his opinion on a sculpture in the Abbey identified as an effigy of Richard Strongbow. Davis’ “Poetical Description” was included in the 1793 Historical and Descriptive Accounts of...Tintern Abbey, although Heath indicates that the piece was extracted from an earlier “Guide to Chepstow and Tintern Abbey by Water”.

John Cunningham’s “Elegy on a Pile of Ruins” was first published as a pamphlet in 1761 and included in his 1766 collection Poems, Chiefly Pastoral. While not specifically about Tintern, two stanzas were folded into Francis Grose’s influential account of the abbey in Antiquities of England and Wales (1772-78), and later encorporated into Heath’s guide. Although Grose meant the citation as a critique on the artificial neatness of the Abbey’s interior, the “Elegy” excerpt effectively became part of the anthologized sentiment associated with Tintern.

The Rev. Luke Booker, author and minister of St. Edmunds, Dudley, Worcestershire produced a well-regarded work on Dudley Castle (1825) and a quantity of less well-regarded verse.(One review of his 1791 volume Miscellaneous Poems begins marvelously: “to be pleased with no productions in literature, excepting with those of the first order, betrays a degree of fastidiousness, which, in a reader, is indiscreet...")³⁵

Booker’s “Original Sonnet Composed on Leaving Tintern Abbey and Proceeding with a Party of Friends down the River Wye to Chepstow” was included in Heath’s guide, but does not appear in either of the poet’s published collections. In the 1803 edition of Historical and Descriptive Accounts of the Ancient and Present State of Tintern Abbey, the sonnet fittingly concludes the guide.

Robert Bloomfield became one of the best-known of the Romantic “peasant poets” with the massive success of Farmer’s Boy in 1800. The Banks of the Wye, his fourth collection of verse, is a description of a 10-day excursion made in the summer of 1807 with a party of Gloucestershire friends. Bloomfield’s preface advises that the work “exhibits the language and feelings of a man who had never before seen a mountainous country; and of this it is highly necessary that the reader should be apprized.” The first edition of the Banks of the Wye was published in 1811 with four small plates illustrating Wye Valley scenery.

Cottle relates in Early Recollections that Vandyke, a descendant of the Dutch master, was invited to England by Joshua Reynolds to assist Reynolds with his portraiture. Vandyke eventually settled in Bristol, where he produced this likeness exhibiting “Mr. C. In one of his animated conversations, the expression of which the painter has in a good degree preserved”. The frontispiece for the second volume of Cottle’s Early Recollections features a portrait originally drawn in crayons by Robert Hancock and copied in ink by Nathan Branwhite. It was drawn, Cottle relates, “when Mr. C’s spirits were in a state of depression on account of the failure of his ‘Watchman’ [a newspaper that ran for one year].”

Joseph Cottle, the Bristol publisher, editor, and poet, was a patron of William Wordsworth, Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His generosity to the latter is sometimes matched by his unreliability as a witness.

In 1795 Cottle, along with Coleridge, Southey and their fiancées the Fricker sisters, embarked on a short pleasure trip from Bristol to Tintern. The first night in Chepstow was marked by a fierce argument between Coleridge and Southey over Coleridge’s failure to deliver a scheduled lecture in a series Southey organized. The next day, having tarried too long at Chepstow and Piercefield, the party found themselves benighted on the road to Tintern. With Cottle on horseback and the rest on foot, they floundered over the stony, downward course, hearing the Wye in the darkness, fearful of the ravine and trying to remember directions. When they eventually reached Tintern they were rewarded with supper and a torch-lit tour of the Abbey. Only Southey and Cottle went on for a midnight viewing of the iron foundry.

“Lines, Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798” was written in July, 1798, and published as the concluding piece in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s seminal Lyrical Ballads, with a few Other Poems. The word “Written” in the title was altered to “Composed” in 1815.⁴²

“No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this,”Wordsworth later mused, “I begun it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days with my notes. Not a line of it was altered, not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol.”⁴³

This ramble with his notes—and incidentally with his sister Dorothy—took the pair on their first day from Bristol (where they had stayed with Joseph Cottle) to Chepstow. On the second day they traveled from Chepstow north on foot, along the Monmouthshire side of the Wye as far as Tintern. The following day they crossed to the Gloucestershire side of the Wye and walked as high as Goodrich. On July 12th William and Dorothy walked all of the way back to Chepstow, but immediately took a boat upriver to return to Tintern.⁴⁴

Wordsworth’s “present pleasure” in this excursion was intensified by his memories of a solitary tour in 1793, alluded to in the opening lines of the poem. His faith in the recuperative powers of landscape and memory seems born out in his sister’s experience too. An invalid in later life, Dorothy Wordsworth recalled the excursion in an 1831 poem Thoughts on my Sick Bed:

No prisoner in this lonely room,
I saw the green Banks of the Wye,
Recalling thy prophetic words,
Bard, Brother, Friend from infancy!⁴⁵

In early June, 1812 Mary Wordsworth, the poet’s wife, visited the Wye Valley for the first time in the company of her brother and sister-in-law, Tom and Joanna Hutchinson. A letter to William written after a long day that included an excursion to Tintern, is filled with her delight in the novelty of the tour and the beauty of a region that had inspired her husband nearly two decades before: "O William what enchanting scenes have we passed through—but you know it all—only I must say longings to have you by my side have this day been painful to me beyond expression". At the Abbey she “sate a long time alone in a deep nich[e] & I would have given the World to have thee by my side.”⁴⁶ A sense of the layered nature of recollection seems to have been a shared family trait.

It is very poignant to know that while Mary was revelling in these new sights, she was unaware that her small daughter Catharine was gravely ill at home in Grasmere. Mary returned to her brother’s house in Radnorshire to be met by a letter announcing Catharine’s death. William’s attempt to reach Mary himself ahead of this communication was unsuccessful. Mary’s letter to William recounting her outing to Tintern Abbey, now preserved in the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, bears a stark, retrospective pencil notation in her hand: “two days before Catharine died.”

This is a second issue of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. The first issue (which exists in two states) was printed by Nathaniel Biggs and and published by Joseph Cottle in Bristol on September 18, 1798. Cottle paid Wordsworth 30 guineas for the copyright, but the work was a commercial failure, and hastened Cottle’s failure as a publisher. Within five days of its publication, the whole edition was sold to the London firm of John and Arthur Arch.⁴⁷

While the first edition of Lyrical Ballads was published anonymously, Wordsworth is identified on the title-page of the expanded second edition. The textual history of the 1800 edition, published by Longman and printed in Bristol by Biggs and Cottle, is extremely complex. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge were at a distance during its preparation, sending revisions by post, and employing intermediaries like Humphrey Davis to oversee revisions. Longman’s 1800 volume is regarded as a work-in-progress by many scholars.⁴⁸

The second edition contains a new preface, and a second volume of new poems. “Tintern Abbey” retains its place as the concluding piece of the first volume. Coleridge’s contributions are far out-numbered by Wordsworth’s. The most notable change is the removal of Coleridge’s “Christabel” and the substitution of Wordsworth’s “Michael: A Pastoral Poem” in its place.

This volume is the first American edition, printed from the London second edition. It was published by subscription by James Humphreys of Philadelphia. An 1802 advertisement for this volume by Philadelphia bookseller Joseph Groff instructs: “Let not the name of Ballads give rise to prejudices in the minds of those who have never seen this work; for it as much superior to those things commonly known by that name, as happiness is preferable to misery.”⁵⁰

Fewer than 20 libraries in North America possess a copy of this edition.