ABSTRACT
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.
