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Two historical movements are important to understanding “Tintern Abbey” and Romanticism as a whole: the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in 1789, the French Revolution involved the uprising of the French working class and poor against the monarchy and the system of monarchical power. It brought with it a vision of true democracy, in which each person would have equal rights and the power to participate in governance. By 1798, at the time “Tintern Abbey” was written, France had seen the rise of the Paris Commune and the Reign of Terror, and by 1804 Napoleon would declare himself Emperor, overturning the principles of liberty and freedom that had guided the original uprising. Yet the French Revolution had a lasting change on the European political landscape. It signaled the beginning of the end of absolute monarchies as a system of governance in Western Europe, and ushered in republics and liberal democracies as political systems. These democratic values were important to Romanticism. In turning away from art that only represented bourgeois and wealthy ways of life, these writers and artists, including Wordsworth, sought to celebrate the human life and dignity of those who had conventionally been disregarded, including people living in rural settings and the working poor. Secondly, “Tintern Abbey” was written during the Industrial Revolution, a time when rural areas throughout Europe were being transformed into centers of industrial production. In emphasizing the natural world and rural life in their poems, the Romantic poets, including Wordsworth, expressed their resistance to these industrial changes. They viewed nature and life in rural settings as more simple and pure than urban life and urban society, and they shared with Rousseau the belief that society is essentially corrupting to the human spirit. Within the poem, the speaker sees the Wye Valley as a place that is still pure, untouched, and intact. He celebrates the restorative power of this landscape, and implicitly seeks to preserve it. Interestingly, despite the poem’s juxtaposition of the pure, untouched landscape of the Wye Valley and industrial settings, recent scholarship has found that the setting of the poem was actually, at the time the poem was written, significantly industrialized. A visitor to the Wye Valley at the time would have seen an ironworks in the area, and the River Wye was polluted and rust colored from iron and copper ore. Workers at the ironworks actually lived within the ruins of the abbey. Meanwhile, scholars have suggested that the “wreaths of smoke” the speaker sees within the poem were likely smoke from the ironworks, and that the people he describes as “vagrant dwellers” were people who, within the area at the time, were displaced and impoverished by war. Arguably, the speaker erases this evidence of industrialization and local suffering in order to make the landscape fit into the poem’s philosophical and aesthetic worldview.