‘I Wanted Some Intelligent Guide’: Charles Heath and the Historical and Descriptive Accounts of the Ancient and Present State of Tintern Abbey

Abstract

Charles Heath (1761–1830) is described on a gothic memorial outside St. Mary’s Church, Monmouth, as a ‘Bookseller, Antiquarian, Historian, who first brought into the notice of tourists the antiquities, scenery and numerous objects of attraction in the neighborhood of Monmouth’. Heath’s contemporaries clearly regarded their fellow entrepreneur and former mayor as one of the inventors of late eighteenth-century Wye Valley tourism. Not only was his marketplace shop an epicentre of visitor activity – in the manner of multi-tasking provincial bookshops up and down the realm – but Heath is also credited with creating the itineraries these noticing tourists would follow. It was in part Heath’s ability to promote the attractions of an ‘undiscovered’ province that led Coleridge to solicit his help in circulating information on Pantistocracy. This ‘philosophical librarian’, a title bestowed on Heath by one client he guided in person about town, the ‘noted Cicerone of Monmouth. . . its literary guide’ in the words of another, wrote and printed a series of modestly-priced, well-regarded topographical accounts of the county of Monmouthshire. His publications include a guide to Tintern Abbey that ran to eleven editions between 1793 and 1828, the high summer of picturesque travel in Britain. The career of the Historical and Descriptive Accounts of the Ancient and Present State of Tintern Abbey spans thirty-five years of tourism at the site, making it a remarkable document within the history of visual culture in Britain. Designed, as Heath explained in 1803, to ‘impart innumerable circumstances, which the contemplation of such a scene naturally excited in the mind of every curious and observant traveller’, the volume is of necessity a sustained profile of the Romantic spectator. Heath’s assessment of the needs, priorities and behaviour of these ‘curious and observant’ visitors to the ruin is documented across the multiple editions of the work. Many visual depictions of the interior of Tintern Abbey in the period are punctuated by the figures of gazing, conversing spectators, often shepherded in small groups by figures who are – then as now – unmistakably tour-guides. Loiter long enough in the vast archive of Romantic prints and paintings of the ruin and one begins to have a nodding acquaintance with particular figures going about their business there – the long-serving landlord of Tintern’s principal inn for instance. Contemporary artists characterize Tintern Abbey as a site where ‘information’ (a word