“Come brother Opie!”

Joe Bray, “‘Come brother Opie!’: Amelia Opie and the Courtroom” (pp. 137–162) This essay examines how Amelia Opie’s lifelong fascination with the human drama of the courtroom is reflected in her fiction, specifically in her tales that revolve around trial scenes. Focusing on three examples in particular, “Henry Woodville” (1818), “The Robber” (1806), and “The Mysterious Stranger” (1813), it argues that Opie’s fictional courtrooms encourage an emotional engagement on the part of both characters and narrators, which in turn can be extended to that of the reader. In the case of “The Mysterious Stranger,” a character is on figurative trial throughout, with both narrator and reader frequently in the dark as to her motives. As a result, judgment is both hazardous and uncertain. Through a sympathetic representation of the passions and vicissitudes experienced by all those in the courtroom context, whether real or metaphorical, Opie’s fiction develops a model of readerly participation that adds a new, affective dimension to traditional accounts of the relationship between early-nineteenth-century literature and the law.

Digitally Mapping the Poetry and Correspondence of Amelia Opie

Amelia Opie was a Romantic era writer, engaged in revolutionary politics, who in midlife, became a devout Quaker, and gave up the publishing of fiction. Many scholars and contemporaries of Opie have commented on her sudden religious conversion, and suggested that Opie was engaged in a complicated “conscious struggle to mediate an identity which could include both her talents as a writer and her personal faith (“Introduction” LII). The Quaker faith had strict rules against the publishing of fiction, and a Quaker should never be engaged in creative authorship. Consequently, Opie’s poetry written after her turn to Quakerism forms an interesting area, and raises questions about her negotiation of artistic and religious identities. Digital methods of statistical analysis were used to examine the shifts in her poetry personal correspondence, particularly with regards to Opie’s attitudes towards mourning and religious faith were examined. Indications were that Opie used religion as consolation in her elegies as well as her life. However, a closer examination of her poetry and letters reveal that Opie was somewhat uneasy with her reliance on Christian faith, negotiating between that and her worldly concerns, rather than being wholly comforted by God. In the case of her father Opie found her faith to be inadequate, showing that only a whole acceptance allows for proper mourning. Although a digital analysis indicates that Opie used her faith as consolation for suffering, a closer reading suggests that this process was complex that her faith was ultimately unable to provide an adequate substitute.

5. Beyond the 'Vestibule': Amelia Alderson Opie's Letters to Henry Perronet Briggs, R. A.

This past summer, under the supervision of Dr. Shelley King, I transcribed and annotated two hundred-odd letters written by the Romantic-Victorian writer, Amelia Alderson Opie, to her cousin and Royal Academy artist, Henry Perronet Briggs. Opie was a somewhat enigmatic character: to reduce her life to its broadest strokes, she transformed from a bubbling, republican member of London's literary scene into a conservative, demure Quaker lady. Her first biographer, C. L. Brightwell, claims that Opie escaped the "various dangerous and seductive influences" of her youth, preferring in time the company of those "cultivated minds" which "actuated by holy principle" encouraged her own "awakened spiritual interest" (36-38). But the correspondence between Amelia Opie and her cousin, artist Henry Perronet Briggs, complicates that narrative of radical change. Although a practicing Quaker when she penned these letters, Opie displays some distinctly un-Quaker-like tendencies. In a much earlier letter, Opie likened correspondents who did not reveal their "real feelings" to her to those who refused her entry into their houses ("11 Mar. 1820"). Henry Perronet Briggs is, therefore, someone who is permitted to see far beyond Opie’s own public persona — beyond what Opie once likened to an individual's "vestibule" — for he is someone with whom she felt entirely at ease. This project thus sheds light not only on Opie's own character, but also points to the larger issues of identity and how they relate to the genre of biography itself.

Many-Coloured Glass, Aerial Images, and the Work of the Lens: Romantic Poetry and Optical Culture

This lecture argues that new optical experiences created by the lens and what we now call the virtual image were the foundation alike of ‘high’ science, associated at this historical moment with the telescope, and popular spectacle. They precipitated and renewed an enquiry into the nature and status of the image (always incipient in poetics) as the technologies of the phantasmagoria, the kaleidoscope and the diorama penetrated deep into the poets' worlds and words. The projected image, without a correspondence in reality, was a troubling aspect of this modern technology, provoking new understandings of materiality and immateriality. Colour, reflection and refraction became central concerns as a corollary of the debate. Some poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Amelia Opie, Keats, Shelley) assimilated this imagery into their work, albeit skeptically. Others (Charlotte Smith, Blake) violently resisted it. The lecture looks closely at image-making in poetic language, and argues that there were both ontological and political stakes in this enquiry.

Politics, Poetics and Propriety: Reviewing Amelia Opie

Tracing out the stages of the reception history of Amelia Opie’s poems, this essay shows that changes in assumptions about sensibility and women’s poetics whereby they came to be gendered “feminine and weak” reduced the political power of Opie’s poetry. Not only Opie’s contemporaneous reviewers but also Opie herself, following their lead in her later publications, enacted a shift in focus from the politics of class to the poetics of gender. At first, the radicalism of some of Opie’s poems that focus on class combined with her appropriately gendered use of a poetics of sentiment rendered conservative reviews ambivalent in their evaluations of her poetry: they approved of the sentimentality but sensed political danger. As Opie accommodated her reviewers’ criticisms, her poetry increasingly conformed to a feminine poetics that obscured the anti-classist and anti-racist radicalism constitutive of her earlier poetics. The political is definitively laid to rest by later generations of critics who see Opie’s work as reflecting rather than analyzing the feelings of her time and thus as merely of nostalgic interest.