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Portrait of a Marriage: John and Amelia Opie and the Sister Arts

Shelley King

Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, Volume 40, 2011, pp. 27-62

(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/sec.2011.0004

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27

Portrait of a Marriage:

John and Amelia Opie and the Sister Arts

SHELLEY KING

Recent studies of the later eighteenth century, such as Gillian Russelland Clara TuitesRomantic Sociability: Social Networks and LiteraryCulture in Britain, 17701840(2002) and Christopher RoveesImagining the

Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism (2006), have emphasized

the importance of social interconnections in the period, replacing the long

dominant myth of the Romantic artist as solitary genius with a more complex

narrative of public and private afliations. In revising the myth of isolated

creativity, such studies locate our understanding of artistic productionboth

literary and graphicwithin the debate concerning public and private spheresof interest that has emerged in criticism concerning the long Eighteenth

Century and Romantic periods over the past two decades.1 In this essay I

want to explore the complexities of the private, domestic sphere of John and

Amelia Opie and its implications for their artistic participation in the literary

public sphere. Their companionate marriage offers perspectives on current

inquiries into the function of both domestic space and the artists studio,

the place of sociability in the production of womens literary work, and

the intersections of gender and class in the artistic world of 1790s London.

An Unlikely Pairing

The 1790s conjunction of radical thought and desire is epitomized most

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famously by William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft: intellectually

inspired by each others Jacobin philosophies and sexually attracted, they

ultimately disciplined their lives to the expectations of the social world by

marrying when Wollstonecraft fell pregnant. Yet just when their relationshipwas being pilloried in the public response to Godwins frank memoir of his

wife following her death, two other persons of notable talent associated with

the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle were joined in matrimony at Marylebone

Church in London: John Opie, a painter dubbed the Cornish Wonder,

married Amelia Alderson, the daughter of a physician of the radical city of

Norwich who had just begun to make a name for herself as the author of

several popular songs and as a coquette who had reputedly been courted

by both Godwin and Holcroft earlier in the decade.2 Each would derive

reciprocal professional benets from the union: Amelia Aldersons desire for

literary fame ourished under a masculine encouragement that supported her

desire to participate in the public sphere of authorship; John Opie enjoyed

the support of a wife whose rened social skills and literary talent helped

to polish and construct the lasting artistic reputation he sought.

The son of a Cornish carpenter, John Opie had been discovered in

1775, at about age 14, by Dr. John Wolcot, a Truro physician who longed

for the life of artistic society in London.3 Impressed by Opies raw talent,

he believed he had found his ticket to the metropolis. For the next six yearshe educated the boy, providing him with access to literature and art and

materials for painting, while he himself cultivated his own talent as a satirist

under the pseudonym Peter Pindar. In 1781 he set his plan in motion. He

had primed the city for their arrival the previous year by sending ahead one

of Opies paintings for the Society of Artists exhibition with a tantalizing

(if manifestly untrue) catalogue description: Master Oppy, Penryn,A Boys

Head, an Instance of Genius, not having seen a picture. Together they

set up shop in Orange Court, with a series of Opies character studies on

display, and began seeking commissions for portraits.4 Wolcot served as akind of agent, promoting Opie as the Cornish Wonder, a half-civilized,

untutored artistic genius. The older man fostered Opies unkempt appearance

and rustic diction; as acid-tongued fellow Cornishman Richard Polwhele

recorded, we were much entertained by that unlicked cub of a carpenter,

Opie, who was now almost ludicrously exhibited by his keeper, Wolcota

wild animal of St Agnes, caught among the tin-works.5 Still, the ploy worked

in a fashionable London eager for novelty. In the spring of 1782, less than

a year after his arrival in London, Opie showed ve canvasses at the RoyalAcademy Exhibition, and caught the interest of King George, who not only

commissioned him to paint Mrs. Delany, a Cornishwoman who was a friend

to the Royal couple, but subsequently purchasedBeggar and His Dog, one

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Portrait of a Marriage / 29

of Opies large character studies, as well.6 Horace Walpoles comments

reect the general response:

There is a new genius, one Opie, a Cornish lad of nineteen whohas taught himself to colour in a strong bold masterly style, by

studying nature and painting from beggars and poor children. He

has done a head of Mrs Delaney for the kingoui vraiment it is

pronounced like Rembrandt, but, as I told her, it does not look

older than she is, but as she does.7

Walpole identies the characteristic strength that would also be Opies

greatest challenge: reconciling his exacting verisimilitude to the tastes and

vanities of the fashionable sitters who commissioned the portraits that werethe artists main source of steady income.

Over the next decade and a half Opies ambition was matched only by

his tireless work and drive for improvement. He married for the rst time

in 1782 to Mary Bunn, the daughter of a Jewish solicitor and moneylender

who sometimes dealt in Opies paintings, and soon after split with Wolcot: an

independent married man with a household needed the whole income from

his art, not the half shares he had gone with his agent, though according to

Wolcots account, he did make one agreement with his former mentor: I

promise to paint for Doctor Wolcot any picture or pictures he may demandas long as I live: otherwise I desire the world will consider me a damned

ungrateful son of a bitch.8 He was also busy building a professional career,

and while portraits paid the bills, the path to artistic reputation at this

time still lay primarily with history painting. Two major canvassesThe

Assassination of James I of Scotland(1786) andThe Murder of David Rizzio

(1787)brought recognition of his talents, and between 1786 and 1800 he

worked on large scale paintings for Boydells Shakespeare Gallery as well

as a variety of commercial book projects designed to be illustrated by largeengraved plates.9 And as he worked tirelessly at his career, and enjoyed the

society of radical London in the early 1790s (including the company of

Wollstonecraft and Godwin), his marriage to Mary Bunn eroded. In May

1795, she left to live with a Major Edwards, and the following year John Opie

sued for divorce, which was granted by Royal Assent December 23, 1796.10

Amelia Aldersons life had taken a less dramatic course. Born November

12, 1769 to prominent Norwich physician James Alderson and his wife

Amelia Briggs, she had been raised by parents who advocated rational

education. The crisis of her young life had come with the death of her motherin 1784, so that at age fteen Amelia had become her fathers hostess and

companion. To amuse herself, she wrote poems that she kept in a journal,

sometimes sharing them with members of the active literary circles in

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Norwich.11 Dr. Alderson had radical interests that he shared with his daughter,

and both were ardent supporters of the revolution in France. By the time she

met John Opie in 1796, Amelia Alderson had begun to test her abilities in

literature and music more seriously. Six years earlier she had published ashort anonymous novel, The Dangers of Coquetry, for the popularif not

entirely respectedMinerva Press.12 In 1791 her play Adelaidehad been

performed at a theater in Norwich, featuring herself in the leading role and

her friend Ann Plumptre in the supporting cast.13 By 1794 she was spending

some time in London, where she was sketched by George Dance, attended

the treason trial of Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall, and John Horne Tooke,

and became a correspondent of William Godwin, seeking his criticism on

another play she was in the process of writing. Her most marked success

had come from a series of lyric poems published only under the initial N

in the radical journal The Cabinet, edited by A Society of Gentlemen.

Only two popular songs published in 1795, My Love to War is Going

and Heres a Health to those Far Away, bore the name Miss Alderson to

establish her public identity as a writer. The subject matter of her work at

this period was romantic loveboth requited and unrequitedand radical

politics. The evidence of Dances caricature to the contrary, she was perhaps

best known as a beautythe Belle of Norwichand as a singer gifted with

remarkable pathos in performance.The standard account of John Opies rst meeting with Amelia Alderson

comes from Cecilia Lucy BrightwellsMemorials of the Life of Amelia Opie

(1854) and describes a moment at a soire given by mutual acquaintances:

At the time she came in, Opie was sitting on a sofa, beside Mr.

F., who had been saying, from time to time, Amelia is coming;

Amelia will surely come. Why is she not here? . . . He was

interrupted by his companion exclaiming Who is that? Who is

that? And hastily rising, he pressed forward, to be introduced tothe fair object whose sudden appearance had so impressed him.

He was evidently smitten; charmed at rst sight.14

Brightwell implies that the meeting took place in early 1797, possibly to

place it after the nalization ofOpies divorce; but William Godwins diary

rst links their names in August 1796, and in December of that year Amelia

Alderson queried Wollstonecraft concerning Opies plans for marriage. As

members of the same circle they were likely to have at least known of each

other.15

Within a year and a half they were husband and wife.

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The Culture of Companionate Marriage

John Opie and Amelia Alderson were married May 8, 1798: but what

exactly did marriage signify at this date, both for these private individualswhose lives concern us here and for the culture at large? By the latter

decades of the eighteenth century, marriage as an institution had become a

subject of increasing debate in British society.16 Because it runs along the

border between two principal Western marriage blueprints, writes Eric C.

Walker, the Romantic period offers a telling history in which to study the

habitations of Western marriage.17 The blueprints Walker refers to are

the earlier sacramental marriage (a community-based joining sanctifying

procreation and, equally importantly in patriarchal culture, securing property

transmission) and affective marriage (sometimes called companionatemarriage), a union based primarily on the satisfaction of private desire.18

As he further notes, it wasnt just a matter of choosing between these two

modes of marriage: the institution itself was also under attack by the radical

circle in which both Opie and Alderson participated. In his Memoirs of

Wollstonecraft, Godwin states clearly his distaste for the public ceremony

that proclaims private emotions:

We did not marry. It is difcult to recommend any thing toindiscriminate adoption, contrary to the established rules and

prejudices of mankind; but certainly nothing can be so ridiculous

upon the face of it, or so contrary to the genuine march of

sentiment, as to require the overowing soul to wait upon a

ceremony, and that which, wherever delicacy and imagination

exist, is of all things most sacredly private, to blow a trumpet

before it, and to record the moment when it has arrived at its

climax.19

In fact, Godwin objected to both marriage blueprints. Of those promoting

private desire, he comments in Political Justice: the method is, for a

thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex, to come together, to see each

other, for a few times, and under circumstances full of delusion, and then to

vow eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every

circumstance they nd themselves deceived. Yet the older sacramental/

property transfer marriages he nds equally repugnant: add to this, that

marriage, as now understood, is a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies.20

In theory, at least, he was willing to do away with the institution altogether.Mary Wollstonecraft was also sceptical concerning marriage, but rather

than recommending the abolition of the institution, she reimagined the

basis of affective marriage, advocating affection and respect rather than

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passion and extreme sensibility as the foundation of the spousal relationship:

personal attachment is a very happy foundation for friendship; yet, when

even two virtuous young people marry, it would, perhaps, be happy if

some circumstances checked their passion; if the recollection of some priorattachment, or disappointed affection, made it on one side, at least, rather

a match founded on esteem.21 For Wollstonecraft, mutual respect and

friendship, which she called the most sublime of all affections, because

it is founded on principle, and cemented by time, offered greater promise

of happiness than either arranged marriages or those founded on passion

alone. Companionate marriage of the kind described by Wollstonecraft

thus acknowledges the importance of personal desire, but disciplines

sensibility to rational choice. In Wollstonecrafts version, as in other forms

of companionate marriage described in the period, signicant emphasis is

placed on the raising of children as a central aspect of the union, and on the

domestic sphere as the wifes chief area of inuence. As Claudia L. Johnson

points out,A Vindication of the Rights of Womanrescue[s] heterosexuality. . .

by politicizing it, guring the married couple not as frivolous and idle, but as

public-minded and purposive, as citizens and parents busy about their work,

as productively embodied rather than decadently sexual.22 Wollstonecraft

places less emphasis on submissiveness to masculine authority based on

love, and gives greater importance to intellectual companionship.As members of the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle, both Opie and Alderson

would have been familiar with this marriage debate. Opie had joked with

Godwin concerning the insufciency of sacraments, and Amelia Alderson

seemed more amused than troubled by Godwins attempts to rationalize

human emotion and to make his human practice t his abstract principles.23

Each had toyed with the possibility of forging other relationships. Although

the story that Godwin was prepared to offer for Amelia Aldersons hand has

been discredited, it remains clear that they enjoyed an intense irtation: her

letters record Godwin pocketing one of her dancing slippers and negotiatingits return.24 The coquetry with Godwin appears to have been contemporaneous

with her attraction to the Mr. B of her correspondence, a married man who

was not in a position to reciprocate. Nor was the charming Miss Alderson

the only romantic interest expressed by John Opie between 1795 and 1797.

Even prior to Mary Opies elopement, his name had been linked with that

of Jane Beetham, one of his young pupils who became a creditable artist in

her own right, but when Opie later approached her father about marriage, he

was rebuffed, and Jane rapidly married to John Read, an elderly, well-to-dosolicitor.25 While the divorce proceedings were beginning, rumour about town

had it that he might be considering marriage to Mary Wollstonecraftbut

when his friend Joseph Farington warned him in November that she was

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not free, being previously attached to Gilbert Imlay, Opie indicated that he

already knew her situation in even more intimate detail.26 Once his divorce

was nal, Opie made a determined effort to secure the hand of Elizabeth

Booth, yet another pupil who was likely to possess a handsome independence.However, despite Faringtons best efforts as go-between, her father remained

unimpressed by Opies suit, eventually sending a letter through his solicitor

warning Opie to desist and threatening to disinherit Elizabeth if they persisted

in their plans. Perhaps given his lack of success with both former pupils,

Opie turned his attention from dependent schoolgirls to a woman of more

mature years and signicant intellectual independence: in AmeliaAlderson

he would nd many of the qualities he admired in Wollstonecraft, tempered

by a more socially acceptable reputation. Nevertheless, given that the objects

of his courtship ranged from nancially promising young pupils to the poor

but intellectually stimulating Wollstonecraft, it seems either that marriage

itself was as much the desired object for John Opie as any specic woman,

or that he hesitated between an affective union augmented by pragmatic,

property-driven concerns and a more fully companionate partnership based

on mutual intellectual interests.

A memoir by Mrs. S. C. Hall recounts Amelia Aldersons early talents

and gestures to her love of Art as perhaps the most compelling motive for

her union with John Opie:

We have heard that in her early days she was one of the most

lovely and brilliant women in her native county; and Norwich, the

city of her birth and death, was proud of her wit and beauty. She

was perfect as a musician according to the simple perfecting

of those days, and sung with power and sweetness the music then

in vogue . . . and added to this fascinating accomplishment, a

knowledge of, and affection for Art, which doubtless led to her

marriage with Mr. Opie, who (apart from his art) seemed the

last man likely to make an impression upon the heart of a gay, a

beautiful, and a rened woman.27

That Mrs. Hall regarded Opie as the last man likely to make an impression

on Amelia Alderson points to the class division between the two: to Opies

humble birth, legendary rough manners, and strong dialect speech.28 To be

frank, the evidence doesnt suggest that Amelia Alderson was immediately

overcome by passion for the Cornish painter. As she wrote to her friend

Mrs. Taylor:

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Mr. Opie, whose head and heart are so excellent as to make me

forget the coarseness of his voice and manners and the ugliness

of his face, has (but mum) been my declared lover almost ever

since I came. I was ingenuous with him on principle and told

him my situation relative to B. and the state of my heart but all

in vain. He said he was sure I did not actually love the gentleman

whoever he was, and he should still persist and would risk all

consequences to his own peace. And so he did and does and I

have not resolution to forbid his visits.29

Self-portraits from a decade earlier show Opie as an intense and brooding

gure (g. 1). The broad brow, full lips, and penetrating gaze are hardly

a model of Regency male beauty: theMonthly Review commented that

his visage was cast in one of the coarse moulds of nature.30 To a young

woman conscious of moving in good society, Opies celebrated working

class origins no doubt gave rise to some anxieties concerning inter-class

marriage.31 Nevertheless, she acknowledges that she is attracted to Opies

head or intellect and to his heart, less in the sense of passion than of

kindness and good-nature. In this same letter (in which she also announces

the marriage of Godwin and Wollstonecraft), Alderson pragmatically lists

her reasons for entertaining his suit: she is ambitious of being a wife and

mother, and of securing . . . a companion for life, capable of entering intoall [her] pursuits, and of amusing [her] by his. She comments: often do

I rationally and soberly state to Opie the reasons that might urge me to

marry him . . . and the reasons why I never could be happy with him, nor

he with me; but it always ends in his persisting in his suit, and protesting

his willingness to wait for my decision; even while I am seriously rejecting

him, and telling him I have decided.32 On Amelia Aldersons part, then,

the decision to marry seems not to have been motivated by an irresistible

passion, but by the kind of rational affection and esteem advocated by

Wollstonecraft in herVindication of the Rights of Woman, by the desire to

obtain a companion for life.

Beyond its obvious physical comforts, what did marriage offer two

such individuals, the once-divorced, multiply attracted artist with working

class roots and the fashionable, intellectually inclined woman who had by

this time wielded domestic authority as her fathers hostess for more than

a decade and a half following her mothers death? Although Amelia Opie

expressed her ambition to become a mother, and John Opie excelled at

painting children, the couple had no offspring; in the absence of domesticparental duties, their model of companionate marriage formed the basis of a

relationship that enabled each to attain marked public professional success

within its private bonds. Certainly the author ofPublic Characters of 17989

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Figure 1. Self Portrait by John Opie. Private Collection; photo courtesy of Robert

Simon Fine Art.

saw their union as a marriage of talents; in the entry on John Opie, R. A. he

writes: this artist has been twice married. His rst match was unpropitious,

and did not add much to his felicity; his second wife (late Miss Alderson,

of Norwich) is a most accomplished, and no less beautiful, woman; and wetrust that the union of painting and literature will contribute to the mutual

happiness of the parties.33 Like all relationships, this one experienced

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its share of stresses, but appears to have offered signicant rewards to its

partners. Brightwell includes notes from John Opie that express his devotion,

and Amelia Opies correspondence with her artist cousin Henry Perronet

Briggs later in the century reects intensely satisfactory memories of heryears as Opies wife, despite his frequent low spirits and close attention to

money.34 While the marriage hardly qualies as loves young dream, it does

represent the mature union of two people endowed with distinctive creative

abilities in a culture that didnt quite expect genuine literary talent from

middle-class women or artistic merit from the sons of Cornish carpenters.

Both emotionally and intellectually, marriage provided each with hitherto

unrealized opportunities for the development of their professional creativity.

8 Berners Street

Chris Roulston has commented that the eighteenth century is a

particularly rich period for analyzing the relationship between gender and

social space, and while interest has primarily focussed on such public

spaces as coffee-houses and salons and their relation to gender, she argues

that domestic spaces offer equally important insights.35 Following Michael

McKeon, Roulston notes that the centurys new privileging of the category

of private desire as the condition for the public ceremony of marriage mademarriage a kind of testing ground for the changing relationship between

the two spheres, and points to the reimagining of domestic space and its

association with marriage as key factors in understanding the cultural changes

taking place. Because marriage has been conceived of as fundamentally

spatial rather than temporal, she argues, over the course of the eighteenth

century, advice literature privatized the married subject through, for example,

its metaphorical use of the architecture of the home, and . . . troubled these

domestic boundaries.36 She concludes that spatial rather than temporal

parameters became central to the conception of the ideal bourgeois marriage. . . [and that] although the inside/outside distinction functioned as a further

mapping onto the dichotomies of public and private, time and space, and

male and female, it was not always identical with them.37 The home, as

understood in the model of companionate marriage, was also there to contain

both masculinity and femininity, and to create an equilibrium between them

within its walls.38 Thus, marital living space becomes a signicant factor

in any attempt to understand both the dynamic of the spousal relationship

and its mediation of public and private life.John and Amelia Opie had been close to another couple in the process

of developing a new philosophy of the idea of home. Julie A. Carlson has

analysed familial connections and domestic living arrangements in her study

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of the philosophical and literary lives of Wollstonecraft and Godwin: the

Wollstonecraftian household . . . follows enlightened specications, chiey

of her own devising. . . . Her idea of a productive household embraces a

separation of work spheres that allows her and Godwin to maintain separateresidences.39 Even more importantly, Carlson explains, the intellectual

climate of the home fostered the type of energetic debate that Godwin

believed was necessary to promote social change, one household at a time:

this dissemination of enlightenment through reading has as a second

consequence the formulation of a new sphere of sociality, one vastly under-

recognized in assessments of Godwin but one that puts in a clearer light

under what conditions he can be said to have valued home. Specically,

Carlson argues that those conditions involve conceiving of home as a

public house or a coffee house where ideas are read, discussed, composed

and diffused. . . . For if, on the one hand, family is opened out to embrace

all friends of man and, on the other, the public nature of opinion must be

consolidated outside of political groups, then the home space becomes the

optimal germinal space of the Godwinian public sphere.40 Carlsons point

is central to reimagining the political importance of domestic spaceby

rendering the privacy of the home as an extension of the public sphere rather

than an escape from it, she acknowledges the complexity of the intellectual

exchange central to companionate marriage and Romantic sociality. Keepingin mind Carlsons political reading of the Godwin-Wollstonecraft domestic

sphere as simultaneously intellectually public and private, I want to extend

Roulstons argument concerning the marital home to suggest that the physical

space of an artists home offers a particularly rich locus for discussing the

multiple intersections of the public and the private in this period.

When Amelia Alderson married John Opie, she moved into his house at

8 Berners Street, a home he had previously shared with his rst wife, Mary

Bunn.41 At this period Berners Street was at the heart of an artists colony of

sorts in Marylebone. Although the most fashionable portrait painters residedin the elite areas west of Oxford Circus, close to their clientele, Kit Wedd

points out that artists of lesser fameor with fewer pretensionsbegan

to colonize the area north-east of Oxford Circus in the acute angle between

Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. Home to innumerable painters

and sculptors for the 1770s until the middle of the nineteenth century, this

area made Marylebone famous as the artists parish.42 James Barrie

lived just around the corner at 36 Castle Street, and Benjamin West and

Thomas Stothard had homes on Newman Street, just a block to the east.

43

As the home of a working artist, the Berners Street house functioned as

both public and private, professional and personal space. It housed Opies

painting room and gallery, as well as the reception rooms in which Amelia

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Opie entertained friends and acquaintances, and the living quarters of the

couple. Joseph Farington, a close friend of John Opies, notes in his diary

that the house included a front and back drawing room, as well as a Great

Show room below stairs.44

In a letter written in January 1807 to the wifeof Sir James Mackintosh, then resident in Bombay, Amelia Opie describes

her reception rooms and her sense of their importance to her social circle:

My rooms are now smarted up, & open into each with folding

doors of a large size, which being thrown back make a room 45

feet longso my house would do for any sized party but my

husband loves not the trouble even of a small oneI am at home

every Sunday morning after church, & I nd that very pleasant,

as some of my visitors are regular in their attendance, & I amsure of two, or three hours of pleasant society.45

Earlier in the letter, Opie offers a glimpse of the range of her social

engagements. After commenting on one set of acquaintances known to Lady

Mackintosh, she adds: when you return, I hope to meet you in another circle,

to which some of y[ou]r friends already belong, I mean the blue-stocking

set, which Lady Cork assembles at her amusement. Amelia Opie moved

easily between Lady Corks pink parties for socialites, and her blue

parties with a more intellectual avour; her Sunday morning at homeswere frequented by artists, literary gures, and socialites.

Quarters were sufciently close that John Opie was aware of domestic

surroundings outside his studio. Harriet Martineau recounts an anecdote

of Opie emerging from his painting room to request a cessation of the

musical entertainment for her guests: once at a morning party where Mrs

Opie was charming her guests by her singing, he put his head in at the door

with, Amelia, dont sing; I cannot paint if you do, and she immediately

obeyed.46 This spatial arrangement both reects and constructs the complex

intertwining of their creative and domestic relationship. As the artists

wife, Amelia Opie often took on the task of entertaining those who came

to have their portraits painted, conversing with aristocrats, politicians, and

performers, and perhaps tossing sweets to maintain the focus of his child

sitters, as she later mentions doing for her cousin, artist Henry Perronet

Briggs. Nevertheless, as Ada Earland comments, few women of that time

could have so successfully lived the double social life of Bohemia and

Belgravia.47 Amelia Opie, an author more often remembered as the prim

Quaker described by Brightwell, was more socially daring in the early yearsof her marriage.48 When recovering from an illness in January, 1800, she

writes: my husband was so kind as to sit with me every evening, and even

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to introduce his company to my bedside. No less than three beaux had the

honour of a sitting in my chamber. Quite Parisian you see, but I dare not

own this to some women.49 In many ways Bohemia suited her radical social

interests as much as Belgravia satised her desire for status and celebrity.Nor did she entirely abandon her political interest in the Revolution: as

Holger Hoock points out, Thomas Lawrence and John Opie associated with

radicals without acquiring a radical reputation themselves, though Opies

wife Amelia must have embarrassed some among the Royal Academicians

party in 1802 when she walked around Paris singing Fall tyrants, fall.50

For the rst three years of their marriage, the house served as the

artists gallery as well as his studio and his home, thus constituting public,

commercial, creative, and domestic space.51 At this time Britain was only

beginning to debate the idea of a national collection of art. Holger Hoocks

fascinating study,The Kings Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the

Politics of British Culture 17601840, conceptualize[s] the politicization

of artistic culture during George IIIs reign and suggests that questions

can fruitfully be asked of familiar spaces like the exhibition room, where

cultural policy makers met in politicized sociability.52 In conceiving of

the art world in Georgian London as a form of public sphere in which both

exhibition spaces and art criticism functioned in ways analogous to coffee

houses and literary periodicals, Hoock effectively moves the arts from anelitist margin to the heart of a public discourse concerning the politics of

patronage and commerce, national identity and private culture. The public

taste for art at the end of the century in London was met primarily through

the annual display mounted at Somerset House by the Royal Academy,

commercial ventures such as those of Boydell, Macklin, Fuseli, and Bowyer

where paintings were displayed to encourage the sale of engravings, and

visits to aristocratic homes opened for viewing or to the galleries of the artists

themselves.53 Weld notes that annually published lists of Eminent Painters

. . . whose galleries and works may be viewed at proper times, by a fee to theservant indicate just how many artists encouraged visitors to their studios

and private galleries.54 Amelia Opie would use this latter practice as a plot

device in some of her tales. In The Black Velvet Pelisse from Simple Tales

(1806), the marriageable hero previews a likely mate before going to the

county where she resides: soon after, in the gallery of an eminent painter,

he saw her picture; and though he thought it attered, he gazed on it with

pleasure, and fancied that Julia, when animated, might be quite as handsome

as that was . . . indeed he had gone to look at her picture the day before hecame down to the country, and had it strongly in his remembrance when he

saw Julia herself.55 The gender roles are reversed in the 1823 tale False or

True; or, the Journey to London. In order to introduce an absent suitor, Opie

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works his portrait into the narrative: Mrs. Ainslie, as there was yet time,

drove to the gallery of a fashionable painter. There her attention was riveted

by an unnished whole-lengthportrait of a gentleman.56 The casual nature

of the commentas there was yet timesuggests that such impromptuvisits were a common pastime. Thus, at least part of the marital home might

be regarded as public space in more than the merely commercial sense.

Yet if the house displayed Opies paintings for public viewing, it also

contained its own private secrets, as Amelia Opies later correspondence

discloses. A letter to her cousin Henry Perronet Briggs when he purchased

his London house in 1837 reveals both the keen personal investment she

felt in her own tenure in an artists residence and her consciousness of the

dwelling as both public and private space:

I do indeed give thee joy of thy new abode & anticipate the

pleasure thou wilt feel on the removalbut neither of you can

feel the delight I did, when I saw ourgallery nished, and the

pictures removed into it. Because your house is anything but a

pig stye, and ours was one. Oh the secrets of that prim House!

Our back parlour, a large room which we never used, but the cats

did, was lled with very large unframed pictures, standing in

series, one before the other & making vallies behind and betweenthem. In these glens our three cats had their soirees& as I had

only two servants (one maid & a man) & they (the cats) had no

servant of their own to sweep out after their revels were over,

thou wilt suppose that pigstye was not too strong an expression,

only catstye would have been better still.57

This letter offers a vivid glimpse of the complex intertwining of the public

and the private in the marital home in Berners Street. The same space that

housed the studio in which John Opie painted celebrities of the day, andthe reception rooms in which Amelia Opie entertained both Bohemia and

Belgravia, also hid the malodorous secrets of early nineteenth-century pet-

keeping and storage.58 Her desire for a separate gallery would appear to

have been as much to remove this private aspect of her home as to shift the

public viewing out of her domestic space.

Professional Benets

What we know concerning the companionate marriage of John Opieand his second wife derives primarily from the portrait Amelia Opie draws

of their relationship in the memoir of her husband prefaced to hisLectures

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on Painting, and she chooses to portray an idealor idealizedpicture of

the marriage of minds and arts.59 Opie acknowledges the complex subject

position she occupies as the author of this memoir, claiming agency both

as a wife making public the details of private domestic life to which shealone can claim authority, and as an author consciously shaping her verbal

portrait in a reection of her husbands professional skills:

Whatever were the faults of Mr. Opie, admitting that I was aware

of them, it was not for me to bring them forward to public view;

and the real worth of his character in domestic life, I only can

be supposed to know with accuracy and precision: and I most

solemnly aver, that I have not said in his praise a single word that I

do not believe to be strictly true;but it was my business to copythe art of the portrait-painter, who endeavours to give a general

rather than a detailed likeness of a face, and, while he throws its

trivial defects into shadow, brings forward its perfections in the

strongest point of view. 60

Sir James Mackintosh criticized this part of the text:

One passage I object towhere she makes an excuse for

not exposing his faults. The apology is unnecessary. . . . She

ought either to have been absolutely silent, or, with an intrepid

condence in the character of her husband, to have stated faults

which she was sure would have been dust in the balance placed

in the scale opposite to his merits.61

Perhaps with the reception ofGodwins intrepid condence in the character

of his wife inMemoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman

fresh in her memory, Opie preferred a more conservative approach. In his

focus on the calibre of John Opie as artist, Sir James also misses the point ofher comment: she makes no claim to be a neutral observer of her husbands

life and character, but rather highlights her subject position as wife, refusing

either to ignore or deny Opies public reputation for difcult temper and

parsimony, but equally refusing to become an apologist. Rather, she claims

a domestic authority to which none other has access, and on the basis of that

shared domesticity speaks to his character as she experienced it in married

life. Many regarded the Memoir as a whitewash, unable to reconcile its

representation of John Opie with their knowledge of his blunt manners and

sarcastic wit. At least one observer, however, subsequently changed hisopinion. In 1890 Samuel Carter Hall recounted the process of his reversal

of a position held for decades:

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In 1882 I had the great pleasure to meet at Plymouth a grand-

nephew of the painter Opie . . . [who] submitted to me a number

of letters from Amelia Opie, several of them dated not long after

she became a widow. They made it clear to me that she had been

the devoted and loving wife of a devoted and loving husband.

Such was by no means the opinion I had previously held; writing

a memory of her, barely ten years ago, I had recorded a very

opposite belief, describing Opie as a coarse man, unworthily

mated to a charming woman.62

In her ction, Opie frequently represents the pains and challenges of spousal

relationships.Adeline Mowbray (1805), for example, explores the private

rewards and public suffering experienced within a companionate cohabitation

in comparison with the public respect and private suffering endured within

a traditional marriage of partners rendered incompatible by the husbands

disrespect of feminine virtue and intellect. In her memoir, Opie focuses

on specic aspects of reciprocal emotional support and compatibility,

documenting John Opies endorsement of her literary ambitions and her

own emotional bolstering of his artistic angst, as well as the shared interest

in the creative arts that rendered theirs as much a marriage of the arts as of

individuals.A mutual devotion to the social and political function of Art and the

professional artist shaped both careers. The effect on John Opie, already

a well-established professional, remains primarily anecdotal, but the story

itself bears scrutiny in the context of this essay. In her Memoir, Amelia

Opie suggests that she moved John Opies focus more intensely to portrait

painting, in part as Muse and in part as spousal responsibility. Her narrative

of companionate marriage weaves a complex dance of romanticized domestic

affect with rational economic and aesthetic forces:

When Mr. Opie became again a husband, he found it necessary,

in order to procure indulgencies for a wife whom he loved, to

make himself popular as a portrait painter, and in that productive

and difcult branch of the art, female portraiture. He therefore

turned his attention to those points, which he had before been long

in the habit of neglecting; and he laboured earnestly to correct

certain faults in his portraits, which he had been sometimes too

negligent to amend. Hence, his pictures in general soon acquired

a degree of grace and softness, to which they had of late yearsbeen strangers. In consequence of this, an academician, highly

respectable as a man and admirable as an artist, came up to him

at the second Exhibition after we married, and complimented him

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on one of his female portraits, saying: We never saw anything

like this in you before, Opie,this must be owing to your wife.

On his return, he repeated this conversation to me; and added in

the kindest manner, that if his brother artists would but allow that

hedidimprove, he was very willing that theyshould attribute

the improvement to his wife.63

This account is dismissed by John Jope Rogers, John Opies rst critical

biographer, as perhaps nothing more than a pretty love-passage in their

early married life, given that an examination of the Academy Catalogue

does not shew the result which might be expected in any marked increase in

the number, at least, of his exhibited female portraits.64 Opies most recent

biographer, Viv Hendra, reports the story but neither afrms nor deniesthe plausibility of a perceptible change in Opies style after marriage.65

Amelia Opie tells the anecdote ostensibly to reveal John Opies generosity

concerning her inuence, making clear that any improvement might equally

be the product of his powerful drive for perfection and her own more passive

role as his practice subject: nor did he ever allow himself to be idle even

when he had no pictures bespoken: and as he never let his execution rust for

want of practice, he . . . endeavoured, by working on an unnished picture

of me, to improve himself by incessant practice in that difcult branch of

his art, female portraiture.66 More important for this discussion, however, isthe degree to which the anecdote reveals a broader cultural desire, expressed

by the Academician, to attribute an improvement in Opies art to his second

marriagea public sense that private desire gratied by a worthy object

might improve even artistic genius.67

Amelia Opie was also instrumental in the task of entertaining and

attracting the society gures who came to have their portraits painted with her

animated conversation and her songs, a task both domestic and intellectual.

As an 1807 biographical sketch of Mrs. Opie explained, in her own home,

where Mr. Opies incomparable talents drew a constant succession of the

learned, the gay, and the fashionable, she delighted all by the sweetness of

her manners, and the unstudied and benevolent politeness with which she

adapted herself to the taste of each individual.68 However, she was not

content to be a mere social ornament and decorative subject. John Opie took

the idea of work and career seriously for his wife as well as for himself,

and his encouragement of her desire to write helped launch one of the most

celebrated female literary careers of the rst part of the nineteenth century.

For Amelia Alderson, marriage to John Opie fostered the development ofher literary creativity and the emergence of her public character as an author.

As noted earlier, she had previously published several works. Anonymous

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44 / K I N G

publication would seem to have arisen from a variety of motives: the lack

of the authors name for the early novel,Dangers of Coquetry (1790), may

reect anxiety concerning social criticism often levelled at female authors,

while that of the series of poems inThe Cabinetwas owing to the radicalcharacter of the periodical. Only a few song lyrics had been published as

the work of Miss Alderson. John Opie encouraged her open participation

in the realm of letters: when our marriage took place, he knew that my

most favourite amusement was writing; and he always encouraged, instead

of checking, my ambition to become an acknowledged author. Our only

quarrel on the subject was, not that I wrote so much, but that I did not write

more and better.69 In so doing, he endorsed the desire for public recognition

reected in her ambition to become an acknowledged author, though in

later life Amelia Opie would soberly reect on the cost to women of this

desire for fame. In an essay on authoresses and bluestockings inDetraction

Displayed(1828) she comments: I must frankly declare that had I known

the pains and dangers which awaited me when I became a public authoress,

nothing but a strong sense of duty, or the positive want of bread, could have

induced me to encounter them.70 Public success for the woman writer came

at a private cost:

if fame be consciously or unconsciously the end in view, [theauthoress] may nd . . . that she has purchased it at the expense

of peace. She has avowed a wish, and perhaps displayed an

ability, to obtain distinction, which have lifted her above the

bounded sphere in which she moved; and neither the success

nor the attempt are ever entirely forgotten or forgiven; and what

degree of fame can make either man or woman amends. . . . And

have not many of both sexes who have been called into public

competition, been made to feel that their wreaths are combined

of thorns as well as laurels, and that when they sought public

distinction, they endangered theirprivatepeace?71

If the reections of the 1820s hold a hint of modest, almost Victorian regret,

nevertheless in the late 1790s she eagerly entered the public eld of letters

as Mrs. Opie, with her husbands full encouragement and her own ambition.

On no subject did Mr. Opie evince more generosity, and liberality of mind,

she writes, than in his opinions respecting women of talents, especially

those who dared to cultivate the power which their Maker had bestowed on

them, and to become candidates for the pleasures, the pangs, the rewards,

and the penalties of authorship.72 Amelia Opie knew well the aspersions

cast against women writers, but found in John Opie a partner who fully

supported her literary ambitions:

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This class of woman never had a more zealous defender than my

husband against the attacks of those less liberal than himself .

. . and there was no employment, consistent with delicacy and

modesty, that he wished a woman to be debarred from, after she

had fullled the regular and necessary duties of her sex and her

situation: nor . . . did he think it just and candid to afx to such

a woman the degrading epithets of unfeminine or masculine.73

While according to the culture of the time there could be no escape from

the duties of her sex and station, John Opie nevertheless offered to his

wife a rational masculine support of her own bluestocking, proto-feminist

desire for literary success, and it was as Mrs. Opie, not as Amelia Alderson,that she attained celebrity.

Perhaps her ambition was also spurred by John Opies own blunt desire

for fame.74 Amelia Opie explicitly links artists and writers as gures who

might consciously seek immortality through their art:

It was his opinion, that no one should either paint or write with

a view merely to present bread or present reputation, nor be

contented to shine, like a beauty or a fashion, the idol only of

the passing hour;he felt it right for painters and authors toexperience the honourable ambition and stimulating desire to

live In song of distant days: his time, therefore, his labour, and

his study, were the coin with which he proudly tried to purchase

immortality.75

The couple living at 8 Berners Street in the late 1790s were thus mutually

committed to pursuing creative success through their separate talents, as John

Opie strove to reinvigorate a career that had begun to wane and his second

wife began her escalade of the London literary world. In rapid succession,her poetry and her novels gained public recognition. Although Mrs. Hall

indicates that Amelia Opies interest in Art predated her marriage, neither

art nor artists gured in the works published prior to 1798. In 1799 and

1800, however, a few of her poems appeared in Robert SoutheysAnnual

Anthology, and the lyric which garnered consistent praise was To Mr. Opie,

on his having painted for me the picture of Mrs. Twiss, a poem in which

she publicly constructs herself as both a devoted friend and an admiring

wife indebted to her husbands talent:

Within my breast contending feelings rise,While this lovd semblance fascinates my eyes;

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46 / K I N G

Now pleasd, I mark the painters skilful line,

Now joy, because the skill I mark, was thine;

And while I prize the gift by thee bestowd,

My heart proclaims Im of the giver proud,

Thus pride and friendship war with equal strife,

And now the friend exults, and now the wife.76

The poem highlights both the complex interconnections of Romantic sociality

and the importance of what Christopher Rovee calls the social nature of

portraiture itself.77 The subject, Frances Twiss, was born Frances Kemble,

the sister of actress Sarah Siddons. Amelia Opie was friends with both sisters,

retaining the portrait of Twiss until her death in 1853, when she bequeathed

it to Twisss daughter. The portrait is thus social in that it registers the tiesof friendship within the circle, but also because its production emerges from

John Opies ability to satisfy his wifes private discourse of affective aesthetic

desire. In addition, it contributed to the public conversation concerning

John Opies art. The poem was published in early 1799, coinciding with the

exhibition of the portrait at the Royal Academy show, potentially enhancing

public interest in the painting.78

The following year she returned more extensively to the theme of the

portrait in Epistle supposed to be addressed by Eudora, Maid of Corinth

to her lover, Philemon, which retells the story of the origin of drawing.This time, she places her adulation of the form in the context of its social

function. In this lengthy narrative poem, Opie takes on a popular theme

in late eighteenth-century art, Plinys tale of the daughter of the potter

Dibutades, who traces her soon to be departing lovers shadow on the wall as

he sleeps, and so discovers the rudiments of the art of portraiture. Although

never a subject for John Opies brush, by 1801 it had been undertaken by a

number of artists, including David Allan and Joseph Wright of Derby. As I

argue elsewhere, this poem explores the intersection of private desire andpublic benet, as the Maid of Corinths discovery of the private portrait,

fuelled by love, rapidly becomes the source of civic pride when the leading

citizens of her city come to her to be immortalized both for their families

and their nation:

Now hear my triumphs. . . . Soon the tale transpired,

Soon was it borne upon the wing of Fame,

Till een my inmost soul of praise was tired. . . .For to our roof assembled Corinth came.

Grave sages, . . . heroes with the laureld brow,. . . .

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Een gifted bards who breathe the lofty lay

Feel their glad hearts with new ambition glow,

And bid me haste their features to portray. . . . 79

As the wife of one of the foremost portrait artists of his time, Amelia Opie

celebrates an art form that was often dismissed as merely commercial and

subordinate to the civic grandeur of history painting, pandering to the private

vanities of individual subjects; rather, she asserts both its domestic force in

the gratitude of lover and its civic force in that of the hero, [and] sage.

Late in her career Opie returned again to the importance of the portrait,

this time addressing its more private role in memory and mourning, and

once more celebrating her husbands talent. In On the Portraits of Deceased

Relatives and Friends Which Hang Around Me, from her 1834 volumeLaysfor the Dead, Opie reects on the paintings that hang in her sitting room: the

portrait of Frances Twiss that had inspired her early reputation as a writer,

of her father, her old French master John Bruckner, a youthful friend who

died in India, and nally the self-portrait of her husband:

But who is he with that expansive brow?

The throne of mind and geniusand an eye

That seems to read each gazers thought? Behold

The kind magician, to whose art I oweThe soothing records of departed days.80

In 1834, Amelia Opie lived still surrounded by images of friends and relatives

painted by a hand now dead for more than two and a half decades: We little

thought when they to being rose, / That I should live to gaze and muse on

them, / So soon the love survivor of you all.81 In Representation, Memory

and Mourning, I observe that:

Opies elegy combines an effusive spousal pride in her husbands

artistic ability with a careful delineation of both the private and

public value attached to the portrait as a genre; and though she

speaks as a feminine voice of distressed elegiac sensibility, she

simultaneously asserts her conscious identity as professional

poet. This conjunction of professional and personal, of the visual

and verbal artefact, points to one more portrait embedded within

the elegy: the portrait of the poet herself as private woman and

public mourner. 82

Just as she had done at the beginning of her career in The Maid of Corinth,

Opie allies the graphic and verbal arts, and in uniting literature and painting,

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48 / K I N G

she articulates a perspective she shared with her husband.83

Opie offered more than private encouragement of his wifes public career

and a shared passion for the art of the portrait. He also used his graphic

abilities to promote both her works and her public fame. He designed thefrontispiece forThe Father and Daughter, the rst novel published under

the name Mrs. Opie (g. 2), as he also did for her volumePoemspublished

the following year (g. 3). By placing his artistic talent at her service, he

not only offered tangible support for her work, but publicly attached his

name and professional expertise to her literary endeavours.84 Perhaps John

Opies most enduring contribution to his wifes fame, however, came in

the role his portraits played in disseminating the image of Mrs. Opie to a

growing public eager for information about contemporary celebrities: singers,

actresses, and authors. The work of Heather McPherson on portraiture and

celebrity in the career Sarah Siddonsone of John Opies most famous

subjectsmight be fruitfully extended to the actresss friend Amelia Opie.

McPherson comments:

Theatrical portraits functioned simultaneously as works of art and

commercial commodities that mutually beneted the artist and the

subject by capitalizing on the popularity of stage personalities.

The celebrity cult and the rise of theatrical portraiture are

emblematic of the general transformation in attitudes, ideas,

and markets that precipitated the commercialization of culture

in Georgian England.85

The cult of celebrity extended to writers as well as actresses, and Mrs.

Opie was the subject of at least six different engraved portraits published

between 1801 and 1822, all based on paintings by her husband. The rst

published image of Amelia Opie appeared inThe Ladys Monthly Museum

in March, 1801: an engraved portrait by Mackenzie after John Opie, with

Memoirs of Mrs. Opie. Two years later in May, 1803, a second engraved

portrait by Ridley after John Opie appeared in the European Magazine

with a biographical notice. Even after his death, Opies designs continued

to provide the basis for the public print image of his wife. A third portrait

was published in June, 1807, inThe Cabinet(g. 4), depicting the author

in the simple morning dress of the 1790s adopted by republican thinkers

like Wollstonecraft, and gazing in rapt exaltation into the middle distance.86

A fourth portrait was twice engraved later in the century: inThe Ladies

Monthly Museum(February 1817) and inLa Belle Assemble(January 1821).Amelia Opies interest in the role such images played in literary fame is made

clear many years later in a series of letters written to Mrs. Dawson Turner,

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Figure 2. Frontispiece, The Father and Daughter, 1801. Engraved by Reynolds

from a design by John Opie.

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50 / K I N G

Figure 3. Frontispiece,Poems, (1802). Engraved by Reynolds from a design by

John Opie.

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Figure 4. Mrs. Opie, The Cabinet(1807). Engraved by Hopwood after a design

by John Opie.

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52 / K I N G

who had engraved a 1798 portrait for herOne Hundred Etchings(privately

printed at Yarmouth, 1825). Opie offers critical feedback on a trial version

of the etching, supplemented by remarks from her father and Mr. Clover,

the current owner of the portrait, and thanks Mrs. Turner for the honor &kindness which she has done me in enabling me to go down to posterity (if

I go downat all)in so very favourable a point of view.87

On Death, Fame, and Art

When John Opie died on April 9, 1807, he was in many ways at the height,

not perhaps of his artistic abilities, but of his professional aspirations. He

had completed delivering the lectures for his professorship in the Royal

Academy one month earlier, when he fell ill and declined into delirium. The

diagnosis suggests some form of infection of the spinal cord, and seems to

have involved a cascading organ failure.88 On her husbands death, Amelia

Opie turned her energies and talents to the task of consolidating the fame he

had so clearly desired, and in which she saw herself as participating. She is

candid in acknowledging the construction of her record of John Opies life

as a form of self-interest, for she believed that her fame was inextricably

allied to his:89 by means of these tributary pages my name will descend with

Mr. Opies to posterity: for as the gums of the East give perpetuity amongstEastern nations to the bodies of the dead, so the merit of Mr. Opies work

will ensure immortality to mine.90 First, she sought a burial commensurate

with her estimate of his reputation. His sister Elizabeth having told her that he

had once commented that he would be buried in St. Pauls, as Reynolds had

been, Amelia Opie set about making it so. In fact, she began her campaign

three days prior to his actual demise, prompting sharp criticism in some

circles.91 Despite resistance from some members of the Royal Academy, John

Opie was buried with full honours beside Reynolds in St. Pauls on April

20, 1807. Perhaps her most important contribution to her husbands career,however, is her preparation of his Royal Academy lectures, to which she

afxed her own memoir as well as tributes from several fellow artists. She

asserts: if I ever valued the power of writing, it is now that I am enabled to

do him justice. 92 The memoir becomes a vehicle for acknowledging John

Opies achievements as an artist and his role in shaping her writing career;

it is as much a portrait of a marriage as a portrait of the artist.

Garrett Horder commented in the Sunday Magazine in 1890 that it

would be a point not easily resolved whether the painter Opies reputationowes more to the talents of his gifted wife or hers to the pictured forms he

has left behind.93 This observation neatly summarizes the companionate

ideal its recognition of the reciprocal talents each brought to a marriage

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in terms of both the private affective support it afforded each partner, and

the public life each created from their artistic talent. Walker argues: what

makes marriage central to human experience is not that it guarantees the

company of another person at the feed trough, or even that it facilitates theaccumulation of capital (shared or unshared), but that it changes identity;

it alters consciousness.94 For Amelia Alderson, marriage to John Opie,

in the context of the development of the companionate model of conjugal

union, enabled the emergence of Mrs. Opie, a professional and personal

identity to which she would cling, even after her conversion to the Quaker

faith required her to drop the title Mrs. and become plain Amelia Opie. In

February 1842 a young man planning a new book wrote to ask if he might

add her nameMrs. Amelia Opieto his list of subscribers. Her tart rejoinder

demonstrates the degree to which her own sense of identity remained linked

to her marriage:

Though I owe thee two guineas, I cannot be satised without

subscribing to thy new bookBut,pray do not call me Mrs.

Amelia Opie I am not Mrs. Amelia Opie butMrs. Opie or

among Friends [ie Quakers]Amelia Opie. I am not an old maid,

but the widow of a distinguished man & it is an affront to my

husbands memory to call me as single unmarried women are

designed. There is no other Mrs. Opie as I believe, any wherebut in Cornwall . . . Mrs. Opie, Norwich is my lawful and proper

designation in subscription or other lists unless made out by

Friends.95

The date ofOpies sharp response is not immaterial: thirty-ve years

earlier, John Opie had delivered the rst of his Royal Academy lectures on

February 16, 1807. Within the month he had fallen ill with a fatal disorder

believed to have been brought on by exhaustion, yet to the end of her life, to

be Mrs. Opie was both private reverence to the memory of a distinguishedman and public proclamation of her literary celebritythe underlying truth

of the initial claim there is no other Mrs. Opie. In her insistence on the

appropriate use of her married name in the public world of letters outside

her private Quaker faith, Amelia Opie continued to honour the companionate

marriage that had enabled her ambitions to shine in the literary public

sphere.

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54 / K I N G

N O T E S

I would like to thank Heidi Strobel and Chantelle MacPhee for organizing thepanel They dream of courtship, but in wedlock wake: Eighteenth-Century Pairs in

Art and Literature (ASECS conference, 2009) for which this paper was originally

conceived, as well as those dedicated scholars who came to an early session on the

rst day of the conference, whose questions opened out the possibilities explored

here. The revised version has also beneted immeasurably from the generous

responses of the anonymous readers forSECCwho helped me better place this

archives-focused study in a wider critical perspective. I am also grateful to the

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the funding that

has enabled both my study of Amelia Opie and my participation at ASECS.

1. Michael Scrivener traces the trajectory of critical response to Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere in Habermas, Romanticism, and Literary

Theory,Literature Compass 1, no. 1 (2004), no pagination. He points especially

to feminist critiques of Habermas, including Joan LandessWomen and the Public

Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (1988) and Nancy Frasers Whats

Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender, inUnruly

Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory(1989),

which directed attention to the role of women especially in the literary public sphere

in this period. Landes further develops this discussion in Further Thoughts on thePublic/Private Distinction,Journal of Womens History15, no. 2 (Summer 2003):

2839. The term, however, has been somewhat Protean: the phrase sometimes derives

from the work of Jrgen Habermas, and specically designates the emergence of a

social space in which private citizens met to discuss matters of political importance,

a sphere opposed both to the intimate world of the household and to the apparatus

of the state (Elizabeth W. Harries, Out in Left Field: Charlotte Smiths Prefaces,

Bordieus Categories, and the Public Sphere,Modern Language Quarterly58,

no. 4 (1997): 457); at other times it simply signals the binary derived from the

nineteenth-century doctrine of separate spheres, and refers to the opposition of a

feminine, domestic private sphere to a masculine, commercial public sphere.

2. Mrs. Inchbald says, the report of the world is that Mr. Holcroft is in love

with her,shewith Mr. Godwin, Mr. Godwin with me, and I am in love with Mr.

Holcroft. A pretty story indeed! . . . Mr. Holcroft too, has a mind to me, but he has

no chance (Cecilia Lucy Brightwell,Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie: Selected

and Arranged from Her Letters, Diaries, and Other Manuscripts [Norwich, UK:

Fletcher and Alexander, 1854], 64).

3. John Wolcot (17381819) was trained as a surgeon-apothecary, but gained

lasting fame through a series of satirical poems published under the pseudonym

Peter Pindar, the rst of which wasLyrical Ode to the Royal Academicians for1782, combining his passion for art with a caustic wit. He later widened the range

of his satire to include political targets, perhaps most notably in The Lousiad: an

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Heroi-Comical Poembased on George IIIs response to nding a louse in his dinner

(Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s. v. Wolcot, John).

4. The paintings on display were The Old Jew, Kneebone of Helstone, The

Beggar and His Dog, Old Trevennon the Beggar, andA Young Boy. Viv Hendra,

The Cornish Wonder: A Portrait of John Opie(Truro, UK: Truran Books, 2007),

26.

5. Quoted in Ada Earland,John Opie and His Circle(London: Hutchinson and

Company, 1911), 15.

6. The rst RA paintings wereAn Old Mans Head,A Boy and Girl,A Boy and

a Dog,An Old Woman, andA Beggar(Hendra,Cornish Wonder, 42).

7. Quoted in Hendra, Cornish Wonder, 38.

8. This anecdote offers in microcosm the competing impressions of Opie held

by his contemporaries. On one hand, its pithy brusqueness is consonant with the

mans reputation for blunt speech, yet theAntijacobin Reviewcommented followinghis death that there is no reason to believe that he ever wrote, even when a boy, the

vulgar note ascribed to him, and said to be still in the possession of Wolcot. It is not

one of the least reasons for suspecting the genuineness of the note alluded to, that

it is brought forward after his death, and made infavorof its reputed possessor!

(Antijacobin Review34 [October 1809], 118).

9. Christopher Rovee argues that John Boydell conceived the Shakespeare

Gallery as a public space in which to imagine a unied social body. . . . History

paintings protable collaboration with engraving assisted the civic imperative of

the arts by spreading its vision far and wide. History painting and engraving together

were to contribute in elevating vulgar tastes so as to bring together multiple social

bodies in a common public spirit (Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British

Romanticism[Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006], 77).

10. Mary Bunn Opies adultery ts the pattern described by Randolph Trumbach

inSex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998): the

business associates of a womans husband who visited her house make up the nal

category of men from whom a woman might take a lover (405). The boundaries of

an artists home were especially permeable. As early as 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft

had commented on the mismatch: Mr. Opie, who frequently calls upon me has

introduced me to his wife.She is really a pretty, easy woman, too much of a irtto be a proper companion to him, yet though they do not appear to seemanythings

in the same light they concur in shewing me uncommon civility (Mary to Everina

Wollstonecraft, 23 February 1792, inThe Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft,

ed. Ralph Wardle [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979], 20910). In his

memoir, John Taylor offers some justication for Mary Opies conduct: Opie was

devoted to his art, to which he chiey and almost solely seemed to direct his attention.

He had many visitors, and among them some, perhaps, who took advantage of his

professional absorption, and attered his young and agreeable wife. She was a pretty

little woman, with pleasing and unaffected manners. Being left much to herself . . . .it was not wonderful that, comparing the unavoidable neglect of her husbandwith the

persevering attention of a gallant, she should manifest the frailty of human nature

(Records of My Life[New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833], 173).

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11. Brightwell includes several poems from this journal (since lost), and Mrs.

Herbert Martin notes that Alderson corresponded with Dr. Aikin, brother of Anna

Barbauld, concerning her poetry (Memories of Seventy Years[London: Grifth &

Ferran, 1884], 73).

12. In 1805, Opies friend and correspondent Sir James Mackintosh commented

to her that the literary taste of Bombay could not distinguish serious literary efforts,

like GodwinsFleetwood, from all the common trash of the Minerva Press (quoted

in Brightwell, Memorials, 90). For a brief account of the press, see http://www.

library.ualberta.ca/specialcollections/printer_friendly/minerva_essay.html.

13. Anne Plumptre (17601818) and her sister Annabella (17691838) were close

friends of Amelia Alderson, and part of a literary coterie centered on William Eneld

(174197) who came to Norwich in 1785 as minister at the Unitarian Octagon

Chapel. (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. Plumptre, Anne).

14. Brightwell,Memorials, 65.15. Even beyond Brightwells 1797 date, there remains some confusion

concerning the year of meeting. Londons National Portrait Gallery holds two

sketches by Henry Bone said to be Amelia Opie that bear the inscription Mrs. Opie

after John Opie, 1794. If Amelia Opie is the sitter, the inscriptions are clearly later

additions (post 1798), but the Gallery feels reasonably condent in the 1794 date,

given that in 1996 the ne Art auction house Bonhams sold an enamel miniature of

Amelia Opie by Bone, apparently based on one of the sketches, dated March, 1794,

on the back. I contend, however, that in 1794 Mrs. Opie would have been Mary

Bunn Opie, and the miniature appears to have brown eyes, rather than the blue-grey

seen in known portraits of Amelia.

16. The foundation texts for any discussion of companionate marriage remain

Lawrence Stones The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 15001800 (New

York: Harper and Row, 1977), and Randolph TrumbachsThe Rise of the Egalitarian

Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England

(New York: Academic Press, 1978). Trumbachs laterSex and the Gender Revolution

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) further develops the legal history

of marriage at the end of the eighteenth century. Also important to our broader

understanding of marriage in the period are Susan Staves,Married Womens Separate

Property in England, 16601833(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)and R.B. Outhwaite Clandestine Marriage in England 15001850(London, The

Hambledon Press, 1995).

17. Eric C. Walker,Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen

After War(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 12.

18. According to William Horne, the social ideology that the majority of

women of fashion espoused gloried the companionate marriage and domesticity.

For most middle- and upper-class women, the struggle for equality was directed

not so much toward economic self-sufciency or social and legal independence as

toward the perceived freedom to nd husbands with whom they were emotionally,intellectually, and socially compatible (Making a Heaven of Hell: The Problem

of the Companionate Ideal in English Marriage Poetry, 16501800 [Athens, GA:

University of Georgia Press, 1993], 21).

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19. William Godwin,Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of

Woman, eds. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker (Peterborough, ON: Broadview

Press, 2001), 105.

20. William Godwin,Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, with Selections from

Godwins Other Writings, ed. K. Codell Carter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971),

302, 303.

21. Mary Wollstonecraft,A Vindication of the Rights of Men. A Vindication of

the Rights of Woman, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, vol. 5 ofThe Works of

Mary Wollstonecraft(London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), 142.

22. Claudia L. Johnson,Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality

in the 1790s(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 59.

23. John Adolphus records: I heard a good anecdote today of Opie and Godwin.

Opie was divorced from his rst wife, and Godwin was an Indel. They were walking

together near St. Martins Church, Ha! said Opie, I was married in that church.Indeed! said Godwin, and I was christened in it. It is not a good shop, replied

Opie, their work dont last (Emily Henderson,Recollections of the Public Career

and Private Life of the Late John Adolphus [London: T. Cautley Newby, 1871]

246). When Amelia Opie announced Godwins marriage to Wollstonecraft to her

friend Mrs. Taylor, she commented: Heighho, what charming things would sublime

theories be, if one could make ones practise keep up with them . . . (Brightwell,

Memorials, 63).

24. See William St. Clair,The Godwins and the Shelleys: the Biography of a

Family(London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 164, concerning Godwins proposal, and

Brightwell,Memorials, 60, for the episode of the slipper.

25. Earland,John Opie, 112.

26. See Joseph Farington,The Diary of Joseph Farington, 16 vols. (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 197884), vol. 3. In fact, on December 18, 1796 Amelia

Alderson wrote directly to Wollstonecraft concerning the issue, suggesting that she

saw some merit in the match. As Janet Todd recounts the moment: Wollstonecraft

and Opie seemed so publicly comfortable together that, writing from Norwich,

Amelia Alderson reported a rumour that they were to marry Law willing. For her

part she believed Opie would gladly marry Wollstonecraft, but not she him (Mary

Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life[London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000], 406).27. Mrs. S. C. Hall, Memories of Amelia Opie The Art-Journal6 (1854): 267.

28. A review of Opies Memoir comments: his manners, however, were in

general destitute of that urbanity which recommends a man to the favour of society;

while his address was awkward and uncouth, his conversation abrupt, and totally a

stranger to uency: yet there was good sense in it, and an acuteness of observation

that displayed more than an ordinary intellect (Monthly Magazine23 [1807]: 457).

John Taylor, a friend ofWolcots, comments: His rustic habits were too rmly xed

for him wholly to subdue them, yet nobody could better conceive what a gentleman

should be; and during the latter years of his life, he endeavoured, and not withoutsuccess, to illustrate his conception by his manners (Records of My Life, 170).

29. Brightwell,Memorials, 63.

30.Monthly Review23 (1807): 457.

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31. Anecdotal evidence suggests that her father found Opies manners uncouth,

and that her cousin retained some levels of animosity even after Opies death. On

being asked by an undertaker if John Opies cofn should be reversed, it having

been placed the wrong way at St. Pauls, Robert Alderson responded: leave him

alone! If I meet him in the next world walking about on his head, I shall know him!

(Earland,John Opie, 234).


33.Public Characters of 17989, 3rd ed. (London: T. Hurst, J. Wallis, and West

and Hughes, 1801), 566.

34. Amelia Opie comments on an early period of nancial stress: and even my

sanguine temper yielding to the trial, began to fear that, small as our expenditure

was, it must become still smaller. Not that I allowed myself to own that I desponded,

on the contrary, I was forced to talk to him of hopes, and to bid him look forward

to brighter prospects, as his temper, naturally desponding, required all the supportpossible (Amelia Opie, Memoir, in John Opie,Lectures on Painting . . . by the

late John Opie, Esq. Professor in Painting to the Royal Academy . . . to which are

prefxed, A Memoir by Mrs. Opie, and Other Accounts of Mr. Opies Talents and

Character(London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809), 32). Diarist Joseph

Farington noted that on his death, Opie died worth property to the amount of

12,000, to the surprise of Mrs. Opie who did not suppose Him to be worth more

than 3,000 (Diary, 8:3016).

35. Chris Roulston, Space and the Representation of Marriage in Eighteenth-

Century Advice Literature,The Eighteenth Century48, no.1 (2008): 25.

36. Roulston, Space, 26. Roulston cites Mark Wigley: Marriage is the reason

for building a house. The house appears to make a space for the institution. But

marriage is already spatial. It cannot be thought outside the house that is its condition

of possibility before its space (quoted in Roulston, Space, 26).

37. Roulston, Space, 28.

38. Roulston, Space, 28.

39. Julie Carlson,Englands First Family of Writers: Mary Wolstonecraft, William

Godwin, Mary Shelley(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 84.

40. Carlson,Englands First Family, 82.

41. Opie took his bride to the house in Berners Street (No. 8), to which he hadremoved in 1791, and where he remained for the rest of his life (Earland, John

Opie, 130).

42. Kit Wedd, Lucy Peltz, and Catharine Ross,Creative Quarters: The Art World

in London 17002000(London: Merrel, 2001), 68.

43. For an in-depth study of a contemporary artists house near 8 Berners

Street, see Michael Phillips, No. 36 Castle Street East: A Reconstruction of James

Barrys House, Painting and Printmaking Studio, and the Making ofThe Birth of

Pandora,The British Art Journal12, no.1 (2008): 1527. Also of interest is the

virtual exhibition, Creative Quarters: the Art World in London 17002000, foundon the Museum of London website: http://www.museumoondon.org.uk/archive/

exhibits/creative/index.html

44. Farington, Diary, 8:3026. The same source records that following Opies

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death, the Lease of Opies house in Berners Street was sold to Londsale, a portrait

painter, for 1250, there being abt. 55 years unexpired (Diary, 8:3088).

45. Opie to Lady Mackintosh, 27 January 1807 (British Library Add. Ms. 7865

f.92)

46. Harriet Martineau,Biographical Sketches 18521875. 4th ed. (London:

Macmillan & Company, 1876), 74.

47. Earland,John Opie, 135.

48. When Mary Russell Mitford readMemorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, she

criticized Brightwells emphasis on her years as a Quaker rather than her earlier

literary life: think of a correspondent of Mrs. Inchbald, and a irt of Godwin

and Holcrofts; think of all that is buried under anti-slavery societies, and Joseph

Lancasters schools! If the quakers demanded a life to themselves, why not make

over the materials to a literary friend, and have two (quoted in The Friendships of

Mary Russell Mitford, ed. A. G. LEstrange, 2 vols. [London: Hurst and Brackett,1882], 2:298).


50. Holger Hoock,The Kings Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics

of British Culture 17601840(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 189.

51. Farington comments on August 22, 1803: I . . . went with Opie to see his

new show roomwhich is now completing (Diary, 4:2113).

52. Hoock, The Kings Artists, 306.

53. Opie himself had encouraged the development of public gallery space

devoted to contemporary art, most notably in his proposal for a Gallery of British

Honour, a sort of Naval Pantheon modelled on that at Rome. David V. Erdman

notes that in 1802 to encourage original historical work by British artists, and to

break the Academys exhibiting monopoly, Opie and other Academicians with Whig

connections supported a gallery in Berners Street under the patronage of the Prince

of Wales, though it was open for only eighteen months (Blake: Prophet Against

Empire, 3rd ed. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977], 440). Amelia Opie

gestures to her husbands commitment to such galleries in her memoir when she

addresses the fate of his last painting. Referring to a kit-cat taken from his portrait

of Mrs. Heathcote in the character of Miranda, she writes that its original purchaser

had ceded his right to his relative, Sir John Leicester, who in 1805 had converted aMayfair property into a gallery to be opened to the public, adding that she should

regret that it was the property of anyone but myself, did I not know that Mr. Opie

rejoiced in its destination; and were I not assured of its being placed in thatrarest

of situations, a gallery consisting chiey ofmodern art, doing honour to the genius

who painted and to the amateur who admired (Memoir, 38). For more on the

role of the gallery in late eighteenth-century London, see Rosie Dias, A World

of Pictures: Pall Mall and the Topography of Display 178099, in Georgian

Geographies: Essays on Place, Space and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century,

eds. Miles Ogborn and Charles W. J. Withers (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress, 2004), 92113, and Richard Altick, Art on Display,The Shows of London

(Cambridge, MA: Bellknap, 1978), 99116.

54. Wedd,Creative Quarters, 70.

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55. Amelia Opie,Simple Tales, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, 1806), 1:278.

56. Amelia Opie, False or True; or, the Journey to London,European Magazine

83 (1823): 515.

57. Amelia Opie to Henry Perronet Briggs, 20 April 1837,Huntington Library,

San Marino, California.

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