In any full discussion of the literary career of Amelia Alderson Opie, primary attention would undoubtedly be given to her fiction. Her novels and tales include The Dangers of Coquetry (2 vols., 1790); The Father and Daughter: A Tale in Prose (1801; to which she appended "An Epistle from the Maid of Corinth to Her Lover" and other verse); Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter (3 vols., 1804), based on the career of Mary Wollstonecraft and given by Harriet Westbrook to Shelley in a successful effort to persuade him to marry her instead of merely rescuing her without benefit of clergy; Simple Tales (4 vols., 1806); Temper, or, Domestic Scenes (3 vols., 1813); Valentine's Evex(3 vols., 1816); New Tales (4 vols., 1818); Tales of the Heart (4 vols., 1820); and Madeline: A Tale (2 vols., 1822). In this area she developed and extended the range of domestic fiction, combining effective social dialogue with pathos and tender sentiment, while attempting to inculcate, in the bourgeois public that read her fiction in edition after edition, common sense and mutual understanding between husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings. For a just appreciation of the merits as well as the limitations of Opie's fiction, see Oliver Elton's Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830 (1912).

In confining my own attention to Opie's poetry, I have found that though her historical place in the Romantic Context is smaller as a writer of poetry than of prose, she produced one of the neglected fine poems of the age that it was part of my hope, in undertaking this series, to rescue from oblivion. This is not to say that I knew Opie's Elegy to the Memory of the Late Duke of Bedford when I began my work, but rather that (as I indicated in the Editor's Introduction to the prospectus to this series) I was certain that there would be at least "a handful of golden nuggets" among these "tons of poetic ore" to "brighten the labors of literary historians, whose primary interests are more akin to those of the geological surveyor than to those of the mineralogical prospector."

Most of Opie's poetry, when assayed, would be cast into the scrap heap, though her humanitarian concerns give some historical interest to her poems on West Indian slavery and on the British poor and social outcasts suffering the ravages of want and of war. Two of her poems most popular with early nineteenth-century readers were "Lines written at Norwich on the First News of Peace" (Poems, pp. 81 ff.) and "The Orphan Boy's Tale" (pp. 149 ff.), which touch effectively on the evils of war to those whose sons, husbands, and fathers are destroyed by it. Her anti-slavery poems—though probably based on strong personal convictions—suffer from her obvious lack of firsthand knowledge of the blacks for whom she has such intellectual sympathy. Her children's book on slavery, The Black Man's Lament, may have brought some of the evils of West Indian slavery to the attention of school children, but—as its subtitle indicates—it could also serve as a training manual on how to operate a sugar plantation and refinery. And one of her most ridiculous poems to modern readers is "The Negro Boy's Lament," with its attempt to represent the speech of a slave.

Opie's technical skill was limited, and some of her poems are destroyed by inappropriate metrics and rhyme schemes or awkward diction. One of the (unintentionally) humorous masterpieces of this series is the title piece of The Warrior's Return volume, in which she employs the stanza that Lewis Carroll later exploited (perhaps after encountering her example?) to such brilliant comic effect in The Hunting of the Snark. Even Carroll, with his magnificent sense of the ridiculous, seldom created stanzas funnier in their contexts than these:

For terror now whispered, the wife he had left
Full fifteen long twelvemonths before,
The child he had claspt in his farewel embrace,
Might both, then, alas! be no more.

. . . . .

'T was day-break: yet still past the windows he saw
Busy forms lightly trip to and fro:
"Blest sight! that she lives," he exclaimed with a smile,
"Those symptoms of housewifery show:

(pp. 4, 5)

The conclusion seems inescapable that Opie had no true imagination in the sense of being able to bring to life the emotions and thoughts of people in situations that she herself had never experienced. From this limitation also follows her greater success in domestic than in historical fiction.

Yet, as I have indicated, though Opie's poetry has never received serious critical attention, she wrote one poem that I personally (albeit with the bias of its discoverer) consider to be one of the really fine elegies in English literature. Though Elegy to the Memory of the Late Duke of Bedford is not in the same class as Lycidas and Adonais, I would rank it with Spenser's Astrophel, Arnold's "Thyrsus," and Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" as an integrated and moving poetic expression not only of grief and regret at the death of an admired contemporary but also of a philosophy of human values and their relationship to the life and death of the memorialized individual. If the majority of readers of these volumes safely follow the consensus of past opinion by ignoring it, I hope that at least a few students of the period will appreciate it as a good poem reflecting an interesting complex of social, political, and philosophical values of its time. To aid in this revaluation, I append (as I have seldom done in these Introductions) a short commentary designed to open up this particular poem to more detailed explication.

Francis Russell (1765-1802), the fifth Duke of Bedford, succeeded to the title on the death of his grandfather, the fourth duke, in January 1771. In 1787, he took his seat in the House of Lords and, after the split in the Whig party over the French Revolution, allied himself with Charles James Fox and the Radical Whigs. When Edmund Burke, who had joined with Pitt's Tories and had become the most eloquent opponent of the Revolution and its British sympathizers, was granted some pensions by the Pitt administration without parliamentary approval, Bedford attacked Burke for selling out his liberal principles to become a crown hireling. Burke in his eloquent reply, Letter to a Noble Lord, demolished young Bedford's position by comparing his own long service to his country—and on behalf of human justice—with Bedford's inexperience, and his own relative poverty to the fabulous wealth that the Russells had garnered from the favors bestowed by a series of sovereigns, beginning with the suppression of Roman Catholic monasteries in the reign of Henry VIII.

Soon after this humiliation, to which Opie alludes, not in her elegy, but in the final piece in her Poems (1802), Bedford gave up political activity and retired to his seat at Woburn Abbey (Bedfordshire) to pursue his interest in scientific and technological improvements in agriculture. In 1793 he had joined with Arthur Young and other enthusiasts for the "New Agriculture" to form the Board of Agriculture, which encouraged the use of fertilizers, selective breeding of farm animals, new methods of draining marshy lands, crop rotation, and the introduction of new farm machinery, including a wheeled plow and threshing machines. He also continued the tradition begun by his ancestors in the Renaissance of draining marginal fen-lands in East Anglia and bringing the land into production of grain, thus augmenting England's food production. In 1799 he joined other wealthy aristocrats in founding the Royal Institution to sponsor and support scientific research and educational developments in a variety of areas (including the experiments conducted in its research laboratory by Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday). In 1800 he had his London house leveled and developed the real estate in what is now the area of the British Museum and London University (Russell Square, Tavistock Square, and Bedford Square).

We have no record of Opie's dealings with the Duke of Bedford, but we can gather from the Elegy that she first saw Bedford and his wife at a centenary celebration of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 held in 1788 at Holkham, the Norfolk estate of Thomas William Coke. On this occasion Bedford, twenty-three years old and undistinguished in anything but pleasing appearance and affability, basked in the glory of his ancestor Lord William Russell (1639-1683), who had been executed for his opposition to Charles II. The Russells, earls of Bedford under the Tudors and the Stuarts, had constantly supported the Protestant cause, agricultural development in East Anglia, and expansion of constitutional government, just as the later dukes of Bedford fought the bourgeois commercialization of English foreign policy (as embodied in Robert Walpole) and opposed Pitt's policy of fighting the French Revolution merely because it threatened British colonial and commercial interests. (For the grain-and-beef-producing agricultural magnates, the expansion of foreign trade and the industrialization that accompanied it represented a threat to their political power through the creation of a rival oligarchy based on trade and industry.) To Amelia Opie, however, these particular economic struggles would not have been evident. Her moral and humanitarian instincts, as well as her heritage as the daughter of a professional man in Norwich (with its strong Unitarian and Quaker heritage), brought home to her only the resultant evils of war and such inhumanity of colonial and industrial development as West Indian slavery and urban squalor and poverty. And on these issues the Duke of Bedford emerged as a champion of humanity, just as his encouragement of food production not only benefitted his own tenants and enhanced the prosperity of East Anglia, but also provided additional food for a nation that had experienced widespread hunger (especially during the wartime curtailment of food imports). The duke died in March 1802 following an operation for a strangulated hernia.

Opie's poem skillfully establishes early (pp. 2-3) that she is no flatterer of the great and the powerful, having refrained from praising the admired nobleman during his lifetime. Contrasting her memory of the joyful celebration at Holkham in 1788 (pp. 3-5) with the opening, imaginative portrayal of the private nighttime interment of the dead duke (pp. 1-2), the poet begins to evoke the imagery of the shining sun, which, combined with that of vegetation and the seasonal cycle, obliquely joins Bedford's fate both to the sun-king imagery traditional in Western literature (prominent, for example, in Shakespeare's Richard II and in literature on Louis XIV) and to the older seasonal fertility myths of Osiris, Adonis, and their analogues. But Opie never directly invokes these parallels; she rather assumes the reader's awareness of these traditions. At Holkham, "Bright was the scene," Bedford's "cheek with conscious triumph glowed" with "bright expression," and "lustre around [him] glowed." Soon after this,

As, when spring's reign approaches, to the sight
The sun by slow degrees imparts his light,
And on the eye with gradual lustre steals,
Ere he the fulness of his blaze reveals,
So on the public love thy virtues stole,—
So beamed the growing splendours of thy soul.

(pp. 5-6)

The full significance of the phrase "growing splendours" becomes apparent a few lines later when

By thee allured, lo! Ceres blessed the plain,
And spread in richer waves the ripening grain,—

(p. 6)

But the rise of Bedford proved to be a false spring: "'Twas the short splendour of a winter's sun." This symbolic pattern, kept in sight throughout the poem, concludes on the final page with the revelation that, removed from the daily and seasonal cycle, Bedford's influence—and perhaps his soul—lives on: "No rainbow splendours his, that fade away,—/ His, the long lustre of a polar day." Thus the winter of his death is transformed into an eternal day.

I have space only to suggest how other elements of the imagery relate to this central symbolic pattern: the parallels between the social utility of the plebian potato and the noble palmetto tree (bottom of page 9) and between the "lowly shrub" and the oak (p. 10) carry on the images of flora, while the mutually beneficial interaction of "the polar region's icy throne" and "the ardour of the torrid zone" (p. 11) prepares directly for the reconciliation of these opposites in Bedford's final role as the arctic sun of a "polar day." Opie's philosophy of human life and social interaction, strongly colored by the ideals of mutual social interdependence (that would later find voice in Carlyle's Past and Present and the neo-medievalism of Ruskin and Morris), grows out of the residual feudalism surviving in the large estates of Bedfordshire and the Norfolk Broads and of Opie's awareness of mutual regard between Bedford and his tenants. (Shelley, who grew up as the scion of a liberal landed aristocracy, also held such an ideal, as Peacock shows us in his depiction of Sylvan Forester and his estate in Melincourt.)

In her imaginative description of the funeral that Bedford might have had if he had not decreed on his deathbed that he was to be buried at night in a private ceremony, Opie suggests almost a religious fast day, uniting rich and poor, young and old in a common mourning of the dead hero, now (implicitly) a god of agriculture. In the concluding "consolation" (pp. 15-16), Opie draws upon the comfort in King Lear—"Ripeness is all"—and on the concept of relative perspectives in different parts of the globe: those in one hemisphere see the winter sun fade quickly, while at the other pole the sun shines continually. But she also invokes other images not as easily integrated into the larger pattern—"From life's rough sea escaped, he gains the shore" and, in a bold transvaluation of a metaphor from Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," his fame, "as forms in amber found / Nor touch can change, nor powerful pressure wound" (p. 16). Opie may allude to the myth in Book II of Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which the sisters of Phaethon, bewailing his fate, are transformed into poplar trees and their tears into amber. The last comfort—"those who in youth appeared the boasts of fame / In age too often sink, the prey of shame"—is very close to Shelley's consolation for the early death of Keats and the other "inheritors of unfulfilled renown" in Adonais. And since that poem employs explicitly the mythic imagery of sun, vegetation, and alternative perspectives that lie at the heart of Opie's Elegy, the poems would seem to be related at least through common antecedents and modes of thinking—or, possibly, through Shelley's knowledge of Opie's poem.

Though limitations of technical virtuosity and (perhaps) intellectual genius may have prevented Amelia Opie from writing a really great poem, the strong feelings and careful workmanship evident in this Elegy combined to produce her finest poem and one of the better poems of its type in the language. Eschewing the conventions of the Greek and Latin pastoral tradition, she creates an eighteenth-century myth of progressive agriculture in the tradition of the fertility myths of the Near East, yet thoroughly modern in its reference and diction. The pastoral poetic tradition was archaic to its practitioners not only in Renaissance Italy and England but even in the Hellenistic and Roman urban and court societies of its origin. Opie's agricultural myth, on the contrary, grew out of a living contemporary reality. In most pastoral elegies, the dead person was a poet or a proto-poet, and the author "in another's fate now wept his own." Opie avoids all suggestion of such sentimental self-interest, for she celebrates the dead simply for his virtues—not for her identification with him.

To conclude; though the lesser poetry of Amelia Alderson Opie enjoyed some contemporary popularity, her masterpiece—a moving poem of great structural and symbolic sophistication—has never been recognized as the excellent work it is. Thus, revaluation of Opie's poetry—unlike the verse of many of her contemporaries—produces an aesthetic as well as a historical dividend.