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

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by your local institution at 09/29/12 6:00AM GMT

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

ecent studies of the later eighteenth century, such as Gillian Russell and Clara Tuites Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 17701840 (2002) and Christopher Rovees Imagining 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 affiliations. In revising the myth of isolated creativity, such studies locate our understanding of artistic productionboth literary and graphicwithin the debate concerning public and private spheres of 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
27

28 / K I N G

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 relationship was 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 benefits from the union: Amelia Aldersons desire for literary fame flourished 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 refined 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 years he 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 a kind 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 five canvasses at the Royal Academy 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 purchased Beggar and His Dog, one

Portrait of a Marriage / 29

of Opies large character studies, as well.6 Horace Walpoles comments reflect the general response:
There is a new genius, one Opie, a Cornish lad of nineteen who has 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 identifies 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 were the 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 first 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 demand as 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) and The 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 large engraved 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 mother in 1784, so that at age fifteen 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

30 / K I N G

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 a short anonymous novel, The Dangers of Coquetry, for the popularif not entirely respectedMinerva Press.12 In 1791 her play Adelaide had 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 first meeting with Amelia Alderson comes from Cecilia Lucy Brightwells Memorials 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 to the fair object whose sudden appearance had so impressed him. He was evidently smitten; charmed at first sight.14

Brightwell implies that the meeting took place in early 1797, possibly to place it after the finalization of Opies divorce; but William Godwins diary first 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.

Portrait of a Marriage / 31

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 individuals whose 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 companionate marriage), 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 difficult to recommend any thing to indiscriminate 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 overflowing 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 find themselves deceived. Yet the older sacramental/ property transfer marriages he finds 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

32 / K I N G

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 prior attachment, 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, significant 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 influence. As Claudia L. Johnson points out, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman rescue[s] heterosexuality. . . by politicizing it, figuring 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 insufficiency of sacraments, and Amelia Alderson seemed more amused than troubled by Godwins attempts to rationalize human emotion and to make his human practice fit 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 flirtation: her letters record Godwin pocketing one of her dancing slippers and negotiating its 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-do solicitor.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

Portrait of a Marriage / 33

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 final, 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 significant intellectual independence: in Amelia Alderson he would find 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 financially 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 specific 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 refined 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:

34 / K I N G
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 figure (fig. 1). The broad brow, full lips, and penetrating gaze are hardly a model of Regency male beauty: the Monthly 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 into all [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 her Vindication 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 domestic parental 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 of Public Characters of 17989

Portrait of a Marriage / 35

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 first 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 we trust that the union of painting and literature will contribute to the mutual happiness of the parties.33 Like all relationships, this one experienced

36 / K I N G

its share of stresses, but appears to have offered significant 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 reflects intensely satisfactory memories of her years as Opies wife, despite his frequent low spirits and close attention to money.34 While the marriage hardly qualifies 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 made marriage 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 significant 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

Portrait of a Marriage / 37

of the philosophical and literary lives of Wollstonecraft and Godwin: the Wollstonecraftian household . . . follows enlightened specifications, chiefly of her own devising. . . . Her idea of a productive household embraces a separation of work spheres that allows her and Godwin to maintain separate residences.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 underrecognized in assessments of Godwin but one that puts in a clearer light under what conditions he can be said to have valued home. Specifically, 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. Keeping in 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 first 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 resided in 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

38 / K I N G

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 wife of 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 find that very pleasant, as some of my visitors are regular in their attendance, & I am sure 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 flavour; her Sunday morning at homes were frequented by artists, literary figures, and socialites. Quarters were sufficiently 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 reflects 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 years of 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

Portrait of a Marriage / 39

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 satisfied 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 first 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 an elitist 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 the servant 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 flattered, 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 he came 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

40 / K I N G

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 unfinished whole-length portrait of a gentleman.56 The casual nature of the commentas there was yet timesuggests that such impromptu visits 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 our gallery finished, 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 filled with very large unframed pictures, standing in series, one before the other & making vallies behind and between them. 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, and the reception rooms in which Amelia Opie entertained both Bohemia and Belgravia, also hid the malodorous secrets of early nineteenth-century petkeeping 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 Benefits What we know concerning the companionate marriage of John Opie and his second wife derives primarily from the portrait Amelia Opie draws of their relationship in the memoir of her husband prefaced to his Lectures

Portrait of a Marriage / 41

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 she alone can claim authority, and as an author consciously shaping her verbal portrait in a reflection 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 copy the 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:

Perhaps with the reception of Godwins intrepid confidence in the character of his wife in Memoirs 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 of her 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 difficult 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 his opinion. In 1890 Samuel Carter Hall recounted the process of his reversal of a position held for decades:

42 / K I N G
In 1882 I had the great pleasure to meet at Plymouth a grandnephew 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 fiction, 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 specific 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 difficult 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 years been 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

Portrait of a Marriage / 43

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 he did improve, he was very willing that they should attribute the improvement to his wife.63

This account is dismissed by John Jope Rogers, John Opies first 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 affirms nor denies the plausibility of a perceptible change in Opies style after marriage.65 Amelia Opie tells the anecdote ostensibly to reveal John Opies generosity concerning her influence, 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 unfinished picture of me, to improve himself by incessant practice in that difficult branch of his art, female portraiture.66 More important for this discussion, however, is the 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 gratified by a worthy object might improve even artistic genius.67 Amelia Opie was also instrumental in the task of entertaining and attracting the society figures 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 first part of the nineteenth century. For Amelia Alderson, marriage to John Opie fostered the development of her literary creativity and the emergence of her public character as an author. As noted earlier, she had previously published several works. Anonymous

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 reflect anxiety concerning social criticism often levelled at female authors, while that of the series of poems in The Cabinet was owing to the radical character 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 reflected in her ambition to become an acknowledged author, though in later life Amelia Opie would soberly reflect on the cost to women of this desire for fame. In an essay on authoresses and bluestockings in Detraction 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, [the authoress] may find . . . 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 their private peace?71

If the reflections of the 1820s hold a hint of modest, almost Victorian regret, nevertheless in the late 1790s she eagerly entered the public field 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:

Portrait of a Marriage / 45

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 fulfilled the regular and necessary duties of her sex and her situation: nor . . . did he think it just and candid to affix 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 figures 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 to experience 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 figured in the works published prior to 1798. In 1799 and 1800, however, a few of her poems appeared in Robert Southeys Annual 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;

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 ties of 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 and public benefit, 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,. . . .

Portrait of a Marriage / 47

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 volume Lays for the Dead, Opie reflects 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 finally 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 owe The 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,

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 the frontispiece for The Father and Daughter, the first novel published under the name Mrs. Opie (fig. 2), as he also did for her volume Poems published the following year (fig. 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 benefited 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 first published image of Amelia Opie appeared in The 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, in The Cabinet (fig. 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: in The Ladies Monthly Museum (February 1817) and in La 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,

Portrait of a Marriage / 49

Figure 2. Frontispiece, The Father and Daughter, 1801. Engraved by Reynolds from a design by John Opie.

50 / K I N G

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

Portrait of a Marriage / 51

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

52 / K I N G

who had engraved a 1798 portrait for her One 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 down at 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 amongst Eastern 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 affixed 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 reputation owes 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

Portrait of a Marriage / 53

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 the accumulation 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 satisfied without subscribing to thy new bookBut, pray do not call me Mrs. Amelia Opie I am not Mrs. Amelia Opie but Mrs. 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 where but in Cornwall . . . Mrs. Opie, Norwich is my lawful and proper designation in subscription or other lists unless made out by Friends.95

The date of Opies sharp response is not immaterial: thirty-five years earlier, John Opie had delivered the first 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 distinguished man 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.

54 / K I N G

NOTES
I would like to thank Heidi Strobel and Chantelle MacPhee for organizing the panel 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 first day of the conference, whose questions opened out the possibilities explored here. The revised version has also benefited immeasurably from the generous responses of the anonymous readers for SECC who 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 Landess Women 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, in Unruly 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 the Public/Private Distinction, Journal of Womens History 15, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 2839. The term, however, has been somewhat Protean: the phrase sometimes derives from the work of Jrgen Habermas, and specifically 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 Quarterly 58, 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, she with 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 first of which was Lyrical Ode to the Royal Academicians for 1782, 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

Portrait of a Marriage / 55

Heroi-Comical Poem based on George IIIs response to finding 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, and A 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 first RA paintings were An Old Mans Head, A Boy and Girl, A Boy and a Dog, An Old Woman, and A 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 the Antijacobin Review commented following his 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 in favor of its reputed possessor! (Antijacobin Review 34 [October 1809], 118). 9. Christopher Rovee argues that John Boydell conceived the Shakespeare Gallery as a public space in which to imagine a unified social body. . . . History paintings profitable 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 fits the pattern described by Randolph Trumbach in Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998): the business associates of a womans husband who visited her house make up the final 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 flirt to be a proper companion to him, yet though they do not appear to see many things in the same light they concur in shewing me uncommon civility (Mary to Everina Wollstonecraft, 23 February 1792, in The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph Wardle [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979], 20910). In his memoir, John Taylor offers some justification for Mary Opies conduct: Opie was devoted to his art, to which he chiefly 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 flattered 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 husband with 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).

56 / K I N G
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: Griffith & 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 Godwins Fleetwood, 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 Enfield (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 confident in the 1794 date, given that in 1996 the fine 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 Trumbachs The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978). Trumbachs later Sex 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 glorified the companionate marriage and domesticity. For most middle- and upper-class women, the struggle for equality was directed not so much toward economic self-sufficiency or social and legal independence as toward the perceived freedom to find 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).

Portrait of a Marriage / 57

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 of The 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 first wife, and Godwin was an Infidel. 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-Journal 6 (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 fluency: yet there was good sense in it, and an acuteness of observation that displayed more than an ordinary intellect (Monthly Magazine 23 [1807]: 457). John Taylor, a friend of Wolcots, comments: His rustic habits were too firmly fixed 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 without success, to illustrate his conception by his manners (Records of My Life, 170). 29. Brightwell, Memorials, 63. 30. Monthly Review 23 (1807): 457.

58 / K I N G
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 coffin 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). 32. Brightwell, Memorials, 634. 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 financial 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 support possible (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 prefixed, 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 EighteenthCentury Advice Literature, The Eighteenth Century 48, 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 had removed 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 of The Birth of Pandora, The British Art Journal 12, no.1 (2008): 1527. Also of interest is the virtual exhibition, Creative Quarters: the Art World in London 17002000, found on the Museum of London website: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/archive/ exhibits/creative/index.html 44. Farington, Diary, 8:3026. The same source records that following Opies

Portrait of a Marriage / 59

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 read Memorials 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 flirt 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). 49. Brightwell, Memorials, 74. 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 room which 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 a Mayfair 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 that rarest of situations, a gallery consisting chiefly of modern 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 University Press, 2004), 92113, and Richard Altick, Art on Display, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Bellknap, 1978), 99116. 54. Wedd, Creative Quarters, 70.

60 / K I N G
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. 58. Storage would seem to have been a difficult problem for many artists. In describing Romneys proposed expansion of the house at Holly Bush Hill in Hampstead, Giles Walkley comments that he planned nothing less than a pantechnicon in which to store the unsold and unclaimed canvasses that threatened to engulf his premises in town (Artists Houses in London 17641914 [Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994], 21). 59. Many contemporary feminist critics remain sceptical of the 1790s idealization of companionate marriage, regarding it as merely a kinder, gentler patriarchy rather than a significant advance in womens equality. Nevertheless, as Susan Staves comments, although the more idealistic and abstract representations must be confronted with more cynical or pragmatic private ones, we cannot simply toss out the idealistic representationsbecause they had power (Where is History but in Texts?: Reading the History of Marriage, The Golden & the Brazen World: Papers in Literature and History, 16501800, ed. John M. Wallace [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press], 141). Opies deployment of the model in the service of her own literary career is a case in point. 60. Amelia Opie, Memoir, 53. 61. Quoted in Earland, John Opie, 243. 62. Samuel Carter Hall, Retrospect of a Long Life: From 18151883 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1890), 186. Hall quotes two sentences from these letters that articulate Amelia Opies grief:
I swear to you that nearly every day of my life (a blank, indeed, to what it was) I go through fits of anguish and regret, for him I have lost, as violent, if not more so, than I have ever felt. He who reads the heart knows how often I cry to Him for mercy in the bitterness of my soul and frenzy, for resignation to his will. My father came in this moment, and seeing me crying, asked what was the matter; as if any new sorrow was necessary to make me cry (1867).

63. Amelia Opie, Memoir,1718. 64. John Jope Rogers, Opie and His Circle: Being a Catalogue of 760 Pictures by John Opie, R. A. Preceded by a Biographical Sketch (London: Paul and Dominic Colnaghi and Co., 1878), 38. 65. Hendra, Cornish Wonder, 124. Thomson, one of Opies apprentices, commented in 1807 on the trajectory of Opies career, saying he had peaked in the early 1780s, fallen off by the late 1790s, but for some time past has painted better (Farington, Diary, 8:301617). 66. Opie, Memoir, 31. 67. The best known portrait of Amelia Opie is the one now in Londons National Portrait Gallery. Ada Earlands 1911 biography and catalogue of John Opies works

Portrait of a Marriage / 61

lists 10 known paintings of Amelia Opie, though many that were identified and known at that time have since disappeared or only recently resurfaced. Just two years ago, Viv Hendra of the Lander Gallery in Truro identified a double painting, offered at a London auction merely as Circle of George Romney, as John Opies double portrait of his wife (http://www.landergallery.co.uk/ Classics/Exhibitions/ Discoveries.asp). See also note 78. 68. Mrs. John Taylor, The Cabinet; or Monthly Repository of Polite Literature 1 (June 1807): 219. 69. Opie, Memoir, 26. 70. Opie, Detraction Displayed (Norwich: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1828), 1556. 71. Opie, Detraction, 157. 72. Opie, Memoir, 256. 73. Opie, Memoir, 256. 74. Mr. Opies ruling passion was ambition,but ambition tending to the use and delight of mankind. It impelled him to eminence in his art, and it displayed itself in a resolution always decided, sometimes impetuous, to obtain every distinction which his path in life laid open to him (Prince Hoare, To the Memory of John Opie, in John Opie, Lectures on Painting . . . by the late John Opie, Esq. Professor in Painting to the Royal Academy . . . to which are prefixed, A Memoir by Mrs. Opie, and Other Accounts of Mr. Opies Talents and Character [London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1809], 64). 75. Opie, Memoir, 30. 76. Opie, To Mr. Opie, on his having painted for me the picture of Mrs. Twiss, Annual Anthology, ed. Robert Southey, 2 vols. (Bristol: T. N. Longman & O. Rees, 1800), 1:34. See also Lines Written in 1799, The Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie, eds. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 163, lines 916. 77. Rovee, Imagining the Gallery, 171. 78. The Whitehall Evening Post of April 27, 1799 offers the following description: Mr. Opies portraits this year have such charms of grace and delicacy, added to their force and truth, as entitle him to new praise. Mrs. Twiss, in the ante-room, Mrs. Price and Mrs. Opie (who is painted in the same canvass in two points of view), are most highly finished portraits. 79. Opie, Epistle supposed to be addressed by Eudora, Maid of Corinth to her Lover, Philemon, Collected Poems, 67, lines 11320. 80. Opie, On the Portraits of Deceased Relatives and Friends, Which Hang Around Me, Portrait the Sixth, Collected Poems, 412, lines 15. 81. Opie, Portrait the Sixth, 412, lines 79. 82. Shelley King, Representation, Memory and Mourning in Amelia Opies On the Portraits of Deceased Relatives and Friends, Which Hang Around Me, Performing the Everyday: The Culture of Genre in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alden Cavanagh (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 127. 83. He loved to see the tie between poetry and painting drawn closer and closer (a tie which he felt to exist, though it was not generally allowed) (Opie, Memoir,

62 / K I N G
28). For a full discussion of the function of the portrait in this poem, see Shelley King, Amelia Opies Maid of Corinth and the Origin of Art, Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 4 (Summer 2004), 62952. 84. Harriet Martineau was less than complimentary concerning the calibre of these illustrations: the edition on our table . . . is illustrated by a most woful frontispiece designed by her husband. Her Poems appeared the next year, adorned in a like manner (Biographical Sketches 18521875, 4th ed. [London: Macmillan & Co, 1876], 3323). 85. Picturing Tragedy: Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse Revisited, Eighteenth Century Studies, 33, no. 3 (Spring 2000), 406. 86. The whereabouts of the original paintings for the first two engravings is unknown, but the third original is currently held by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The location of the fourth portrait is also unknown. 87. Amelia Opie to Dawson Turner March 4, 1822 (quoted in King, Representation, 127). 88. Farington describes the autopsy report: Carlisle came. He had this morning opened the body of Opie & found everything as He had expected it wd. be. An inflammation upon the Spine above the Os Coxygus, and inflammation of the Brain, part of which was dissolved, and 5 ounces of water in the Brain, whereas there ought not to have been more than half an ounce. There was also inflammation in the bowels (Diary, 8:3015). 89. At least one contemporary obituary discussion of John Opie paid tacit homage to their connection: although less pathetic than Northcote, and less humorous than Smirke, he succeeded admirably in the delineation of Simple Tales (British Gallery, Director: a Weekly Literary Journal 2, no. 23 [1807], 3623.) Conceptually, the phrase Simple Tales refers not to a specific painting by John Opie, but to his talent at representing rustic subjects; however, the italicized form gestures to Amelia Opies collection of tales by that title published the previous year. 90. Opie, Memoir, 54. 91. Farington records the gossip of the day brought to him by Northcote: all that had been proposed arose out of the vanity of Mrs. Opie. . . . [Northcote] remarked on the proposal of having Opie interred in St. Pauls, three days before He died, for such a wish Thomson had communicated to Owen at the time, but it originated with Mrs. Opie. It was surprising that it shd. have done so, as most persons cd. not have borne to think of his funeral while He was living (Diary, 8: 3018). Whether this gesture stemmed from personal vanity, as charged by Northcote, or from a sincere desire to obtain the public recognition she felt John Opies contribution to British Art merited cannot be determined at this distance. 92. Samuel Carter Hall, Retrospect, 186. 93. W. Garrett Horder, Amelia Opie, Sunday Magazine (1890): 454. 94. Walker, Marriage, 30. 95. Amelia Opie to unknown correspondent, 28 February 1842, Norfolk Record Office, Norwich.