Amelia Opie was born in 1769 in the old city of Norwich, within reach of
the invigorating breezes of the great North Sea. Her youth must have
been somewhat solitary; she was the only child of a kind and cultivated
physician, Doctor James Alderson, whose younger brother, a barrister,
also living in Norwich, became the father of Baron Alderson. Her mother
died in her early youth. From her father, however, little Amelia seems
to have had the love and indulgence of over half a century, a tender and
admiring love which she returned with all her heart's devotion. She was
the pride and darling of his home, and throughout her long life her
father's approbation was the one chief motive of her existence. Spoiling
is a vexed question, but as a rule people get so much stern justice from
all the rest of the world that it seems well that their parents should
love and comfort them in youth for the many disgraces and difficulties
yet to come.
Her mother is described as a delicate, high-minded woman, 'somewhat of a
disciplinarian,' says Mrs. Opie's excellent biographer, Miss Brightwell,
but she died too soon to carry her theories into practice. Miss Brightwell
suggests that 'Mrs. Opie might have been more demure and decorous had
her mother lived, but perhaps less charming.' There are some verses
addressed to her mother in Mrs. Opie's papers in which it must be
confessed that the remembrance of her admonition plays a most important
part--
Hark! clearer still thy voice I hear.
Again reproof in accents mild,
Seems whispering in my conscious ear,
and so on.
Some of Mrs. Alderson's attempts at discipline seemed unusual and
experimental; the little girl was timid, afraid of black people, of
black beetles, and of human skeletons. She was given the skeleton to
play with, and the beetles to hold in her hand. One feels more sympathy
with the way in which she was gently reconciled to the poor negro with
the frightening black face--by being told the story of his wrongs. But
with the poor mother's untimely death all this maternal supervision
came to an end. 'Amelia, your mother is gone; may you never have reason
to blush when you remember her!' her father said as he clasped his
little orphan to his heart; and all her life long Amelia remembered
those words.
There is a pretty reminiscence of her childhood from a beginning of the
memoir which was never written:--'One of my earliest recollections is of
gazing on the bright blue sky as I lay in my little bed before my hour
of rising came, listening with delighted attention to the ringing of a
peal of bells. I had heard that heaven was beyond those blue skies, and
I had been taught that _there_ was the home of the good, and I fancied
that those sweet bells were ringing in heaven.' The bells were ringing
for the Norwich Assizes, which played an important part in our little
heroine's life, and which must have been associated with many of her
early memories.
The little girl seems to have been allowed more liberty than is usually
given to children. 'As soon as I was old enough to enjoy a procession,'
she says, 'I was taken to see the Judges come in. Youthful pages in
pretty dresses ran by the side of the High Sheriff's carriage, in which
the Judges sat, while the coaches drove slowly and with a solemnity
becoming the high and awful office of those whom they contained.... With
reverence ever did I behold the Judges' wigs, the scarlet robes they
wore, and even the white wand of the Sheriff.'
There is a description which in after years might have made a pretty
picture for her husband's pencil of the little maiden wandering into the
court one day, and called by a kind old Judge to sit beside him upon the
bench. She goes on to recount how next day she was there again; and when
some attendant of the court wanted her to leave the place, saying not
unnaturally, 'Go, Miss, this is no place for you; be advised,' the Judge
again interfered, and ordered the enterprising little girl to be brought
to her old place upon the cushion by his side. The story gives one a
curious impression of a child's life and education. She seems to have
come and gone alone, capable, intelligent, unabashed, interested in all
the events and humours of the place.
Children have among other things a very vivid sense of citizenship
and public spirit, somewhat put out in later life by the rush of
personal feeling, but in childhood the personal events are so few and
so irresponsible that public affairs become an actual part of life and
of experience. While their elders are still discussing the news and
weighing its importance, it is already a part of the children's life.
Little Amelia Alderson must have been a happy child, free, affectionate,
independent; grateful, as a child should be, towards those who befriended
her. One of her teachers was a French dancing-master called Christian,
for whom she had a warm regard. She relates that long afterwards she
came with her husband and a friend to visit the Dutch church at Norwich.
'The two gentlemen were engaged in looking round and making their
observations, and I, finding myself somewhat cold, began to hop and
dance upon the spot where I stood, when my eyes chanced to fall upon
the pavement below, and I started at beholding the well-known name of
Christian graved upon the slab; I stopped in dismay, shocked to find
that I had actually been dancing upon the grave of my old master--he who
first taught me to dance.'