498 NOTES AND QUERIES
THE REDISCOVERY OF AMELIA OPIE’S
CROMER NOTEBOOK
IN her 1854 biography of Amelia Opie, Cecilia
Lucy Brightwell describes a notebook in which
the Opie recorded a number of her early
poems:
The sonnet to the memory of her mother
was written . . . at Cromer, in the year 1791;
and is the first in an old manuscript book
containing her earlier poems, many of which
she afterwards published. They were pro-
duced in this and the following year, and
are inscribed ‘Verses written at Cromer.’
This place seems to have been, throughout
life, very dear to her; owing no doubt, in
part, to the fact that she had frequently
spent the summer season there with her
mother in her childhood; hence it became
associated in her mind with these earliest
recollections.1
Brightwell’s biography was written and pub-
lished within a year of Opie’s death, and it is
clear from her discussion of this manuscript
and many others that she had easy access to
a wide range of Opie’s works, both in print and
in manuscript form. The fate of the ‘old manu-
script book’ after this point becomes very mys-
terious. By the time Margaret Macgregor
produced a short biography of Opie with a
bibliography of printed and manuscript
works in 1932, the manuscripts had been
broken up and widely distributed, and the
notebook is not listed in Macgregor’s other-
wise exhaustive census.2 When we began the
research for our Oxford edition of The
Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie,3 we
initiated a search for this particular manuscript
(among many others), but traces of the note-
book had all but disappeared. We did not find
the ‘old manuscript book’ in time for the pub-
lication of The Collected Poems in 2009. We
did, however, continue to search for this
1
Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia
Opie, Selected and Arranged from Her Letters, Diaries, and
Other Manuscripts (Norwich: Fletcher & Alexander, 1854),
38.
2
Margaret Eliot Macgregor, ‘Amelia Alderson Opie:
Worldling and Friend’, Smith College Studies in Modern
Language, xiv.1–2 (1932–3).
3
Shelley King and John Benjamin Pierce (eds), The
Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie (Oxford, 2009).
2014
manuscript, and while working on another re-
search project we were led to the Berg
Collection in the New York Public Library,
and during a quick search under ‘Opie’ in the
card catalogue we found an item titled
‘Evening Walk at Cromer and Other Poems’.4
Upon calling up this item, we were both
surprised—perhaps shocked is a better descrip-
tion—to discover that this was the ‘old manu-
script book’, beginning, just as Brightwell had
Downloaded from http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Connecticut on June 21, 2015
described it, with the ‘Verses written at
Cromer—1791’ and the ‘Sonnet on Visiting
Cromer for the First Time since the Death of
My Mother with Whom I used Frequently to
Visit it’.
The notebook itself is surprisingly substan-
tial, consisting of 333 pages or 165 leaves
bound without a cover.5 It includes forty-six
of Opie’s poems included in The Collected
Poems and forty-eight poems not recorded in
the Oxford edition. One poem is not by Opie—
‘The following lines were written by Mrs L—at
the bottom of my epistle from Caroline to
Henry’—but it is followed by a response
poem written by her. The poems are mainly
written in ink, although pencil corrections are
seen in several of the poems and a few are
written entirely in pencil. In addition, eight
pages are devoted to pencil sketches with
another eight pages including some sketches
intermingled with lines of poetry. There are
also sixty-nine blank pages and eight pages
including short prose passages, as well as
including addresses. Many of the notebook
pages are numbered by Opie, but not all are
numbered, and a break in the numbering be-
tween pages numbered ‘12’ and ‘19’ suggests
4
[Cased] Opie, Amelia (Alderson). Verses written at
Cromer—1791. Holograph collection of poems, unsigned,
dated 1787–April 19, 1793. The Henry W. and Albert A.
Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The
New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations. We would like to thank Director Isaac
Gewirtz and his staff for permission to quote from the
manuscript and for their generous help during our research
of the manuscript.
5
We would like to give special credit to our research as-
sistant, Angela Du, who provided a meticulous transcription
of the notebook and sorted out several bibliographical de-
tails related to the document. Her work was in part spon-
sored by a generous grant from the Queen’s University
Undergraduate Student Summer Research Fellowship.
2014 NOTES AND QUERIES
some pages may have been removed or fallen
out of the book.6
Opie’s use of the book appears to span a
significant period from 1791—just prior to
her first major publication of seventeen
poems in The Cabinet in 1795—through to at
least 1808 when she published her second
major volume of verse, The Warrior’s Return.
However, the notebook also includes tran-
scriptions of works composed outside these
dates. Some of the earliest poems as dated by
Opie include fair copies of ‘Verses, written in
the year 1788 to two young officers who were
remarkable for their attachment to each other’
(309), ‘The Virgin’s First Love’ dated as ‘writ-
ten in 1787’ (242), and a version of ‘The
Complaint’ titled ‘Caroline to Henry—written
in 1787—’ (245). Of works published later,
there is a rough transcription with some edits
of ‘Sonnet’ (The world invites thee—go,
Lorenzo, go) which did not appear in print
until 1825 in The Literary Souvenir. While it
is difficult to establish precisely the end date
of Opie’s use of this notebook, internal evi-
dence gives us a general sense of how her use
of the book changed over time.
In its initial phase, the notebook appears to
have been used for a specific purpose: the tran-
scription of works written in 1791 and 1792 at
Cromer, a small coastal town approximately
twenty-three miles from Opie’s hometown of
Norwich and a place she held dear as a
summer retreat and location closely associated
with fond memories of her mother, who died
31 December 1784 when Opie was only 15
years of age.7 The first Sonnet, ‘On visiting
Cromer for the first time since the death
of . . . [her] Mother’, establishes a context for
the notebook which may have been intentional
on Opie’s part. The titles of some of the early
poems, such as ‘Ode Written on the approach
of a storm—’ (15–19), ‘On leaving Cromer’
(31), and ‘Sonnet—on being forc’d to give up
the hope of revisiting Cromer’ (61), along with
two early subtitles marking out early sections
6
Since pagination is not consistent throughout the note-
book, my references to the notebook will be based on a
consecutive page count of existing recto and verso pages.
Citations to the notebook will be included parenthetically
based on this numbering, not Opie’s which is sometimes in-
consistent or nonexistent.
7
Brightwell, p. 7.
499
of the notebook—‘Verses written at Cromer–
1791’ (1) and ‘Verses written at Cromer—In
the year 1792’ (64)8—suggest that the note-
book may have initially been reserved for
specific use in Cromer on Opie’s many visits
there. It was in a true sense the Cromer
Notebook, being anything but inclusive when
measured against Opie’s prodigious output
through the early 1800s. For instance it in-
cludes only eight of the seventeen poems
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included in The Cabinet in 1795, five of the
fourteen poems in the first edition of The
Father and Daughter (1801), nine of the
thirty-eight poems in Poems (1802) and nine
of the thirty-seven poems in The Warrior’s
Return (1808). None of the poems included in
her final volume of verses, Lays for the Dead
(1834), appears in the notebook, suggesting it
was not in use at this late date. Thus, the docu-
ment appears to have been in periodic use from
1791 through 1808 at least, but it was not her
only repository or work space for poetic
production.
Indeed, Opie’s habits in the use of the
Cromer Notebook changed over time. Early
use of the book involved a careful transcription
of a fair copy onto recto pages only. The versos
were consistently left blank, but over time the
versos were increasingly used to draft out revi-
sions to passages of poems transcribed on the
rectos. Later in terms of date of composition, it
appears the rectos became locations for either
composition or making fair copies of add-
itional poems. Over time, the notebook was
increasingly used for composition and revision,
with some revisions in pencil, some in ink, and
some including so many layers of revision, it is
difficult to distinguish them or to determine a
final product. The levels of disruption are per-
haps most marked on the poems on pages 26,
30, 154, 158, 172, and 174 which are written
upside down into the notebook.
It is not entirely clear what direct or indirect
relationship the texts in the notebook bear to
the actual publication of Opie’s poems. The
relatively early poem ‘Death’, which appeared
in The Cabinet in 1795, is carefully transcribed
into the notebook on page 165. However, the
8
Opie even adds ‘end of the 2nd year’ on page 89 to in-
dicate the closure of the 1792 section of the notebook. After
this, however, there are no indicators of separate sections.
500 NOTES AND QUERIES
printed version varies slightly from the manu-
script fair copy in the Cromer Notebook. The
printed version opens
Death, in whose port, we all must seek for shelter!
The fabled Proteus never could assume
More various shapes than thou display’st to man:9
The notebook version begins
Death! thou sure port, where all must seek for shelter,
The fabled Proteus never could assume
More various shapes than thou dost wear to man! (emphasis
added)
Admittedly, the changes are relatively minor,
but it is not clear, even in this particular in-
stance, if the Cromer Notebook version acted
as a copy text and edits were made at or during
printing or if a different manuscript was
used for production of the printed version.
Moreover, line 4 of the Cromer version
shows evidence of a slip in transcription with
Opie first writing ‘The tender stripling who has
seen’ and then stopping to strike out ‘has seen’
and continuing with ‘beholds thy power’. The
transcription could be from a rough draft copy
or even another fair copy. Further study is
needed (especially given the size and scope of
this document), but our initial observations
suggest caution must be exercised in determin-
ing the relationship of these manuscripts to the
published versions.
While it is not possible in this short space to
list all the elements in this document, we have
compiled an initial list of poem titles and note-
book page numbers. The titles are separated
into those included in The Collected Poems
and those not in the Oxford Edition.10
List A: Works included in The Collected Poems
A Mad-Song: 239, 241 (CP 93–4)
Address to Love: 286, 287, 289, 291 (CP 264)
Another on the Same Subject: 101, 103, 104,
105 (CP 75–6)
Death: 165, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177 (CP
20–3)
Elegy to the Memory of the Late Duke of
Bedford: 222 (CP 46–53)
9
King and Pierce, p. 20, ll. 1–3.
10
The titles used in this list correspond to the titles in The
Collected Poems.
2014
Julia, or the Convent of St. Clare: 154, 156,
158, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 199, 201, 202,
203, 205, 207, 209, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216,
217 (CP 154–61)
La Partenza, From Metastasio: 130 (CP 17–9)
Laura: 177, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189
(CP 8–11)
Lines to Laura: 253 (CP 261)
Love Elegy, To Laura: 135, 137, 139
(CP 178–9)
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Ode to Borrowdale in Cumberland: 26, 30,
34, 35, 36, 37, 38 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45
(CP 165–7)
Ode. Written on the Approach of a Storm: 15,
17, 19, 21 (CP 13–4)
Song (I once rejoiced, sweet Evening Gale): 97,
99 (CP 94)
Song (Think not while gayer swains invite):
219, 221 (CP 24)
Song (Was it for this I dearly loved thee?): 118
(CP 171–2)
Song . . . To Laura: 91, 93 (CP 89)
Sonnet (The world invites thee—go Lorenzo,
go): 2, 12, 32 (CP 313–4)
Sonnet on the Approach of Autumn: 29
(CP 176–7)
Sonnet on Visiting Cromer: 1 (CP 3)
Sonnet to Winter: 49, 51 (CP 59)
Sonnet. Written on the Sea Shore: 3, 5
(CP 15)
Stanzas to Cynthio: 121 (CP 174)
Sun Set: 85, 87, 89 (CP 12–3)
Symptoms of Love. To Henry: 146, 147, 149,
151, 152, 153 (CP 113–4)
Sweet Maid I’ve Heard Thy Frequent Sigh: 6,
7, 8, 9 (CP 39)
The Complaint: 245, 246, 247, 248, 250
(CP 96–9)
The Despairing Wanderer: 65, 66, 67, 68, 69,
70, 71 (CP 109–11)
The Emigrant: 172, 174, 290, 292, 294
(CP 38)
The Lucayan’s Song: 254, 256, 258, 260, 302,
304, 306, 308 (CP 168–71)
The Rising of the Lark: 237, 239 (CP 43–5)
The Virgin’s First Love: 242, 243, 244
(CP 101–3)
The Voice of Him I Love: 269, 271 (CP 95)
The Warrior’s Return: 316, 318, 320, 322, 323,
324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 330 (CP 149–53)
These Scenes Belov’d, Upon Whose Tranquil
Shores: 31, 33, 61 (CP 4)
2014 NOTES AND QUERIES
To Anna: 330 (CP 188–9)
To Eolus’s Harp: 106 (CP 103)
To Henry (Suppress that cruel doubt dear
youth!): 128, 129, 131, 133, 299, 301, 303
(CP 187–8)
To Henry (Why bid my trembling lips explain):
89, (CP 141)
To Laura: 74, 75, 77 (CP 177–8)
To Lorenzo: 50 (CP 164)
To Lothario: 295, 296, 297 (CP 187)
To Rosaline.—From the French: 139, 140, 141,
142, 143, 145 (CP 262)
To Twilight: 45, 46, 47, 49 (CP 120–1)
Why Bid My Trembling Lips Explain: 89
(CP 141)
Written on Seeing a Bust of Minerva at Felbrig
Hall: 22 (CP 4)
Yes, Mary Anne, I freely grant: 109 (CP 92)
List B: Works not included in The Collected
Poems
Absence: 123, 125
Epigram: 230
Epigramme: 107
Epigramme (trans): 107, 108
Miss — —: 157, 159
Miss A— H—: 161, 163
On receiving from Mrs F—a sash beautifully
painted by herself: 273
On Refusing to Shew — —the Above
Verses—: 261, 263, 265, 267
On the Springtides: 11, 13, 15
Portraits Miss —: 155, 157
Song (Cease dangerous youth your cruel
praise): 218, 219, 224
Song (Cease Dearest Girl, to Bid My Muse):
117, 119
Song (I wish I were, where Henry Lies!): 231,
233
Song (Kind youth! Thy needless pity spare):
297, 299
Song (Oh thou by fellow feeling sway’d): 5, 7
Song (Say, What is Love? Louisa Cried):
109, 111
Song (Too Tender Youth, I Own Thine Eyes):
119
Song—to Florio: 305, 307
Sonnet (I blame not you ye <xxx> whose
wooded brows): 3
501
Sonnet (Rise mists of Night! & as ye Slowly
Sail): 73
Sonnet suppos’d to be written by Eliza:
51, 53
Sonnet to Mr — — Written in Cumberland,
1790: 58, 59
Sonnet—written at Wroxham, August ye 9th
1792: 95
Sonnet—written in a bower—In Wroxham
Churchyard: 126
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Suppos’d to be written by Eliza: 127
The Contrast: 113, 115, 117
The English of the verb ‘to dash’: 291, 293
The following lines were written by Mrs L— at
the bottom of my epistle from Caroline to
Henry: 22
The Forc’d Marriage: 76, 77, 78, 79, 80,
81, 83
The Laurel and the Rose Tree: 221, 223, 224,
225, 227, 228, 229
The Muse to —: 255, 257, 259, 261
The Sly Question: 53, 54, 55, 57
The Stray Smile—on a Frow’ning Beauty:
249, 251
To — —: 28, 189, 191
To Amelia Alderson: 319, 321
To Dr Aikin: 283
To Eliza: 11
To Laura (Laura, you bid me tell the cause):
191
To Mr L—. Occasion’d by the foregoing: 23,
25, 27, 35
To Mr Th—: 277, 279, 281
To Mrs —: 121
To Mrs Freshfield: 233, 235
To Mrs Th—: 275
To the Poppy: 285
To the Nightingale: 285
Trust me dear youth, thy feeling heart: 123
Verses, written in the year 1788 to two young
officers: 309, 311, 313, 315, 317
While you suffering die: 288
While, veiled in nights, my sorrows flee: 10.
JOHN B. PIERCE AND SHELLEY KING
Queen’s University
doi:10.1093/notesj/gju175
 The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press.
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Advance Access publication 7 November, 2014