3823. Robert Southey to Amelia Opie, 11 April 1822

 

Address: To/ Mrs Opie/ Norwich
Stamped: KESWICK/ 298
MS: The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, tipped into a graingerised copy of Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, Selected and Arranged from Her Diaries, Letters, and other Manuscripts, 2nd edn (Norwich and London, 1854), between pp. 188–189. ALS; 3p.
Previously published: Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, Selected and Arranged from Her Letters, Diaries, and other Manuscripts (Norwich and London, 1854), pp. 190–191.

Keswick. 11 Apr. 1822
My dear Madam

Your Madeline

(1)

Madeline, A Tale (1822), Opie’s final novel. The eponymous heroine suffers a long illness, but recovers at the end of the novel.

is a great favourite here, & well deserves to be so. The tale is beautifully told, & every where true to nature; – if there be a little of that ideal colouring which belongs to this species of composition as much as to poetry, it is in your hero rather than your heroine. The tragic catastrophe would, as you say, have made the story more perfect, – but it would have made the book painful instead of pleasing in recollection. I am sure that I should not have looked at it a second time, compared one part with another, & dwelt upon particular scenes, if there had been death at the end. And this I think is not so much the weakness of my individual temper as it is a natural feeling. The theatres show it to be so, by the preference which is given to comedy. They who have borne a part in the tragedies of real life (& who is there that can go thro the world without it?) – shrink even from the sorrow which is produced by fiction.

The Quarterly Review will be much better employed in recommending Madeline to notice, than in pointing out in the Pirate beauties which every body has seen, & defects which nobody can have overlooked.

(2)

Walter Scott, The Pirate (1822). It was reviewed by Nassau William Senior (1790–1864; DNB) in Quarterly Review, 26 (January 1822), 455–474, published 30 March 1822.

The part which I bear in that Journal is greatly overrated, & the influence which I possess there quite as much so. For two days I ha years I have been vainly endeavouring to get a book by Sir Howard Douglas

(3)

Southey had tried in vain to persuade the Quarterly to review Howard Douglas’s Observations on the Motives, Errors and Tendency of M. Carnot’s System of Defence (1819), which provided a critique of Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot’s (1753–1823) classic work on fortifications, Traité de la Défense des Places Fortes (1810), on issues such as the effectiveness of vertical fire by defending forces.

reviewed there, tho the subject is of great importance, & national interest as well as national an credit concerned in it. I could not do it myself, because it required scientific knowledge which I do not possess.

To convince you however that your tale has greatly interested me I will write to Mr Gifford, & ask him to admit an article upon it.

(4)

Madeline, A Tale was not reviewed in the Quarterly.

Most likely he will consent; – I cannot be quite sure of this, nor can I promise any thing farther for the paper than that it will be written in right good will. As for my prose, – any bodys prose is mistaken for mine, – & what is far more strange any bodys opinions. The guessing at anonymous writings is almost as much a matter of hap-hazard, – as the attempt to discover any person by their walk & figure at a masquerade

Mrs S. desires me to present her compliments. Remember me to Wm Taylor when you happen to see him.

Fare well my dear Madam
& believe me yrs truly
Robert Southey.

Notes

1. Madeline, A Tale (1822), Opie’s final novel. The eponymous heroine suffers a long illness, but recovers at the end of the novel.[back]
2. Walter Scott, The Pirate (1822). It was reviewed by Nassau William Senior (1790–1864; DNB) in Quarterly Review, 26 (January 1822), 455–474, published 30 March 1822.[back]
3. Southey had tried in vain to persuade the Quarterly to review Howard Douglas’s Observations on the Motives, Errors and Tendency of M. Carnot’s System of Defence (1819), which provided a critique of Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot’s (1753–1823) classic work on fortifications, Traité de la Défense des Places Fortes (1810), on issues such as the effectiveness of vertical fire by defending forces.[back]
4. Madeline, A Tale was not reviewed in the Quarterly.[back]
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