The Sociability of Protest: Amelia Alderson and the Norwich Cabinet of 1794

Abstract

ABSTRACT Amelia Alderson (later Opie) first published her poetry and prose in the progressive Norwich periodical The Cabinet soon after her return from London in 1794, where she had attended the Treason Trials and spent a considerable amount of time with William Godwin and other members of his circle. Alderson’s work during this period emerges out of her movement between Norwich and London, as well as between public spaces of political action and semi-private spaces of conversation. Encouraged to pursue a rhetoric of Godwinian rationality by the man himself, Alderson was also drawn to a counter-mode of discourse that embraced the performance of heightened feeling, drawing upon rhetorical flourishes and plot devices from sentimental poetry and the novel in order to evoke first empathy and then political enthusiasm from the reader. Alderson’s contributions to The Cabinet complicate the periodical’s representation of male duty and progressive patriotism by presenting the dilemma of the female citizen, caught as she is between filial duty, romantic love, and her own desire for “liberty” (of physical movement, belief, and action), and thus Alderson mediates between various modes of masculine Romantic sociability and political discourse, even as she generates an alternative (and explicitly feminine) voice of protest.