First published among the poems included in the first edition of The Father and Daughter(1801), “The Negro Boy’s Tale” was re-issued in volume form more than twenty years later as part of Harvey and Darton’s catalogue of anti-slavery literature for children. Opie added a prefatory “Address to Children” giving a brief history of the abolition movement and exhorting her young readers “to endeavour to remove all the sufferings of your Black fellow-creatures, as well as of sufferers over the whole world.” Two years later she published a second anti-slavery poem for children, The Black Man’s Lament; or, How to Make Sugar, also with Harvey and Darton.
Editions
—. The Negro Boy’s Tale, a Poem, Addressed to Children. London/Norwich: Harvey and Darton/S. Wilkin, 1824.
Criticism
Eberle, Roxanne.”‘Tales of Truth?’: Amelia Opie’s Antislavery Poetics.” Romanticism and Women Poets: Opening the Doors of Reception, edited by Harriet Kramer Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt, UP of Kentucky, 1999, pp.71-98.
Farrant, Ann. “Amelia Opie’s Anti-Slavery Poems for Children.” Children’s Books History Society Newsletter, vol 74, 2002, pp.12-6.
The Amelia Alderson Opie Archive 