Purchases, 1959-1967 (R1126, R3217, R3352)
Open for research
Joan M. Sibley, 2010
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born 28 July 1844 in Stratford, Essex, near London as the first of nine children of Manley and Catherine "Kate" (Smith) Hopkins. His father founded a marine insurance firm and was also a published poet, and his mother, who was the well-educated daughter of a London physician, was fond of music and reading. Both the Hopkins and Smith families included artists, and Gerard displayed the family skill in the detailed sketches that he made throughout his life.
Hopkins attended Cholmondeley Grammar School at Highgate from 1854 to 1863, where one of his friends was Ernest Hartley Coleridge, the grandson of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Hopkins' earliest extant poem,
In 1866, Hopkins converted to Catholicism, greatly shocking his High Church Anglican family. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1868 (destroying the poetry he had written) and studied theology at St. Beuno's College in Wales from 1874 to 1877. The Welsh language and its poetry inspired him to write once again and also led to his poetical innovations and techniques such as "sprung rhythm."
After his ordination in 1877, Hopkins served variously as a missioner, preacher, and parish priest in Oxford and London, and in the manufacturing cities of Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow. He also taught Latin and Greek at Stonyhurst College, Lancaster, and at University College, Dublin. His years in Ireland, marked by overwork and poor health, provoked a series of poems known as the "terrible sonnets," reflecting his melancholy dejection. He died of typhoid on June 8, 1889, in Dublin.
Because Hopkins put his responsibilities as a priest before his poetry, his literary output was slim; apart from a few poems, he was not published during his own lifetime. However his experiments in prosody (especially sprung rhythm), his concept of inscape, and his use of imagery established him as a daring innovator amongst his fellow Victorian poets, one whom poet and critic John Crowe Ransom called the first modern poet.
Bump, Jerome.
Everett, Glen.
The Gerard Manley Hopkins Collection includes manuscripts for four of Hopkins' poems, page proofs for the first edition of
Hopkins' poetry manuscripts date from 1877-1879 and include
Series II. contains letters written circa 1861 to 1888 by Hopkins to the Irish poet and novelist Katharine Tynan, his brother Everard Hopkins, his sister Grace Hopkins, and his father Manley Hopkins. A letter to a professor Müncke dates from Hopkins' time at Highgate, 1854-1863. Typed transcripts of most of these letters are also present.
The bulk of the items that make up Series III., Works and Letters by Others, were created by members of the Hopkins and Smith families. These range from letters between his relations (among the correspondents are his father, mother, brothers Arthur and Lionel Charles, and sisters Grace and Kate) as well as drawings by various family members, and even a keepsake piece of unused lace worked for Queen Victoria's wedding dress in 1839 that was given to one of Hopkins' aunts. Family manuscripts include a poem by his brother Everard (dated 1900) as well as two juvenile stories (1854) and a program for an amateur entertainment (1863) in which Hopkins and other relations appeared.
Additional Hopkins materials are located elsewhere in the Ransom Center. The Ernest Hartley Coleridge manuscripts collection holds seven letters written by Hopkins to Ernest Hartley Coleridge between 1862 and 1867. In the Photography Collection, the Hopkins Literary File Collection includes 17 photographs, chiefly portraits of Hopkins and members of his family. The Art Collection holds a religious icon with Virgin and Child that was owned by Hopkins and an additional four sketches by a Hopkins family member (items 85.41.1-4). The Vertical File Collection contains clippings about Hopkins and other printed ephemera, most notably several copies of his father's bookplate with the family coat of arms (flaming tower) and motto "Esse quam videri" ("It is better to be than to seem").
The collection of Gerard Manley Hopkins papers at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University includes drafts and copies of poems, and some personal papers.