Editing Gerard Manley Hopkins's Letters

At present Oxford University Press are publishing the Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins in eight volumes. The General Editors are Lesley Higgins and Michael Suarez and there are six other members of the editorial team, including Philip Endean, S.J., Jude Nixon, Kelsey Thornton and myself. Professor Lesley Higgins has already produced the Oxford Essays (vol. iv) and Professor Thornton and I are working on the letters, which will be the next part of the project to be published.
(Lesley Higgins presents a feminist view of Hopkins's Poetry at The Hopkins Festival)

The letters will appear in two volumes, arranged chronologically with the incorporation of as many replies as we can find. It will include alterations to the text and information about the envelopes giving posting times and places and be accompanied by extensive annotation. The volumes produced by Professor Thornton and myself are supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain, to whom we are very grateful, for the work would simply not be possible without their assistance.

To-night, I thought that I would talk about a fragment of a letter that we discovered recently and set it in context. This is work in progress - we haven't yet unravelled all the references.

The fragment has up to now simply been considered within the context of Hopkins's drawings where it is plate 6 in Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins , edited by Humphry House and Graham Storey. Recently I noticed a fragment of writing on the verso of this drawing. We believe that it is part of a letter to Arthur, the brother next but one to Gerard in the family. We think this partly because of the tone and partly because the letter has come down through Arthur's descendants, the Handley-Derry family, with one written by Gerard to Arthur in 1881.

Arthur was the brother with whom Gerard went on his most productive sketching trips during a family holiday on the Isle of Wight in 1863. Arthur later became a professional illustrator, working for the Illustrated London News , the Graphic , Punch and as illustrator for various novels, most famously Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native . He also painted in water-colours and oils. His pencil drawings are superb.

Gerard sent other decorated letters to his siblings such as that shown as Plate 7 in the Journals and Papers. Unlike the first one where the drawing occurs below the signature, this is clearly a decorated salutation but it helps to provide a context of the sort of illustration that Gerard sent to his brothers and sisters. Here, in this salutation to Arthur, there is plenty of Gerard's imaginative flare visible in his modifications to decoration used in medieval illuminated manuscripts: he replaces stylised Italianate foliage with natural bracken, for example, and makes the A of 'Arthur' a support for a cooking pot above a fire; we might guess that this letter was written in winter since there are no leaves on the trees and the liquid in the pail/ churn has turned to icicles.

Another charming salutation, in a letter to Gerard's sister Milicent, has a wonderful combination of practicality and fancy (Plate 5 in the published Journals ). It shows a beetle who is a passenger in a hazelnut shell that serves as a carriage drawn by a little steam engine. The hazelnut shell carriage is attached to the engine by cotton and a tack. The beetle is drawn with observational accuracy and Gerard seems to have considered how such a toy train might be made, with the wheels mounted on pins; the engine seems to be made of a bit of wood with a twisted paper funnel, and yet, with wonderful fancy, it exudes smoke- and so on.

There was a tradition of sending illustrated letters within the Hopkins/ or Smith family. Catherine, Gerard's mother, received a number decorated with rather beautifully drawn foliage from several of her sisters and Maria, her sister who married George Giberne, an experimenter with photography from about 1850, used photogenic drawings of leaves for some of her letters. So Gerard had family examples of personally decorated letters though none of the others were as inventive as his.

The caption to the drawing on the new letter fragment ( Journals , plate 6) reads: 'Fashionable Variation of the Sinking figure in the Lancers; now called the "Setting of the Evening Star"'. For a long time I thought that Humphry House and Graham Storey had made a rare mistake in their transcription and that it should be the sinking figure in the 'dancers'. However, 'Lancers' is far more interesting, and confirmed by an upper case L on the verso. The Lancer was a ballroom dance that was imported from the Continent with troops returning from the Napoleonic wars. It became the dance at Almack's in 1817. Almack's was a club for men and women which opened in St James in London in 1765.

It was the place to be seen in early nineteenth-century London - it was said to be more important to be allowed in there than to 'come out'/ be introduced at court. Admission, by the season, was controlled by a succession of aristocratic ladies such as Anne Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry, and later the Countess de Lieven (wife of the Russian ambassador) and Princess Esterhazy (wife of the Austrian ambassador). They decided who could buy non-transferable vouchers costing ten guineas a year, and whose vouchers would not be renewed or who might abruptly be excluded because their behaviour had been unacceptable.

One of the people they admitted was the very poor Irish poet, Thomas Moore, who wrote an amusing account of the battle between native English Country Dance and the Quadrille (of which the Lancer was a type). The poem seems to have been influenced by Pope's 'Rape of the Lock' because the dispute is depicted as a mini battle between Country Dance personified as an English nymph and Quadrille personified as a French coquette. Country Dance, driven from the city by the popularity of the quadrille, decides to attend a New Year's ball in the country. As she approaches the door of the village hall she hears violinists playing an aria by Rossini and fears that even here her enemy has invaded. However, she summons up her courage and enters, only to find herself face to face with the 'cat-like' Mamselle Quadrille, the 'ideal' French beauty. Quadrille dances so 'slidingly', so near the floor that it seems she has made a 'compact' never to part from contact with mother earth. Country Dance, by contrast, is called 'fresh' and 'frank', English from head to toe, she's 'a little gauche', given to 'skips and bounces' that endanger her gowns and play 'the devil' with flounces. The two compete and, of course, Country Dance, ousts her rival.

The drawing in Gerard's letter of five young women dancing reveals a side of the him that we are usually unaware of: his interest in contemporary social fashions. The dancer in the foreground, who is drawn with greatest detail, has a series of eight (or possibly nine) bows on her dress and two in her hair. I thought that these were simply bows but they have been made so prominent that they may also be representing stars in a constellation surrounding the setting of the planet Venus, the morning, and the evening star. Alternatively, it may be that the stars in a constellation are signified by the other four dancers. Either way we would have two superimposed images: women in ball dresses, and the planet seen within a constellation. This superimposition is found in Hopkins's poetry, as for example, in the poem 'Moonrise June 19/ 1876', in which he records glancing out of his window very early one morning to see a crescent moon just rising above a Welsh mountain and describes the crescent moon as 'the fringe of a fingernail held to the candle'. Hopkins's use of metaphor is striking because of his gift for evocative wording and his ability to recognise similarities regardless of disproportion in size, such as the moon and the tip of a fingernail.

Because Kelsey and I are presenting the letters in chronological order, we need to be able to date each one as closely as possible. From the handwriting I would guess that this fragment is no later than mid-1865, and 1862 to early 1864 would be more likely. We have rather little by which to judge Hopkins's writing before 1862. Other clues come from the allusions, the most intriguing of which reads: 'Last Saturday Aunt Fanny and I went to the Crystal Palace. There was a concert - Madam Lemmens-Sherrington and Mr. Santley sang. One of the songs was from Victorine and anoth.' And there it breaks off.The allusions are most easily tackled in the order in which they appear: Aunt Fanny was Frances Smith, one of Gerard's mother's sisters, and we know from his Journals that he borrowed a music book from her and sent her a couple of letters between September and December 1864 ( Journals , p. 44).

The way in which Hopkins mentions the Crystal Palace and the concert sounds as if the concert was not the principal reason for going to the place: Last Saturday Aunt Fanny and I went to the Crystal Palace. There was a concert' rather than 'Last Saturday Aunt Fanny and I went to a concert. It was at the Crystal Palace.'

So why should he have gone there and what might he have seen? The Crystal Palace to which Hopkins was referring was the rebuilt edifice at Sydenham. The original Palace was constructed at Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The rebuilt structure was some considerable way south of the city centre on a hill at Sydenham, one of the highest places in the London area so the Palace could be seen glinting in the sun from many places within the city.

Two railway lines and two stations were constructed and the area became a popular suburb. Construction on the palace started in 1852 and the building was opened by Queen Victoria in 1854. Called the Palace of the People it cost £1.5 million and over £60,000 in upkeep annually - a colossal sum but it was an amazing place. The main building, exclusive of wings and colonnades, was 1,850 feet long (approximately 600 metres) and over 400 feet wide (about 120 metres), and was composed of 9,642 tons of iron and twenty-five acres of glass.

The rebuilt Crystal Palace had a central transept that was made much higher than in the original building, and the north and south transepts and the two towers were new. The towers were designed to give the force necessary for the decorative fountains, which surpassed those of Versailles; there were 11,000 jets of water, the highest of which rose to a height of over two hundred feet. The towers were each 282 feet high (107 feet higher than Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square). It took several attempts to construct them in a way that was strong enough to take the force of the water.

However, they were then so strong that in 1942, when it was feared that they were rather visible and unmistakable landmarks for enemy aircraft, they had to be demolished with dynamite. The park too was extensive, providing a variety of entertainments. There was a 'prehistoric' swamp complete with models of dinosaurs. They were the first prehistoric animals ever built and 'arrived' only 30 years after the first fossils of dinosaurs were discovered. There were lakes and woodland walks, a 'gymnasium' where national contests were held, and a cricket ground. Later a theme park with a rollercoaster was added and a football ground in which some twenty cup finals were held. There was a speed track (used to film the original version of The Italian Affair with Michael Cain).There were fireworks displays at night including early ones in which men in asbestos suits carried out routines that moved wooden frames to which fireworks were attached. (The silliest of the shapes I have seen illustrated were gigantic roosters. Apparently there was also a giant gymnast who carried out cartwheels and gradually disappeared into the night as the frame burnt up - first the legs disappearing so that the torso and arms carried on revolving and then steadily dwindling - rather like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland .)

The palace itself contained rooms displaying art and the architecture from a variety of places and historical periods: Egyptian, Grecian, Pompeian. Medieval, Spanish (the Alhambra) among others. In the week when I think Hopkins may have been there the following things were advertised in The Times :