CHAPTER I .sx THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING MANLEY .sx 1844-63 .sx Even his name is usually wrong .sx Gerard Hopkins disliked 'Manley' , and seldom used it except on official papers , yet today anyone neglecting to put in his middle name is probably met with a look of momentary mystification and an almost automatic correction of " Oh , Gerard Manley Hopkins " , so that one soon learns to include it , to save time and avoid confusion .sx 'Gerard' , given in honour of the saint , is appropriate enough , but his second name came from his father and his father's forebears , and his uneasiness with it is equally fitting , since in some ways his life was to be an adjustment to his family and to his father in particular .sx 'Manley' had a good bit to do with his once lying in bed contemplating the ugliness of his name until he was so mortified that it was a cure to vainglory simply to recall the thought .sx The play on 'manly' can hardly have escaped Gerard Hopkins .sx It is a word ringing with Victorian values , one that sprang unbidden to the lips of headmasters familiar with Tom Brown's Schooldays and the works of G.A. Henty and which must equally have set the teeth of a generation of schoolboys on edge .sx Honesty , chastity , virility , bravery , frankness , clean fingernails and a host of other major virtues are all comprised in its syllables .sx Above all , for a Victorian , it indicated decent English values .sx A recent study of Ritualism and sexual deviation is called 'UnEnglish and Unmanly' , and the title tells it all .sx Manliness is precisely what Hopkins's father wanted in his eldest son , and the name was to be his guide :sx the importance of being Manley .sx Manley Hopkins ( 1818-1897 ) and his wife Kate ( 1821-1920 ) had nine children , of whom the first and best known was born on 28 July 1844 in Stratford , Essex , where the Hopkins family had been settled for a quarter of a century .sx Stratford was still some way from being the busy part of London that it is today , but it was beginning to lose its rural character .sx Nonetheless , it was a good place for a young couple , married only a year , to begin a family , for it was inexpensive enough for them to live comfortably on what was still a somewhat overextended income .sx Like his father and grandfather , Manley Hopkins was an average adjuster , or marine insurance broker .sx His grandfather , Martin Hopkins , had prospered and risen to the bourgeois respectability of Master of the Glass-Sellers Company and freeman of the City .sx Martin's son , Martin Edward ( father of Manley ) , had made a good marriage to Ann Manley , daughter of a well-to-do Devon family of yeomen farmers who had owned their land for six centuries .sx But Martin Edward was not so good a man at business as his father , and he seems to have had trouble settling to a particular form of insurance and trade .sx For a time he apparently prospered , since in 1830 he gave a subscription of pounds30 to the building of two new chapels , but at his death in 1836 he left the family finances in some disarray , with an estate of only pounds200 .sx His widow , a jolly woman who lived to be ninety years old , with a strong Devon accent to the end , was left with five children , of whom Manley was the eldest son .sx At eighteen he had already been out of school for three years at the death of his father , and he took over responsibility in providing a home for his mother and brothers and sisters .sx During the next few years he learned average adjusting , then in the month his first son was born , he set up his own firm , which is still in business .sx Chestnut House , 87 The Grove , Stratford , was a pleasant three - storied semi-detached house with big rooms and high ceilings , sufficiently large to accommodate Manley Hopkins , his wife , mother , sister and , for a time , two brothers .sx They lived comfortably , if not luxuriously , with a cook , housemaid , nurse and nurse - maid for the rapidly growing family , and presumably daily women to help with the cleaning .sx Large though the household sounds today , it was not far off the standard of a rising young businessman and his family .sx By 1852 , when they left Stratford , the Hopkins family had four children besides Gerard ( one died the following year at twenty-two months ) , and the house was bulging .sx The family sounds conventional enough , but there were some murky corners in it .sx Kate Hopkins , the mother of the rapidly expanding family , was the daughter of a London doctor , John Simm Smith , who had a prosperous practice and a somewhat colourful reputation .sx Among his patients was a Mrs Ann Thwaytes , who had inherited pounds500,000 on her husband's death .sx Dr Smith had been attending her since 1832 and had advised her since then on the administration of her property .sx He had been receiving about pounds2000 annually for his help , as well as some pounds50,000 in gifts .sx As residuary legatees of her estate she named Dr Smith , his brother Samuel and his son John in her will .sx Dr Smith and his brother were to receive pounds180,000 .sx In the lawsuit that naturally resulted on her death , it was established that Mrs Thwaytes believed " that she and Dr Smith were members of the Holy Trinity , that Dr Smith knew all her thoughts , and that she had a special part to play in the Last Judgement , for which event she had prepared the drawing-room of her London house .sx " Although nothing criminal was proven against Dr Smith , the resultant publicity was painful for the Hopkins family , but the money had been useful in acquiring a fine house for the Smiths in Croydon .sx It may also have contributed to the running of Chestnut House .sx Rather less spectacularly but more interestingly for his grandson , Dr Smith had been a fellow student of Keats when walking the hospitals and remembered him well .sx Kate Hopkins came from a family that perhaps seemed on the face of it more likely to produce a great artist than did her husband's .sx Among her connections , admittedly distant , she could boast of Sydney Smith and Gainsborough , while Thomas Lovell Beddoes was the best Mr Hopkins could claim .sx She was naturally motherly and sweet-tempered , and said to be far better educated than most women of her day .sx She was certainly interested in music and poetry , and before her marriage had learned to speak German while staying in Hamburg , although that is perhaps an inadequate basis for the statement of her son's first biographer that she was " a keen student of philosophy , history , and politics " .sx Gerard's many letters to her suggest that she was loving , a trifle too demanding about affection , and generally willing to be a buffer between her husband and her son .sx It is only fair to add that the tone of Gerard's letters to her does not support the claims of his biographer about the breadth of her intellect , and that at some periods of his life his letters seem more dutifully filial than spontaneously loving .sx She was proud of his poems without necessarily understanding them completely .sx Their correspondence was seldom concerned with poetry .sx Manley Hopkins , in spite of having left school so young , was a man of startling breadth of interest , although it sometimes seems spread a bit too thinly ; we are reminded of Gerard's apparent belief that he was capable himself of achieving something remarkable in almost any field that attracted his interest .sx Besides founding Manley Hopkins and Sons and Cookes ( a title that suggests he might have welcomed the interest of Gerard ) , he became a widely recognized authority on average adjusting .sx He acted as Consul-General for the Kingdom of Hawaii in London for over forty years ( of which more later ) , and in the chinks of his life he was constantly busy writing .sx He wrote A Handbook of Averages ; a history of Hawaii that was for a time the standard work because of the way he had read everything about the kingdom he could get his hands on , even though he wrote it in a few months without ever having visited the islands ; A Manual of Marine Insurance ; three volumes of poetry that may be the best ever produced by an average adjuster ; a book on the cardinal numbers ; and an unpublished novel .sx In his spare time he wrote literary criticism and poetry for The Times , Once a Week , Cornhill , and other London periodicals , as well as a series of newsletters about London for a Hawaiian paper , the Polynesian , and occasional verses for almost any happening that caught his fancy .sx The importance of all this activity is not that he was a master of any aspect of it but that it helped create the kind of family atmosphere that nurtures creation in its members by the simple process of taking it for granted .sx Although there is no record that any of his books was ever reviewed , he certainly assumed that writing was intended for the eyes of others , an inherited attitude towards publication that made it difficult for his son to go through life entirely unknown to the literary world .sx Undoubtedly Gerard was greatly influenced by his father's incessant literary activity , but since he did not emulate him directly , it is difficult to be precise about the nature of the influence .sx What is more certain is that Manley Hopkins's writings reflected his attitudes to the Roman Catholic priesthood and to homosexuality , both important in his future dealings with what seemed to him a wayward son .sx His history of Hawaii has occasionally been praised by scholars for its understanding of Roman Catholic priests and its admiration of their work in the islands , with the suggestion that his tolerance may have inspired Gerard's later conversion .sx The truth is quite different , for his approving remarks about Jesuits and other Roman Catholics are quotations from other writers ( e.g. , Richard Henry Dana the younger ) and used primarily as a stick with which to beat the Protestant missionaries .sx The opinions of the Roman Church expressed in his own voice are far from admiring :sx We cannot for a moment praise or defend conduct wherein truth is sacrificed to expediency , or even if it were not blasphemous to say it , to religion ; but the priests of the Roman Church look upon their allegiance as inviolable , and as excusing some acts which the clergy of other churches would disdain and detest .sx They are in the position of privates in an army .sx When the latter take away the lives of men standing opposite to their ranks , men against whom they have no personal quarrel and whom they have never seen before , they look upon themselves as instruments only , scarcely more accountable for the bloodshed than their rifles are .sx The responsibility of life remains with the superior authority ; their own judgement seems taken away , - the voice of conscience to be suspended .sx .sx This was written only four years before Gerard became a Roman Catholic , and it goes a long way to indicate both the attitude of his father and precisely what Gerard was rebelling against .sx It is mildly surprising to find that Manley Hopkins's writings for The Times included such important reviews as those of two major Tennyson poems , The Princess and In Memoriam .sx In a heavily jocular consideration of the latter , he raps Tennyson over the knuckles for two serious faults in what he nonetheless recognizes as perhaps the most important English elegy .sx In the first place , " the enormous exaggeration of the grief " is responsible for our feeling that " Instead of a memorial we have a myth .sx .. The hero is beyond our sympathy .sx " The second major defect " is the tone of - may we say so ?sx - amatory tenderness .sx .. Very sweet and plaintive these verses are ; but who would not give them a feminine application ?sx .sx .. Is it Petrarch whispering to Laura ?sx We really think in that floating remembrances of Shakespeare's sonnets have beguiled Mr. Tennyson .sx .. the taste is displeased when every expression of fondness is sighed out , and the only figure within our view is Amaryllis of the Chancery Bar .sx "