The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Volume VI: Sketches and Scholarly Studies, Part II: Musical Settings and Sketches

Sketches and Scholarly Studies: Part II, Musical Settings and Sketches brings together two crucial aspects of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s insatiable drive to create: drawing, predominantly (but not exclusively) from the early part of his life, when he had ambitions to be a painter; and music, from the later part of his life, when he found in music suggestions of a new contact with the eternal.

Hopkins grew up in a home that emphasized cultural and artistic accomplishments; his brothers Arthur and Everard were both professional illustrators, and his sister Grace was an accomplished pianist. Limited as the corpus of Hopkins’s drawings is--four small sketchbooks and a handful of loose drawings--there is certainly evidence to suggest that he might have been a successful illustrator adhering to Ruskinian principles. This edition reproduces the surviving drawings, with a full introduction and annotations placing them in the context of Hopkins’s creative life. His musical compositions are presented in both manuscript facsimiles and new transcriptions, revealing his exploration, in a new mode, of ideas of rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint.

R. K. R. Thornton, Professor Emeritus, University of Birmingham

R. K. R. Thornton, the son of an artist, is retired and balances editing with painting and writing. He was Head of the Department of English at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne until 1990, and a Professor at the University of Birmingham until 2000. He has edited and published on a variety of writers, often supposedly minor figures, including John Clare, Ivor Gurney, Ernest Dowson, and Joseph Skipsey. Hopkins, by no means a minor writer, has occupied much of his time.