Details
HOPKINS, GERARD MANLEY. Autograph letter signed ("Gerard M. Hopkins S.J.") to his close friend Canon Richard Watson Dixon, Milltown Park, Milltown, Ireland, 25 October 1884. 3 pages, 8vo, on imprinted stationery of University College, Dublin (the college name and address crossed through by Hopkins), with a few revisions.
A very good letter mainly concerned with a notice about Dixon that Thomas Arnold (Matthew Arnold's elder brother and a literary historian) had asked Hopkins to write for a new edition of his A Manual of English Literature (1885). "I am heartily ashamed of myself that I never answered your most kind and comforting letter received on Galway Bay in the summer. Neither do I answer it now, but only say that I am, thank God, much better since then and now drowned in the last and worst of five examinations. I have 557 papers on hand [to read and grade]: let those who have been thro' the like say what that means. At this most inopportune time Mr. Tom Arnold has asked be to write a short notice of you for the forthcoming new edition of his handbook of English Literature and somehow or other [I] must do it. Therefore please fill up the following and send it [to] me without delay here (where I am come for quiet). It of course is a rough draft..." Hopkins then devotes a page of the letter, with blank spaces for Dixon to fill in, to his notice, mentioning particularly his subject's Pre-Raphaelite association: "...He matriculated at......College, Oxford,......where and elsewhere [he] enjoyed the friendship of Mr. [Edward] Burne Jones and others who wrote and illustrated the Germ..." Hopkins ends: "...Add any particulars you like, but I do not say they or even all the above can appear, so short is the space at my disposal..." Printed in The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon (1935), no. Letters of Hopkins are rare.
A very good letter mainly concerned with a notice about Dixon that Thomas Arnold (Matthew Arnold's elder brother and a literary historian) had asked Hopkins to write for a new edition of his A Manual of English Literature (1885). "I am heartily ashamed of myself that I never answered your most kind and comforting letter received on Galway Bay in the summer. Neither do I answer it now, but only say that I am, thank God, much better since then and now drowned in the last and worst of five examinations. I have 557 papers on hand [to read and grade]: let those who have been thro' the like say what that means. At this most inopportune time Mr. Tom Arnold has asked be to write a short notice of you for the forthcoming new edition of his handbook of English Literature and somehow or other [I] must do it. Therefore please fill up the following and send it [to] me without delay here (where I am come for quiet). It of course is a rough draft..." Hopkins then devotes a page of the letter, with blank spaces for Dixon to fill in, to his notice, mentioning particularly his subject's Pre-Raphaelite association: "...He matriculated at......College, Oxford,......where and elsewhere [he] enjoyed the friendship of Mr. [Edward] Burne Jones and others who wrote and illustrated the Germ..." Hopkins ends: "...Add any particulars you like, but I do not say they or even all the above can appear, so short is the space at my disposal..." Printed in The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon (1935), no. Letters of Hopkins are rare.