ABSTRACT
The poet Gerard Hopkins (he is usually given his middle name, Manley, but he hated it, so I don’t use it) was born in Stratford in 1844 when the place was an Essex village a few miles to the east of London. It was suitable for moderately successful businessmen, like his father, working in the city, which his father was. The house where he was born is long gone, but is marked by a huge lump of rock and an inscription outside the public library on The Grove. St John’s Church, where he was baptised a few years after it was built, is still there, the middle of a lively, noisy town. Hopkins died in 1889.
