ABSTRACT
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on 28 July 1844 at Stratford, Essex. He was the eldest of nine children. His father, a minor poet (though by profession the head of a firm of average adjusters), wrote The Philosopher's Stone (1843), and Spicilegium Poeticum (1892). The involvement in settling insurance for trading vessels and dealing with claims after shipwrecks may be traced in two of H.'s poems: The Wreck of the Deutschland and The Loss of the Eurydice. Two of his brothers (Arthur and Everard) became professional artists, and from an early age he himself took a great interest in draughtsmanship, producing landscapes in which the Pre-Raphaelite tradition of rendering the particularity of the scene is pursued to an extreme analogous to that of his verbal descriptions of nature. The family background was highly congenial to the budding creative artist.
