ABSTRACT
The G. M. Hopkins's family was prosperous, cultivated and, on both sides, had connections with the fine arts. Hopkins's great-uncle on his mother's side, Richard Lane, was Gainsborough's great-nephew and himself a distinguished line-engraver and lithographer who exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy. The Hopkins family was clearly a closely-knit and affectionate one, with strongly shared interests in poetry, painting, music and word play. His love of the Classics remained, indeed grew stronger. But he had clearly outgrown Highgate and its restrictions. The Balliol that Hopkins went up to in April 1863 was a small college of fewer than a hundred undergraduates, but a very distinguished one. After a long period of intellectual lethargy that had afflicted most of Oxford, Balliol had been one of the first colleges in the 1830s to reform itself, to set high standards of scholarship and intellectual enquiry and, above all, of dedicated teaching.
