HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE H0091 10/31/00 "HARDY, HOPKINS, & SOME TRIVIA" ======================================================== Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 08:53:21 -0500 (EST) From: Meg Cronin Subject: a joke and hopkins Hello everyone, I keep forgetting to relate a Hardy joke to you. It was made by a student in my seminar--Jessica. We were discussing Return of the Native and class. I was trying to suss out what the students understood of class and position in the 19th c., as complicated by the rustic environment. So we had been talking about Thomasin and Wildeve and the incorrect license and Mrs. Yeobright's disgruntlement about T's humiliation. Some thought Wildeve had deliberately gotten the wrong license. Others thought not; it was just an "accident." Well, I asked: Why is it not okay for Thomasin to return unmarried from heading off with Wildeve, but it seems okay for her to be in reddleman's van alone in the evening? Jessica said, "Because if they fooled around, everyone would know as soon as they saw her." The class howled. I guess the picture of an embarrassed Thomasin all rubbed with red was too much to stand. My real question: Did Hardy know Hopkins's poetry? I realize it was published late in his career. Thanks Meg Meoghan Cronin St. Anselm College mgcronin@anselm.edu ========== Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 13:15:17 -0800 From: Betty Cortus Subject: Re: a joke and hopkins Dear Meg, As far as I can determine Hardy never read Hopkins, but according to Seymour-Smith's biography Hopkins did know Hardy's work and wrote about it to Robert Bridges. By the way, an interesting piece of trivia; GMH's brother Arthur Hopkins did the illustrations for the serial version of _The Return of the Native_. Exerpts of Hardy's correspondence with his illustrator appear in Purdy, and there is more in the _Collected Letters_. Betty Cortus hardycor@mailhost2.csusm PS. I enjoyed the Reddleman anecdote. ========== From: "Alan Shelston" Subject: Re: a joke and hopkins Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 12:53:57 -0000 Meg, I don't think we can establish for sure whether Hardy read Hopkins or not. But Robert Bridges was one of the signatories to the tribute to Hardy that was delivered to him in 1917 (?) - working from memory, and Bridges was responsible for the 1918 first edition of Hopkins's poetyr that came out the following year. Only circumstantial, but it might be of interest. The condition of reddle-men's wives doesn't bear thinking about. Alan Shelston University of Manchester. ========== From: erb@segr.demon.co.uk (Roy Buckle) Subject: Re: a joke and hopkins Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2000 15:13:50 GMT In message <000d01c04402$d16a4580$0306893e@default> you wrote: > The condition of reddle-men's wives doesn't bear thinking about. Couldn't resist-doesn't take much to find an answer. Try: 'A condition of constant red-alert' Roy Buckle ========== Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 10:26:54 -0500 (EST) From: Keith Wilson Subject: Re: a joke and hopkins Not really Hardy-related, but I remember once being shown -- somewhat ruefully -- by the special collections librarian at the University of California at Riverside (where, incidentally, much of T.H. Tilley's Hardy drama-related material ended up) a copy of the 1918 Bridges-edited first edition of Hopkins' poetry, acquired by a previous librarian in part because of a Hopkins (d. 1889) autograph signature on the fly-leaf. This should share an honoured place in any inexplicable literary mysteries catalogue with the notice (still there in 1999) in the Carlyle birthplace museum in Ecclefechan that accompanies a list of attendees at an 80th birthday (1875) dinner for Carlyle. According to the museum-supplied notice (though not the actual contemporary list) these luminaries included Dickens and Wordsworth -- dropping in, no doubt, from the astral plane for a free nosh. Keith Wilson Department of English, University of Ottawa 70 Laurier Avenue East, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5 Telephone/Voice-Mail: (613) 562 5770; Fax: (613) 562-5990 e-mail: kgwilson@aix1.uottawa.ca ========== Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2000 09:57:56 -0600 From: Bill Morgan Subject: Re: a joke and hopkins Along the lines of Keith's mysterious reappearances by dead writers, I can report that on ebay recently there was offered for sale a copy of one of Wilde's books with his autograph, published in 1910. Wilde died in 1900. Such are the extraordinary powers of the literary greats, one supposes. wishing for as much life as is allowed and none thereafter, Bill Morgan ========== From: "James Gibson" Subject: Hardy and Hopkins Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 17:46:12 -0000 Dear Meg As Gerard's brother, Arthur, was the illustrator of the serial version of The Return of the Native (1878) it is not surprising he knew about Hardy the novelist.ÊÊ Blunden in his Thomas Hardy (1941) mentions Gerard's 'writing to Robert Bridges on October 28th, 1886, as follows: 'In my judgement the amount of gift and genius which goes into novels in the English literature of this generation is perhaps not much inferior to what made Elizabethan drama, and unhappily it is in great part wasted.ÊÊ How admirable are Blackmore and Hardy!... Do you know the bonfire scene in The Return of the Native and still better the sword-exercise scene in the Madding Crowd, breathing epic?Ê or the wife-sale in The Mayor of Casterbridge....(p56).ÊÊ Ê ÊIt has been pointed out more than once that the following passage in The Return may have an influence on Hopkins' poem 'The Windhover': 'While she looked a heron arose from that side of the sky and flew on with his face towards the sun.ÊÊ He had come dripping wet from some pool in the valleys, and as he flew the edges and lining of his wings,Ê his thighs, and his breast were so caught by the bright sunbeams that he appeared as if formed of burnished silver.' Ê As Hardy's first book of verse was not published until nine years after Hopkins' death in 1889, and Hopkins' first collection of verse was not published intil 1919 and then had a very small sale, it seems almost impossible that Hardy's poetry could have any influence on Hopkins' work, and that Hopkins' poetry is unlikely to have had any influence on Hardy's. Ê James Gibson. ==========