To commemorate Hopkins’ time teaching at the Oratory School (September 1867 – April 1868), the Hopkins Society is holding a day-event with lectures, visits to the Oratory Church and its Museum, together with lunch at a nearby cafe.

We shall be meeting at Birmingham Oratory, 141 Hagley Rd, Edgbaston B16 8UE.

Programme

10:00am:  Arrival and tea/coffee.

10:30am:  Revisiting ‘Inscape’ and ‘Instress’: an exploration of their origins,
Lecture by Dr Jill Robson, Hopkins Society UK.

12:00pm:  Lunch at Café Rumi, 205 Hagley Road, Birmingham.

1:30pm:    Visit to the Museum of Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman and the Oratory Church.

2:30pm:    Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Idea of a University
Lecture by Philip Healy, Hopkins Society UK.

3:45pm:    Tea/coffee and departure.

The cost for the day, inclusive of tea and coffee, is £40 per person, and £20 for students (full time education or theological training). At lunchtime we will go to Café Rumi for pre-ordered food; this is not included in the cost for the day. Please note, the closing date for registration is 18 September 2023.

To register and pay for the event, please download, complete and return this registration form:

On receipt of your registration form, you will be sent the Café Rumi menu to pre-order your lunch. You will be able to pay for your lunch on arrival at Café Rumi.

10.15 am: Arrival and coffee/tea.

10.45 am: Morning lecture:

2023 Annual Hopkins Lecture

‘ “Daily make me harder hope”: Hopkins and the place of the poet’ (Dr Rebekah Lamb, University of St Andrews).

12.15 pm: Walk in the grounds and readings of Hopkins’s springtime poems.

1.15 pm: Lunch

2.15 pm: Afternoon lecture:

‘Punctuation and Prosodic Markings in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ (Irene Kyffin, Hopkins Society).

3.30-4.00 pm: Tea/coffee and departure.

The cost for the day, inclusive of two course lunch and teas and coffee: £25.00 per person.

To register, please download the Booking Form here, and follow the instructions for completion.

5.00 – 6.00 pm
Theme: Trees.

Details will be circulated to members in advance.

Friday 14 to Sunday 16 October at the Christian Heritage Centre, Stonyhurst 

The weekend had as its focus Hopkins, science and poetry.

The programme included the Hopkins Lecture on ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins and his letters to Nature’ by Dr Jill Robson and:

• Dr Anna Nickerson (Cambridge University) gave a talk on her research in progress for her forthcoming book, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Epistemology: Poetry and the Manifoldness of Knowledge (Bloomsbury);
• A visit to Whalley Abbey;
• A presentation by Elaine Marshall on Ribblesdale.

Sunday included a Eucharist at which recently deceased members of the Society, Lance Pierson and Chris Proudfoot, were remembered.

The Theme: Hopkins, Voice, and Echo.
When trying to define the terms “underthought” and “overthought,” Gerard Manley Hopkins observed, “Perhaps what I ought to say is that the underthought is commonly an echo or shadow of the overthought, something like canons and repetitions in music, treated in a different manner, but that sometimes it may be independent of it.” Hopkins’s poem “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” demonstrates the most obvious thematic and structural ways in which echo, voice, and dialogue function in his writings. The conference will feature presentations that will discuss voice and echo broadly defined, as well as the textual networks, intersections, or recontextualizations that inform Hopkins’s poetry, and the intertextual practices and voices (allusion, citation, translation, pastiche, parody) shaping his prose and verse. Papers that examine his epistolary voices, the homiletic voice of Fr Hopkins, or Hopkins as echo in other poets’ works, would also be welcome.

Keynote Speaker
We are pleased to announce that Martin Dubois has accepted our invitation to be the Keynote Speaker at this year’s conference. Martin Dubois is Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK. His first book, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience, appeared in 2017. He is currently editing Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context, a collection of thirty-eight essays on Hopkins to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.
 
Organising Committee:
Paul Kelly (Chair), Lesley Higgins, Amanda Paxton, Stephen Tardif, Frank Fennell

We met in St Bartholomew’s Church in Haslemere, which has a memorial window to Gerard Manley Hopkins donated by his grieving parents less than a year after his death. It was in memory of a dear son – he was not a famous poet then. Rather surprisingly, the stained-glass window next to it is a memorial to the Poet Laureate Tennyson, who had also lived there. Gerard’s parents and family moved to Haslemere from Hampstead three years before he died.

He visited Haslemere only once, but his parents, sisters and brothers lived on in a house built for them, until the last one died in 1952. So there is a long Hopkins family association with Haslemere.

During the visit, we heard about the history and iconography of the GMH memorial window.  We also heard from a local historian about the involvement of the Hopkins family. We visited the family house (at least seeing it from the outside), and saw various family graves. 

The programme for the day:

• 10.30am Coffee at the Link
• 11.00am ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins and his family in Haslemere’ – Katherine Jessel
• 12.15pm ’Suffering and Transformation: the history and iconography of the memorial window’ – Dr Jill Robson
• 1.15pm Lunch
• 2.30pm The churchyard and the Garth (viewing)
• 3.30pm ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins the composer ‘ – Michael Burgess
• 4.30pm Tea and depart

2 October 2021. We had originally planned with the Betjeman Society to have The Highgate Highflyers conference in person during the first weekend of October. After consulting the ALS committee, it was held online. 

During that day there were online talks by Lance Pierson on ‘Poetry’s Odd Couple’ by Lance Pierson about the links between Hopkins and Betjeman;  Dr Jane Wright on ‘Making Sense of Hopkins’Poetry’; Dr Jill Robson on ‘Hopkins, Betjeman and Victorian Church Architecture’ and Julia Hudson on the ‘Highgate School Archives of the Two Poets’. At first sight they seem very different poets, but there are many points of intersection between the two in their lives, poetry and interests.

It was a very successful day with excellent sessions by the contributors. Robin Pierson, Lance’s son read Lance’s session as he was not well enough on the day (although he was present via zoom). At the UK Hopkins Society Steering Group meeting on October 28, the President, Michael Burgess paid tribute to Lance’s work with this day as he had spearheaded the whole enterprise from the first meetings in 2019 through to October on behalf of both the Hopkins and Betjeman Societies.