Chapter 4 - Northern England

Summary

This chapter offers a reconsideration of what might appear a fairly unproductive period in Hopkins’s writing life, at least when seen in comparison to his Welsh and Irish phases. It discusses the years Hopkins spent in northern England, first during his Jesuit training and then later in his work as a priest. The chapter begins by outlining Hopkins’s varied experience of northern England, both while based at Stonyhurst College in rural Lancashire, and in his postings in industrial and urban centres in the north-west. It considers his responses to these locations via his poem ‘Felix Randal’, a poem written while Hopkins was based in Liverpool. Proposing that the poem’s language owes much to Hopkins’s knowledge of Lancashire, the chapter makes a case for ‘Felix Randal’ as revealing Hopkins’s ideal northern England.