Chapter 2 - Oxford

Summary

This assessment of Hopkins’s undergraduate years at Oxford, from 1863 to 1867, considers the social and physical environments in which he flourished and flailed, the intellectual and cultural opportunities he seized, and the religious conflicts in which he was embroiled. In terms of his undergraduate work, the chapter analyses how the essential elements of the Victorian zeitgeist – historicism and scientism – were a felt presence throughout Hopkins’s essays. In terms of his personal life, Hopkins’s homoeroticism is linked to the negative, self-recriminating ‘selving’ articulated in diary entries and poems. Contexts for his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism are also explored.