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.

This chapter reviews the influence the Tractarian Movement had on Hopkins. It provides an overview both of the ecclesiastical discussions and disputes which shaped Hopkins as a young man, and of the Tractarian literary and theological environment into which we can place his poetic output. It discusses the religious controversies Hopkins encountered in his undergraduate years, particularly around the perceived ‘Romanism’ of the Tractarian Movement. It then considers the themes of reserve and sacramentality characteristic of Tractarian poetry before turning once again to theology. Hopkins’s encounter with patristic ideas, it is suggested, proved deeply formative. The chapter ends with a brief reflection on how the Tractarian theology of participation and presence is apparent throughout Hopkins’s mature work.

Gerard Manley Hopkins embraced Roman Catholic sacramental theology. Grace, which creates recipients anew in their deepest selves, may be offered within sacraments or outside of them. A valid sacrament establishes a formal relationship; this ‘thing-which-is-also-a-sign’ distinguishes sacraments from other sources of grace. The words consecrating the Eucharist, Hopkins believed, literally embody Christ upon the altar – unlike poems. Sacraments require physical, not merely intellectual elements. Poems are more like ‘sacramentals’, which do not establish a reality without intellectual recognition and willed assent. Keenly aware of the relation between nature’s physicality and the physicality of sacraments, Hopkins did not confuse natural awareness of God’s goodness with sacramental grace, and rejected pantheism. He developed his personal vision of Catholic sacraments and their relation to Nature through Tractarians like Henry Parry Liddon, as well as the aesthetics of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Ruskin.