When the British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was studying at Oxford University in 1866, he decided after much intellectual grinding of teeth to convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. He spoke with John Henry Newman, Oxford’s most famous convert, after he made his decision.  Hopkins, who came from a large and loving family, dreaded telling his parents.  He was right to fear their reaction. Manley and Kate Hopkins, a distinguished and cultivated couple, were devastated by the news. It was almost as if their son had been killed.

Leaving aside the doctrinal differences that led to Hopkins’ decision, I am fascinated by his family’s reaction and by what it says about the vast gulf between that time and ours. Today, parents generally consider their adult children (Hopkins was twenty-two) to be intellectually independent, in no need of philosophical guidance whatsoever. Or, do they? Perhaps the  reaction of the Hopkins family is similar to the way atheist parents might react today if they were told by their son he was going to become an evangelical Christian.

Manley Hopkins, who was a successful businessman and a man of letters, wrote to one of his son’s friends begging him to “save him from throwing a pure life and a somewhat unusual intellect away in the cold limbo which Rome assigns to her English converts.” Manley disagreed with his son’s theological position, but also feared how Gerard would be treated as a Catholic outsider. There was a blizzard of gut-wrenching letters between Hopkins and his parents in the weeks just before his official conversion.

Hopkins wrote:

 You are so kind as not to forbid me your house, to which I have no claim, on condition, if I understand, that I promise not to try to convert my brothers and sisters. Before I can promise this, I must get permission [presumably from Catholic authorities], wh. I have no doubt will be given. Of course this promise will not apply after they come of age.

Manley wrote to his son:

O Gerard my darling boy are you indeed gone from me?

Hopkins wrote to his distressed mother:

Your letters, wh. [sic] show the utmost fondness, suppose none on my part and the more you think me hard and cold and that I repel and throw you off the more I am helpless not to write as if it were true. In this way I have no relief. You might believe that I suffer too. I am your loving son.

In reading these letters, one is struck by the intimacy of this family. The famous “cult of domesticity” of Victorian times was more than just superficial domestic preening. Among the cultivated, each family was a gathering of minds. The disharmony caused by Hopkins’ decision could only take place in a world where intellectual harmony was prized within the home.

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