Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World by Catherine Phillips

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A student at Oxford during the years when John Ruskin and Walter Pater had great influence on undergraduates, Hopkins himself skteched and knew a great deal about the contemporary art world.

Hopkins seems to share a great deal with the early Pre-Raphaelites who, following Ruskin, attempted to combine an extreme hard-edge realism with elaborate symbolism derived ultimately from habits of reading scripture common to both Protestants and Catholics.