HOPKINS SOCIETY EVENTS
1 Hosting the Association of Literary Societies AGM 2021 - on Saturday 22 May. The Betjeman Society and the Hopkins Society are joint hosts. To be held at St Michael's Church, Highgate, London .....This is Plan A, assuming that the effects of Covid 19 will have subsided enough by then to allow us to go ahead as normal.
There will be a Plan B if circumstances prevent the event taking place as planned ...... a restricted number will attend and sessions will be streamed ...
Plan C - there will be no physical presence; the AGM will be broadcast using "Zoom" or similar vehicle ....
- The day will be a day devoted to Hopkins and Betjeman, apart from a short 1-hour meeting after lunch, with representatives of all the other affiliated literary Societies (over 100).
- The venue is Highgate in North London because both poets went to school there. (However the content is almost entirely different from the day the Hopkins Society event held there in 2019.)
- The morning will have 2 lectures: 'Hopkins and Betjeman: Poetry's Odd Couple' by Lance Pierson, on the differences between the poets and their surprising similarities and .....
'Breaking Hopkins Open' by Michael Hurley, Cambridge University lecturer, helping people understand two of Hopkins' poems
- The afternoon will have a choice of 4 options:
- Highgate School's archive on Hopkins, Betjeman and other literary figures (this is the only 'repeat' from 2019)
- Hopkins and Betjeman's views on church architecture, with special reference to St Michael's where we are meeting
- Guided walk through Betjeman's childhood in Highgate, with the poems he wrote about it
- Guided walk round the other literary figures who lived in Highgate
- For people who want to stay, there will be a dinner on Saturday evening, and also on Friday.
- there will be a list of possible events and visits on the Sunday for those who can stay over - some related to Hopkins and Betjeman, others of more general literary interest.
Booking will open, with fuller information, on 1st March 2021.
2. Stonyhurst weekend at the Christian Heritage Centre 1 -3 October 2021
The Christian Heritage Centre has been booked and the weekend will include contributions from Jill Robson on "Hopkins and Nature"; there will be additional speakers along with visits to the museum and observatory at Stonyhurst School with a possible outing to two local abbeys that Hopkins visited. The Sunday morning will include mass at the school.
3 Postponed until 2022 - Hopkins Society Day at St Bartholomew's Church, Haslemere, Surrey 10.00 – 16.30pm.
We are intending to meet in St Bartholomew's Church in Haslemere, which has a memorial window to GMH donated by his grieving parents less than a year after his death. It was in memory of a dear son – he was not a famous poet then. Rather surprisingly, the stained-glass window next to it is a memorial to the Poet Laureate Tennyson, who had also lived there.
Gerard's parents and family moved to Haslemere from Hampstead three years before Gerard died. He visited Haslemere only once. But his parents, sisters and brothers lived on in a house built for them, until the last one died in 1952. So there is a long Hopkins family association with Haslemere.
On the visit, we will hear about the history and iconography of the GMH memorial window. We will also hear from a local historian about the involvement of the Hopkins family. We will visit the family house (at least seeing it from the outside), and see various family graves. (Photos of the newly restored grave of Gerard's parents are shown below ...)
Further details of travel (Haslemere has a station), and local accommodation, plus the full programme details will be available as soon as we know the new date ......
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3 Hopkins Society Day on Saturday 26 September 2020 at The Birmingham Oratory .......also postponed now until 2022 - full details will be posted when available ....
OTHER FORTHCOMING EVENTS
1 see also The USA based "Official" Hopkins US based website: http://www.hopkinspoetry.com .....
2 There is a Virtual International Conference - "Hopkins and his Environments" June 24 - 26 2021, being put on by "The Hopkins Conference Group". The organising committee is currently has a "Call for Papers" with a deadline of January 25 2021 ... see ....www.gerardmanleyhopkins.online. 300 word proposals can be sent to 19higgins55@gmail.com.