From the Margin to the Core: the Vagaries of Publicizing

Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1918 and 1930

Justin Tackett

Stanford University

“I would rather be attacked than unnoticed,” Samuel Johnson once observed, according to Boswell. “Any publicity is good publicity” is one way to gloss Johnson’s observation. Both versions, it turns out, are particularly relevant to the peculiar manner in which Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins was first publicized by Oxford University Press (OUP), a history much different from the received accounts of Hopkins’s rise to notoriety predicated on critical recognition.

Hopkins’s rise in the 1920s between OUP’s publication of the first edition of Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918) and the second edition (1930) is often seen as delayed but inevitable. As Elgin Mellown put it in his study of the two editions, “Hopkins was not so much born before his time, as before his critics” (Mellown 51). Mellown was partly attempting to account for the discrepancy in sales between the books: it took a full decade for OUP to sell the first edition’s modest print run of 750 copies, but it took mere months for OUP to sell all 2,026 copies of the second edition. The second edition, essentially a slightly augmented reprint of the first, was so popular that eight more impressions were printed, enabling a Hopkins mania that consumed the midcentury. Mellown theorized that Poems was published at a pivotal moment when the works of T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, and other Modernists were beginning to turn the tide of poetic criticism. The Cambridge critics and others had discovered Hopkins by the late 1920s and embraced him in developing their Modernist agendas. When the second edition arrived in 1930, Mellown argued, this critical momentum made Hopkins’s work wildly popular.1 Mellown’s assessment is accurate in an important way: the critical shift was a significant factor in securing Hopkins’s canonicity. But this assessment does not

1 See Mellown, “Reception” (1965).

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acknowledge the many other complicated and extracritical factors that were involved in getting Poems read.

Sending the first edition into the world was more turbulent, serendipitous, and perplexing than the critical theory suggests, and this foray often had little to do with literary esteem. Hopkins’s rocky start was enmeshed in the material contingencies of global events affecting OUP and the cumbersome mechanics of increasingly commercializing academic presses at the beginning of the twentieth century. Central to this story is a now largely forgotten publication called The Periodical and how its own troubled history combined in the unlikeliest ways with a World War, a poet laureate’s death, a special book exhibition, the rise of modern publicity, and the career of Hopkins’s own nephew. In what follows, I explore all of these factors and more in order to reconstruct the extracritical logistics of how Hopkins was publicized in those early days and how each twist and turn impacted his notoriety.

Oxford University Press’s The Periodical

Recounting the story of OUP’s handling of Hopkins is immediately set off-balance by a quandary of international import: the editorial files for the first and second editions of Poems are lost. They were most likely destroyed or lost either when OUP’s London office was closed during the Nazi blitz in the 1940s or when the office closed for good in 1976 and removed its effects to Oxford. The files might also simply have been thrown away to economize for space at some point.2 Because of this loss, we can no longer know for certain all that OUP had planned for the two editions of Poems. Instead these plans must be gleaned laterally from other sources in which OUP expressed and recorded itself.

The Periodical is one such source, and a particularly salient one, full of works from Hopkins and his circle. In December 1896, the London office of OUP—the same office that would later produce the first edition of Hopkins’s poems—began under the aegis of Henry Frowde to publish this booklet of about twenty pages, whose title can sometimes make it difficult to find in online library 2 The Autumn 1955 issue of The Periodical notes that its first issue was published “at the Oxford University Press Warehouse, Amen Corner, which became one of London’s bombed sites on the night at the end of 1940 when Paternoster Row, still then the centre of English publishing, was destroyed. By that time, however, the Oxford Press had been for more than a decade in its present London headquarters at nearby Amen House, which was marvelously preserved from the neighbouring devastation” (30.250, 125).

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searches, though myriad libraries still possess collections of it today. Originally edited by R. M. Leonard as an advertising tool for OUP’s new books, The Periodical was mailed about four to five times annually to anyone who requested it from OUP’s warehouse at Amen Corner in Paternoster Row, London. From the beginning, Leonard made The Periodical’s guiding principle clear by printing the Johnson quote I cite above on its first page.

[FIGURE 1: Cover of the first Periodical]

According to many contemporary reviews, The Periodical was among the first academic press journals to offer substantial

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excerpts from the books it was designed to promote. As a result, readers would have had their first glimpse of several significant OUP works within The Periodical’s pages. In response to the first issue, The Journal of Education remarked weeks later, in February 1897:

The Periodical is only a publishers’ circular, and as such to be consigned to the paper-basket after a rapid glance. Such was our first impression, but it was a mistaken one, and we found ourselves reading the first number from cover to cover. The secret is that, instead of titles of books followed by advertisement cuttings, Mr. Henry Frowde gives us racy extracts from the books themselves and jottings about the Clarendon Press and its famous paper. If the interest of the first number is sustained, the Periodical will be a formidable rival to at least one so-called literary journal we could name. (“Jottings” 111)

Indeed, The Periodical would go on to print for the first time extracts from the mammoth and unfinished project of the Oxford English Dictionary (at first called A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles), a lengthy passage from Jane Austen’s then-unpublished novel fragment, Sanditon, and two original poems by Inklings member Charles Williams, which were written on the occasion of The Periodical’s 150th and 200th issues. The Periodical’s circulation was international from the beginning, as the provenance of reactions to its first issue reveal. OUP’s innovation as an academic house that published substantial excerpts in its circular was striking enough that it elicited reactions from almost two hundred newspapers and magazines across the United Kingdom, as well as the United States and Canada. In its first issue, OUP offered no explanation for starting the new publication, but given that the New York branch opened on Fifth Avenue in September 1896, it is likely that The Periodical made its debut three months later for the purpose of providing corresponding international publicity.

The Periodical spread well beyond the confines of the Anglo-American world. The March 1903 issue, for example, reproduced the following request from a reader in India: “Will you be good enough to us to increase my knowledge through The Period [sic], placing time to time upon my table it for ever in future for the sake of Savior.” The Periodical would cite similar requests from Spain, the Gold Coast, and France, among other locations. Indeed, the

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hundredth issue of April 1919 boasted that the publication had “been read by many thousands, and its regular recipients . . . include all classes from Princes and ex-Prime Ministers to studious artisans and squatters. It is filed in many a library, and consulted by many a librarian, and has formed a link more binding than some might imagine between those interested in scholarly publications throughout the civilized world” (286).

Because of this, many scholarly, fictional, poetic, and dramatic extracts would have enjoyed greater exposure by appearing in the pages of The Periodical than in the pages of the books themselves. Any journal’s claims about its own prowess should of course be regarded with skepticism, but a survey of libraries around the world indeed supports The Periodical’s claims to global circulation.3 Moreover, these extracts would have been far more portable and accessible than the books they came from; until 1905, The Periodical’s pages were printed on only one side of the paper “for the convenience of those who may care to take extracts from its columns,” as each issue stated. And OUP charged no subscription fee (a common enough practice among house journals), which meant that anyone of any demographic who desired The Periodical could obtain it.4 I will return to this idea and its importance for Hopkins scholarship in a moment. The Periodical folded in 1979 just a year after OUP celebrated its 500th anniversary, giving no explanation as to why (though the permanent closure of the London office three years before might have contributed to its decline). It only observed in its last issue that its eighty-three years of circulation had made it 3 A search on WorldCat reveals that approximately 130 libraries from thirteen different countries representing six continents currently possess issues of The Periodical. In contacting many of these libraries, I discovered that at least universities in the United Kingdom, the United States (City College of New York, the Library of Congress, and Stanford), Canada, Australia, and Germany were actively subscribed to The Periodical during 1918-1930 and receiving issues as they were published. This search does not, of course, account for libraries that likely possess issues not catalogued on WorldCat. 4 Unfortunately, this waiver of a subscription fee also meant that OUP had little incentive to keep accurate circulation numbers, so no record of exact numbers survives today. On multiple occasions, however, The Periodical hinted at estimates. In its December 1931 issue, for example, the “Obiter Scripta” section contained this remark: “This is the final notice to those who wish to receive copies of The Periodical in future, and have not forwarded a request. Postcards for reply were sent with two issues, and a warning was also printed on this page. The result has been thousands of requests, and the lopping off of some ‘dead wood’. In many cases the cards, which have come from all parts of the world, have been accompanied by compliments from well-known persons” (16.162, 184).

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“unique among publishers’ house journals in its longevity.” The first issue’s opening page had quoted Dr. Johnson. So as if to bookend the publication, the editor’s farewell remarks on the last page of the final issue (Spring 1979) quoted Johnson as well (from his “Preface to Shakespeare”):

After a long life, The Periodical (b. 1896) now comes to an end. For eighty-three years it has regularly presented a miscellany of extracts from forthcoming books together with facts, observations, and anecdotes about the Press and its authors; and the mixture seems to have persuaded some to buy and many to borrow Oxford books, so contributing to the enlightenment, perhaps even to the gaiety, of nations and to the deeper satisfaction of our authors. It has been unique among publishers’ house journals in its longevity; it has been to George Moore, writing to Humphrey Milford, ‘the only journal from which I have ever learnt anything’. It has had only four editors in its existence; it has always been available free to those who asked for it. The present editor, sadly concluding his own seventy-fourth number, finds a reflection of his sentiments in Samuel Johnson’s editorial apology: ‘I have endeavoured to be neither superfluously copious, nor scrupulously reserved, and hope that I have made my author’s meaning accessible to many who were before frighted from perusing him, and contributed something to the public, by diffusing innocent and rational pleasure.’ (48)

The Periodical was thus ushered out of the world the same way it had come in.

Despite its longevity and significance, however, The Periodical is omitted in bibliographic studies of various writers. And Hopkins is no exception. Tom Dunne’s impressive Hopkins bibliography, for instance, does not include any of The Periodical’s many articles on and excerpts from the poet. These omissions are of interest in themselves. But just what did OUP’s house journal have to do with the selling and distribution of Hopkins’s Poems?

Publicizing the First Edition of Poems

OUP’s rollout of Poems was tumultuous on many fronts. Robert Bridges, Hopkins’s long-time poetic trustee and amanuensis,

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had managed to get a smattering of Hopkins’s poetry published in a few anthologies, most notably volume 8 (Robert Bridges and Contemporary Poets) of Alfred H. Miles’s ten-volume series The Poets and the Poetry of the Century (1892) and Bridges’s own The Spirit of Man (1916), which helped stir up interest in Hopkins.5 The first edition of Poems—edited by Bridges, who was poet laureate at the time and therefore one of OUP’s most cherished authors—was officially published on 19 December 1918 (though advance copies were ready eleven days earlier) in London under Humphrey Milford (Archives 1973, 1).6 The book quickly made it into a few influential hands thanks to Bridges’s private circulation to his friends. Copies were given by him as gifts, which was fortunate for the recipients since the volume was widely acknowledged afterward to be “dear at Mr. Milford’s price” (qtd. in Mellown 40) of 12s. 6d., costing between two and three times comparable contemporaneous volumes of poetry. By April 1919, Roger Fry, John Masefield, and former Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, among others, had it in hand.7

OUP’s publicity for selling the book to the reading public, on the other hand, was delayed and lacking. By dint of material contingencies, Poems was not announced and excerpted in The Periodical till four months after its official publication. The first edition was published just a month after the conclusion of the Great War, as it was then called, and this hampered its publicity. In its 1920 Catalogue, OUP mentions that it experienced considerable “limitations imposed by the war on publication,” which included

5 Notably, Hopkins’s poetry was printed anonymously in the body text of The Spirit of Man, as all excerpts were, with a brief citation in the backmatter. Additionally, some of Hopkins’s poetry—such as the first stanza of “The Wreck of the Deutschland”—was altered by Bridges from Hopkins’s intended final version to an earlier one. Presenting Hopkins this way, the book built a limited but enthusiastic audience. When W.H. Auden later wrote an introduction to a reprint of the book, he observed, “My own generation . . . is eternally grateful to The Spirit of Man because it printed for the first time poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We were enormously impressed and when, a few years later, Bridges published a selection from his work, we rushed to buy it.” See The Spirit of Man (1916) and (1973). 6 Bridges’s remarks on the print run in a letter dated 14 December 1918 are significant. Expressing his annoyance to Gracie Hopkins, the poet’s sister, that the illustrations were mishandled by OUP, he wrote, “I have instructed the Oxford Press not to bind up more copies than are actually demanded in the market, but to wait until demobilization shall allow us to have better impressions. . . . [I] hope that the copies which come out a year hence will be as I intended” (Letters of RB 747-8). This remark implies that, in Bridges’s mind, the perceived market was small but that after a year’s time, Hopkins’s notoriety would have sufficiently grown to warrant another printing. This would not happen, however, for another twelve years. 7 See Letters of RB for Stanford’s remarks regarding Fry (69); 29 December 1918 regarding Masefield (750); 8 March 1919 regarding Asquith (753).

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inflation and the rapid fluctuation of prices due to scarcity of paper and other factors (44).8 The same issue that first publicized Poems, in fact, recorded this very problem: “Owing to the exigencies of the paper situation recent issues have been only half the customary size, but it is hoped now to revert to the normal” (6.100, 288). Probably because of these “exigencies” and others, OUP failed to produce The Periodical in December 1918, the issue in which Poems would otherwise have appeared.9 This was the only December in which The Periodical missed publication for the next several decades. An impromptu January 1919 issue was published to pick up the slack for the missing December one, but it only covered new titles up to December, and so again excluded Poems. As a result, it was not until 15 April 1919 that any mention of Poems was made in the OUP’s own The Periodical.

8 In the 15 August 1918 issue of The Dial, Edward Shanks observed, “[L]iterature in London has been very quiet recently. We are really beginning to feel the pinch for paper. It began by snuffing out aspirants altogether and next hampered recent comers to the profession. Now it is squeezing the famous, and Heaven knows where it will stop. . . . A publisher told me the other day that a book which sold before the war at five shillings ought to cost twenty-five shillings now” (102). This same article noted that “Dr. Bridges is understood to be preparing for publication the poems of his friend the late Father Gerard Hopkins . . . Soon we shall know all about them” (Shanks 102). No one, including Shanks, could have known that the book was still more than four months in the offing. In a letter from December 1918, Bridges also alludes to other war-induced difficulties, but his handwriting is frustratingly illegible: “Another disaster also [?] this is a war product. viz. [?] of the impressions of [?]” (Letters of RB 749). 9 Issue numbers count from Vol. 6, No. 98 (October 1918) to Vol. 6, No. 99 (January 1919).

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[FIGURE 2: Periodical article introducing 1E (3 pages)]

In that issue, at last a three-page article titled “Gerard Manley Hopkins” appeared, quoting from Bridges’s introduction to Hopkins in the Miles volume, Bridges’s “Preface to Notes” from Poems, and excerpts from Hopkins’s letters (6.100, 305-7).10 The article also reproduced stanza 14 from “The Wreck of Deutschland” and, significantly, “The Windhover,” a poem that Bridges knew Hopkins regarded as his best poem. This belated article apparently triggered

10 This momentous article is undocumented in Hopkins bibliographies.

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at least one reviewer’s search for Poems that might not have happened otherwise. On 19 April 1919, four days after the article appeared, a writer for The Tablet reported that the first edition was already (maybe always?) exceedingly difficult to find. He had searched for the book in Orchard Street, the Times Book Club, Bumpus’s, Glaisher’s, Cork Street, Bond Street, Quaritch, Hatchard, and Sotheran—typical London booksellers—before finding “a solitary copy” in “Bickers, near the Haymarket” (“Et Caetera”

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484).11 Thus the book, as well as the publicity for it, were elusive in their respective ways.

These are some of the facts surrounding the distribution of Poems. If these facts are now put in concert with what is known about The Periodical, a general picture of the material forces

11 It is possible Poems proved elusive by April because it had already sold out to admirers, but this is unlikely given the sales figures above. It is more likely that OUP declined to push the volume with local booksellers or that those booksellers declined to stock it, given its price. Bridges does note in a letter from June 1919 that Logan Pearsall Smith told him “Hopkins was having a boom at the Poetry Book shop. Truly the world is upside down—and its rump is not altogether beautiful” (Letters of RB 756). The nature of this “boom” is not clear from Bridges’s ambiguous remark, except that it surprised him. It is not clear whether he was surprised because he never expected Hopkins to be popular or because sales had until then been sluggish.

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impinging on the first edition—very different from that of the critical theory—begins to emerge. Thousands of people around the world subscribed to The Periodical, which was sent free to subscribers. Poems was widely acknowledged to be expensive, and the book was difficult to find in bookstores. Of the 750 copies, only a third was in circulation by the end of 1919, less than two-thirds by the end of 1920, and it took a decade to sell the rest.12 So The Periodical article—which was significantly delayed following the book’s actual publication—was available to more people than the first edition itself for some time to come, a scenario amplified by the fact that the article appeared in issue No. 100, making it even more likely that this particular issue was read and kept. Additionally, The Periodical gave “The Windhover” a more global exposure than the first edition did in those crucial early years. “The Windhover,” and the material in the facsimiles printed here, had (in our contemporary parlance) gone viral. While the first edition itself deepened appreciation of Hopkins among literary (and Catholic) devotees, The Periodical spread his reputation around the world to a wider lay public, most of whom would not have heard of him before.13 Knowing this provides us with more complete coordinates for tracking Hopkins’s readership, with Poems as the vertical axis and The Periodical as the horizontal. For these reasons alone, the role that The Periodical played in forming Hopkins’s readership is noteworthy.

I want to argue further that The Periodical also serves as a publicity barometer: a gauge of internal pressures at OUP that compels us to take a look at the press’s publicity in other periodicals. What OUP’s intentions were regarding the ads they placed in other periodicals is not completely clear, but these ads suggest the press initially had little intention of advertising the first edition widely, and for understandable reasons. OUP’s advertising in the Times Literary Supplement, one of its most prominent outlets, presents one example of what I mean. No advertisement of any kind appeared for

12 According to Dunne, the first edition “was published in an edition of 750 copies. Of these, 50 were given away; 180 were sold in the first year; 240 in the second year; then an average of 30 a year for six years, rising to 90 in 1927. The last four copies were sold in 1928” (Dunne 14). 13 The first edition also had some multinational appeal, but we have far fewer details about this. Bridges wrote in March 1919 to Hopkins’s mother, “I have heard nothing about the actual sale of Gerard’s poems, but I get tidings of their having found their way far and wide. The last correspondent was at Florence. I do not expect that there will be a very wide sale at first; indeed it will probably always be somewhat special: but so far I have heard nothing but admiration in the way of comment” (Letters of RB 753).

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Poems in the TLS in December and for much of January. Nevertheless, a fairly extensive and generally positive review of the book appeared on 9 January 1919. It praised Hopkins for hearing “everywhere a music too difficult, because too beautiful, for our ears,” which suggested that there was potential for a wider enthusiastic audience (19). OUP then placed an ad for Poems in the TLS on 23 January 1919, over a month after the book had been published (38). The significance of the TLS ad and its timing is complicated. In the 1880s, OUP started sending review copies to journals if it felt important books had been overlooked (History 703). But if this had happened in the case of the TLS, it does not explain why OUP then decided to take out an ad only after a positive review appeared—unless OUP’s idea was to let the TLS tout the book first. But then why wait two weeks to place the ad? Why not capitalize on the hype immediately?

Publicity in The Athenaeum, another elite venue for OUP’s publicity, supports the idea that OUP waffled on advertising. Poems was not advertised there until 4 April 1919 (124). It seems this ad appeared more than four months after the book was published because, again, OUP originally had no plans for placing it. On the other hand, it is possible that OUP had by then recovered from the armistice, had put The Periodical back on track, and had thus already planned its announcement of Poems for its April issue. In other words, it might have been precisely The Periodical’s recovery that triggered OUP’s placement of an ad in The Athenaeum.

These delayed advertisements imply that OUP had muddled plans—or, in the most extreme scenario, originally no plans at all—for advertising the first edition beyond its own catalog. Indeed, after consulting numerous periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, the earliest advertisement I found for Poems was a spare one in The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record of 4 January 1919, though in this same periodical, by contrast, other contemporary OUP books were advertised weeks before their publications (18). The very inception of Poems corroborates the idea that OUP was ambivalent about publicizing the book and reveals its potential reasoning. If we look past the publicity back to 20 August 1889, just two months after Hopkins’s death, we find that Bridges wrote to C.H.O. Daniel (who owned an active private press in Oxford), outlining specifically how he wanted a volume, memoir and selected poems, to be handled:

I should fancy that there might be about 40 pages of verse—lyrical—and I cannot tell how long the memoir

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is likely to be, but certainly not so much as this. It will be a unique volume, privately printed only—but I think that need not exclude your having a few copies for private sale, at say £1 a copy. (Letters of RB 189)

Bridges emphasizes the “private” nature of the book, which he intended for an existing but small group of devotees, and he did not expect Hopkins to be read much beyond this any time soon. Bridges’s bibliographical plan in 1889 was more or less exactly how the book turned out in 1918, and his attitude toward its audience persisted through these decades as well. Again, such letters suggest OUP (and Bridges) never intended to advertise the poems and only did so in response to positive reviews. Such was the uncertain ground upon which the first edition was launched and publicized. Certainly, such speculation about other periodicals remains speculation, but the evidence does confirm that the result of this publicity on Hopkins’s rise has been overlooked.

I turn now to a sharply contrasting case study to reify the circumstances surrounding this original release: the second edition, published in 1930. By then, OUP had largely (re)mastered its publicity game, and the fate of this edition accentuates how differently the first edition had been handled.

Publicizing the Second Edition of Poems

The second edition was blessed by both happenstance and intention. It is well known that certain critical responses to Hopkins’s poems buoyed his notoriety, most notably I.A. Richards’s essay “Gerard Hopkins” in The Dial (1926) and later his influential Practical Criticism (1929), which examined “Spring and Fall.” And yet it seems OUP was not convinced by the critical shift of the 1920s that a second edition would now be the wild success it in fact became, as evidenced by its print runs.14 On 27 November 1930, 14 This doubt apparently lingered even in the face of some later evidence to the contrary. OUP’s office in New York was clamoring for more copies, but the London office was not keeping them adequately supplied. A memo dated 17 April 1946 stated:

We should very much like to go ahead with our own edition but we appreciate of course your reluctance to permit us to do so. Our proposal that we produce our own book was based on the very strong demand for this book over here (our last 1000 copies from your edition went out of stock almost immediately after they were put on sale) and we know that in a reasonably short time we can sell several thousand more with no trouble at all.

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OUP published the book with a new introduction by Charles Williams, who had joined OUP in June 1908 and spent the majority of his career in OUP’s London office where The Periodical was being produced (Hadfield 13). Print runs were conservative, and they were actually reduced for the second and third impressions, never exceeding 3,500 copies until the tenth impression was printed in 1944, as files for the 1948 volume indicate (Archive 1973, 1).

OUP had, however, transformed its general attitude toward publicity, due in no small part to Hopkins’s own nephew, Gerard Hopkins, who had joined the press at the end of the Great War and was close friends with Williams. During this time, the rise of Modernism coincided with the institutionalization of publicity, and Hopkins’s nephew brought this new commercialized regime to OUP. The Bookseller would later remark in 1957 that “Milford had economized on advertising . . . The fact that the Oxford Publicity Machine is today in its smoothness and power . . . a Rolls-Royce among bubble cars, is mainly due to Gerard Hopkins” (qtd. in Sutcliffe 267).15 In the months leading up to the 1930 volume, he must have had a direct hand in how the advertising was handled. After all, Bridges had written in a 1909 letter that he “always regarded Gerard’s family as his literary executors” and, in another letter, that “the actual holder of the copyright [for Hopkins’s poetry] is Father G.M.H.’s nephew, Gerard (Jerry they call him) Hopkins” (Letters of RB 570; 926).

Whoever was behind it, the second edition was well heralded in a number of ways in The Periodical, which was no longer reeling

Our present order with you is for 2000 sheets (this confirms the understanding in your HMP/ES of 12 April), but our back orders are already so high as to indicate that another 1000 should be added to this. This is the kind of market that naturally inclines us to think in terms of producing our own book when it is next to impossible for you to supply us adequately.

London was partly “reluctan[t]” to allow New York to proceed with its own book because it was already planning the 1948 edition. See Memorandum (1946). 15 Use of the term “publicity machine” here is illuminating. According to the OED, this term was coined in the same decade that Williams arrived at OUP. In fact, while the promotional sense of “publicity” dates to 1826, the opening of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of compound constructions denoting the corporate institutionalization of publicity (e.g., “publicity bureau” [1901], “publicity campaign” [1904], “publicity expert” [1905], “publicity manager” [1907], “publicity drive” [1917]) that was beginning to transform several industries, including publishing. Similar observations can be made of compound uses of “advertising” and “marketing.” See “publicity, n.” in OED Online.

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in the aftermath of a world war.16 To start, OUP planned two other publications in anticipation of the new Poems. For Christmas 1929, it produced a foolscap folio of “A Vision of Mermaids,” a collector’s item featuring that poem and a drawing by Hopkins, which it advertised prominently on the inside of the back cover of the December 1929 issue of The Periodical. Additionally, the first full-length biography of Hopkins, written by G.F. Lahey, was published a few months before the Poems and was advertised on the inside front cover of both the April and June 1930 issues of The Periodical. All three of these publications were advertised and reviewed collectively under “The Poet Hopkins” by The Tablet in its Literary Supplement of 6 December 1930 (767).

Two more occurrences, which had little to do with critical assessment of Hopkins, sealed the success of the second edition that were as felicitous for its sales as the Great War was calamitous for first edition sales. Robert Bridges, the celebrated poet laureate of seventeen years, died on 21 April 1930, just after his The Testament of Beauty (1929) had achieved stunning popularity. Bridges’s death was discreetly noted on the new title page of Poems by the removal of “Poet Laureate” from beneath his name. As a result of his death, Poems received serendipitous advance publicity in his obituary in the June 1930 issue of The Periodical, which listed the following among his achievements: “The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins / 1918 / (out of print – a new edition is in preparation)” (15.155, 88-9).17 Hopkins was mentioned in articles about the late poet laureate

16 World War I was also disruptive to The Periodical’s distribution, not just its production. For example, the University of Heidelberg was an active subscriber to the journal from 1896 until 1914, when the outbreak of war terminated its subscription. Similarly, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Bavaria subscribed from 1912-1914 and again from 1928-1936. Importantly, therefore, this library never received the April 1919 Periodical but did receive the October 1930 issue, which might have been the first glimpse of Hopkins’s poetry by Bavarians using the library. 17 Bridges was consulted about the second edition shortly before his death. On 11 May 1929, he wrote to Roger Fry, “As for the matter of your letter—Milford is now getting a 2nd Edition of Gerard Hopkins’ poems ready. They have a man [Charles Williams] at the Press in London who writes elaborately and metaphysicopoetically in the manner of Donne and he is to be entrusted with the ‘editing’—which is mainly the difficulty of knowing what to add to the old edition. He is coming to see me on Tuesday, and I am sure that he is amenable.” Bridges adds, “I think it wonderful that the book should have had such a welcome. I shall of course insist on the new edition being well printed etc. and on good paper. Modern books of verse are beastly” (Letters of RB 900-01).

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that appeared in other publications across the nation for some time afterward.18

Moreover, OUP put on a grand display of books that ran through the end of 1930 and into 1931, which showcased the late poet laureate’s work to the likes of George Bernard Shaw, J.M. Barrie, and Virginia Woolf, among many other literati who attended (The Publisher & Bookseller [14 November 1930] 1121). Whether it was specifically planned to commemorate Bridges’s death, who published many books with OUP, or was instead an independently planned but coincidental event, the press grandly advertised in The Periodical of October 1930 this “Exhibition of Oxford Books, Ancient and Modern, to be held during the months of October, November, and December” in its London showrooms (15.156 back cover19; the December 1930 issue reported that the exhibition would be extended to the end of January due to its popularity [169]). Such an exhibition was likely not just celebratory but was designed to sell books too, since “twentieth century sales promotion ha[d] largely taken the form of book exhibitions,” as Marjorie Plant explains (446). On 7 November 1930, The Times documented this event, reporting that there were “many exhibits, new to the public, showing the intimate connexion of Robert Bridges with the Press” and that the “Bridges documents, carr[ied] the visitor almost to the present day” (21). Announcements for, or even advance copies of, the second edition of Poems might have been among these documents. At any rate, a surge in interest in Bridges would have helped increase interest in Hopkins at that pivotal moment.

The second edition was first advertised in the same October 1930 Periodical as the exhibition was, a full month before it appeared on shelves, and it was accompanied there by a full-page article titled “Gerard Hopkins Again,” which quoted from Williams’s Introduction and reproduced an excerpt from “Margaret Clitheroe” (15.156, 110).20 Williams’s Introduction to the second edition of Poems was manifestly important in building Hopkins’s reputation. Gerald Roberts has claimed that “apart from Williams’s

18 In its extensive obituary on Bridges from 22 April 1930, for example, The London Times wrote: “On the other hand his theory of Stressed Verse (derived in part from his friend Father Gerard Hopkins) has been adopted, consciously or unconsciously, by many of the younger poets as the basis of their own method” (17). 19 Only issues of The Periodical distributed from OUP’s London office carried this advertisement. Issues distributed from the New York office were wrapped in a different cover that carried that office’s address and other ads on the back that were more relevant to its American audience. 20 This article is undocumented in Hopkins bibliographies.

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Introduction, there could be no question of explaining the surge of interest in Hopkins. The appreciativeness of Charles Williams’s Introduction was an encouragement to sympathetic reading” (Roberts 23). Roberts is right about Charles Williams, but there is more to the story: even some of the text of his Introduction appeared in The Periodical where global readers could (re)consider Hopkins before ever seeing the second edition. The Periodical again brought awareness of Hopkins onto the world stage.

OUP’s advertisements in other periodicals were much better handled, too. Whereas the first edition had only been advertised retrospectively in the TLS, OUP took out a full-page ad on 20 November 1930 in which the second edition was prominently advertised among other books, a week before its publication date (957). A few weeks later, OUP placed another ad in the TLS on 11 December 1930 with the headline “Oxford Books for Christmas.” The second edition was the first volume on the list, placed prominently in a decorative box; the first edition never received this treatment despite also being published shortly before Christmas (1057). As if this were not enough, the second edition was advertised yet again on Christmas day (1103). The exposure the second edition of Poems received in 1930 was thus remarkable in the TLS. The same was true for other periodicals, such as The Publisher & Bookseller, which carried an ad for the second edition on 28 November 1930 in the week of its publication (1218).

In sum, all of these developments—well-placed early advertisements, companion publications, and fated events—converged in a veritable publicity bonanza around the second edition of Poems that the first edition never enjoyed. In light of these facts, then, it is small wonder that several thousand copies of the book sold out immediately, regardless of whatever the existing critical reputation of Hopkins was at the time.

Conclusion

These are some of the significant paratextual and extracritical facts that can be added to the existing account of Hopkins’s publication history and reception from 1918 to 1930. OUP’s publicity for each of the first two editions in The Periodical greatly differed and thus impacted Hopkins’s rise in popularity, quite beyond the critical shift described by Mellown. The ways in which editorial plans, publicity, historical events, and the contingencies of the periodical world intertwined, clashed, triggered and reacted to

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one another were complex and are now impossible to disentangle. And, most especially, more of this class of facts needs to be uncovered in order to continue fleshing out Hopkins’s unusual publication history, a history that has always been symptomatic of more universal cultural transformations. I conclude by adding that The Periodical can be mined further by scholars interested in such extracritical facts. For example, neither the 1933 nor the 1991 Bridges bibliography cites it, despite the vast amount of material devoted to him in its pages, including poetry extracts, his election to the laureateship, his contributions to the Society for Pure English, and his obituary. The Periodical also documents the lives of Walter Raleigh and Henry Bradley, the rise of Jane Austen scholarship under OUP’s care, and of course the history of the press itself. The extremely impressive new History of Oxford University Press, of which volumes I-III were published in 2013 (with volume IV on its way), does a better job of documenting The Periodical than any previous press histories, and I am humbly indebted to its contributors and editors. Given the immense scope of its task, however, its citations about that popular publication, free as it was to anyone in the world, are understandably somewhat limited.21 It is hoped that scholars will take a look at the History and The Periodical and continue to consider, in their work on Hopkins and beyond, the impact that planned and unplanned publicity had and continues to have on the formation of literary judgments and the canon.

Works Cited “The 100th Number of the Periodical.” The Periodical. 6.100 (April

1919): 285-8. Print. “Books and a Building: The Exhibition of Oxford University Press

Books at Messrs. J. & E. Bumpus.” The Publisher and Bookseller (14 November 1930): 1121. Print.

21 In two small instances, they are also incorrect. In volume II (covering 1780-1896), see Fig. 16.1 and Plate 14 (the front cover of The Periodical’s first issue) and pp. 695 and 703. In volume III (covering 1896-1970), see pp. 44, 81, 102 (with Figure 3.2 depicting the February 1901 issues), 234, 318, 337, 513 (which mistakenly cites “1974” as The Periodical’s final year), 547, and 825 (which mistakenly cites “1978” as The Periodical’s final year). It is hoped that the History’s eagerly anticipated fourth volume, which starts from 1970, will contain additional information about The Periodical as its run drew to a close.

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Bridges, Robert. The Selected Letters of Robert Bridges. Vols. 1-2. Ed. by Donald E. Stanford. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1983-4. Print.

Closing remarks from The Periodical’s last issue. The Periodical. 41.328 (Spring 1979): 48. Print.

Dunne, Tom. Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976. Print.

“Et Caetera.” The Tablet. No. 41 (19 April 1919): 484. Print. “Exhibition of Oxford Books.” The Periodical. 15.156 (October

1930): back cover. Print. “Gerard Hopkins.” Times Literary Supplement (January 1919): 19.

Print. “Gerard Hopkins Again.” The Periodical. 15.156 (October 1930):

110. Print. “Gerard Manley Hopkins.” The Periodical. 6.100 (April 1919): 305-

7. Print. Hadfield, Alice Mary. Charles Williams: An Exploration of His Life

and Work. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Print. The History of Oxford University Press. Eds. Ian Gadd, Simon Eliot,

and William Roger Louis. Vols. 2-3. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. with notes by Robert Bridges. London: Humphrey Milford for Oxford UP, 1918. Print.

__________. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Second Edition. Intro. by Charles Williams. London: Humphrey Milford for Oxford UP, 1930. Print.

“Jottings.” The Journal of Education: A Monthly Record and Review. No. 331. (Feb. 1897): 111. Print.

“The Late Laureate’s Publications.” The Periodical. 15.155 (June 1930): 88-9. Print.

McKay, George L. A Bibliography of Robert Bridges. London: Oxford UP, 1933. Print.

Mellown, Elgin W. “The Reception of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Poems, 1918-30.” Modern Philology, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Aug. 1965) 38-51. Print.

“Mr. Robert Bridges, O.M.” The London Times. Issue 45493 (22 April 1930): 17. Print.

“Obiter Scripta.” The Periodical. 16.162 (December 1931): 184. Print.

“Oxford Books, Monuments of the Past: A Striking Exhibition.” The London Times. Issue 45664 (7 November 1930): 21. Print.

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Oxford University Press advertisement for Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “A Vision of Mermaids” Foolscap folio print. The Periodical. 14.152 (December 1929): inside back cover. Print.

Oxford University Press advertisement for G.F. Lahey’s biography Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Periodical. 15.154.(April 1930): inside front cover. Print.

Oxford University Press advertisement for G.F. Lahey’s biography Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Periodical. 15.155 (June 1930): inside front cover. Print.

Oxford University Press advertisement for Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Times Literary Supplement (23 January 1919): 38. Print.

Oxford University Press advertisement for Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Athenaeum (4 April 1919): 124. Print.

Oxford University Press advertisement for Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record (4 January 1919): 18. Print.

Oxford University Press advertisement for Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Second Edition. The Publisher & Bookseller (28 November 1930): 1218. Print.

Oxford University Press advertisement for Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Second Edition. Times Literary Supplement (20 November 1930): 957. Print.

Oxford University Press advertisement for Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Second Edition. Times Literary Supplement (11 December 1930): 1057. Print.

Oxford University Press advertisement for Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Second Edition. Times Literary Supplement (25 December 1930): 1103. Print.

Oxford University Press Archives, 23 April 1946. Memorandum from New York to Amen House.

__________, 6 November 1973. Letter from J. L. Williams to Miss A. Bayley.

__________, 17 April 1946. Memorandum from New York to Amen House.

Oxford University Press General Catalogue. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1920. Print.

Plant, Marjorie. The English Book Trade. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1974. Print.

“The Poet Hopkins.” The Tablet Literary Supplement (6 December 1930): 767. Print.

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The Poets and the Poetry of the Century: Robert Bridges and Contemporary Poets, Volume VIII. Ed. Alfred H. Miles. London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1892. Print.

“publicity, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 25 May 2015.

Review of The Periodical, No. 1. The Journal of Education: A Monthly Record and Review. 331 (February 1897): 111. Print.

Roberts, Gerald. Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987.

Shanks, Edward. “Our London Letter.” The Dial. Vol. 65 (15 August 1918): 102. Print.

The Spirit of Man. Ed. by Robert Bridges. London: Longmans Green, 1916. Print.

__________. Ed. by Robert Bridges. Introduction by W.H. Auden. London: Longmans Green, 1973. Print.

Sutcliffe, Peter. The Oxford University Press: An Informal History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978. Print.