Catherine Phillips: Gerald Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xix + 303. Cloth £ 30.00.

• Grace Brockington

On 30 August 1867, Gerald Manley Hopkins recounted in his journal the experience, familiar to most people, of lying on his back on the grass and looking through his fingers at the bright summer sky. Unlike most people, he recorded the incident in minutest detail, noting the interleaved pattern of hand and sky, the play of light and reflection, and the pigments he might use for painting the image. ‘I saw more richness and beauty in the blue than I had known of before, not brilliance but glow and colour’, he wrote.

It was not transparent and sapphire-like but turquoise-like, swarming and blushing round the edge of the hand and in the pieces clipped in by the fingers, the flesh being sometimes sunlit, sometimes glassy with reflected light, sometimes lightly shadowed in that violet one makes with cobalt and Indian red.

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