It was because Hopkins’s superiors in England had so little use for him…that they encouraged him to take a position as Professor of Greek and Examiner in Classics at the Royal University of Ireland, in Dublin. This prestigious-sounding post actually involved teaching elementary Latin and grading a truly staggering number of tests: six examinations times seven hundred and fifty students, according to Hopkins, for a total of forty-five hundred papers every year.
Such was the life of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who fortuntely was able to write a little poetry amidst all that grading. His lament about this predicament has its own poetic quality:
From the college, he issues a series of increasingly desperate cries for help. “The melancholy I have all my life been subject to has become in late years not indeed more intense in its fits but rather more distributed, constant, and crippling.”
From this New Yorker book review.
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So if Manley is free this afternoon, he should come give me a hand. The grading I have will seem relatively light for him.
My great-uncle Hugh MacNeill (a notorious windbag, and the model for “Professor MacHugh” in the Aeolus section of Ulysses) succeeded him in this job, before being forced into early retirement (for drinking, gambling and family, abandonment thereof). Now perhaps I have a better idea of what drove him to drink …
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