Book description
This illuminating biography of Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-75)
unravels fully the famous Cornish parson-poet's rich personality.
Drawing on a mass of unpublished material, Piers Brendon re-creates
one of the most bizarre of Victorian lives, revealing the mixture of
truth, over-simplification and falsehood in the legend which has built
up around him.
The popular account depicts Hawker as a youth of wild high spirits
who delighted in hoaxes and practical jokes. As an Oxford
undergraduate he won the Newdigate Poetry Prize and married his rich
41-year-old godmother. In 1834 he became vicar of Morwenstow and spent
the rest of his life in his desolate country parish on the storm-swept
coast of north Cornwall. He was a charitable, hard-working
Anglo-Catholic but, owing to the remoteness of his position and lack
of sympathy from his parishioners, his true genius became warped and
he succumbed to wayward eccentricity.
His dress was, to say the least, unorthodox, and he became obsessed
with antiquarian lore, lending a haunting reality to the arcane
superstitions which he cultivated. He entertained no doubt whatever
about the active agency of demons and angels, ghosts and brownies. He
talked to birds, invited his nine cats into church and excommunicated
one of them when it caught a mouse on Sunday. Out of the timbers of
wrecked ships he built a hut, a forbidding sanctuary perched on the
high cliff-edge, where he invoked mystic visions and composed romantic
poetry.
Piers Brendon here rescues Hawker from legend, and his fascinating
book substitutes character for caricature. An even more interesting
and idiosyncratic Hawker emerges, scarred and moulded by the stark
isolation of his hostile seaboard benefice, a man of remarkable
insight and compassion, who submitted in strange ways to his calling,
and who, it turns out, proves to have been a true prophet in his
yearning exclamation: 'what a life mine would be if it were all
written and published in a book.'
Piers Brendon is the author of more than a dozen books, including
biographies of Churchill and Eisenhower, the best-selling
Eminent
Edwardians; The Windsors;
The Dark Valley;
the highly acclaimed
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire
and, most recently,
Eminent Elizabethans
. He also writes for television and contributes frequently to the
national press. Formerly Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre, he is
a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature.
