Hopkins: A Literary Biography.

These two books could not be more different in origin, approach, and publisher's reputations, yet they both deserve the full attention of Hopkins scholars and general readers interested in the ideas and personalities of the Victorian period.

Although but a revision away from his University of Amsterdam thesis, Zonneveld's study of Hopkins's social attitudes within the broad context of nineteenth-century Roman Catholic social thought provides many fresh insights, especially on selected Hopkins poems that deal with social problems. Zonneveld announces his own commitment to the Roman Catholic faith; however, he is able to provide objective and searching analysis of the often-contradictory social views of nineteenth-century English Catholics. His interest in Hopkins's social vision led him to conduct research in Great Britain, France, and Italy. The book also features a wide-ranging examination of European Catholic thought as presented in various Victorian periodicals. His approach is truly interdisciplinary: he analyzes and linguistic patterns in poems, but he also explains Victorian social history as well as moral and theological issues of the period.

Zonneveld's first chapter covers the social views of such prominent Victorian English Catholics as Henry Edward Cardinal Manning and John Henry Cardinal Newman. He examines leading Catholic journals (some published in England and some on the Continent) such as The Month, The Dublin Review, The Tablet, and Revue de Belgique to establish the broader movements of thought beyond Hopkins's Jesuit milieu. While he discusses the tenets of socialism, the events of the 1871 Paris Commune, and the various demonstrations of the unemployed, …