A new accession arrived at the archive recently. It is a beautifully bound volume made in 1876 containing hand painted illustrations, photographs, an address, poems in many different languages and scripts, each written out by hand. It came to us together with some boxes of printed books from St Beuno’s, the Jesuit Spirituality Centre in North Wales.
The volume is an album made as a gift by the residents of St Beuno’s for the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury, Bishop James Brown, to celebrate his 25 years in office. Brown was the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury, having been appointed on the bishopric’s creation in 1851. St Beuno’s was included in the diocese until 1895 when the new bishopric of Menevia was created, incorporating most of North Wales. St Beuno’s had been founded in 1848 as a college where young Jesuits could pursue their studies of Philosophy and Theology, and by 1876 James Brown had been its bishop for most of its existence. He was important to the community of young Jesuits who passed through St Beuno's because many of them were ordained priests by him there.
St Beuno’s honoured the bishop’s anniversary by inviting him to celebrate the Feast of St Ignatius with them – 31 July 1876. The actual day of his anniversary had fallen a few days earlier, and this had been celebrated in Shrewsbury Cathedral on Thursday 27 July. He arrived at St Beuno’s on Saturday evening, dined with the Jesuits that night and the following morning was present at High Mass. After Mass the Rector of St Beuno’s read an address to the Bishop which started:
'Our little community at St Beuno's, which has lived so long in peace and quiet under your sheltering care, hastens to offer you its most sincere congratulations and warmest good wishes on the happy occasion of your Silver Jubilee.'
Following the address the Bishop was presented with a quarto bound volume. This is the album now at the British Jesuit Archive.
The volume is made up of 85 single leaves of white paper, with a thinner paper used as interleaving. Only one side of each page is used. There are hand painted borders of every page of text or illustration, some in colours, others in monochrome. It begins with the Bishop’s coat of arms, a dedication in Latin, a photograph of St Beunos’s, these last two with beautiful floral decorations. The address in English to the Bishop is printed – again complete with hand illustrations. The next four pages are a list of names of Jesuits ordained by the Bishop, and following this the bulk of the book is a series of verse or prose congratulatory texts in a variety of languages and scripts, written by members of the St Beuno’s community. There are 24 of these, one each in Hebrew, Sanskrit, Syriac, Arabic, Manchu, Mandarin, Tamil, three in Greek, four in Latin, one in Italian, two in French, four in English, two in German and one in Welsh.
Among the list of names of those ordained by Bishop Brown is Gerald Manley Hopkins. He wrote a letter to his father describing the occasion and this volume:
‘we presented him with an album containing a prose address and compositions, chiefly verse, in many languages, among which were Chinese and Manchoo … [which] were by a little German very very learned, with a beaky nose like a bugle horn, and they were beautifully penned by himself. For the Welsh they had to come to me, for, sad to say, no one else in the house knows anything about it; I also wrote in Latin and English.’[1]
The German Jesuit with so many languages at his disposal was Fr Joseph Floeck SJ (1845-1904), whose name is inscribed in the volume along with Hopkins' as having been ordained by Bishop Brown.
Hopkins’ three poems he mentions in his letter to his father are indeed in the volume, in three different languages as he describes. They are written out by hand, but not by himself – Hopkins’ handwriting is very distinctive, and in the album the same few hands were used for all the verses in western scripts.
The Victorian tradition of writing vers d’Occasion – poems for a special anniversary – was popular throughout society and the Jesuits were eager participants in the practice. Fr Gallwey SJ, Provincial of the English Province from 1873-1876, admitted in a letter that
‘I have indeed once or twice on compulsion tortured my brain for rhymes—to greet a new Provincial or for some other similar reason’.
Bishop Brown’s Silver Jubilee was a fitting opportunity for such verse. It was also common for Jesuits then to compose in many different languages, and Hopkins writes in a later letter to his friend Canon Dixon that at Stonyhurst poems were written in ‘all the tongues’ and that these were hung up for all to read.[2]
Printed versions of the poems can be found in Hopkins’ collected poetry[3] as poem number 102 a, b, c. However, the three poems are not translations of each other, rather three different poems celebrating the Bishop of Shrewsbury.
The painted decorations in the album were done by a woman, Miss Barnett from London, who was employed to paint them by the community at St Beuno’s. There are different styles to her painting. Perhaps most striking are the floral decorations to the opening pages, especially on the page with a photograph of St Beuno’s and the dedication page, showing strawberry flowers and violets. On the opening of the address to the bishop she painted historiated initials, accompanied by more flowers, and she made similar initials for the poem in Hebrew and some of the poems in other scripts. The three poems by Hopkins were decorated with pen and ink initials with foliate designs in the initials and pen and ink scroll work extending up and down the pages. Each poem was set within a monochrome border.
We have only had this fascinating album at the archive for a short time, and this blog is the result of a preliminary look at it and some of the literature relating to it. If you are interested in researching the album, do make an appointment to come and visit our archive. Alternatively, to read some of the scholarship relating to this volume, we hold the extensive archive of Alfred Thomas SJ, a Jesuit whose life-long work was studying the poems and life of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This collection has been catalogued, and the catalogue can be searched here.
[1] Abbott, Claude Colleer, (ed), Further letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins including his correspondence with Coventry Patmore. Second edition, London 1956. p 140
[2] Thomas SJ, Alfred, ‘G. M. Hopkins and the Silver Jubilee Album’, The Library, 5th Series, Vol XX, No 2. June 1965, pp 148-152
[3] Mackenzie, Norman H., The poetical works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Oxford, 1990. Poem number 102, a,b,c, pp 128-131 and 350-354
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