Dolben

Abstract

Abstract Hopkins probably first met Robert Bridges, an undergraduate of Corpus Christi, at one of Canon Liddon’s Sunday evening lectures in the Michaelmas term of 1863. They became good friends, and in February 1865 Bridges introduced Hopkins to Digby Mackworth Dolben, who was entered for Balliol in 1866. Dolben was not quite seventeen, three-and-a-half years younger than Hopkins. He had ‘fine dark melancholy eyes’, was ‘tall, pale, and of delicate appearance, and though his face was thoughtful and his features intellectual, he would not at that time have been thought good-looking’. He dressed neglectfully, and had an abstracted manner. He was short-sighted but did not wear spectacles, and ‘though the dreaminess which it gave to his expression came to be a characteristic and genuine charm’, wrote Bridges, ‘it was, until it won romantic interpretation, only an awkwardness’.