The Vicar of Morwenstow: Being a Life of Robert Stephen Hawker, M.a.

The Victorian age produced no stranger clergyman than Robert Stephen Hawker, vicar of Morwenstow, Cornwall, and this 1876 biography captures every magnificent eccentricity of the man. S. Baring-Gould, himself an inveterate collector of the odd and beautiful, writes with evident affection about a poet-clergyman who composed Christmas carols, scandalized his parishioners with medieval vestments, and kept company with smugglers and ghosts. Hawker's life was a study in glorious contradiction: a man of deep religious feeling who delighted in Cornish folklore, a poet who celebrated the Celtic West while serving Anglican orthodoxy, a rebel who ran away from school after a single night yet became one of the most learned men of his day. Baring-Gould unfolds his story with Victorian relish in anecdote, tracing his journey from mischievous youth through poet of the Western sea to the haunted, beloved eccentric of Morwenstow. For readers enchanted by the strange corners of the nineteenth century, by poets who defied convention, by clergymen who questioned their calling while fulfilling it, this remains an indispensable portrait.