Editing in the Bath: Or, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Intentionality, and the Man from Petrograd

The relationship between authorial intention and the work of textual editing is often vexed, particularly if the author does not themselves intend to be published at all. Cue Gerard Manley Hopkins. In Hopkins' case, though, things become still more complex when we attend to the fact that the only person who is said ever to have desired, or intended, that Hopkins be published may not really have existed. Or, if he did exist, he may well have been someone who ended his life in a bath, in Oxford, in 1929.