Robert Stephen Hawker was born on December 3, 1803, in a village just outside of Plymouth, to a poor clergyman with nine children.  He spent most of his childhood in Plymouth, raised by his grandparents.  A mischievous boy, he rebelled against the strict environment of his grandfather’s house and ran away from several boarding schools.  Hawker attended Oxford, leaving school briefly in 1823 to marry Charlotte I’ans, who was 22 years his senior.  He was devastated by her death in 1863, but he remarried one year later, this time to a woman 40 years his junior, named Pauline Kuczynski. 

After completing his studies at Oxford, he was appointed vicar of Morwenstow, a small town in northern Cornwall.  According to biographer and literary critic Piers Brendon, “[F]rom the Dark Ages until the coming of the motor-car Morwenstow remained a remote and inaccessible part of a distant and backward province” (64).  Although, throughout his life, Hawker completed his best work work in remote and rustic huts, he found the isolation and backwardness of his parish stifling. 

Hawker spent much of his life writing ballads, the most famous of which was “The Song of the Western Men.”   His greatest poetic accomplishment was The Quest of the Sangraal (1863), where he presented his own version of the Arthurian legends.  Hawker died on April 15, 1875, after converting to Catholicism on his deathbed, and was buried in Plymouth Cemetery.  Hawker’s eccentric character was evident even at his funeral, where the mourners, at his request, wore purple instead of black.

© Copyright Shea Davis 2007