The slightly odd title of this volume – not Marcus Clarke, but Cyril Hopkins’ Marcus Clarke – is reminiscent of a spate of movies in the 1990s, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Those weren’t the authentic products, but this book does present Hopkins’s Clarke, in that much of the volume is made up of his childhood memories of the author of For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) and long extracts from Clarke’s letters to Hopkins.

Those films relied on the authors’ fame, but no one remembers Cyril Hopkins (1846–1932). Cyril and his brother were both at school with Clarke, and the brother was famous, or became so as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. As the editors of Cyril Hopkins’ Marcus Clarke point out, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Marcus Clarke achieved most of their fame posthumously. Cyril never became celebrated, certainly not with this biography, which is published now for the first time. This doesn’t seem to have bothered him unduly. He worked on the biography for many years and tried, in a rather desultory way, to get it published. It appears to have been a labour of love, dedicated to a childhood friend whose imprint on him was enduring. Ultimately, Hopkins’s manuscript was sold, for £170, to the Mitchell Library, where it languished, apart from loving visits from Clarke scholars, until this resurrection by Australian Scholarly Publishing.