Robert Stephen Hawker is known more as a notable eccentric than as an important writer, despite the power of his ballads and of his masterpiece, The Quest of the Sangraal (1864). Perhaps this is because his early sensational biographers, S. Baring-Gould and F.G. Lee, preferred vivid and bizarre depiction to an accurate account of Hawker's behavior and accomplishments.

Hawker was born at Stoke Damerel, Devonshire, on 3 December 1803, to Jacob Stephen Hawker, a doctor who later became a minister, and Jane Elizabeth Drewitt Hawker. Hawker was influenced by his grandfather and namesake, Robert Hawker, a well-known Calvinist divine and preacher. Throughout his youth, Hawker had a reputation for rebelliousness, mischief, and practical jokes. One of his least harmful hoaxes was an impersonation of a mermaid; he sat on a breakwater for a few nights combing his hair and singing. Hawker resented school. He boarded for a time at Liskeard...