The Gerard Manley Hopkins Collection was originally started by Gonzaga English professor Fr. Anthony Bischoff, S.J. His research collection (BRC) includes manuscripts; correspondence; legal documents; drawings; photographs; books which Hopkins used as poet and classicist; materials related to family, friends, and contemporaries; Jesuit journals pertinent to Hopkins’s life; major scholarly studies of Hopkins from around the world; and copies and microfilms of archival materials housed in England, Ireland, and North America
As this display case summarizes, every aspect of Hopkins’s life and its contexts are represented in the BRC.
In his introduction, Bridges famously described “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins’s singular ode, as the “dragon” at the gate.
Hopkins writes to William Shapter, S.J. (1847-1928), Charles de Lapasture, S.J. (1839-1923), and Francis Goldie, S.J. (1836-1912), former associates at various Jesuit institutions, who had sent their good wishes when he pronounced his final vows (as a Spiritual Co-adjutor) on 15 August. The playful, allusive letter begins: “Pax Christi. | My hearties, -- I am going to answer ‘the three of yez’ under one trouble -- no, no, not trouble, not trouble: pleasure is the word -- under one pleasure. This pleasure must shall be brief, because, the according to the one of yez, I am to call to yez on my way to Glasgow to so very shortly. . . .”
Framed photograph of a portrait, itself based on a photo taken at Clongowes Wood College, Co. Kildare, Ireland, in 1884. Hopkins was often a guest at Clongowes (vividly represented in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916). The photograph is inscribed “My brother Gerard. Lionel C. Hopkins 13 October 1947.”
George Giberne, a talented amateur photographer, was married to Kate Hopkins’s sister, Maria Smith. Hopkins used his uncle’s architectural photographs for making drawing; his aunt, also a sketch artist, encouraged the young man’s talents.
