The portrait of the three brothers was painted by Maria Smith Giberne, his mother’s sister, or Maria Rosina de Giberne, sister of George Giberne.
Ann Hopkins (b. 1815), Manley’s sister, was a skillful visual artist and pianist who encouraged her nephew’s creative talents and intellectual pursuits (including an interest in archaeology).
The young men are assembled in front of the doors to the Balliol chapel passage. Hopkins is standing 6th from the left.
During the summer or “long vacation” of 1866, Oxford friends A. W. Garrett, W. A. Comyn Macfarlane, and Hopkins constituted a summer “reading” party at Whiting’s Farm in West Sussex, England.
Two photographs taken at Clongowes have survived. In this one, Hopkins is seated in the first row, extreme right; the Rector of Clongowes at the time, J. Conmee, S.J., is seated in the front row, center.
Hopkins is standing second from left.
During the two-year novitiate in Manresa House, Roehampton (a village south-west of London), the young men took turns serving as Beadle or porter, one of whose tasks was to record the daily schedule or “Order of the Day.” Hopkins was Beadle in February 1869.
Russell, for many years the editor of The Irish Monthly, had asked for Hopkins’s opinion of some Latin doggerel poetry; Hopkins replies with “Great haste, as I have an invoice of 331 papers from the R.U.I.” to grade.
From the late 1860s, Hopkins sent Newman a birthday letter almost every year. In this missive, Hopkins also discusses the state of University College (its forerunner in Dublin was the Catholic University established by Newman in the 1840s). The letter begins: “Your Eminence and dearest Father, Pax Christi – I wish you a very happy eighty-eig[h]th birthday and year and as many more as God shall send. It seems that you still enjoy the blessing granted Moses. This poor University College, the somehow-or-other manned wreck of the Catholic University, is afloat and not sinking; rather making a very little way than losing any. There is scarcely any public interest in the University question in this country. Nay, there is none. But this does not prevent good and really patriotic people in a quiet but not ineffective way doing what can be done to advance it.”
The request from Goldie, who had spent time in the Balearics (i.e. Mallorca, Minorca, Ibiza, and Formentera in the Mediterranean off the east coast of Spain) gathering material for his Life of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez (1889), is the stimulus for Hopkins’s poem on that saint, who had been canonized on 06.09.1887.
The MacCabe family lived in Donnybrook village, south of Dublin. Dr MacCabe (later, Sir Francis), the medical director of Dundrum Criminal asylum, and his wife first met Hopkins while he was teaching at Stonyhurst, where their son was a pupil. When Hopkins moved to Dublin, they befriended him.