Hopkins’s notebooks and papers were first edited by Humphry
House in 1937, in one volume which contained his Journal and selections from diaries, undergraduate essays, sermons, and other spiritual writings. That book* has long been out of print; and the recovery of Hopkins MSS has gone on. In 1947 three more of his Journal notebooks were discovered by Fr D. A. Bischoff, SJ, at the Jesuit Provinciate in Farm Street. In 1952 Lionel Hopkins, Gerard’s last remaining brother, died, aged 97; and House was invited to search The Garth, Haslemere (the Hopkins family home for over fifty years) for further MSS. Here he found and catalogued over seventy new letters, t retreat notes, sketches, and music ;J and, with them, a mass of other long-accumulated family material: letters, photographs, scrapbooks, papers of all kinds. All this was clearly of considerable value in filling out the little-known details of Hopkins’s early years, and an essential background to a new edition of the notebooks.