The Conversion of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Some Documents from the Archive of Pusey House, Oxford

Abstract

In 1994 the archive of Liddon House, London, was moved to Pusey House in Oxford. The journals of Henry Parry Liddon, kept more or less daily from 1858 to 1890 (the year of Liddon's death), thus came to be housed alongside the enormous correspondence of Edward Bouverie Pusey which Liddon himself spent much effort in collecting. Liddon's journal entries from 1863 onwards contain a number of references to the young Gerard Manley Hopkins, then an undergraduate at Balliol. A number of Hopkins scholars have made use of the journals in their research but none, to my knowledge, has examined them since their move to Oxford. Recently, a number of other documents have come to light which relate to Hopkins's time in Oxford, and in particular to his conversion. One of these documents strongly suggests that the only extant letter from Edward Pusey to Hopkins has been misdated since its publication in 1935, and hence that the accepted chronology of the days leading up to Hopkins's reception into the Roman Catholic Church needs slightly to be revised.