ABSTRACT
Hopkins delighted in Balliol College as it was when he came up in April 1863: it is, he wrote to his mother, 'the friendliest and snuggest of colleges, their inner quad is delicious and has a grove of fine trees and lawns where bowls are the order of the evening'. Dr John Simm Smith, Hopkins's maternal grandfather, rented Blunt House from 1847 to his death in 1877. It was a large mid-eighteenth-century brick-built house, with stone facings and a frontage of c. 112 feet. Hopkins was one of the earlier boys to win an open award at Oxford or Cambridge. The Highgate school continued to grow and by the 1920s numbered c. 500. Hopkins studied theology in St Beuno's College from August 1874 to September 1877; he was ordained priest in the chapel on 22 September 1877. He began The Wreck of the Deutschland St Beuno's College in December 1875 and finished it early in 1876.
