Gertrude’s poems

Sydney, Newcastle and London : W. E. Smith [for John Hopkins], 1895. Octavo (180 x 125 mm), original royal blue cloth over boards with gilt-lettered title to upper board (boards with flecking and light staining, spine darkened and frayed at ends); all edges gilt; front pastedown with bookbinder’s ticket of W. E. Smith, Sydney; page [i] frontispiece portrait and facsimile signature of Gertrude Hopkins; page [ii] blank; page [iii] with the author’s father’s notice: To Relatives and Friends. So many of you who already possess one or more of the Poems contained in this volume have asked for copies of others in my possession, that I have had them printed and bound, together with a few introductory lines by a friend of the family, for Presentation only. In case this book may get into the hands of critics or strangers, they are asked to kindly remember this. The Author’s Father.‘ – this page is also inscribed ‘Presented to Harold Freeman Esq. by the Author’s Father, John Hopkins, Nov. 9th 1895’; page [iv] blank; pp. [v]-vii In Memoriam (an appreciation and biographical sketch of Gertrude by an anonymous friend); page [viii] blank; pp. 1-82 (poems and short prose pieces), [1] colophon; occasional spotting or handling marks at the margins, pp. 60-61 both with heavy off-setting, otherwise internally very good.

This posthumous collection of verse and philosophical meditations by a young Sydney woman, Gertrude Hopkins (1869-1894), was printed by her father, John Hopkins, in the year following her tragically early death at the age of 24. As explained by him in the notice To Relatives and Friends, the humble volume was intended strictly for private circulation – a proud father’s tribute to the literary talent and intellect of his beloved daughter, ‘a pure, unselfish soul … a joy and a blessing, adorning and faithfully discharging with love and tenderness all the relations of a daughter, sister, friend’ (In Memoriam).

Gertrude grew up in Oxfordshire, the third daughter of John and Eleanor Hopkins. Her family emigrated to New South Wales in the hope that a sea voyage and milder climate might prove beneficial to her father’s ill-health; they arrived in Sydney in September 1884. Gertrude lived with her family in Dulwich Hill, Sydney, until her death after a long and painful illness on 27 September 1894 – one day shy of her twenty-fifth birthday. She is buried in Rookwood Cemetery. A gifted writer whose poetry and short prose pieces are preoccupied with themes of nature and the divine, Gertrude was also, according to the anonymous author of the In Memoriam, a talented artist who left behind ‘many beautiful and well-executed sketches’.

Gertrude’s poems is a genuine rarity, with only four copies traced in Australian collections (SLNSW; SLV; University of Newcastle Library; University of Queensland Library)