The Hopkins Manuscript

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Every character in this book is entirely fictitious and no reference whatever is intended to any living person.

(From The Imperial Research Press, Addis Ababa)

When the Royal Society of Abyssinia discovered ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’ two years ago in the ruins of Notting Hill it was hoped that some valuable light would at last be thrown upon the final, tragic days of London.

But a careful study of the manuscript has proved these hopes to have been raised in vain. Edgar Hopkins, its author, was a man of such unquenchable self-esteem and limited vision that his narrative becomes almost valueless to the scientist and historian, and is scarcely mentioned in the Royal Society’s massive and masterly ‘Investigations into the Dead Civilisations of Western Europe’.

But despite all its shortcomings, ‘The Hopkins Manuscript’ possesses one unique feature. It is the only personal day-by-day record yet discovered that gives us the intimate feelings of an Englishman during the days of the Cataclysm. Our ignorance concerning the History of England has caused much comment in recent scientific debates, but it should be remembered that for a hundred years after the collapse of the ‘Western Civilisation’ the peoples of the reborn nations of the East indulged in an orgy of senseless destruction of everything that existed in their own countries to remind them of the days when they lived in servitude to the ‘white man’. Every printed book, every vestige of art surviving from Western Europe, was systematically hunted out and destroyed. The damp climate of England completed this work of destruction in the seven hundred years that followed, and the tragedy of our revival of interest in the long past nations of Europe is that it has come too late.

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