The Hopkins Manuscript by R.W. Sherriff

First published in Great Britain in 1939; published by Scribner on January 17, 2023

Apart from its outdated science and technology, The Hopkins Manuscript is a book that could have been written this year. Set in the mid-1940s, this post-apocalyptic novel is based on the kind of European nationalism that was festering when it was first published in 1939. The novel even imagines a nationalistic British prime minister who might be mistaken for Boris Johnson. But the novel is not overtly political. At least initially, the apocalypse has a natural rather than a human cause.

The story purports to be a manuscript found in the ruins of Notting Hill. The Royal Society of Abyssinia has been investigating the dead societies of Western Europe. Historians found the manuscript to be of little value, although it does supply the only firsthand account of a Western European who survived the Cataclysm that occurred 700 years earlier.

The Hopkins Manuscript is as much pre-apocalyptic as post-apocalyptic. This is the story of an ordinary man who, despite being flawed by conceit and an inflated sense of self-importance, tells a gradually darkening story about muddling his way through catastrophic times.

Edgar Hopkins is a 53-year-old bachelor and a retired schoolmaster in a small English village. He has given up grammar school arithmetic and now devotes his days to hobbies: raising and showing chickens, gardening, and studying the moon. Hopkins is a prideful man who, thanks to his prize bantam’s accumulation of blue ribbons, regards himself as a minor celebrity. He easily feels slighted. Hopkins is quick to judge people he regards as self-impressed, often believing them to be jealous of his own accomplishments. Like many people, Hopkins wants to be the star of his own story and resents anyone who receives attention that he believes to be his due.

Hopkins attends quarterly meetings of the British Lunar Society in London. Scientists and philosophers deliver lectures about the moon to its members. At one eventful meeting, Hopkins learns that the moon is moving closer to the Earth. The members are sworn to secrecy, as the government does not want the public to panic. Hopkins is unbearably proud that he is among the chosen few who are entrusted with the secret but can barely refrain from boasting of his own importance.

To keep people well-mannered as the apocalypse approaches, the government convinces newspaper editors to report the possibility that the moon will only strike a “glancing blow,” perhaps causing a survivable atmospheric disturbance that will merely cause hurricanes and floods. The government orders the construction of dugouts in each city and village to maximize the chance of survival in the event that the moon does not obliterate the Earth when the bodies collide. It supplies watertight steel doors and oxygen cylinders so that village residents can sit out the apocalypse in comfort before cleaning up the mess. The villagers are happy to have a project to distract them from the end of the world and are even happier to believe that the apocalypse is nothing to worry about.

The reader knows from the start that Hopkins will survive. More than half the manuscript is devoted to events that lead to the cataclysmic event. The wry humor with which Hopkins describes his life is a welcome change from typical apocalyptic fiction. The zombie apocalypse novels that were popular as the end of the twentieth century neared were often amusing (not always intentionally), but the eco-catastrophe novels that have dominated the current century and the “war of annihilation” novels that followed the Second World War were not meant to tickle the funny bone. R.C. Sherriff imagines an unlikely apocalypse that does not depend on war or pandemic or global warming or even a zombie attack. I wish apocalyptic writers of today were as creative, even if modern readers might think it unlikely that the Earth would survive the apocalyptic event (or that the event could happen in the way the novel describes).

The last third of The Hopkins Manuscript reveals its broad lesson. Devastating events can pull us together. Eventually, however, the worst aspects of human nature will pull us apart again. Greed, tribalism, and appeals to fear are so much easier to sustain than compassion and cooperation. R.W. Sherriff certainly had the rise of Nazi Germany in mind as he wrote the story.

Hopkins takes note of political conflicts that weaken western European nations and make it vulnerable to attack from the East, but he sticks to his goal of telling “the story of these days as I saw them with my own eyes.” The days become increasingly depressing, turning an amusing story into a sad one.

Hopkins is true to himself through the entire novel. He’s lonely, apart from the post-apocalyptic attachment he forms with a young man and his sister for a couple of years after the catastrophe. He’s content with his loneliness because he prefers breeding chickens to the company of those who do not appreciate his courage, fortitude, and wisdom. Although those attributes might actually be in short supply, he is appealing because of his ordinariness. He lacks insight into his faults (as do most people), but he is a decent human and the perfect observer to record an eyewitness account of the end of western civilization, albeit from a narrow perspective.

Fans of post-apocalyptic fiction might want to seek out The Hopkins Manuscript as an early example of the genre. It isn’t as emotionally affecting as the best post-apocalyptic novels of the 1950s, but like those novels, it works because of its focus on the life of one person rather than the death (and possible rebirth) of the planet as a whole.

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