A Hopkins Chronology

Abstract

H is born at 4.15 a.m. on Sunday 28 July 1844 at Chestnut House, 87 The Grove, Stratford, Essex, the first of seven surviving children of Manley and Kate Hopkins, and baptised at the church of St John the Evangelist, Stratford; on Christmas Eve his father makes him the subject of a poem (‘Hail! little worshipper of Light!’). Manley, who ran a successful marine insurance business in the City of London, was himself a writer of sorts, publishing some collections of verse, reviewing poetry for The Times and writing a book about mathematics and an unpublished novel; his Manual of Marine Insurance and The Port of Refuge, or advice and instructions to the Master-Mariner in situations of doubt, difficulty and danger established themselves as standard works. From February 1856 he was for forty years Consul-General for Hawaii in London, in which capacity he found a butler for King Kamehameha IV, wrote Hawaii: an Historical Account of the Sandwich Islands, and contributed a series of London newsletters to the Polynesian over the pseudonym ‘Fleet Street’; he reported a sighting of the dodo in Samoa a century after it was thought to be extinct, and when Queen Emma of Hawaii visited England she called on the Hopkinses.¹