Few other short pieces of nineteenth-century fiction have caused as much stir as George Tomkyns Chesney's The battle of Dorking, first published in the tory Blackwood's Magazine in May 1871.Footnote 1 For one recent commentator, the story was ‘perhaps the most influential short work of British fiction in the nineteenth century’, with Chesney in effect having ‘accidentally invented the thriller’.Footnote 2 This is something of an exaggeration, but the tale was certainly popular, selling over 100,000 copies when it was issued as a pamphlet – a very large number in mid-Victorian publishing terms.Footnote 3 The story was also, if not the first thriller, then the first in what was to become a modern industry of future-war and invasion-scare literature.
The battle of Dorking outlines how a foreign army – Germans, to be precise, though their nationality is never explicitly stated – land in southern England and proceed to overwhelm and defeat the small and unprepared British force raised to meet them. By the Edwardian era, stories more or less directly inspired by Dorking were a mass-publishing phenomenon, as illustrated with the popularity of serialized narratives like William Le Queux's The great war in England in 1897 (1894) first published in Alfred Harmsworth's paper Answers, and The invasion of 1910 (1906) in the Daily Mail – though Le Queux's later claim that The invasion sold a million copies is probably hyperbole.Footnote 4 ‘“The Battle of Dorking” is perhaps the most celebrated book dealing with the subject’, the New London Journal observed in 1906, ‘but fiction writers by the score have attempted to picture the great war of the future’.Footnote 5 In November 1914, the satirical magazine Punch even joked that
Amongst the (more or less) skilled industries that have been gravely affected by the outbreak of hostilities must now be placed the making of prophetic fiction. It is calculated that the number of novels dealing with ‘The Next Great War’ that have had to be scrapped must run well into four figures.Footnote 6
Future-war fiction can, relatively simply, be defined as literature that portrays warfare in the near or distant future. This could include ‘fantastic’ literature like the proto-science fiction of authors like George Griffith,Footnote 7 as well as more ‘serious’ fictional narratives, like H. O. Arnold-Forster's In a conning tower (1888) first published in Murray's Magazine.Footnote 8 Invasion-scare literature – which can be defined as stories where Britain is invaded by a foreign enemy – forms a sub-category of this wider genre, and has variously been seen as distinct from, or overlapping with, other narratives, like stories about blockades, spies, or attacks on the empire.Footnote 9 As with the wider future-war genre, invasion-scare narratives included highly technical treatises and polemics, alongside popular stories aimed at a mass audience. Such literature contained a multitude of different tropes, with stories varying ‘in sophistication and intent’.Footnote 10 While fictional descriptions of future wars and invasions have a long pedigree, and were not exclusively British phenomena, it was The Battle of Dorking that set off this literary industry in its modern form. It was also on the British Isles that the vision of foreign fleets and hostile armies found its most eager audience in the decades prior to 1914.
Despite the extensive interest shown towards future-war and invasion-scare literature by scholars – not least by I. F. Clarke – the way such stories were read and interpreted by Victorian and Edwardian readers remains unclear.Footnote 11 This article outlines the multifaceted nature of the narratives, and the way they were shaped by and in turn positioned themselves among their readership. It argues that the popularity of the stories does not automatically indicate that the politics of the narratives were accepted by their readers. Instead, by showing how stories of future wars mirrored wider discussions about Britain's changing place in the world, the article offers a new interpretation of the genre, that sees its popularity as at least in part due to the ways in which it included the readership in a temporal and spatial idea of what it meant to belong to the British world. As such, pre-1914 future-war and invasion-scare literature formed an important part of the late Victorian commodity culture, but any attempts to use it to promote specific political goals or change public perceptions were facing an uphill struggle.
I
It is often claimed that stories about near-future battles and invasions had a negative impact on the British pre-Great War psyche, pushing the country one step closer to war with Germany in 1914. Cecil D. Eby, to take one example, claims to have found a ‘public wave of xenophobia disguised as invasion neurosis’ in the ‘paper invasions’ of the years 1870–1914.Footnote 12 Such conclusions have been drawn in other studies of the late Victorian and Edwardian period as well: Michael Paris identifies anxiety over invasion as a pronounced part of British culture from the 1890s onwards – a time, he writes, when British youth were fed a ‘constant diet of propaganda’.Footnote 13 A. J. A. Morris argues that, while the press shares responsibility for invasion ‘scaremongering’ before 1914, the ‘more persuasive source’ was the popular novelists.Footnote 14
However, there are few indications that the narratives functioned – as some have argued – as a ‘barometer of British anxieties’ in the period in question,Footnote 15 and the output of stories did not necessarily coincide with the rise and decline of external threats from foreign aggressors.Footnote 16 When it came to political campaigning, where invasion-scare literature might be expected to have blossomed, it was an unsuccessful and mostly underused tool in the electoral politics toolbox. In writing The battle of Dorking, I. F. Clarke claims, ‘Chesney had invented an ideal mode for continuing politics by means of fiction.’Footnote 17 But this is not supported by existing evidence. When Alfred Harmsworth, the later Lord Northcliffe, ran for office on a Unionist ticket in Portsmouth in the 1895 general election, he hired the author Beccles Wilson and the naval expert William Laird Clowes to write a serialized invasion text to support his candidature.Footnote 18 The resulting ‘Siege of Portsmouth’ ran in instalments in the Mail – a Portsmouth newspaper Harmsworth bought to support his bid, not to be confused with his later Daily Mail.Footnote 19 Despite these investments, the newspaper magnate's political campaign failed, in marked contrast to Unionist successes elsewhere that year. There are no indications that the story itself was unpopular: the paper included local citizens in the narrative, and they seemed to have enjoyed reading about themselves in this way. One of them, Corporal Elwin Thomas – a Crimean war veteran who falls down dead while stirring the populace with stories of past wars in one of the instalmentsFootnote 20 – wrote to the paper a few days later, with the tongue-in-cheek criticism that he would have preferred being despatched by ‘an old-fashioned eighty-pounder’ instead.Footnote 21 Readers were clearly able to engage with and enjoy invasion-scare literature without necessarily accepting the specific arguments put forward in such stories.
Numerous people picked up and read invasion-scare fiction throughout the Victorian and Edwardian era, and many of these were unquestionably convinced that Britain was indeed under threat. Answers ‘editorial chat’ on 20 January 1894 remarked with satisfaction that its serialization of Le Queux's The great war in England ‘is arousing great enthusiasm among my readers’.Footnote 22 But a question must be raised as to whether the enthusiasm of Answers’s readership was representative, or indeed what being enthusiastic about a story really entailed. Harmsworth would later despair about the way readers seemed to be outside of his control: ‘I see my way to getting large circulation’, he complained, ‘but how am I to get influence?’Footnote 23
Le Queux, who claims that he wrote The invasion of 1910 to ‘wake up’ the country to the danger of foreign aggression, argued in his autobiography that the effect in this regard had been far from satisfactory.Footnote 24 The commercial success of the Daily Mail’s venture was substantial, but the idea that it shaped people's perception of British vulnerability was much less tangible. As a multifaceted genre, encompassing various strands of the political spectrum, the future-war and invasion-scare fiction published in the late Victorian and Edwardian era was undoubtedly popular, but did not successfully propel any specific policies to the forefront of political debate. Le Queux might have hoped that his story would change the national conversation about Britain's vulnerability to invasion, but it was published too late to have any impact on the political campaigning and on the Liberal landslide in the 1906 general election. Indeed, Le Queux wrote to Lord Roberts, the head of the National Service League and retired commander-in-chief, that the story would begin in the Daily Mail in March, ‘when we hope the excitement over the opening of Parliament will be at an end’.Footnote 25 The anti-Liberal bias and pro-National Service arguments in The invasion of 1910 were mostly met with shrugs from Conservative and Liberal commentators alike. The Pall Mall Gazette, then under the editorship of the Conservative Douglas Straight, drily commented about the story that ‘the sensational novelists of the day are doing their best to finish off the British Empire’, while the New London Journal simply observed that, ‘[h]appily, the prophetic horrors of the sensational novelist are rarely fulfilled’.Footnote 26 For the Liberal Daily News, Le Queux's success was simply accidental; even the Sporting Times weighed in, labelling the tale as ‘hysterical rubbish’.Footnote 27
Part of the reason for the stories’ ineffectiveness was that the various political arguments within them were often unclear or could be interpreted in different ways. This was true from the genre's inception: there are, for example, few signs that The battle of Dorking led to any spurt in recruitment for the Volunteers, the organization charged with defending Britain from an invader. As John Gooch notes, Volunteer recruitment numbers were ‘disastrous’ in the period between 1868 and 1872.Footnote 28 Yet Chesney's story – which describes the unprepared, badly led and undersupplied Volunteers being mowed down by disciplined German soldiers – was hardly a good recruitment argument and might have turned anyone off from joining their ranks; nor is it at all clear that increased recruitment was what Chesney wanted to accomplish with the story. Clarke assumed that Chesney wanted to promote conscription, as the line arguing for ‘enforced arming of [Britain's] manhood’ at the end of the narrative seems to support.Footnote 29 Yet Chesney would later publicly claim that he was satisfied with the size of the armed forces – it was their organization that was the problem.Footnote 30
Chesney was nervous enough about his story being labelled a tory tract that he wrote a letter to the Spectator, claiming that he was ‘nothing if not a Liberal’.Footnote 31 This probably rang a bit hollow, not least considering how the story had been published in a tory journal, but it illustrates how Dorking could, at least in theory, be presented and discussed as a politically malleable or even neutral form of fiction. Darko Suvin argues that the intended audience for the story was the Liberal bourgeoisie – though the story itself, he argues, was written from a right-wing perspective – while David Finkelstein takes Chesney at his word and believes that he was, in fact, a Liberal at this point in his career.Footnote 32 Either way, it was never the case that the genre was securely fixed at the tory or right-wing end of the political spectrum, as has often been claimed.Footnote 33
Nor is there any indication that the stories functioned as a successful form of social control. This argument has been put forward most explicitly by C. J. Keep. In Keep's reading, the success of Dorking was a ‘testament to the enormous influence exerted by bourgeois ideology on the late-Victorian social formation at home and abroad’.Footnote 34 Across the empire, Chesney's readers, in engaging with his story, were tied together by a bourgeois idea of the British imperial project, according to Keep. Other studies, while not going so far as Keep, have echoed this sentiment. The rise of a mass press and the ‘publishing revolution’ of the late nineteenth century, according to this reading, led to the spread, and widespread acceptance of, imperialist and militarist ideas throughout British society.Footnote 35 ‘The public had little to set against a patriotic imperialism’, notes John MacKenzie, ‘and the critics of empire never really broke through.’Footnote 36 The problem with this argument is, first, that it implies that British readers – of both middle and working class – more or less uncritically accepted militarist and imperialist ‘propaganda’. One should be careful about inferring from the existence of a mass press that society as a whole read these papers without at least to some extent drawing their own conclusions from the articles and stories printed in them. Newspapers were not necessarily an indication of the popular will, as various political commentators throughout the later nineteenth century, among them Karl Marx, F. W. Hirst, and George Carslake Thompson, pointed out.Footnote 37 Pre-war British politics was, by its very nature, contested – as was the concept of a ‘public opinion’.Footnote 38 Secondly, it also assumes that future-war and invasion-scare stories formed an effective part of such propaganda. But, as noted above, readers took away different ideas from the stories, and the narratives could be interpreted in different ways. It is true that early British science fiction – including invasion-scare literature and future-war fiction – was often written by an upper-class ‘establishment’ group of writers, as outlined by Darko Suvin.Footnote 39 But this does not automatically indicate that all stories were infused with an establishment mentality, or that the readers accepted such ideas when they came across them. Indeed, invasion-scare fiction alone, from 1871 onwards, contained numerous satirical and even radical and left-wing narratives, existing alongside what might be termed ‘establishment’ stories.Footnote 40Dorking did not exist in a vacuum. This is true of the entire genre: narratives were not uniform or written with the same motivations behind them or the same readers in mind. The military establishment certainly took an interest in, and actively wrote and discussed, invasion-scare and future-war fiction, as A. Michael Matin and Patrick M. Kirkwood has shown.Footnote 41 But it would be reasonable to assume that, for the most part, the average reader approached such stories differently from members of the armed services. Stories like J. N. Hampson's 1898 ‘Great Britain v. France and Russia’, published as a Navy League prize essay in Leo Maxse's National Review,Footnote 42 reached a specific audience with an interest in naval issues and in the state of the Royal Navy. But readers’ enthusiasm for technical details or specific political arguments does not on its own explain the massive popularity of certain other stories, and of the genre as a whole among a general readership by the turn of the century.
II
For H. G. Wells, writing in 1901, fiction was a poor way to attempt to predict future developments: ‘Stories of the Year 2000, and Battles of Dorking, and the like’ did not belong to the scientific study of the future; they were, he argued, too occupied with the present to offer any new insights into what might come.Footnote 43 Echoing Wells, there has been a marked tendency in later studies to view pre-war invasion-scare fiction as anchored in their own time, unable therefore to engage with wider ideas of historical developments: in particular, the stories have been classified according to their success, or lack thereof, in making prognostications about the upcoming First World War.Footnote 44 However, while the stories were written for their own time and with a view to a contemporary readership, future-war fiction was often shaped by ideas of historical developments, and kept an eye towards past, present, as well as future. Indeed, the way future-war stories created a recognizable world through their ideas of belonging to a British nation that had been shaped by developments in both time and space helps to explain why the stories were popular among a wide selection of readers. This development took place alongside, and was in turn shaped by, the increased commercialization of the narratives and the way they were marketed and sold.
From an early stage, many authors behind numerous Dorking imitations seem to have been as much fascinated by the novelty of writing their stories from the perspective of the future as they were of the idea that Britain could be invaded. Following Georg Lukács, Fredric Jameson has argued that modern science fiction – of which future-war narratives necessarily form part – emerged in the wake of the historical novel, in particular those of Walter Scott, from the early eighteenth century onwards. Science fiction, then, was a product of the bourgeois cultural revolution, whereby capitalism reshaped people's cultural habits.Footnote 45 Building on this idea, John Rieder has argued that Chesney, who builds his narrative around the idea of a grandfather telling his grandchildren about the British defeat in the titular battle, fifty years after the event, is an inversion of Scott's framing of Waverly or ‘tis sixty years since (1814).Footnote 46
Invasion-scare fiction imagined a timeline of events that tied past and present together with a potential future – as Corporal Elwin Thomas's fate in ‘The siege of Portsmouth’ illustrates. According to Matthew Beaumont, literature like The battle of Dorking belongs to a more general category of mid-Victorian ‘cacotopian’ fiction, where pessimistic forecasts were written as a reaction to the events of the Paris Commune. Such stories, Beaumont argues, presented themselves as ‘false prophesies’: ‘And their status as false prophesies’, he notes, ‘depends on the hopeful assumption that their readers have the power and the will to execute the political responsibility ascribed to them.’Footnote 47 But while an imagined possible future was an important element of invasion-scare literature, not all stories envisioned a ‘cacotopian’ timeline. Instead, imagining the past as part of a longer continuum that included the present as well as the future, stories often imagined the various ways in which history had influenced Britain's development.
Throughout the period between the publication of Dorking and 1914, future-war stories – as well as related forms of fiction – were consciously presenting themselves as based on historic precedents. Some authors were unapologetic about their debt to historical events, like William Laird Clowes and Alan H. Burgoyne, for whom, in the book Trafalgar re-fought (1905), the Nelson centenary was an opportunity to imagine the legendary admiral as alive and well, fighting his most famous encounter with Villeneuve in the near future using modern battleships.Footnote 48 Two decades after Chesney's story, presenting near-future-war stories as, in a sense, history that had not yet happened was a thoroughly established practice. George Sydenham Clarke not only chose the fitting pseudonym ‘A. Nelson Seaforth’ for his 1891 story The last great naval war, but also made sure that his readers knew this was ‘an historical retrospect’.Footnote 49 His story was joined by A. C. Curtis's A new Trafalgar in 1902.Footnote 50 Trafalgar was of course not the only historical event popular among authors. One story from 1901 was simply titled The coming Waterloo, though it did not find room for a resurrected duke of Wellington.Footnote 51 An earlier, radical story from 1871 titled The coming Cromwell decided to give Britain, as the title suggests, a new Lord Protector instead of digging up the old one.Footnote 52
Some narratives were written with the explicit aim of making British readers realize that the past afforded important lessons. A 1903 story in the Fortnightly Review, written by the pseudonym Vates (that is, ‘prophet’) describes a French invasion of Britain as revenge for the earlier humiliation in the 1898 Fashoda incident. A French general questioned by the story's narrator after the invasion has been foiled is, however, contemptuous of Britain having learned anything from the event, or from its own recent history.Footnote 53 The aim of the story was, of course, to prove the fictional general wrong. The idea that recent imperial history could serve as inspiration for home defence was a point made more explicit in other fictional invasions. ‘Remember Ladysmith and Mafeking!’, shouts a character in The new battle of Dorking (1900) – a story anonymously penned by Colonel F. N. Maude – and is answered with a roar from the crowds he is addressing. Later in the story we are told that ‘It is the spirit of the English people who conquered India, with comparative handfuls of men, and whose women behaved so magnificently in the Mutiny, that saves us from internal wreck when we suffer temporary reverses in the field.’Footnote 54
Others took a more indirect approach. In one 1871 repudiation of Chesney, where Germany is invaded by Britain, instead of the other way around, the anonymous author used the pseudonym ‘Motly Ranke McCauley’ [sic], invoking the most famous British and German historians of the century. Even the subheading made clear that the narrative was one of many ‘chapters from future history’.Footnote 55 It was not alone: another 1871 story purporting to convey the tale of The second Armada also chose the ‘chapter from future history’ approach,Footnote 56 while Bracebridge Hemyng told of the coming Commune in London under the only slightly altered subheading ‘a chapter of anticipated history’.Footnote 57 Yet another ‘Macaulay’ wrote in 1874 of The carving of Turkey: a chapter of European history, from sources hitherto unpublished. Footnote 58 The ghost of Edward Gibbon hung over The decline and fall of the British empire – at least three such tales were published between 1881 and 1905.Footnote 59 Others presented themselves as fictional academic field investigations of Britain from a vantage point in the future, though some were more tongue-in-cheek than others.Footnote 60 These narratives engaged directly with a philosophy of history, portraying Britain within a general lifecycle of empires. Kelly Mays has noted that Victorians were fascinated by the idea that their own present would one day become past, interpreted and misunderstood by someone from their future. Not for nothing did Macaulay's New Zealander, surveying the ruins of empire, become almost a parody of itself in its own time.Footnote 61 Indeed, as Lisa Yaszek has observed, philosophies of history have long been used by science fiction authors.Footnote 62The battle of Dorking, with its vision of the fall of the British empire, was an early version of this trend.
By placing themselves in an unfolding historical narrative, the stories following in the wake of Dorking were often imaginatively engaging with ideas of continuity as well as change. It is well recognized that in forming their views of British society, Victorian and Edwardians were highly occupied with the past, leading some to claim that their culture was inexorably headed towards industrial decline.Footnote 63 But the popularity of the future-war genre suggests they were just as interested in reading about the future, and that ideas about past events did not preclude their having an eye towards ideas of progress and historical developments beyond their own time.
III
The focus on British history also illustrates how the stories were, by default, almost always more about Britain itself than about the foreign enemy. The narratives looked inwards, towards the fault-lines and stresses of British society. Mentions of British ‘soil’ were, throughout the period between 1871 and 1914, a recurrent theme in stories where invaders threaten the British Isles – from Dorking’s narrator lamenting that he will soon rest ‘in the soil I have loved so well, and whose happiness and honour I have so long survived’, to the rallying cry of ‘let no d----d foreigner set foot on English soil until he steps over our dead bodies’ in Louis Tracy's The final war (1896).Footnote 64
While southern England sees its fair share of fictional invaders throughout the pre-war period,Footnote 65 invasion-scare narratives were from an early stage eager to link localities with a wider idea of belonging to a British nation. Authors often used a localized narrative as a synecdoche, telling a story about the parts that made up the bigger British whole. More often than not, the result was an expanded ‘Englishness’ that left little room for the other three nations – though these could also feature in their own right, alongside other localities. In one of the many responses to Chesney's pessimistic Dorking in 1871, for example, Charles Stone described a country united across social and geographical lines, successfully resisting the invaders: ‘The stalwart miners of Northumberland and Durham, of Cornwall and the Welsh coal-districts; the great muscular navvies, and healthy agricultural labourers, the sharp mechanics of the manufacturing towns, and the yeomen, gentlemen, clerks – in fact everybody rushed to arms.’Footnote 66 Stone also pointed to successful earlier local resistance to historic invasions: ‘The men of Kent have never been beaten’, as the narrator at one point exclaims, a reference to William's conquest of the Isle in 1066, ‘and never will be.’Footnote 67 As Paul Readman observes, ‘national identities in Britain were importantly predicated on local identities, local and national patriotisms being a symbiotic and mutually supportive relationship across most of the modern period’.Footnote 68 This dynamic played out on the pages of invasion-scare literature throughout the pre-war decades.
Even Ireland, despite often being portrayed as a weak spot in the British armour, or a more-or-less ungovernable part of the wider commonwealth, could also be included as a loyal, albeit subordinate, defender of British interests, as in Tracy's The final war. Footnote 69 Indeed, many stories portrayed a fictitious invasion as the catalyst for the rediscovery of a timeless national unity, even if the nation itself is at times unclearly defined. In The siege of London (1885), where the invasion does not end well for the British defenders, the country at least discovers or reaffirms its shared identity. As a French army lands in Scotland, the invaders discover that any hopes of a rerun of the Jacobite rebellion were doomed to disappointment: ‘the Highlanders were not to be tempted from their allegiance to the British Crown. The Bas Breton interpreters employed by the French appealed to them as kindred Celts, but their appeals were in vain; and the country people displayed the most uncompromising hostility to the invaders.’Footnote 70
By contrast, British overseas possessions could be a source of insecurity or even weakness in stories where the British Isles are under threat. In 1901, as Wells was looking towards the future, Britain had yet to emerge victorious from the conflict against the Boer republics in South Africa. The British empire itself seemed in many respects to be creaking at the seams, unable to conquer new lands, let alone hold on to what had already been won. Unease about Britain's ability to retain its imperial gains had been prominent already in Dorking in 1871, where Chesney hints that the invasion is at least partly to be blamed on the undermanned army and navy being stretched to their limits defending the vast territory of the British empire.Footnote 71 Lamentations over imperial overstretch were common in invasion-scare texts throughout the period between 1871 and 1914, and were particularly prevalent – not only in fiction – in the aftermath of the South African War.Footnote 72 The narrator in The new battle of Dorking quickly realizes the danger presented by the French invasion force, as most of the British army is away in South Africa, leaving only ‘Militia and Volunteers, stiffened by ex-Reservists and a sprinkling of Regulars’ for home defence.Footnote 73 In the epilogue to his 1903 story The riddle of the sands, Erskine Childers notes that the Royal Navy is ‘distracted by the multiplicity of its functions in guarding our colossal empire and commerce’.Footnote 74 The empire, in this reading, is held together by a too-thin red – or rather blue and khaki – line, and imperial commitments have led to an underappreciation of the danger posed to Britain itself.
Arguments about imperial overstretch in such stories were rarely made in an effort to convince readers to abandon the empire or to scale back from imperial commitments.Footnote 75 Chesney was an engineer in the Indian Army, and by 1871, when he wrote Dorking, he was a brevet lieutenant-colonel and principal at the Royal Indian Civil Engineering College at Coopers Hill, while Childers had served in South Africa during the Boer War – though he would end his days in opposition to British rule in Ireland. Stories written by authors like these were not anti-imperial tracts. However, fictional descriptions of invasion and defeat have been linked with a wider societal unease about the empire, as scholars like Patrick Brantlinger, Matin, and others have argued. In this reading, the narratives are expressive of a fear of imperialism in reverse, or the empire turning in on itself.Footnote 76 Britain, such stories seemed to argue, could in effect be conquered in the same manner as it had acquired its empire, itself reduced to a colonial possession. As Matin observes, this unease can be most commonly found in stories published in the decades of the new imperialism, towards the end of the century;Footnote 77 though the sentiment is also to an extent present in earlier stories like A parallel case (1876) – a satire which presented Britain as a conquered nation, under the rule of the ‘Ashantees’.Footnote 78 Ailise Bulfin has analysed ‘invasion literature’ as part of a wider literary field than just texts about military invasion: in so-called gothic literature, one can find invaders in the shape of vampires or mummies, reflecting the ‘anxieties about the products and consequences of two-way imperial traffic, about colonial dissent spreading beyond the borders of the colonies and about the large-scale immigration of “undesirable” colonial subjects into “white” society’.Footnote 79
Such interpretations are much more convincing than the argument that invasion-scare stories were successful pro-imperial propaganda, but there are also other ways to read the narratives. Alongside narratives of imperial overstretch or of imperialism in reverse, one could also find ideas of spatial and temporal unity that included the empire as well. Perhaps the story most illustrative of the link between local, national and imperial connections in the genre is the aforementioned ‘Siege of Portsmouth’ – the serialized narrative Alfred Harmsworth used to promote his candidature in the 1895 general election.
‘The siege’ ran alongside the Portsmouth Mail’s more conventional political campaign over the summer of 1895. In this story, Britain is invaded by French and Russian forces in the near-future year of 1897, and Portsmouth itself is put under siege. The city becomes a microcosm of the wider invasion and war, as it is Portsmouth ‘that was to witness the desecration of British soil by the foot of the foe’.Footnote 80 The most interesting instalment is the one published in the paper on Thursday 20 June: a theatre group, besieged along with the rest of the city, volunteer their services to its defence. The actors have been playing soldiers in a stage production commemorating the 1895 siege and relief of Chitral, and have presumably learned valuable lessons about military drill simply by pretending to be soldiers on the imperial frontier.Footnote 81 It probably helps that the stage props include two fully functioning Maxim guns – a weapon that has come to symbolize British imperial conquests and wars of aggression during the scramble for Africa, and that, even at the time, was recognized as an important tool of imperialism. The siege of Chitral had been one of the few occasions where the British had used machine guns on the Indian subcontinent.Footnote 82 In ‘The siege of Portsmouth’, then, local, national and imperial experiences are tied together, localizing the invasion narrative while also contextualizing it: Portsmouth's fortunes are mirrored in those of the nation and the empire, and vice versa.
References to imperial campaigns in stories like ‘The siege of Portsmouth’ are indicative of how the empire, and the British imperial project itself, could feature in more complex ways in the invasion-scare texts than as either pro-imperial propaganda or fears of imperial overstretch or imperialism-in-reverse. This could take the form of either lessons learned while running or defending the empire, or of imperial forces coming to the rescue in the metropole's time of need. Both ideas are present in William Le Queux's best-selling The invasion of 1910. In one telling passage, where the narrative is told through the eyes of an observer in the Daily Mail offices, London's role as an imperial capital is underlined:
Through our windows in Carmelite Street came the dull roar of London's millions swelled by the [League of] Defenders from the west and south of England, and by the gallant men from Canada, India, the Cape, and other British colonies who had come forward to fight for the Mother country as soon as her position was known to be critical.
The story continues: ‘In the streets are seen Colonial uniforms side by side with the costermonger from Whitechapel or Walworth, and dark-faced Indians in turbans are fighting out in Fleet Street and the Strand.’Footnote 83 The ‘League of Defenders’ is a fictitious volunteer defence group, organized to combat the invaders. In Le Queux's story, the Defenders fight alongside the Legion of Frontiersmen – a patriotic volunteer group in existence at the time, which probably served as a model for the League itself.Footnote 84
In the defence of London by colonial contingents, forces from settler-colonies, and local British forces, the empire in this story is presented as an organic integration of its various component parts into a common front against the invaders. Colonial assistance was also forthcoming in the earlier Le Queux story The great war in England in 1897, where French and Russian armies invade. Native Indian troops are among the soldiers being sent to fight on British soil in this narrative, but Le Queux was careful also to include spontaneous mobilization of specifically Anglo-Saxon volunteer armies: a Canadian volunteer contingent, coming from a country where ‘more than a quarter of the population were themselves French’, is described as comprising ‘men to whom the knowledge of Britain's danger had been sufficient incentive to induce them to act their part as Britons’.Footnote 85 In these narratives, instead of being weakened by imperial overstretch, Britain is made stronger by its imperial connections.
As illustrated by Le Queux's reference to Canadian volunteers acting ‘their part as Britons’, future-war and invasion-scare stories pointed to temporal and spatial continuities to present an idea of a united British world, one where the ‘soil’ is ultimately less important than a timeless idea of an abstract ‘Britishness’. The 1871 short story The battle of Berlin describes a future war between Britain and Germany over the status of Heligoland – a British colony and, in Jan Rüger's words, a ‘notoriously discontented border island’ in the North Sea.Footnote 86 The story sees the population of Heligoland forcibly transported off the island by a German Reich eager to have them parade through Berlin. After Germany is defeated, however, the Heligolanders reaffirm their identity as British subjects by opting to travel to Australia and settle there, rather than return to ‘the barren sandheap’ they had used to call home.Footnote 87 Other stories also found that ‘Britain’ could exist elsewhere: while clearly satirical in intent and execution, the 1871 story The cruise of the Anti-Torpedo illustrated how invasion literature could imagine a British nation outside of its natural boundaries. The story outlines the aftermath of a successful German invasion, where the only representatives of Britain left unconquered are aboard an ‘unsinkable’ ship called the Anti-Torpedo. As the narrator in the story explains, ‘We were the sole free and independent representatives of our beloved countrymen; … In a word, we were England afloat.’Footnote 88 Rather than attempting a lone reconquest of the metropole, the crew plans to kidnap a group of women from Southend, to, in their words, ‘perpetuate the breed elsewhere’.Footnote 89
This idea of ‘England’ or ‘Britain’ as something that could be transposed to other parts of the world could be found in more serious narratives as well. The exiled king in When William came (1914) – written by ‘Saki’, or H. H. Munro – has made the mistake of retreating to Delhi after a successful German invasion of Britain, leading ‘the king across the water’ to preside over a ‘half-Asiatic court’.Footnote 90 But other exiles found themselves more, not less, British after their exodus. The mistake of moving to an ‘Asiatic’ possession is not made by King Edward VIII in the 1881 pamphlet The decline and fall of the British empire, who escapes from a revolutionary London to Australia. As Britain declares itself a Republic in the far-away future year of 1965, Australia in turn declares independence, and King Edward becomes emperor of the Australians instead.Footnote 91 ‘An Ex-Revolutionist’, author of England's downfall (1893), tells how, after the revolution, the empire is dismembered, or declares independence, and the British royal family emigrates to Canada and Australia.Footnote 92 A New Britain is established in New Zealand in the 1875 story Europa's fate, which includes natural disasters as well as future wars; and the narrator in William Delisle Hay's The doom of the great city also escapes to New Zealand when London is choked by a poisonous fog.Footnote 93 Other narratives included the United States as a favoured destination.Footnote 94
In stories like these, past or present imperial possessions serve as vantage points from where to witness the fall of the old homeland. While E. E. Mills and the pseudonymous Lang-Tung viewed The decline and fall of the British empire from Asia – Japan and China, respectively – an 1890 story with that title imagined a future expedition to London, this time from Australia, a millennium into the future. The story ends on the hopeful note that ‘when Australia is overcrowded, we will return to the old home and repopulate England. We are English, for England is the home of our fathers.’Footnote 95 This is a more optimistic outlook than that with which Chesney ended The battle of Dorking: the grandchildren of that story are preparing to leave Britain to settle in an unspecified location overseas, described simply as ‘a more prosperous land’.Footnote 96
Escape to the periphery, either permanently or with the intention of a future return to ‘the old home’, was clearly influenced by ideas of a wider Anglo-Saxon world that was as much British – if not more so – than the British Isles. There was a distinction, however, between the settler colonies and other imperial possessions, both in fictional narratives and in the society in which they were published. In The expansion of England (1883), J. R. Seeley did not include India in his vision of ‘Greater Britain’. This was in marked contrast to his inclusion of ‘those ten million Englishmen who live outside of the British Islands’. ‘The latter’, he wrote, ‘are of our own blood, and are therefore united with us by the strongest tie.’Footnote 97 The historian J. A. Froude, travelling through Oceana in the mid-1880s, found in ‘the other Englands’ that the rural ideal of ‘merry England’ was more alive than in England itself; he included California in this description.Footnote 98 As Duncan Bell has shown, the idea of ‘Greater Britain’ could mean different things to different people, but it often encompassed the settler colonies and the United States; this was, for example, how Charles Dilke envisioned it.Footnote 99 Such sentiments could be found across the political spectrum,Footnote 100 and were echoed in the literature of future war: one story unabashedly described the United States as a ‘larger, happier and freer England across the seas’.Footnote 101
The sea itself, connecting the wider British world together, was often seen as a uniquely British Mare Nostrum, or constituting a British sphere of influence. For the character Davies, in The riddle of the sands, it was obvious that Britain's future as well as its past lay on the oceans, as a ‘maritime nation’.Footnote 102 According to the geopolitical theorist Sir Halford Mackinder, writing in 1902, Britain's role as world power was precisely linked with its position at the centre of the maritime world, an observation few Edwardians would have found reason to quarrel with.Footnote 103 The idea that British freedoms rested with its maritime connection was firmly established by the eighteenth century, as P. J. Marshall notes.Footnote 104 A British world, centred on the British Isles, could be expanded to include all of white civilization, in opposition to such imagined threats as the ‘yellow peril’ from Asia. In the stories around this theme, such as The yellow danger (1898) by M. P. Shiel, the external threat of an Asiatic enemy leads ‘white Europe’ – with Britain in the vanguard – to form a ‘new armada’ to defend themselves.Footnote 105
IV
What readers took away from reading about near-future conflicts remains contested. On the one hand, insecurity over Britain's role and position in the geopolitical landscape influenced and shaped stories to a certain extent; but they were also marketed to and read by an audience that may not have had similar ideas or preoccupations. Instead, the genre's popularity, in particular in the age of Le Queux and Harmsworth, should be read as an indication of the stories’ ability to engage with a wide group of readers – and how the texts were marketed to this group.
The accidental popularity of Dorking came out of a mid-Victorian magazine with a limited readership: in the 1870s, Blackwood's circulation averaged around 6,500.Footnote 106 By the mid-1890s, the media landscape in Britain had been upended by proprietors like W. T. Stead, Harmsworth, George Newnes, and Arthur Pearson. These men were instrumental in creating a mass-circulation press in the country.Footnote 107 As James Thompson observes, consumption was part of what defined the nineteenth-century idea of what it meant to belong to ‘the public’.Footnote 108 Thomas Richards points to the publication of Harmsworth's Daily Mail in 1896 as an indication of the shift towards a media landscape – a visual culture of advertising and marketing – that included both the middle and working classes.Footnote 109 Partly as a consequence of this, the way the British public were described changed considerably from the earliest stories in 1871, to the later Edwardian narratives. Chesney, writing in 1871 – a few years after the 1867 Reform Act – decried that ‘Parliament-rule was beginning to give way to mob-law.’Footnote 110 But by 1906, when Le Queux published his Invasion of 1910, successful authors showed a marked eagerness to give their increased readership more active roles in the narratives.Footnote 111 This development took place alongside the rise of the mass press: so that while some stories published in 1871 had invoked and referred to the wider public, it was in the 1890s that this same public were given the chance to read the tales on a mass scale. And readers, in turn, engaged with the stories in a more active way: Portsmouth's citizens were invited in, so to speak, in the defence of their city – and by extension the country – in ‘The siege of Portsmouth’.
With the publication of Le Queux's 1906 story, which sees the invaders embark on a veritable tour of Britain, reportedly to ensure a large readership by including as much of the country as possible in the serialized experience,Footnote 112 local newspapers eagerly reported on the developments from a local perspective. ‘How our country acts later in the story is to come’, wrote the Manchester Courier as the ‘invader’ neared Manchester in early April, ‘but we presume the Salford Fusiliers will give Fritz a roughish time!’Footnote 113 Le Queux and Harmsworth, in their use of the modern mass press, had created a story that tied the country together in the shared experience of a fictitious invasion. If one of the traits of modern print culture had been to create ‘imagined communities’,Footnote 114 Harmsworth and Le Queux had taken this one step further by including all of British society in the Daily Mail’s invasion. This was a tangible example of a trend the American journalist Walter Lippman would later describe: ‘There are newspapers, even in large cities’, he wrote, ‘edited to the principle that the readers wish to read about themselves.’Footnote 115
Daniel Pick has argued that anxiety directed at modernity was a prevalent theme in fin-de-siècle invasion texts.Footnote 116 But the stories could not have existed in the form and setting they took on without the modern means of mass communication. They were, therefore, fundamentally a product of modernity. As this article has shown, future-war literature, and in particular its sub-category of invasion-scare texts, consistently appealed to or invoked an imagined and malleable British identity across time and space, throughout the period between 1871 and 1914. They harangued or appealed to their readers over a variety of perceived societal ills, and dreamed of – often with sincerity, though occasionally more jokingly – an immemorial and transposable British world.
There were certainly still stories with a smaller circulation and with either a more specialized audience or for other reasons written with a narrower focus. But by 1914, these narratives had been joined by stories that meant that future-war fiction had become established as a spectacle in a marketplace, advertised and marketed with a wide group of readers in mind. Herein lies a more convincing explanation for the popularity of stories by authors like Le Queux by the Edwardian era. A genre that often appealed to a timeless national identity, and that saw a remarkable degree of continuity in presentation and theme across four decades, became a best-selling venture because it was well suited to a modern audience.
British future-war fiction changed British culture in a lasting way. The popularity of Chesney's Battle of Dorking fuelled an industry that had picked up enough steam by the turn of the century to enable authors to pour out a seemingly never-ending supply of stories about imaginary battles on land and sea. While this literature did not prepare Great Britain for a Great War, it did create a viable commercial genre that was read and commented on by a large group of readers from various social strata. Chesney's political argument and his goal in publishing The battle of Dorking may have been unclear, but from a literary standpoint his narrative cannot be described as anything other than a success.
