‘To Arms!’: Invasion Narratives and Late‐Victorian Literature

Abstract

This article introduces readers to the fiction of invasion, a paranoid literary phenomenon that responded to widespread social concerns about the possible invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period between 1870 and 1914. It begins with an overview of the development of this relatively unknown body of work in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, charting assumptions of imminent large-scale war, fascination with the technology of warfare and the marked participation of military men who used the fiction to agitate for increased defence spending. While this alarmist brand of popular fiction provoked considerable contemporary commentary, modern critical engagement with it has been somewhat limited. Beginning in the 1960s and dominated by the work of the master bibliographer I. F. Clarke, the initial scholarly response necessarily took the form of classification and survey and evinced particular interest in adjudging the accuracy of fictional predictions about future war. More recent scholarship is concerned with reading the fiction in the context of its own times, probing its relationship with external imperial factors and internal domestic concerns and its effectiveness as a propaganda tool. In addition to offering an overview of this line of enquiry, this article seeks to broaden the understanding of the invasion narrative in fin-de-siècle popular fiction, drawing lines out to the recurrence of the invasion theme across a broad range of genres and modes exceeding that of future war fiction and including socalled 'yellow peril' narratives, crime and detective fiction and the gothic. In conclusion, a number of avenues complementing the textual and the historical are suggested for future exploration. Defining the Invasion Tale: 'This Forecast of the Coming War'The defences of London had been broken. The track of the invaders was marked by ruined homes and heaps of corpses, and London's millions knew on this eventful night that the enemy were now actually at their doors. … The people were in a mad frenzy of excitement, and the scenes everywhere were terrible. Women wept and wailed, men uttered words of blank despair, and children screamed at an unknown terror.

With Gordon, Kitchener and Others in the Sudan: Mapping Fictional Engagement with the Imperial Frontier

“…The collective moods it stirred and articulated included mourning for Gordon, national shame for the debacle, desire for revenge, fascination with the enemy's "barbaric" prowess and embarrassment at the unfairness of modern industrialised warfare. These elements may be construed as crucial in sustaining the paranoid imaginary pervading various strands of contemporaneous popular fiction: fictions of reverse colonisation set in Britain and envisaging retaliatory invasions from abroad (Arata 1996: 107-32;Bulfin 2015); detective 1 The number of occurrences per decade is 1,325 (1850-9), 2,640 (1860-9), 6,730 (1870-9), 225,318 (1880-9), 131,362 (1890-9), 55,857 (1900-9)the best part of the latter relative to the Boer War years, after which British interest declined. After 1900 the alternative spelling Sudan starts being used; its occurrences are, however, comparatively few (British Newspaper Archive, mined on 3 June 2019).…”

“…After 1900 the alternative spelling Sudan starts being used; its occurrences are, however, comparatively few (British Newspaper Archive, mined on 3 June 2019). stories featuring foreign or colonial criminals (Bulfin 2015); "Imperial Gothic" stories (Brantlinger 1988: 227-53), often pivoting on archaeological retrievals, desecrations of tombs and mummies, long-buried curses, vengeful objects, or atavistic, mystically inclined fantasies of lost worlds and eternal, dangerous queenssuch as Roger Luckhurst (2012) associates with the contemporary situation in Egypt and the Sudan.…”

Indifference to the Navy? Security, identity and naval power 1870–84

“…Chesney managed to do both, with much of the fleet scattered around imperial possessions and that which was in home waters destroyed by 'fatal engines which sent our ships, one after another, to the bottom'. 120 In establishing a new genre of fiction, 121 Chesney clearly linked into pre-existing fears of invasion, only now these fears were presented as a ghastly insight into what the future might hold. With the May 1871 issue of Blackwood's reprinted six times and the story when re-issued as a six-penny pamphlet selling 110,000 copies by July, 122 it is clear that Chesney hit a nerve -or just produced a romping read.…”