In the 19th century, the British feared invasion by the French, Germans, terrorists and even aliens. Mike Ashley explains how these concerns were reflected in literature.
In the 19th century, Great Britain might have had the greatest navy in the world and ruled the waves, but the potential of new military technology, such as aerial bombardment or powerful artillery, made the British Isles increasingly vulnerable.
Invasion by tunnel
At the height of the Napoleonic wars between Britain and France, both Britain and France staged farces such as La descente en Angleterre (The Raid on England, 1797) by Jean-Corisandre Mittié and the anonymous The Invasion of England (1803). It was the new technology, though, that was most alarming. The French had first crossed the English Channel by hot air balloon in 1785, and the threat of an aerial invasion fleet was ever present in English minds. This was further aggravated by the idea of a Channel Tunnel, which Napoleon had considered and for which plans had been prepared by Albert Mathieu in 1802.
The Battle of Dorking
In 1871 Lieutenant-Colonel George Tomkyns Chesney caused uproar with the publication of his story ‘The Battle of Dorking’. Chesney believed that Great Britain was unprepared for an armed invasion from Germany, especially after Germany’s unexpected victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The story is told in retrospect from 50 years in the future when a soldier recounts the terrible events to his grandson. Using a powerful new weapon, the German navy destroys the British fleet. They march upon London and the final battle is at Dorking in the Surrey Hills. Germany takes control of Britain, and the Empire is disbanded.
The reaction to the story was immediate. The British, having grown complacent with their military superiority, were horrified, and the government had to reassure the public that plans to review the army were already in hand. Chesney’s alarmist story had catapulted the genre of future-war fiction into the public arena.
The terrorist threat
The twin ideas of the super-inventor and future war came together at the end of the 19th century with a number of novels in which a scientist creates a machine with which he is able to hold the world to ransom. Jules Verne had sown the seed for this with Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1870) where Captain Nemo uses his submarine, the Nautilus, to attack British ships in his hatred of the British.
The ultimate threat
It was left to H G Wells to develop the popularity of the invasion-threat novel by having the ultimate invader, the Martians, in The War of the Worlds (1898). Wells' Martians are technologically superior to anything Earth can throw at them and show that, in the future, whoever is the most scientifically advanced will hold the upper hand in any combat.