British Invasion and Spy Literature, 1871-1918: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Society, by Danny Laurie-Fletcher

Abstract

Reviewed by: British Invasion and Spy Literature, 1871–1918: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Society by Danny Laurie-Fletcher John McBratney (bio) British Invasion and Spy Literature, 1871–1918: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Society, by Danny Laurie-Fletcher; pp. vii + 264. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $89.00, $69.99 ebook. British writers of the long nineteenth century used the term invasion to refer to a host of phenomena: the ingress of an Indian gem into England (Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone [1868]), the entry of women into male professions (George Gissing's The Odd Women [1893]), and the assault of extraterrestrials upon earthlings (H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds [1897]), to name a few. In British Invasion and Spy Literature, 1871–1918: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Society, however, Danny Laurie-Fletcher focuses on the most widespread and deeply felt understanding of invasion among Britons from the end of the Franco-Prussian War to the conclusion of World War I: the threat of military attack upon Britain from Continental European powers, especially Germany. Haunted by the fear that Great Britain was sliding into economic, political, and military decline and that younger nations, like the United States and Germany, were overtaking it in the Darwinian struggle for global dominance, British writers—especially Conservative and Unionist writers—produced, from 1871 on, a flood of invasion narratives in various fictional and nonfictional formats for mainly middle-class and working-class readers eager to consume popular, sensationalized accounts of threat and attack. Spurred by this sense of threat, the spy narrative genre also sprang up, sometimes blending with the invasion narrative in the same work, with alien agents seeking to undermine British defenses and British agents working to counter these enemy efforts. Stories of invasion and espionage exerted a powerful influence not only on the reading public but also on politicians at crucial points before and during World War I. Given the occasional intertwining of these narratives, Laurie-Fletcher is wise to study them together. His treatment of them, however, is less argument than exposition; his [End Page 137] book advances no new or sophisticated thesis. It offers, instead, two things: a comprehensive survey of an understudied body of literature in its many forms (newspaper article, periodical essay, government report, memoir, short story, novel, and play) and a rich description of the interaction between the producers of this literature (figures like press magnate Lord Northcliffe and scaremonger author William Le Queux) and British politicians (most notably the beleaguered Liberal War Secretary Richard Haldane). Laurie-Fletcher has done extensive research, digging into government archives and reading widely in primary and secondary materials, including about 120 short stories and novels, extending from George Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871), which inaugurated the invasion narrative genre, to John Buchan's World War I spy novels, Greenmantle (1916) and Mr. Standfast (1919). He brings to his monograph an encyclopedic command of the details of these materials and a mastery of the historical contexts within which British invasion and spy literature was written, published, and received. Laurie-Fletcher's book raises two questions that apply to study of both the Victorian and modernist eras: How much influence did the growing power of the mass print media have upon political decision-making? And what became of the late-Victorian New Woman after the upheaval of World War I? Driven by expansion of the franchise, education reform, increased literacy, and technological advances, the British newspaper industry underwent explosive growth in the late nineteenth century. In the political turmoil of the early twentieth century—particularly over women's suffrage, the labor movement, Home Rule, and defense spending—newspapers played an increasingly important role, often in concert with pressure groups, as advocates for political policy on the left and the right. Laurie-Fletcher contends that the Teutonophobic Conservative media, fearful that an allegedly vast network of German spies was operating in Britain and adamant that a German invasion aided by this network was imminent, was decisive in the birth in 1909 of the Secret Service Bureau (SSB), which split in 1910 into MI5 and MI6. Although much of the Conservative brief combined hysterical fantasy with deliberate fabrication, Laurie-Fletcher asserts...