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

Abstract

AbstractThis 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 so‐called ‘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.