Edwardian Invasion Literature 1899-1914
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External Threats Mask Internal Fears: Edwardian Invasion Literature 1899-1914 Harry Joseph Wood Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy School of Histories, Languages and Cultures, University of Liverpool May 2014 © Harry Joseph Wood 1 External Threats Mask Internal Fears: Edwardian Invasion Literature 1899-1914 Contents Acknowledgements 3 Illustrations 4 Introduction 5 Chapter 1 Invasion and the Edwardian Age 1.1 Introduction 16 1.2 Crisis or Golden Age? Trends in Edwardian Historiography 17 1.3 British Invasion and Future-War Literature 1871-1914 31 1.4 Approach and Methodology 54 1.5 Conclusion 77 Chapter 2 Limitless Britishness: The Nature of National Identity in Edwardian Invasion Literature 2.1 Introduction 79 2.2 Imagined Britishness 80 2.3 The State of the Nation 84 2.4 The Threats to the Nation 112 2.5 Conclusion: The Breadth of Britishness 137 Chapter 3 Dreams of ‘A Nations in Arms’: Representations of Compulsory Military Service in Edwardian Invasion Literature 3.1 Introduction 139 3.2 Case Study: A J Dawson’s The Message (1907) 140 3.3 The Case for Conscription 147 3.4 The Need for Conscription: Britain’s Social Perils 153 3.5 Visions of Military Reform 179 3.6 Conclusion: A Multi-Faceted Campaign 200 2 Chapter 4 The Edwardian Crisis and Contemporary Invasion Narratives 4.1 Introduction 202 4.2 Perfidious Liberals 203 4.3 The Persistent Sisterhood 217 4.4 The Irish Question 229 4.5 The Red Hand of Ruin 249 4.6 Conclusion: An Edwardian Crisis? 268 Conclusion 270 Bibliography 276 3 Acknowledgements During the course of writing this thesis I have been able to rely on a large number of generous, caring, and supportive people. Mum, Dad and Ann, and Jack – thank you for your unquestioning support, encouragement, love, and good humour. I am also extremely lucky to have four living Grandparents, who are incomparable in their individual ways. To my extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, and close friends too numerous to name – thank you. I would also like to thank my friends and PhD colleagues in the Department of History at Liverpool. Jon, Wendy, Lucy, Angel, Nick and Emily – I would not have got to this stage without your help. In turn, thanks to Alex Drace-Francis, Charles Esdaile, Martin Heale, Mark Towsey, and Richard Huzzey, for your support and advice. I have been privileged to work on this project with three hugely dedicated supervisors. Michael Hughes, Robert Foley, and Jon Hogg – thank you for reading my endless drafts, and helping to craft the finished product. My thanks also go to A. Michael Matin, Matthew Hendley, and Richard Scully, for helping to develop my ideas and arguments. Finally I thank Ellen, whose unconditional love helps put everything into perspective. It is to you that I dedicate these pages. 4 Illustrations Figure 2.1 - H. M. Brock, ‘…That Queen of Ancient Britons…’ 95 (A. J. Dawson, The Message) Figure 2.2 - T. S. Crowther, ‘Count Von Beilstein Was a Spy!’ 118 (W. Le Queux, The Great War in England in 1897) Figure 3.1 - H. M. Brock, ‘The Roaring City’ 160 (A. J. Dawson, The Message) Figure 3.2 – ‘The Invasion of 1910’ 188 (The Times, 13th March 1906) Figure 4.1 - H. L. Shindler, ‘…three guns were in position’ 227 (A. C. Fox-Davies, The Sex Triumphant) Figure 4.2 - T. S. Crowther, ‘Irish Volunteers Halting in King’s Cliffe’ 237 (W. Le Queux, The Great War in England in 1897) Figure 4.3 – Book cover, unknown illustrator 256 (J. D. Mayne, The Triumph of Socialism) 5 Abstract Invasion literature is a branch of fiction that enjoyed significant popularity in Britain prior to the First World War. Focusing on invasion narratives of the Edwardian period, this thesis foregrounds the literature’s representation of domestic political issues. These include debates over national identity, the campaign for compulsory military service, and the socio- political upheavals of the late-Edwardian period. Through emphasising the importance of these internal themes, the thesis argues that such narratives were vehicles for multifaceted critiques of British society rather than one-dimensional predictions of invasion. Exploring the ideological origins of these narratives, the thesis questions the dominant understanding that invasion literature was a Tory product. The genre is instead interpreted as a product of the British ‘Radical Right’. Presenting invasion literature as a repository of varied contemporary anxieties, the thesis reconsiders the analytical value of the ‘Edwardian Crisis’, arguing that narratives of invasion illustrate a pronounced sense of approaching crisis. This thesis therefore offers an original contribution to modern British political and cultural history, and invasion literature studies. Introduction The history of the British Isles has been heavily shaped by the fear of invasion. From the Romans to the Spanish Armada, and from Napoleon to Hitler, many of the key moments of Britain’s island story have revolved around invasions, both those that succeeded and those that were repelled. Successive generations have experienced anxieties, both rational and irrational, over the prospect of foreign troops landing on British beaches.1 In the modern period Britain’s relationship with the sea saw such fears grow exponentially. As an imperial power whose welfare increasingly depended on maintaining control of global shipping lanes, the threat of a foreign attack on the metropole began to exert a major influence on Britain’s foreign and defence policy.2 Such fears became particularly acute during the late-Victorian and Edwardian years. A series of high-profile invasion scares gripped Britain in the years approaching 1914, ranging from the anti-French channel tunnel panic of 1881 through to the height of the Anglo-German naval race in 1909. Despite a consistent chorus of scepticism from some politicians and strategic planners, the threat of invasion remained a key facet of 1 For a detailed account see Norman Longmate’s two volume study of the invasion history of Britain, Defending the Island: from Caesar to the Armada (London: Grafton Books, 1990), p. 9, and Island Fortress: The Defence of Great Britain 1603-1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1991). 2 For a work that focuses on the early modern and modern period see F. J. McLynn, Invasion: from the Armada to Hitler, 1588-1945 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). 6 Britain’s political climate throughout the pre-war period.3 For the historian Howard Moon, it was “nothing less than a national obsession”.4 Moon’s bold assertion raises important questions concerning the popular currency of invasion anxieties. In his study of Britain’s evolving defence policy The Prospect of War, John Gooch identified invasion as a fear that predominantly concerned an upper-middle class political elite.5 Yet there is a range of evidence that suggests invasion was a far more universal fear, one that cut across boundaries of class and national identity. The late- Edwardian airship panic, recently reassessed by Brett Holman, is one such example. Between 1912 and 1913 people all over Britain and Ireland reported seeing mysterious aircraft in the night sky, sightings which were presumed to represent a worrying expansion of German aerial power. Despite having little basis in reality, the sense of unchecked German activity in British airspace exerted an extraordinary hold on the national consciousness.6 The great success of Guy du Maurier’s invasion-scare play An Englishman’s Home (1909) – watched by nearly 200,000 people in London alone – similarly suggests that the threat of invasion enjoyed significant popular purchase, both as a socio-political anxiety and as a form of entertainment.7 When war broke out in August 1914, moreover, many Britons assumed that invasion was imminent. Entrenchment was even begun in the vulnerable county of Essex, where detailed plans were also made for civilian evacuation.8 The fear of foreign attack also had an important influence on Britain’s cultural climate, particularly on Edwardian literature. The apocalyptic prospect of invasion naturally spoke to 3 During his time as President of the Board of Trade, Winston Churchill described the German invasion scare as “a false, lying panic started in the party interests of the Conservatives”. See F. W. Hirst, The Six Panics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1913), p. 91. 4 H. Moon, ‘The Invasion of the United Kingdom: Public Controversy and Official Planning’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of London, 1968), p. 652. 5 J. Gooch, The Prospect of War: Studies in British Defence Policy, 1847-1942 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1981), p. 36. 6 B. Holman, The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941 (Ashgate: Farnham, 2014), pp. 187-202. 7 For these figures see ‘Notes – Mainly Personal’, Evening Telegraph (21st June 1909), p. 4. 8 C. Pennell, ‘‘The Germans Have Landed!’: Invasion Fears in the South-East of England. August to December 1914’, in H. Jones, J. O’Brien and C. Schmidt-Supprian, eds, Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 106-112. 7 literary Modernism, a movement with the themes of change and transformation at its heart. Various canonical ‘greats’ of the period, in turn, were directly shaped by fears of military, political, and cultural invasion. While Rudyard Kipling’s account of ‘the Great Game’ in Kim (1901) involved the improbable threat of Russian infantry pouring over the Hindu Kush, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) and G. K. Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday (1908) imagined London invaded not by armies but by foreign political radicalism. In Howards End (1910), seen by Richard Scully as “the most important literary representation of Germany of the period”, E.