Background
The novel was originally commissioned by Alfred Harmsworth as a serial which appeared in the Daily Mail from 10 March 1906. According to historian of Germany Sir Richard Evans, the paper built up "mass alarm" by dressing its London newspaper vendors as Prussian soldiers complete with pickelhaube helmet and placards showing maps of where the 'troops' would be next day. [1] The rewrite of the story, featuring towns and villages with large readership of the Daily Mail, [2] greatly increased the newspaper's circulation and made a small fortune for Le Queux; it was translated into twenty-seven languages, and over one million copies of the book edition were sold. [3] The idea for the novel is alleged to have originated from Field Marshal Earl Roberts, who regularly lectured English schoolboys on the need to prepare for war. [4]
To Le Queux's dismay, a pirated and abridged German translation (with an altered ending) appeared the same year: Die Invasion von 1910: Einfall der Deutschen in England translated by Traugott Tamm. [4]
In Le Queux's earlier novel, The Great War in England in 1897 , it is France which invades Britain as an implacable enemy. In that book's plot, German soldiers land in Britain as allies coming to help repulse the French invasion, and are welcomed as saviours. In between Le Queux's two disparate depictions of an invaded Britain, the Entente Cordiale of 1904 changed the diplomatic and military landscape.
Outline
The book takes the form of a military history and includes excerpts from the characters' journals and letters and descriptions of the fictional German campaign itself.
It is centred on an invasion by the Germans, who have managed to land a sizeable invasion force on the East Coast of England. They advance inland, cutting all telegraph lines and despoiling farmland as they go, and the British struggle to mount a proper defence, fighting a battle at Royston. The Germans eventually reach London and occupy half the city. A junior Member of Parliament declares that "Britain is not defeated" and organises a resistance movement, the "League of Defenders," despite harsh reprisals by the Germans and a severe lack of arms. The Germans seem unable to combat this and tighten their control of London and suddenly find themselves faced with a popular uprising. Eventually, a newly formed British Army marches to liberate London. The fictional war, however, is a stalemate since it appears that German forces have managed to occupy Belgium and the Netherlands.
In many ways the book's imagined war is similar to the actual Franco-Prussian War of 1871. In that war, as in the book's imagined war, the Germans overcame a badly prepared and organized army, penetrated all the way to the nation's capital where they encountered stiff resistance by mobilized citizens - though the book's resisting Londoners do not have the strong Socialist orientation of the 1871 Parisians.
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the War of 1870, was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia. Lasting from 19 July 1870 to 28 January 1871, the conflict was caused primarily by France's determination to reassert its dominant position in continental Europe, which appeared in question following the decisive Prussian victory over Austria in 1866. According to some historians, Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck deliberately provoked the French into declaring war on Prussia in order to induce four independent southern German states—Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt—to join the North German Confederation. Other historians contend that Bismarck exploited the circumstances as they unfolded. All agree that Bismarck recognized the potential for new German alliances, given the situation as a whole.
Theodor Fontane was a German novelist and poet, regarded by many as the most important 19th-century German-language realist author. He published the first of his novels, for which he is best known today, only at age 58 after a career as a journalist. Many of his novels delve into topics that were more or less taboo for discussion in the polite society of Fontane's day, including marital infidelity, class differences, urban vs. rural differences, abandonment of children, and suicide. His novels sold well during his lifetime and several have been adapted for film or audio works.
Military science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction and military fiction that depicts the use of science fiction technology, including spaceships and weapons, for military purposes and usually principal characters who are members of a military organization, usually during a war; occurring sometimes in outer space or on a different planet or planets. It exists in a range of media, including literature, comics, film, television and video games.
William Tufnell Le Queux was an Anglo-French journalist and writer. He was also a diplomat, a traveller, a flying buff who officiated at the first British air meeting at Doncaster in 1909, and a wireless pioneer who broadcast music from his own station long before radio was generally available; his claims regarding his own abilities and exploits, however, were usually exaggerated. His best-known works are the anti-French and anti-Russian invasion fantasy The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) and the anti-German invasion fantasy The Invasion of 1910 (1906), the latter becoming a bestseller.
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The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service is a 1903 novel by Erskine Childers. The book, which enjoyed immense popularity in the years before World War I, is an early example of the espionage novel and was extremely influential in the genre of spy fiction. It has been made into feature-length films for both cinema and television.
La Débâcle (1892), translated as The Debacle and The Downfall, is the penultimate novel of Émile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart series, which first appeared as a serial in La Vie populaire from 21 February to 21 July 1892, before being published in book form by Charpentier.
Invasion literature is a literary genre that was popular in the period between 1871 and the First World War (1914–1918). The invasion novel was first recognised as a literary genre in the UK, with the novella The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871), an account of a German invasion of England, which, in the Western world, aroused the national imaginations and anxieties about hypothetical invasions by foreign powers; by 1914 the genre of invasion literature comprised over 400 novels and stories.
The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer is an 1871 novella by George Tomkyns Chesney, starting the genre of invasion literature and an important precursor of science fiction. Written just after the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War, it describes an invasion of Britain by a German-speaking country referred to in oblique terms as The Other Power or The Enemy.
Before Armageddon: An Anthology of Victorian and Edwardian Imaginative Fiction Published Before 1914 is a collection of stories, including invasion literature, and one article, all edited by Michael Moorcock. Originally published in hardback by W.H. Allen in 1975, it was re-issued as a paperback by Star in 1976.
The Great War in England in 1897 was written by William Le Queux and published in 1894.
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The Back Door was an anonymous work of invasion literature serialised in Hong Kong newspaper The China Mail from 30 September through 8 October 1897. The work, written in the form of a historical account, describes an imagined Russian and French landing at Hong Kong's Deep Water Bay, followed by shelling of Victoria Peak, a sea battle in the Sulphur Channel between Hong Kong Island and Green Island, and a last stand at Stonecutters Island in which British forces were decisively defeated. The story was intended as a criticism of the lack of British funding for the defence of Hong Kong; fears of invasion were driven by French expansionism in Southeast Asia and increasing Russian influence in Manchuria. It was speculated, but never proven, that members of the Imperial Japanese Army read the book in preparation for the 1941 Battle of Hong Kong, in which Japanese forces overran Hong Kong in just 18 days. In terms of its style, it follows the model laid out by George Tomkyns Chesney's The Battle of Dorking, but is noteworthy for its attention to detail, even giving real names of individual soldiers and ships; one reviewer described it as "unique" in its verisimilitude, stating that only William Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910 and Cleveland Moffett's The Conquest of America could compare to it.
The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. It was written between 1895 and 1897, and serialised in Pearson's Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan magazine in the US in 1897. The full novel was first published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann. The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between humankind and an extraterrestrial race. The novel is the first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and his younger brother who escapes to Tillingham in Essex as London and Southern England are invaded by Martians. It is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon.
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The Battle of Artenay' also known as the Battle of Arthenay, took place during the Franco-Prussian War, on 10 October 1870, in Artenay a small town located on the road from Orléans to Paris, France which was about 10 miles north of the city of Orléans. In this fierce battle, with superior strength compared to the opponent, The I Corps of the Kingdom of Bavaria, under the command of Lieutenant General Ludwig von der Tann-Rathsamhausen, in collaboration with the 22nd Division of the XI Corps of the Kingdom of Prussia and the two cavalry divisions of the Prussian army attacked and penetrated the defense system of the army of the Loire of the young French Republic, under the control of general Joseph Edouard de la Motterouge, causing heavy losses for the French military of which many people were taken prisoner. The winning conditions Artenay were favorable enough for Von der Tann to strike Orléans, while the forces of France knocked back on Orléans forest in an agitated state. Despite this, Nièvre's Garde Mobiles and the Pontifical Legion in the French army were noted for their strong resistance, while a monk in Prussian Cavalry under the command of Prince Albrecht demonstrated his prowess in the battle at Artenay.
The Fighting in Fréteval was a battle in the Franco-Prussian War, it occurred in December 14 — 15, 1870, near the village of Fréteval of France. In this fierce engagement, a corps of the Prussian army under the command of Friedrich Franz II, Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin contested Fréteval with a force of the French army 's Loire Corps under General Antoine Chanzy, but neither side was able to seize the advantage. The battle demonstrated the effective combat capabilities of Chanzy's forces, with a huge numerical superiority over Mecklenburg's forces. From 15 December, however, Mecklenburg's army was reinforced on the left, and in light of that situation Chanzy finally made a retreat to Le Mans.
The siege of Peronne was a battle during the Franco-Prussian War, from December 26, 1870 until January 9, 1871, in Péronne, Somme of France. The German siege force, under the command of Lieutenant Generals August von Goeben and Albert von Barnekow, forced the French army at Péronne- which could not be rescued and had to surrender after more than a week under the bombardment of the Prussian army. With the victory, the armies of Albert von Barnekow captured a defending force of thousands of French soldiers in Peronne, and obtained a large number of cannons and war materials to the Prussians hands. In general, the advantage of the artillery of the Prussians as well as the dynamism of German officers is credited with leading to German victories in the sieges of French fortresses, and the success at the Siege of Péronne solidified German control over the river Somme.
