The Battle of Dorking
The 6d pamphlet that caused an invasion scare
In May 1871 Blackwood’s Magazine published an anonymously-penned story which was to become the sensation of the year. A fictional account of a successful Prussian invasion of Britain, its explosive and controversial theme caused panic amongst political elites, fuelled debates on national defence and spawned a new sub-genre of invasion thrillers. Demand for the work proved insatiable, and within six months of its re-publication as a sixpenny pamphlet by the Edinburgh publishers William Blackwood & Sons, it had sold over 100,000 copies, been quoted in speeches by leaders of Britain’s military and political establishments, and been denounced by prime minister William Gladstone as a panicmongering work, ‘mischievous as well as mad, heaping together a mass of impossible or incredible suppositions’.
‘The Battle of Dorking’, with its description of the dangers awaiting a militarily-weakened Britain, provided powerful propaganda material for those fighting potential government cuts in military expenditure
The success of The Battle of Dorking was due to a combination of historical and cultural circumstances, as well as calculated publishing and marketing decisions. The newly-reunified Prussian empire had vanquished France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, marching its soldiers through Paris and proving that it was a military force to be reckoned with. Political nervousness at this newly-risen power was linked with concurrent efforts to reform the British military system by Gladstone’s secretary of war, Edward T. Cardwell. The Battle of Dorking, with its description of the dangers awaiting a militarily weakened Britain, provided powerful propaganda material for those fighting potential government cuts in military expenditure and those anticipating the need for an even better trained and equipped nation. At the same time, the Blackwood firm’s business decisions regarding the promotion and production of the work proved instrumental in expanding the appeal of The Battle of Dorking beyond the pages of
Blackwood’s Magazine.
The anonymous author of The Battle of Dorking was Sir George Tompkyns Chesney, a former lieutenant-colonel in the Bengal Engineers who, after distinguished service in India as soldier, administrator and teacher, had returned to Britain in 1868 to establish the Royal Indian Civil Engineering College at Cooper’s Hill, Staines. He became its first president in 1871. A scant few weeks after a Franco-Prussian armistice was concluded in spring 1871, Chesney wrote to the Blackwood firm proposing a tale ‘describing a successful invasion of England, and the collapse of our power and commerce in consequence’. The idea was accepted and within a few months the piece was ready to open the May issue of Blackwood’s Magazine.
Rise of a new political power
The work overwhelmed contemporary readers with its forceful rhetorical power and its translation of current political preoccupations into descriptions of shocking military events. The Franco-Prussian war, begun in September 1870 and concluding in the unexpected, humiliating defeat of France and the temporary occupation of Paris in March 1871, fundamentally altered the balance of power in 19th-century Europe. Prussia’s rise from a collection of nation-states to a unified military and political power was made complete with this victory. The alarm over the rise of this new political entity, harnessing new technologies and military strategies to upend traditional power structures, was to feature greatly in consequent debates and reflections on Britain’s future as a world power.
Chesney’s work uses the distanced, narrative perspective of a ‘Volunteer’ recounting the details of a German invasion 50 years after its successful conclusion. Prussia invades and conquers Britain with ease, the result of too many crumbling edges of empire requiring attention. Britain’s military resources are scattered to quell uprisings in India, Canada and Ireland, and its fleet dispersed across five oceans. The result leaves Britain bereft of trained troops and secure ports, leading to devastation and defeat within days of invasion. Yet it is not solely the lack of adequate forces which so decides the issue. Chesney’s strategy was also to expose what he took to be the inabilities of Britain’s home defences to confront disciplined opposition. As I.F. Clarke perceptively suggests in his definitive study on the subject, Voices Prophesying War, the point is ‘they show enterprise, discipline, and exceptional military abilities: we are feckless, unprepared, and have been imprudent enough to send off the best part of the Fleet on a fool’s errand to the Dardanelles’.
This tale was received with glowing public reviews. ‘No article that has been written on the fruitful subject of our panics can compare with that containing the “reminiscences of a volunteer” which heads the new number of Blackwood’, trumpeted the Pall Mall Gazette on 3 May. ‘Would you like to peep into futurity?’ asked the Graphic. ‘If so, read in Blackwood the story of “The Battle of Dorking”’.
The sixpenny release
In light of the work’s popularity, the firm issued it as a sixpenny pamphlet in late May 1871. Advertisements were taken out in the weekly journals that had featured the work in their review columns, and throughout the summer months of 1871, bulk quantities of the work were produced and bound in Edinburgh and sent by overnight freight trains to London for sale in the capital immediately after receipt. The firm identified areas of highvolume traffic, such as London’s banking and journalism districts, and hired street vendors to advertise and sell the work in strategic spots. Railway bookstalls and other established street vendors were also used to drive forward sales.
Initial results were extremely satisfying. Within a month, the initial impression of 70,500 copies had been exhausted and another
27,000 copies run off. Within three months, total sales for the work had passed the magic figure of 100,000. With markedly high sales came equally marked political and literary impact. William Gladstone’s private and public reactions, for example, suggested he viewed it as nothing less than a Tory-led attempt to counter Cardwell’s cost-cutting and reforming proposals, and to inflame public opinion towards again increasing the military budget. ‘Be on your guard against alarmism’, he warned the public in a speech at Whitby in September 1871, excoriating the author of The Battle of Dorking for writing a work whose result would merely be ‘the spending of more and more of your money’. It also featured throughout the summer in public speeches by the duke of Cambridge, the prince of Wales and Viscount Goschen, Liberal MP for London, batted about like a shuttlecock in competing arguments for and against Cardwell’s reforms.
Following the successful implementation of Cardwell’s reforms, the work lost its political significance. It became a cultural reference point instead, a title instantly recognisable and redolent with intended meaning. The work made it into Punch
in form of a page of execrablywritten doggerel. The satire was not up to the usual Punch
standards, a fact bluntly noted by a reviewer for the Spectator, who commented sarcastically, ‘For the first time we can remember, some singularly ill-written prose was by mistake printed in Punch in lines as if it were verse’.
Satire was to turn into light humour as time elapsed. By the end of 1871, the work was being used as a light-hearted quip. ‘Weren’t you wounded at the Battle of Dorking?’ became the stock question of anyone suffering from minor injuries. It was turned into sheet music ‘of much force and vigour for the Piano’, with lyrics tweaked to satisfy patriotic sentiment: British drawing rooms did not resound to songs of defeat, but rather to the driving of Prussians into the sea, and the consequent retrieving of the glory of England and its fighting spirit.
Launch of a new type of fiction
In subsequent decades, the subject of invasions so clearly outlined in Chesney’s text would thread its way into literary spaces. Between 1871 and 1914, there appeared no fewer than 60 works on the subject, ranging from fictional rebuttals to its themes, to highly technical forecasts by military experts. As I.F. Clarke notes, Chesney’s work had the unusual distinction of launching a new type of purposive fiction, a fiction ‘in which the whole aim was either to terrify the reader by a clear and merciless demonstration of the consequences to be expected from a country’s shortcomings, or to prove the rightness of national policy by describing the course of a victorious war in the near future’.
Examples included H.G. Wells’ 1897 work The War of the Worlds, which adopted a similar anonymous narrator structure to tell the tale of a successful invasion of Britain by technologically-superior aliens. Likewise, British battles to combat German spies seeding the ground for imminent invasions threaded their way through adventure fiction ‘shilling shockers’ such as Erskine Childers’s 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands and John Buchan’s 1915 tale The Thirty-Nine Steps.
The Battle of Dorking’s success was due to a remarkable confluence of text with contemporary political and social concerns. Its subsequent movement from print context to embedded cultural reference would prove its most telling achievement: for over 40 years, this 64-page, sixpenny pamphlet became a major source of reference in British literary and cultural consciousness, until its prophetic call for military reorganisation and revision was finally realised and acted on in 1914, though too late to prevent devastation and war from being visited on the country.
Initial results were extremely satisfying.Within a month, the initial impression of 70,500 copies had been exhausted and another 27,000 copies run off