‘They got it all wrong!’ – Victorian War Fiction and the First World War

Abstract

Beginning with George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking, invasion novels became a regular feature of late Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction. The article takes a closer look at the depiction of war in these texts from a military history point of view; it argues that they were not so far from reality as to render them useless to the military historian. Rather, they can be used to provide insights into how the authors and their audience thought about the great war that many expected to come within their lifetime.