Abstract
This book examines the British invasion/spy literature between 1871 and 1918, a relatively new form of literature, to further the understanding of the politics behind the creation of this literature and, to a degree, contemporary attitudes towards class, race, empire, the concept of the gentleman, women in relation to war work and sexual relations, as part of the social, cultural, and political responses before and during World War I. This form of literature belonged to the thriller genre, a description given to stories that focused on thrilling the reader and which were often cheaply produced in paperback with a target audience, although not exclusively, a male readership. In Britain, these stories took shape as a cultural response to events and movements outside and within, particularly challenges from Irish nationalism, the Boer War (1899–1902), the creation of the German Empire (1871), rival powers’ naval expansion, and increased trade tensions. Some of the political responses were the creations of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB), the secret service that developed into the Secret Service Bureau known as MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) known as MI6, and the passing of the Official Secret Services Acts of 1889 and 1911.
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Notes
- 1.
Peter Cain, ‘Political Economy in Edwardian England: The Tariff-Reform Controversy’, ed. Alan O’Day, The Edwardian Age: Conflict and Stability, Macmillan, London, 1979, 36–37.
- 2.
When founded in 1883 the Branch was originally named the Irish Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police. This was because its mission was to counteract the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish Republican terrorist group.
- 3.
Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 2008, 17.
- 4.
This includes Australian-born Guy Boothby and Dorota Flatau, both of whom lived in Britain.
- 5.
Novels published in 1919 will be included as many were written or first serialised during World War I. For example, Mr. Standfast was written between July 1917 and July 1918 and then serialised in Popular Magazine in January and February 1919. Andrew Lownie, John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier [1995], David R. Godine, Boston, 2003, 141.
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John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps [1915], Thomas Nelson & Sons, Edinburgh, London & Melbourne, n.d., 17.
- 8.
Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, 123.
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Claud Cockburn, Bestseller: The Books that Everyone Read 1900–1939, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1972, 15.
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Oppenheim was still remembered enough in the 1970s to be referred to in le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy by Saul Enderby, George Smiley’s successor as head of British secret intelligence (‘The Circus’), when he comments that information that has been delivered is ‘like something out of Phillips Oppenheim’. John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy, Hodder & Stoughton, London, Sydney, Auckland & Toronto, 1977, 217.
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A guinea was £1.1.0.
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Laurie-Fletcher, D. (2019). Introduction. In: British Invasion and Spy Literature, 1871–1918. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03852-6_1
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