The Impact of Fiction on Public Debate in Late Victorian Britain: The Battle of Dorking and the “Lost Career” of Sir George Tomkyns Chesney

  • Patrick M. Kirkwood Center for Transnational and Comparative History, Central Michigan University
Keywords: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, The Times, R.U.S.I., Invasion Literature, Dorking, Gladstone, Liberalism, military reform,

Abstract

This article re-examines the impact of The Battle of Dorking (1871)—a seminal work of British “speculative fiction”—on print and political debates throughout the 1870s and beyond. In doing so, it also re-examines the military, educational and political career of Dorking’s author, Sir George Tomkyns Chesney, and finds him to be a more substantial figure than most previous scholarship suggests.

Author Biography

Patrick M. Kirkwood, Center for Transnational and Comparative History, Central Michigan University
Ph.D. Candidate in Transnational and Comparative History
Published
2013-01-03
Section
Articles