“The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer” was written by George Chesney and first appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 667 (May 1871). General Sir George Tomkyns Chesney (1830-1895) was a lecturer at Sandhurst and a Lieutenant-Colonel (later General) in the Royal Engineers. He was not a writer by trade, although he did pen a novel and a number of short stories. “The Battle of Dorking” is best-known as the most famous and influential Future War story.

The frame story of “Dorking” is a man telling his grandchildren about what Great Britain was like before the war which destroyed the Empire. Great Britain, in 1871, is falsely confident, lulled into a feeling of invulnerability because of its economic power, its overestimation of the abilities of its Army and Navy, its blindness about the military might of the Germans and the British Empire’s weak position overseas, and a general egotism that, because Great Britain is Great Britain, it can never be defeated. Events prove the English to have been wrong. The Army is scattered around the world, dealing with a “rising in India” and “the difficulty with America,” and the fleet is active around the world, protecting Canada and fighting privateers in China. When “the Secret Treaty” is published, and Holland and Denmark are annexed by the unnamed (but implicitly German) enemy, England gets itself involved and declares war. But England is not prepared for the war, and there is substantial confusion during the call-up of the Army. The Army regulars are clearly insufficient to stop the enemy, so volunteers are activated. But there are not enough weapons for them, and housing, supplies, and transportation are all problems. The English fleet is defeated in battle and the enemy begins landing men at Dorking, where they are opposed by those men that can be hastened there, the nameless narrator among them. The English fight bravely, but they are outmanned, outgunned, and outgeneraled by the enemy, and the English forces are defeated. Most of the narrator’s comrades in arms are killed and the narrator himself is badly wounded. He returns to his hometown to find it occupied by the enemy. After the enemy captures London, England surrenders. The terms of the peace treaty are harsh, with the colonies being stripped away and England forced to pay ruinous war debts. England becomes decrepit, with the narrator’s grandchildren preparing to emigrate. The story ends with an analysis of the causes of England’s defeat in the war.

“The Battle of Dorking” was not the first Future War story. There were a number of precursors to Chesney’s work. But “Dorking” was the most influential of the Future War stories. It was immediately popular and controversial; the Blackwood’s issue in which it first appeared was reprinted six times by the end of May, 1871, and a sixpenny pamphlet of “Dorking” sold over 110,000 copies. Its popularity was partly due to good timing. “Dorking” appeared on the heels of the crushing German defeat of the French in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, at a time when the political and psychological tension in Europe and England was high, and the idea that a war between Germany and England was inevitable was beginning to settle on both British policy makers and the British public. “Dorking” influenced English literature and political discourse–Prime Minister Gladstone himself denounced it in a September 2, 1871 speech:

I should not mind this “Battle of Dorking,” if we could keep it to ourselves, if we could take care that nobody belonging to any other country should know that such follies could find currency or even favour with portions of the British public; but unfortunately these things go abroad, and they make us ridiculous in the eyes of the entire world.¹

Numerous sequels to and rebuttals of “Dorking” were printed in the 1870s and 1880s. French, German, Japanese, and American versions were produced. Variants of “Dorking” continue to be published today. “Dorking” has almost become a cliché, and many of those familiar with the story’s plot and influence will never have read it.

So the modern reader who comes to “Dorking” for the first time will be surprised at how modern it feels. There is a certain old-fashionedness to the pontificating, and the political analysis is obvious soapbox thumping, but the narration of the events, of the run-up to the war and the battle itself, are the equal in realism to Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Chesney’s use of the you-are-there narrative style, a journalistic approach which he took from newspaper articles by the reporter pair of Erckmann and Chatrian (see: “The Invisible Eye”), works perfectly in “Dorking.” Chesney focuses on the basic details of the narrator’s life: the heat, the dust, the hunger, the regret at the clothing he left behind, the fear under fire and the later feeling of being inured to it, the fatigue, and the general confusion. The narrator’s account could be that of any raw soldier from any point in history, from a rookie Greek hoplite to a raw recruit new to Afghanistan. By concentrating on one man’s experience rather than on the campaign as a whole, “Dorking” gains an immediacy it would otherwise lack. Too, Chesney was a career military man and had served during the siege of Delhi, so he could make use of personal experiences to impart realistic emotions and reactions to his narrator. Chesney made the reality of combat as vivid as he could without upsetting the sensibilities of his readers, so that “Dorking” has a description of a German soldier’s face as the narrator runs him through, and the narrator later sees the senseless, random death of a child by an artillery shell. The journalistic style gives the story the feeling of a lack of artifice. In terms of war narratives, this deadpan narration and lack of affect is far more effective than a more emotional approach.

There are other aspects of the story which will interest modern readers. There is an emphasis on the media and news, via the papers and telegraph wires, which will seem familiar to modern readers. In the repeated references to it and the narrator’s (and the English people’s) reliance on it, and their feeling of helplessness without it (“it was as if we had suddenly come back to the Middle Ages”²), the Great Britain of 1870 will seem strikingly similar to the Great Britain and United States of the twenty-first century. Readers may be struck at how similar Chesney’s post-battle England is to other English post-apocalyptic works, from Wells’ The War of the Worlds to John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids. Chesney spends much less time on the post-war days than later writers did, but like them he has a combination of emptiness, tragedy, and mundane details, which gives a compellingly tragic feel to the text, more than an objective narrative viewpoint would have been capable of.

“The Battle of Dorking” remains a good read, and is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand a sizable element of the English Fin-de-Siècle Unease of the late nineteenth century.

Print: George Chesney, The Battle of Dorking; or, Reminiscences of a Volunteer. Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2009.

I.F. Clarke, The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871-1914. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

I.F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, 1763-1984. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.

¹ William Ewart Gladstone, Annual Register, Part I, 108, qtd in I.F. Clarke, “The Battle of Dorking, 1871-1914,” Victorian Studies 8, no. 4 (June, 1965): 322.

² George Chesney, The Battle of Dorking (London: Grant Richards, 1914), 25.