The Invasion of 1910

A German army lands in Essex, and London falls street by street — written as a newspaper history of a war that had not happened, with the battles fixed to real towns. Le Queux published it in 1906 with Northcliffe's backing, and the serial was routed through towns that would buy copies. It sold a million and did as much as anything to make the invasion scare a political fact. Fifty-six plates of quiet country roads, calm mornings and wooded lanes by painters including Childe Hassam and John Constable run alongside the text, their peacetime landscapes a deliberate counterpoint to the invasion.