The first decade of the 20th century was a boom period for scare-fiction of various kinds — probably the most famous, William Lequeux's The invasion of 1910, appeared the year before this book, as did H.G. Wells's In the days of the comet (and The war of the worlds eight years before that). Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill came out in 1904 and The man who was Thursday in 1908, and even Joseph Conrad had a go with The secret agent in 1907. By 1909, the whole thing was such a cliché that P.G. Wodehouse came out with a parody version, The Swoop, in which "England was not merely beneath the heel of the invader. It was beneath the heels of nine invaders. There was barely standing-room." — but fortunately, Clarence the Boy-Scout is on hand to save the situation.

Where others saw the danger in Germans or Martians or anarchists or chemical catastrophe, Bramah's scare-novel of 1907 is meant to awaken his compatriots to an even more serious lurking peril: the English working-class and its poisonous socialistic ambitions. The story opens in the near future (1916), in a slightly alternative world where flying is an elegant human-powered activity for the wealthy (like cycling in its early days) and where messages can be transmitted by a kind of wireless fax system (which oddly seems to have exactly the same size of address space as our familiar IP v5 - set by eight sixteen-position selectors).

Instead of getting a mere 29 seats as Keir Hardie really did in 1906 (Daniel Jencka oddly calls this election a "Labour landslide" in his Introduction), Labour have been solidly in power for some ten years, and have been grinding the faces of the rich with horrendous taxes on share dividends, First Class railway tickets, domestic servants, and similar necessities of everyday life, all the while cutting spending on the armed forces and letting colonies drop away into independence. In the latest election, however, Labour have been pushed out by even more hard-line socialists, who are threatening to do things like introduce worker representatives on company boards, set a minimum wage, and impose taxes on personal wealth. Bramah is a lot vaguer about what these governments are doing with the money they take in — there are brief passing mentions of horrific ideas like the eight-hour day and sick-pay, but the general impression we are supposed to get is that socialism is all about taking money away from the taxpayer.

Naturally enough, the right-thinking middle and upper classes are getting restive, and an enigmatic resistance organisation — "The League" — is set up under the leadership of English-Gentleman Sir John Hampden and Intrepid-Man-of-Action "George Salt", assisted by the feisty lady office-worker Miss Irene Lisle. After much obfuscation, it turns out that their tactic for bringing the government down is to organise a consumer boycott of coal, which of course puts the socialists at odds with their key supporters in the mining districts, and provokes a vaguely Chestertonian showdown in early 1919.

Daniel Jencka, who edited the book for its 1995 reprint by Specular Press, sees this as a key piece of early "capitalist fiction", but that seems to an unwarrantably American reading of things. Bramah isn't a precursor of Ayn Rand, lauding individualism and the wisdom of the free market (what's individualistic or free about a boycott?). This isn't a book about economics, however much it might sound like that: it's good old British class prejudice. Bramah's argument against socialism (and democracy) is quite simply the horribly offensive notion you still occasionally come across, that working-class people are not intelligent and responsible enough to be given control over their own lives. If you give "them" the eight-hour day, "they" will spend the other sixteen hours of it drinking and making babies. "They" talk in dialect, haven't been to Oxford or Cambridge, and don't have "a stake in the country". Etc.

It's a book that reads weirdly to readers a century later, because almost everything Bramah rails against, from processed breakfast cereal to minimum wages and universal suffrage, is something we accept without question nowadays as a necessary component of a moderately fair and free society. As he's not the most inspired and competent of satirists, it is sometimes only the context that makes it clear that we are meant to be disapproving of the things he's telling us about. Of course, it was also bad luck for Bramah that we now remember the years 1916-1919 for something rather different — although it's interesting to speculate on whether the First World War could have been prevented by the sort of disarmament Bramah condemns.

It's also a rather clumsy book: the adventure story element feels rather rudimentary and bolted-on, and we spend too much time in endless conferences of the Socialist cabinet ministers whilst the action happens offstage and largely in secret. Miss Lisle is meant to be the heroine, but she gets very little to do except send faxes and look decorative.

What did rescue it a little for me was the entertaining business of watching the editor flounder through the business of annotating the book. Back in 1995, we didn't have Google and Wikipedia, so it was a lot harder to research stuff outside your own field (I don't know what Jencka's background is, but he's obviously not an expert on turn of the century London). Sitting in a library in Georgia, you would have to make a few inspired guesses and leaf through a lot of old issues of Lloyd's List to find out what Bramah is referring to when he talks about admirals who got their only experience on the deck of the Koh-I-Noor: it was a paddle-steamer that used to take holidaymakers from London to Southend. This is one of the many references that left Jencka baffled (and he sportingly admits it!), but of course these days it's the sort of thing you can dig out in a quarter of an hour without any real expertise. And it's a joke that W.S. Gilbert did rather better some years earlier ("that junior partnership, I ween, / Was the only ship that I ever had seen"). Oddly, Jencka doesn't comment on Bramah's choice of the name "Sir John Hampden" for his leading character: does he find this too obvious for his American readers to need telling?

The period detail was quite interesting, but the book itself is neither entertaining nor edifying, so it's probably one to avoid. ( )

A political dystopia that doesn't really work. ( )

Should be required reading! ( )