The Battle of Dorking; Mrs Brown and the game board George Chesney 1871

CHESNEY (Lt.-Col. George Tomkyns). The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1871. [Together with] Arthur Sketchley, Mrs Brown on the Battle of Dorking. London: George Routledge & Sons, [1871] and Snelling Brothers’ New Game of The Battle of Dorking (London, Registered Design No. 28294, c.1873).
 
Three items, comprising:
(i) Original pamphlet issue of The Battle of Dorking from Blackwood’s Magazine (May 1871), sewn as issued in grey pictorial wrappers, foxing and wear moderate and heavy in places, but complete;
(ii) Mrs Brown on the Battle of Dorking, 8vo, original yellow pictorial wrappers, a clean and bright copy of Sketchley’s comic sequel;
(iii) Large folding lithographed game board (minus pieces), 620 x 480 mm approx., red and cream squares with key locations (London, Reigate, Brighton, Dorking, etc.) in black and green, splits to the square and creasing to folds, contained within the original green cloth folder lettered in gilt, worn to the cloth.
 
Condition as a group good to very good overall, the first of the two pamphlets showing moderate and in places heavy foxing as well as edge wear, the board with age-creasing with worn boards but the latter is a very scarce survival.
 
A rare grouping illustrating the fervour that followed publication of Chesney’s Battle of Dorking, the short story that first crystallised Victorian fears of a German invasion. Published anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine in May 1871, Chesney’s tale of Britain’s unpreparedness — its army overwhelmed on the Surrey Downs — became one of the most widely read and debated pieces of fiction of the late nineteenth century. Its influence was immediate: it spawned a new literary genre of “invasion narratives” that would run from Le Queux to H.G. Wells, and even provoked debate in Parliament about the state of national defence.
 
Arthur Sketchley’s parody, Mrs Brown on the Battle of Dorking, transformed Chesney’s militarism into broad comic theatre, as the Cockney matron “Mrs Brown” blusters through the imagined German advance in her inimitable dialect. The Snelling Brothers’ board game turned the same scenario into an amusement, the German forces advancing south from London towards Brighton across a stylised map of the Home Counties.
 
This Dorking trio is a rare set to find in commerce, in particular because of the game board.