By Murray Hedgcock
Tom Smith's informative background study on The Swoop! (Spring Plum Lines) provided a welcome reminder of a largely-forgotten genre popular in Britain around the turn of the century, warning of conflict to come, usually at the hands of the horrible Hun.
It was substantial and significant enough to justify a 1997 anthology, The Great War with Germany, 1890-1914, edited by I. F. Clarke, and published by Britain's Liverpool University Press.
Nearly 30 extracts or complete stories based on the premise are included, plus essays from Germany picking up the theme, and a 1915 study, "America Fallen," published by George Haven Putnam to warn America what could happen if Germany won the battle in Europe.
A substantial extract from The Swoop! is there, the editor demonstrating his essential good judgment by saying it was written by "the man who became the greatest comic writer in Twentieth Century English literature." Its lighthearted but witty approach is matched by reproductions of eleven cartoons by the brilliant comic artist W. Heath Robinson. Published in the newspaper The Sketch in 1910, these illustrated his fantasies as to how the Germans might be defeated.
The
Swoop! is a reminder that Plum,
contrary to popular belief that he was a dreamer living in a never-never
world, could put his finger on current attitudes and, while making
the reader laugh, make him think also.