What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War

By Ernest Bramah

“Abounds in humor and wit, especially in the early chapters. Bramah’s condemnation of the power of the press to corrupt and mislead is a pertinent today as it was in 1907” – Times Literary Supplement

This satirical speculative novel of political resistance is better known in its abridged form as The Secret of the League (1909). It mixes science fiction, social realism and office espionage, and accurately predicted the invention of the fax machine and the ascendancy of Labour politics. What Might Have Been is a political thriller, with a nail-biting Buchanesque car chase, a sea battle that C S Forester could have written, and dramatic rescue missions in the air. The flying machines are both delightful and dramatic.

Now, for the first time since 1907, What Might Have Been is available at its original length, with 7000 words restored to recreate this lost landmark in British speculative fiction. The critical introduction by Jeremy Hawthorn sets out the novel’s history, and its connections with Bramah’s more famous literary works, The Wallet of Kai Lung, and Max Carrados.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Handheld Classics
• Release date: Oct 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781999828059

Ernest Bramah

Ernest Bramah (1868–1942) was an English author of detective fiction.

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What Might Have Been

Also published by Handheld Press

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First published in the UK in 1907 by John Murray, London.

Subsequently published as The Secret of the League, in an abridged version.

This ePub edition published in 2017 by Handheld Press Ltd.

34 Avenue Heights, Basingstoke Road, Reading RG2 0EP

www.handheldpress.co.uk

Copyright of the Introduction and Notes © Jeremy Hawthorn 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The right of Jeremy Hawthorn to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

ISBN 978-1-9998280-5-9

Series design by Nadja Guggi and typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro and Open Sans.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group Ltd.

Contents

Introduction by Jeremy Hawthorn

Preface

The Period, and the Coming of Wings

The Millionth Chance

‘If Two Men Are Agreed, Their Force Can Cleave Granite’

The Downtrodden

Miss Lisle Tells a Long, Pointless Story

‘Schedule B’

Tantroy Earns His Wage

Secret History

The Order of St Martin of Tours

Man Between Two Masters

By Telescribe

The Effect of the Bomb

The Last Chance and The Counsel of Expedience

The Great Fiasco

The Incident of the 13th of January

The Dark Winter

Salt Deserts His Post

The ‘Finis’ Message

Stobalt of Salaveira

The Bargain of Famine

‘Poor England’

Notes

Works by Ernest Bramah

Bibliography

Jeremy Hawthorn is a retired professor of English who lives in Trondheim, Norway. He has written articles and books on Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and literary theory. His textbook Studying the Novel (Bloomsbury Academic) is now in its seventh edition, and his The Reader as Peeping Tom (Ohio State University Press) was published in 2014.

Introduction

The History of a Novel

BY JEREMY HAWTHORN

Ernest Bramah today is chiefly remembered for his Kai Lung tales, and his short stories about the blind detective Max Carrados. Kai Lung first appeared in book form in The Wallet of Kai Lung, published in 1900, while Max Carrados introduced its title character to the reading public in 1914. In between the books featuring these very successful characters, early in 1907, Bramah published What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War. It was published anonymously by the prestigious publishing house of John Murray in a six-shilling edition. Murray also issued the book simultaneously in their ‘Imperial Library’, identical to the home edition apart from the binding and bound-in book advertisements.

Founded in 1768, John Murray was famous for having published many major authors, including Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and Lord Byron, and inclusion on their list was a mark of some achievement. Bramah’s biographer Aubrey Wilson reports that initially the first edition of What Might Have Been, of 1,525 copies, did not sell well (Wilson 2007, 89). Thus when John Murray was asked by Thomas Nelson & Sons – another long-established publisher – whether they would grant permission for the novel to be included in their Sevenpenny series, Murray agreed to do so, even though this would affect their own sales, as the Nelson edition would cost less than a tenth of the price of the Murray edition. On publication of the Nelson edition the unsold copies of the Murray edition were pulped. The Nelson cheap edition sold well, which may have contributed to Murray’s decision to follow the industry trend; by 1910 Murray was planning its own cheap series of shilling novels, the Albemarle Library (Buchan 1910).

The novelist John Buchan had joined Thomas Nelson in 1907 as their literary advisor, developing the Sevenpenny series, and many others, for Nelson’s, and may well have chosen Bramah’s novel for republication. By July 1909 production of the Nelson edition was well underway, and in a letter to George Brown, Nelson’s production manager, Buchan requested advance copies for distribution to ‘Anti-Socialist and Constitutional associations’, adding: ‘It would be really worthwhile doing a little advertising for that book, and perhaps publishing several opinions from public men, as there seems to me just a chance of a really big circulation with it’ (Buchan 1909). Buchan’s optimism was justified: there were two slightly different printings of the book in 1909, and it was frequently reprinted during the twentieth century. Aubrey Wilson has estimated from royalty statements that some three hundred and sixty thousand copies of the Nelson edition were sold, although it is not clear what period of time this figure covers (Wilson 2007, 90).

Nelson’s edition was published with Bramah as the named author rather than anonymously, and with a new title: The Secret of the League, although the subtitle remained the same. A 1907 letter to Bramah from John Murray makes it clear that Bramah had discovered that the title What Might Have Been had already been used by another author, Mrs Frances Cashel Hoey, who published a novel of that title in 1881 under the name of Cashel Hoey (Wilson 2007, 89).

The Secret of the League is nearly seven thousand words shorter than What Might Have Been, and differs from the first edition in a number of ways. The most substantial change is that the Preface, in which is introduced the conceit of a Collateral history additional to our familiar Past, Present, and Future, is omitted, along with all references to the Collateral ‘phase of existence’. Chapter III of What Might Have Been (on street renumbering, and Salt’s first interview with Sir John) is omitted from The Secret of the League, while the order of Chapters I and II, and of Chapters XV and XVI, is reversed. ‘Salt Deserts his Post’, Chapter XVII in the first edition, becomes Chapter XVIII in The Secret of the League, and is renamed ‘The Music and the Dance’. Passages from the discussion of the State schools in Chapter I of What Might Have Been – including the examples of pupils’ howlers that are strikingly similar to garbled understandings of British history in the much later comic classic 1066 And All That by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman (1930) – were also removed.

Such substantial editing for the Nelson edition of 1909 justifies reprinting the original Murray edition. This reprint of the original version of the novel offers readers considerable pleasures in the missing passages. The sustained attack on George Bernard Shaw alone, for example, missing from The Secret of the League because the chapter in which it occurs was deleted, constitutes a good case for choosing the text of the first edition. It is also important as an early example of Bramah’s objections to Shaw, seen later in his 1920 story ‘The Delicate Case of Mlle Célestine Bon’, and in his 1930 novel A Slight Flutter.

The effect of many of the deletions from the Murray edition was to dilute the absurd, satirical element that plays a prominent part in the earlier part of the novel, so that the serious political plot is given more weight. Accordingly, The Secret of the League is a darker, more disturbing text than its predecessor. While this may make the Nelson version of the novel more attractive to those interested in, or sympathetic to, its political message, readers will also find that the Murray edition’s balancing of this political message with lighter and fantastical elements makes for a more varied and enjoyable reading experience.

There was no specifically American edition until The Secret of the League was published by the Specular Press, Atlanta, in 1995.

Critical and popular evaluation

As What Might Have Been was published anonymously, initial reviewers were forced to trust the tale, not the teller. Bramah collected reviews of the novel, and Wilson quotes from two of the positive reviews that he preserved, now in the Bramah archive in the Harry Ransom Research Library in Texas (negative reviews were also kept). While The Pall Mall Magazine reported that the novel ‘gives a striking picture of England in 1916, with an imagined Socialist Government’, the Evening Standard and St James’s Gazette described it as ‘a clever story, abundant in word satire, amusement, excitement and even instruction’ (Wilson 2007, 91). These two responses can be taken as representative; later commentators have often tended to see the book either as a relatively serious political prophecy that, like most such prophecies, painted a picture of an imagined future containing both novel technologies and frightening social and political developments, or as a more light-hearted satirical and humorous account whose serious political points are secondary to the desire to amuse and entertain.

In later years, and especially since the novel was republished as the abridged The Secret of the League under Bramah’s name, many commentators have noted that the novel’s reactionary politics make it unlike most of Bramah’s other published work. Although often advancing some conservative opinions in his other writing, Bramah usually delivers these in a humorous and humane manner. For example in one of his Kai Lung tales, ‘The Story of Wong Ts’in and the Willow Plate Embellishment’, the character Wong Ts’in finds a way to circumvent the power of ‘certain of the more turbulent among his workers [who] had banded themselves together into a confederacy’ (Bramah 1985, 22) – in other words, a trades union. When his daughter’s admirer inadvertently sits on a newly painted plate, he manages to transfer the image to another surface on which he then sits, thus rendering the copying skills of the turbulent workers obsolete. This is more farce than realism, and is many miles away from George Salt’s relentless waging of ‘social war’ on the organised working class.

The political aspects of the What Might Have Been have attracted the attention of a number of commentators – John Buchan included – perhaps more interested in the novel’s politics than its literary qualities. In 1940 George Orwell reviewed Bramah’s novel along with Jack London’s The Iron Heel, H. G. Wells’s The Sleeper Awakes, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. His review, entitled ‘Prophecies of Fascism’, found that all of these novels made interesting reading in the light of the rise of fascism in Europe, and he characterised the régime established at the end of Bramah’s novel as one ‘that we should now describe as Fascist’. Orwell asks: ‘Why should a decent and kindly writer like Ernest Bramah find the crushing of the proletariat a pleasant vision?’ and answers his question thus: ‘It is simply the reaction of a struggling class which felt itself menaced not so much in its economic position as in its code of conduct and way of life’ (Orwell 1969, 32). In Bramah’s defence it is worth pointing out that when faced with the reality of fascism, on the evidence of his writing he did not support it. In 1940, the same year that Orwell’s review appeared, Bramah’s Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree was published, and includes the story of one Chang Won who attempts to persuade his emperor of the virtues of his invention – clearly gunpowder – after a dramatic display of its power. The inventor tells the emperor that with this invention he can reduce all other lands to vassal states, ‘and then proclaim your Empire from the Khin-ling range to the barrier of the trackless seas – one Land, one Prince, one Banner! May he who we revere live for a thousand years!’ (Bramah 1940, 84). The ironic echo of the Nazi slogan ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’, propounded by Hitler in a speech in 1935, makes it clear that Bramah was at the close of his life no friend of absolute leaders or of thousand-year Reichs.

There is a widely circulated belief that Orwell admitted that Bramah’s novel had in some way inspired his own Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The normally reliable Aubrey Wilson reports that ‘in his letters Orwell does identify this work as being one the [sic] formative sources for his seminal Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (Wilson 2007, 91). The Wikipedia entry for Bramah repeats this claim, stating that ‘George Orwell acknowledged that Bramah’s book, What Might Have Been, influenced his Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (accessed July 2017). This contention – repeated on the internet in many forms but always without a source – appears to be false. Orwell was an admirer of Bramah’s work, especially his Max Carrados stories, and Bramah wrote to him in a letter on 4 August 1936, thanking him for a review in which he praised these, while politely granting that Orwell’s low opinion of The Wallet of Kai Lung, noted in the same review, was justified (quoted in Wilson 2007, 222). What Might Have Been is, however, a very different sort of work from Nineteen Eighty-Four. While Orwell’s novel presents the reader with the realities of an imagined state in which totalitarianism is dominant throughout, only at the end of What Might Have Been is democracy overthrown. Moreover while Orwell was concerned to depict the horrors of totalitarianism, Bramah was more concerned to depict the chaos and mismanagement of a democratically elected socialist Britain. The nation reverts in ‘Year Collateral 1919’ to a system of paternalistic capitalism rather than the establishment of a dystopic state similar to Orwell’s vision.

At the other end of the political spectrum, there has been some conjecture that Bramah’s novel might have been read by Ayn Rand, given that her right-wing libertarian ideas would have made her sympathetic to its politics. The name of the hero of her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged – John Galt – could, it has been suggested, be read as a half-echo of Bramah’s George Salt. In his book The Ayn Rand Cult (1999) Jeff Walker outlines the similarities between the two books, suggesting that a number of themes from Bramah’s novel are restated in Atlas Shrugged, and he lists many parallel elements in the two works (Walker 1999, 310). But he provides no evidence that Rand had read Bramah’s novel, or even that she was aware of it.

Admirers of Bramah’s other works have frequently argued that What Might Have Been compares badly to them. In a lengthy piece on Bramah published in the Listener in 1947, John Connell summarises the plot of the novel and notes that in it ‘there is not a hint of the velvety irony which one normally associates with Bramah’s writing; it is in deadly earnest, and it is savage and angry’ (Connell 1947, 842). H. J. Lethbridge, in an Introduction written for a 1985 reissue of Bramah’s Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, dismisses the novel in terms similar to those used by Connell, as ‘a gloomy, reactionary, fiercely illiberal novel set in the future’, and notes that ‘Bramah, as a writer, had clearly gone off course’ (Lethbridge 1985, vi). It is time to appreciate What Might Have Been on its own terms, and not as a failed example of Bramah’s light humour.

Ernest Bramah

Bramah wrote a Preface for the 1924 collection of his short pieces entitled A Specimen Case. In it he makes some very interesting comments about the writer’s need to choose between what he wants to write, and what the public wants to read, but he also jokes at some length about the way the word ‘Mystery’ has repeatedly been applied to his person. He quotes publisher Grant Richards, who wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that he was continually being asked ‘Is there really such a person as Ernest Bramah? And so on’ (Bramah 1924, 18), and who, ‘later’, was ‘induced to state without reserve: Finally, I do assure his readers that such a person as Ernest Bramah does really and truly exist. I have seen and touched him’ (Bramah 1924, 18–19).

If he was aware of it, Bramah would doubtless have been much amused by the fact that in 1938 the Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges, an admirer of Bramah’s Kai Lung stories, included the novelist in his satirical ‘thumbnail biographies’, and noted that in Bramah’s case the biography ran the risk of being no less pointless and encyclopaedic than a history of the world according to Adam. ‘We know nothing of Ernest Bramah’ he declared, ‘except that his name is not Ernest Bramah’ (Borges 1999, 164). Borges cited the publisher’s note on ‘The Author’ at the front of the 1937 Penguin Books reissue of Kai Lung Unrolls his Mat, which reports that Bramah’s entry in Who’s Who ‘gives nothing more than a list of his works and the address of his literary agent. His literary agent supplied us with a photograph and for further information referred us back to Who’s Who. All other attempts to discover more were fruitless’. The circularity of this search must have appealed to the author of The Garden of Forking Paths.

By 1939, however, a reprint of the Penguin edition of Kai Lung’s Golden Hours contained a rather fuller account that has all the appearance of having been written by Bramah himself.

Born in Manchester. At seventeen chose farming as a profession; after three years of losing money gave it up to go into journalism. Started as correspondent on a typical provincial paper, then went to London as secretary to Jerome K. Jerome. Worked himself into the editorial side of Jerome’s magazine Today, where he got the opportunity of meeting the most important literary figures of the day. Soon left Today to join a new publishing firm, as editor of a publication called The Minister; finally, after two years here, turned to writing as his full-time occupation. Was at one time intensely interested in coins and has published a book on the English regal copper coinage.

The account then lists his ‘Chinese’ books, mentions two one-act plays and ‘many stories and articles in leading periodicals’, but omits the Max Carrados detective stories – and What Might Have Been.

In 2007 Aubrey Wilson’s biography, The Search for Ernest Bramah, filled out many of the gaps in our knowledge of Bramah’s life. Wilson trawled through the records of Bramah’s publishers and agents and the extensive Bramah archive in Texas, and he interviewed some who remembered Bramah. The author was born Ernest Brammah Smith in Hulme, Manchester, on 20 March 1868 (Wilson gives his birth date as 5 April, which is not corroborated by the birth certificate), the fourth child of textile worker Charles Clement Smith and his wife Susannah, whose maiden name was Brammah. Ernest later adopted and adapted this name to use only a single ‘m’, as his nom de plume. Wilson describes the family as prosperous rather than wealthy, and Bramah was educated at Manchester Grammar School, where he was a very indifferent pupil. In 1897 he married Maisie Lucy Barker, who brought with her a settlement of £300 a year, enough to underwrite Bramah’s developing writing career. The couple had no children, and Bramah died on 23 June, 1942, in Weston-Super-Mare. His wife died in July 1957.

What Might Have Been and Britain in 1907

Exactly when Bramah started work on What Might Have Been is uncertain. Wilson quotes from a letter from Bramah to publisher Grant Richards, probably written in 1901 or 1902, in which he reports work on a ‘modern novel of English life’ that may or may not have been What Might Have Been. However as What Might Have Been was published early in 1907 it is fair to assume that the momentous General Election of 1906 (completed on 8 February) left its mark on the novel. There are clear hints in Bramah’s first book, English Farming And Why I Turned It Up (1894), on his failure as a farmer, that he was a man of the right, and the General Election result could not have pleased him. Not only did the Liberal Party win a landslide victory at the expense of the Conservatives, who lost more than half of their seats, but the Labour Representation Committee, which previously had only two seats, won 29 seats, and changed its name to the Labour Party following the election. Twenty-nine may seem insignificant compared to the 397 seats won by the Liberals, or even the 156 seats won by the Conservatives and their allies, but doubtless Bramah saw this as an ominous sign of the direction in which the country was heading. The new government immediately instituted a process of reform that culminated in the introduction of old-age pensions, the National Insurance Act of 1911 that introduced health insurance for industrial workers, unemployment benefits for those in seasonal trades, and the weakening of the power of the House of Lords.

It should be remembered that women did not have the vote at this time, and that there were still property qualifications for men, such that the total electorate in 1906 was 7,264,608, at a time when the population numbered just over 39,000,000. It should be remembered, too, that many Roman Catholics in Ireland boycotted the vote, and 73 candidates for the Irish Parliamentary Party were elected unopposed. One striking absence from What Might Have Been is any direct mention of the campaign for women’s suffrage, which was in very full swing at the time the novel was written and published. The Anti-Socialist Union was founded in 1908, too late to have influenced the writing of the novel, but the earlier Liberty and Property Defence League (founded 1882) might have served as a model for the Unity League. Its aims were much more diffuse, but opposition to socialism and trades unionism figured prominently among them.

The 1906 Trades Disputes Act, which followed the election of the Liberal government, meant that trades unions were no longer legally liable for employers’ losses caused by a strike, and this led to an increase in industrial action. At the time Bramah was writing the novel industrial action had not reached the level it would in the years immediately prior to the First World War, but the novel’s portrayal of the power of trades unions suggests that Bramah saw which way the wind was blowing, and was unhappy with it.

The discussion of Britain’s weakened military capacity in Chapter XIII of What Might Have Been reflects the naval arms race of the early twentieth century, which was triggered by Anglo-German tensions during the Boer War (which Bramah opposed) and exacerbated by the expansion of the German fleet from 1898 onwards. HMS Dreadnought, a battleship far in advance of anything possessed or planned by Germany or any other naval power, was launched on 10 February 1906, and in the same year a scare campaign regarding increasing German naval power led to public demands for more such ships.

The social and political commentary of the novel is not aimed exclusively at such issues of great moment, however, and Bramah’s dry wit is allowed to engage with more trivial debates. The paragraph in Chapter II that opens with ‘Hastings permitted mixed flying’ clearly mocks the long-standing debate about whether mixed swimming should be allowed at coastal resorts. Christopher Love reports that ‘the suppression of mixed swimming was challenged as early as the 1890s, and with increasing success from 1900’ (Love 2008, 21). Even the ludicrous replacement of London addresses by codes, outlined in the third chapter of the novel (and omitted from The Secret of the League) seems to have originated from some public interest in this topic. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, published in the same year as What Might Have Been, a novel that also attacks revolutionary and socialist groups and ideologies, allows itself a rare flash of humour on this topic. After detailing the random and contradictory way street names and numbers are given to houses, the narrator ironically proposes that rather than changing their street addresses, the actual buildings should be moved: ‘Why powers are not asked of Parliament (a short act would do) for compelling these edifices to return where they belong is one of the mysteries of municipal administration’ (Conrad 1990, 17).

Light humour, dystopia, thriller, or science fiction?

What Might Have Been is not an easy novel to categorise. The opening chapters include light humour, parody, and ironic social comedy. Gatacre Stobart’s conversation with Muriel Hampden following his rescue of her in Chapter II borders on the farcical – quite different from the way he is presented in his conversation with her father in the following chapter, which is deadly serious. Chapter XV, with the dramatic arrest of ‘George Salt’ and his rescue from the hands of the police in a car chase could come from a John Buchan thriller. If in the early chapters we are often aware of the author gently pulling our legs while we watch him pull the strings controlling his characters, in later chapters (such as Chapter XV) we believe in Salt as a character, and experience the tension generated by Bramah’s economic style as we follow the car journey and Salt’s race against time to win the political battle. Bramah earns his place in histories of science fiction, too, through the introduction of flying, coding typewriters, and the ‘Telescribe’ system.

In the Kai Lung books, Bramah switches between a relatively realistic frame narrative, and stories within this frame told by Kai Lung that contain fantastic and supernatural elements. That same opposition between the (relatively) realistic and the fantastic can be observed in What Might Have Been, with the clearly fantastic early account of individual flying leading in to a lengthy socio-realistic account of political machinations. The two elements sit perhaps less comfortably together than they do in the frame / framed structure of the Kai Lung books, and Bramah’s recognition of this fact may lie behind some of his cuts for the 1909 edition.

Modern readers may be surprised that a professional writer like Bramah, who had a keen eye for sales, should have written the political dystopia What Might Have Been rather than another Kai Lung volume, but the Kai Lung tales took some time to become popular, and the first printing of The Wallet of Kai Lung required years, according to publisher Grant Richards, to sell out (Wilson 2007, 67). As a professional writer Bramah tried a number of different genres in search of the elusive best-seller, from his first book on his farming experiences, through the 1898 A Handbook for Writers and Artists, and a Chinese-themed book unrelated to the Kai Lung tales (and vastly inferior to them), The Mirror of Kong Ho (1905). While What Might Have Been was certainly in part the product of the author’s dismay at political developments in Britain in the early twentieth century, it was probably also an attempt to tap into a lucrative market for what we would now call science fiction and futuristic romances. H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901) had been best sellers, and were not without a political dimension reflective of Wells’s socialist beliefs. Bramah had good grounds to believe that his own contribution to the sub-genre, albeit one reflecting a different set of political commitments, might also sell well. In the long run, this belief was justified.

Another novel that bears comparison with What Might Have Been is The Inheritors, the first of three collaborations between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, then known as Ford Madox Hueffer. Published in 1901 The Inheritors, like Bramah’s novel, mixes what we would nowadays refer to as science fiction, with intrigue and conflict in the British political system. The intrigue is instigated by a group of ‘Fourth Dimensionists’, outwardly indistinguishable from ordinary human beings, who infiltrate the political system and eventually gain control of the British parliament. The narrator is used by the Fourth Dimensionist woman he meets at the start of the novel, then discarded once she succeeds in her political machinations. While What Might Have Been has its old, principled, and respected politician Sir John Hampden, The Inheritors has the similarly upright Mr Churchill, the Foreign Minister. But while Sir John is, ultimately, victorious, Churchill, and the probity and principle for which he stands, are defeated by the Fourth Dimensionists.

The opening chapter of What Might Have Been clearly declares a desire for topicality, with its ironic portrayal of the new tabloid press (‘Two new farthing daily papers’), new forms of evangelical Christianity aimed at the lower classes (‘the Rev. Sebastian Tauthaul’s striking series of addresses … entitled If Christ put up for Battersea’), and advertising (of cocoa and soap). These were popular targets at the time: Henry James’s disconcertingly still topical tale ‘The Papers’ (1903) investigates the humorous aspects of what we would now term celebrity culture, and its dependence on the press, while H. G. Wells’s Tono Bungay (1909) hits out at patent medicine and advertising. It is worth noting that the objects of Bramah’s humorous scorn in these early chapters can hardly be blamed on the Labour Party or the trades unions. Alfred Harmsworth, arguably the first modern press baron, was the epitome of a successful capitalist. He was made a baronet in 1904, and a peer, Baron Northcliffe, in 1905. The rise of mass advertising was intertwined with the rise of popular journalism, and again responsibility for its rise can hardly be laid at the door of socialists or the Labour Party. It is as if Bramah’s irony and satire are without a specifically political motivation in these early chapters. It is tempting to wonder whether these chapters were written before the 1906 election.

Predicting the future

Readers of older texts in any genre that attempt to predict the future may respond with admiration (if the predictions hit the mark) or smugness (if they do not). From the perspective of the twenty-first century Bramah’s novel has both hits and misses. If the novel was, as George Orwell asserted in 1940, a prophecy of fascism, then its depiction of a successful revolt against socialism and democracy must be considered one of its hits. Although the Labour Party never obtained the parliamentary dominance predicted in the novel, Bramah was correct that its power was destined to grow way beyond the 30 seats obtained in the 1906 election, and also that it was destined to replace the Liberal Party.

On the technological level, the vision of a future in which flying was common can be taken as correct in general, and ludicrously wrong in terms of its not-too-serious specifics. Much the same is true of postal codes, introduced from 1959 in the United Kingdom. In contrast, the cypher typewriter used by George Salt is described in a manner that must have led Bramah’s first readers to assume that such an invention might well be possible, while prompting present-day readers to note how uncannily well he anticipated coding devices such as the German ‘Enigma’ machine of the Second World War. In like manner, the ‘telescribe’ system provides an eerily accurate portrayal of what half a century later would be known as the fax or facsimile system.

In other words, there are different conventions, triggering different generic expectations on the part of the reader, attached to the various futuristic aspects of the novel. Bramah’s changes to the text in The Secret of the League suggest that he might have been attempting to reduce its more ludicrous and humorous aspects and to get the reader to focus more on its hard, realistic political plot. The flying stayed (it was integral to the novel’s plot, and the inclusion of an illustration at the front of the 1909 edition entitled ‘She began to unbuckle the frozen straps of his gear’ makes it clear that either Bramah or his publisher, or both, saw the flying as a selling point), but some of the gentler humour (the parliamentary debates, the satire on education) was removed. The 1909 illustration hints at a romantic element in the novel, crucial to cheap fiction sales at the time. But in the novel the characters of Muriel Hampden and Irene Lisle serve only to allow the hero to behave like a true Edwardian gentleman and protect the ‘weaker sex’.

Conclusion

For the modern reader, What Might Have Been offers humour, social commentary, political polemic, futuristic prediction, and thriller-type excitement. Some of the specific references in the text may be unfamiliar, and the notes

Reviews for What Might Have Been

[gttexas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Should be required reading!