"[2] – and features references to many well-known figures of the day, among them the politician Herbert Gladstone, novelist Edgar Wallace, actor-managers Seymour Hicks and George Edwardes, and boxer Bob Fitzsimmons.

"[4] – the destruction of nearly all the capital's statues, the reduction of the Albert Hall to a heap of picturesque ruins, and the burning of the Royal Academy, earn Prince Otto a hearty vote of thanks from the grateful populace.

[5] The European parties form an alliance and expel the other invaders, but the Swiss soon leave, to be home in time for the winter hotel season, and when Prince Otto and Grand Duke Vodkakoff are offered music hall engagements and the leader of the army of Monaco is not, he takes offence and withdraws his troops.

Complaining about the difficulties caused by so many simultaneous and surprise invasions, the leader of the German forces, Prince Otto, refers explicitly to Blyth's novel: "'It all comes of this dashed Swoop of the Vulture business', he grumbled."

Six years before The Swoop, Wodehouse (under the pseudonym Henry William-Jones) contributed a humorous article to Punch magazine in which he outlined, in a mock-serious tone, the plot of an "Inspired-Prophecy kind of novel, in which England is overrun by invaders until the last few chapters".

(Eby 1988, p. 75) Many writers of invasion-scare stories took as their starting point an assumed unpreparedness on the part of Britain's armed forces to counter the threat of invasion, and they wrote with the aim of raising public awareness of this deficiency.

Du Maurier, for example, was a serving army officer (Clarke 1997, p. 17) while Le Queux was assisted by Field Marshal Earl Roberts, who had resigned from active duty a few years earlier to devote himself to the National Service League, which promoted universal military training.