When William Came

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When William Came is a novel written by British author Saki (the pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro) and published in 1913. At the time of writing it was set several years in the future, after a war between Germany and Great Britain, which Germany won. The "William" of the title is William II, German Emperor. The book chronicles life in London under German occupation, and the changes that come with a foreign army's invasion and triumph. Like Robert Erskine Childers's 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands, it predicts World War I and is an example of invasion literature, a literary genre which flourished at the turn of the last century as tensions between European nations increased.

The novel contains a number of anti-Semitic references, with Jews disparaged as "cosmopolitan" and linked to the weakness of England in surrendering easily to the German invaders.

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