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Would you know how to discern these signs, there are myriads of books upon the market today which will help you.
—Sydney Watson, Scarlet and Purple
Exactly at eleven, someone emerged from the vestry and passed up the rostrum stairs. A moment later the man was standing at the desk. Many instantly recognized him. It was the Secretary of the Church. A dead hush fell upon the people. … "He has come, and we, the unready, have been left behind … My wife has gone … My daughter, too."
—Sydney Watson, The Mark of the Beast
"Now I know, dear Abraham," she presently cried, "How it is that Jehovah is allowing our Rabbis … to be led to dates that prove the Messiah is coming soon? Now I know why God has allowed our nation to be stirred up,—the Zionist movement, the colonization of Jerusalem and its neighbourhood, and all else of this like—yes, it is because the Christ is coming."
—Sydney Watson, In the Twinkling of an Eye
It's hard to write something new about the end of the world. Senses of endings are so basic to thinking about time and mortality that ideas of personal and global apocalypse recur throughout the history of civilizations. Norman Cohn, in The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), famously compared medieval millennialism to fascism's 1,000-year Reich and the perverted utopias of the Communist Bloc. Today, however, it appears that millennial aspirations have outlived their exploitation by medieval sect-masters and tyrannical governments. If a recent series of opinion polls are to be trusted, millennialism's new spiritual home lies not in "Old Europe" but deep in the American South, where the astonishingly successful Left Behind series enjoys its most fervent following.1
What is interesting about much of the comment on the Left Behind phenomenon is the assumption that this market did not exist before the publication of the series' first novel. Indeed, a great deal of media discussion has assumed that the series' fictionalizing of apocalyptic interests was entirely without precedent. The opposite is the case. Rapture fictions have been a feature of Western evangelicalism throughout the 20th century, and end-times novelists have repeatedly rewritten the apocalypse to take account of changing social and political concerns.
The genre appears to have been born 90 years ago, when a British writer named Sydney Watson turned his attention to the creation of an apocalyptic trilogy, Scarlet and Purple (1913), The Mark of the Beast (1915), and In the Twinkling of an Eye (1916). Watson was the author of books such as The Lure of a Soul ("demonstrating the dangers of Spiritualism"), Escaped from the Snare (on Christian Science), The Gilded Lie ("a Story illustrating the dangers and subtleties of 'Millennial Dawnism'"), and Plucked from the Burning ("a startling story, dealing with Ritualism and Romish Practices in the Church of England"). But it was his rapture trilogy that achieved the widest impact. Published as the world moved into its most expansive and technologically advanced war to date—the ironically millennial "war to end wars"—Watson's novels established the narrative contours and stock characters of the rapture genre.
His influence resonates through succeeding narratives. Over half a century later, when Dr Frederick A. Tatford, the former director of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, published his own rapture novel, he explicitly noted the importance of Watson's legacy, acknowledging that The Clock Strikes (1971) would be "on similar lines to The Mark of the Beast, but with a more modern setting."2 When Russ Doughton directed his famous rapture movies—A Thief in the Night (1972) and its successors —he alluded to Watson's fiction in providing his faithful remnant in the tribulation with the possibility of death by guillotine. But similar executions also feature in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' The Mark (2000). There can, it seems, be no escaping Watson's shadow: "let's call a blade a blade."3
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