HMS Lord Nelson as a late pre-dreadnought

Lord Nelson was laid down three days after Agamemnon and was also launched and commissioned later. The two ships were the culmination of the Royal Navy's mixed-calibre battleship designs. Their awkward timing matters because Dreadnought had already been in service for two years when Lord Nelson entered service in 1908. The chronology exposes the limits of the label pre-dreadnought: it identifies a design tradition, but does not mean every ship in the category was completed before Dreadnought.