By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Here’s a question for you: which costume drama shows Colin Firth emerging soaking wet from a lake?
If you answered, ‘Pride and Prejudice, obviously’, then read on. The BBC television adaptation of Austen’s novel from 1995 does feature a rather damp Mr Darcy, played by Firth, but we never actually see him emerging from the lake. But this hasn’t stopped many people from being absolutely sure the scene’s there.
It isn’t. And needless to say, the whole thing is missing from Austen’s book.
I’ll come to the answer – the name of the costume drama which does show a sodden Mr Firth emerging from a lake – in a moment. The reason I’m blogging about this matter is that I attended a pub quiz recently which had a round on the ‘Mandela effect’, that form of collective misremembering whereby a myriad people are convinced something happened, but it never did.
Common examples include the idea that the Monopoly man used to sport a monocle, or that Kit Kat bars used to have a hyphen in the name. But the effect gets its name from a kind of collective hallucination that Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s during a prolonged hunger strike. (He didn’t, by the way.)
This got me thinking about literature and the Mandela effect. The pub quiz round I just mentioned didn’t feature any specifically bookish examples; the closest was a rather poorly worded question about what the wicked queen says to the magic mirror on her wall in ‘the original’ of Snow White: ‘mirror, mirror on the wall’ or ‘magic mirror on the wall’.
The answer is that in the 1937 Disney animation Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the queen says ‘magic mirror on the wall’, but in the original stories – such as in the Brothers Grimm version which put the tale on the map – she says ‘mirror, mirror on the wall’. (Well, technically she says ‘Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand’, but you get the idea.)
So the ‘Mandela effect’ here is really to do with Disney’s decision to alter the original line to ‘magic mirror’ and make the queen’s line less good, for reasons known only to themselves. We all correctly remember the wording in the canonical Brothers Grimm version. But are there any bona fide examples of literary Mandela effects?
The area that most readily springs to mind is misquotations. Hamlet never said ‘Alas, poor Yorick; I knew him well’, but many people think he did; Tarzan never said ‘me Tarzan, you Jane’ in any of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ hugely popular books, nor in any of the films; and, perhaps most famously of all, Sherlock Holmes never said ‘elementary, my dear Watson’ in any of Conan Doyle’s stories.
Then there are the things which people think are in classic books but aren’t. Frankenstein isn’t a doctor. Dracula isn’t killed with a stake through the heart. There’s no Trojan horse in the Iliad.
But these examples don’t really qualify for the Mandela effect either, since in most cases, they’re not based on a misremembering of the details people think they’ve read but on good old-fashioned ignorance of the reading matter in question: people have seen film adaptations in which these things happen, but haven’t read the original source material.
A few years ago I did find one example which might qualify, but it’s a) very small and b) based on a very small sample population (namely, me). In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice attends a ‘mad tea-party’ attended by several eccentric and comical characters. There’s the Dormouse (which keeps falling asleep), the March Hare, and the Mad Hatter.
Except there isn’t. No character called the Mad Hatter appears in Carroll’s novel. He’s just ‘the Hatter’ and that’s what he’s always called.
But I could’ve sworn he was referred to as the Mad Hatter, even though, now I think of it, that would’ve been beating us over the head a little too hard with the whole ‘madness’ theme of the tea-party. The March Hare isn’t ‘the Mad March Hare’, after all!
I have my misgivings about the whole ‘Mandela effect’ because many of the examples often cited sound to me like people just being silly. Or American. Of course Mandela didn’t die in the 1980s and I’m not sure why anyone would’ve thought so, when there was a whole ‘free Nelson Mandela’ movement which was regularly in the media and often taken up enthusiastically by popstars. And Disney just replaced the famous fairytale line about the mirror on the wall with a worse line, so our minds choose to (mis)remember the better one that’s actually in the source material. (Mind you, the Monopoly man did definitely once have a monocle and he looks bloody weird without it.)
So I’m wary of extrapolating from my own stupid faulty memory and drawing too many conclusions from my ‘Mad Hatter’ example. But perhaps you, dear readers, have examples of your own to bring to the (mad) party. Have you ever read something then later sworn something was in it which, in fact, wasn’t?
As for Colin Firth’s wet-shirt adventure, that occurs in Volmont, a 1989 film adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses. You can watch the scene here.