Authors: M. A. Sandiford
Afterword
Darcy’s Journey
diverges from
Pride and Prejudice
after Darcy’s proposal at Hunsford,
dated here in 1814. Elizabeth refuses to read Darcy’s letter, the Gardiners cancel
their summer trip, and she goes to Venice instead of Derbyshire. Such a journey
could have happened only after Napoleon’s exile to Elba in April 1814, which
led to a brief interval of peace until his escape in February 1815.
As will be obvious, many people, places,
and events in
Darcy’s Journey
are historical. They include not only Wellington,
Waterloo, and the Prince Regent, but references that are less well-known. I
list below the main ones, in the order in which they appear in the novel; most
are the subject of Wikipedia entries.
In Venice, the British consul Richard
Hoppner and his wife Isabelle are historical; Hoppner later became a friend of
Lord Byron. The opera house La Fenice is of course a real place, opened in
1792. So is Caffè Florian, which has occupied its current site in St Mark’s
Square since 1720. Palazzo Gritti is now a hotel.
On the route from Venice to Padua, all places
are real except for Hotel Petrarca in Oriago. Villa Foscari is a 16
th
century Palladian villa. It had been abandoned by the start of the 19
th
century, but is now restored and open to the public.
In Padua and Verona most locations are
real, including the Basilica of Saint Anthony, the Roman Amphitheatre, Palazzo Maffei,
the Prefettura, and Castelvecchio; the people are fictional (Gerard Hanson,
Alice Dill, Pavoni, Zamboni, Fraulein Edelmann, Commander Graf). The same
applies to the onward journey across Europe to Brussels: most places are real,
people fictional.
In Brussels the de Crécy and de Beaufort
families are fictional, but there are well-known historical events starting
with the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on 15
th
June 1815. In her biography
of Wellington, Elizabeth Longford described this as ‘the most famous ball in
history’. It was attended, as described in the novel, by the Duke of Wellington
and the Prince of Orange. Sir James Webster and his wife Frances are historical
people who attended the ball; gossips speculated whether Lady Frances was
having an affair with Wellington, or only flirting. Many participants wrote recollections
of the ball (see
Duchess of Richmond’s ball
in Wikipedia for details);
it also inspired writers such as Thackeray and Byron. Actions by Wellington and
the Prince of Orange are taken from these memoirs.
The other major historical event,
obviously, is the Battle of Waterloo (and engagements like Quatre Bras that preceded
it). In outline the novel conforms to historical accounts, although these are
debated: some have claimed, for instance, that Wellington exaggerated the role
of British forces in turning the battle. General descriptions of the aftermath
were taken from the article
British medical services at the Battle of
Waterloo
by M.R. Howard (British Medical Journal, 1988). This covers the
main types of injury, treatments used by surgeons, and the role of camp
followers (especially women) in transporting and caring for the wounded. The
regiments existed, although it is uncertain what roles they played in the
fighting.
For an eye-witness account, I relied
especially on the memoir
A Week at Waterloo in 1815
by Lady Magdalene de
Lancey, wife of Sir William de Lancey (freely available from Project Gutenberg).
Charles Dickens wrote in 1841 that reading it had been an ‘epoch in his life’:
‘I shall never forget the lightest word of it from this hour to the hour of my
death’. Lady de Lancey describes how she was sent to Antwerp before the
fighting began, learned of her husband’s possibly mortal injury, made her way
to the village where he lay, and nursed him until his death a week later. I
used events from this memoir in describing Elizabeth’s perspective on the
battle and its aftermath.
Finally, it was indeed Major Harry Percy
who brought news of Wellington’s victory to the Prince Regent, whose main
residence was Carlton House. Lady Hertford—or to give her full title, Isabella
Anne Seymour-Conway, Marchioness of Hertford—was the Prince Regent’s
mistress, and Lord Bathurst was Secretary of State for War and the Colonies.
However, the dinner party at Carlton House is fictional.
M.A. Sandiford, April 2016