Coming Alive

Sometimes fiction and fact blend seamlessly and a collection sheds new light on war

- Huon Mallalieu

IN a later essay, Umberto Eco related how the protagonist of The Name of the Rose, Brother William of Baskerville, had taken on a life independent of his creator. In the medieval whodunit, the fictional monk travelled from Rome to Avignon in the train of a historical cardinal and, as the beginning and end dates of the real journey are known, the book’s action had a tight timeframe. Eco had been contacted by a reader who had come across an account of a festivity at another point on the cardinal’s progress and, logically, William must have ‘been’ there, too—unknown to Eco.

A pair of pistols in Thomas Del Mar’s December sale (Fig 2) produced a slightly similar hallucinatory feeling of fiction coming to life. In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Rawdon Crawley, the betrayed husband of Becky Sharp, is determined to fight Lord Steyne, but the Marquess, despite having earlier declared ‘One or other of us must not survive the outrage of last night’, buys him off to avoid the duel. Had the 3rd Marquess of Hertford, who was Thackeray’s real-life model for Steyne, accepted such a challenge, he might have used these silver-mounted 30-bore duelling pistols.

They were made by John Manton of London in 1790–1, with fine mounts by Michael Barnett, probably for the 2nd Marquess, from whom they passed to his son, the 3rd, and grandson, whose widow founded what became the Wallace Collection.