The Queen’s Reading Room has just had its annual festival at Chatsworth House. In this video as shown on the ITN royal family YouTube channel, she makes a speech about Jane Austen (who turns 250 this year), a segment of which I will now quote:

We are provided with this magnificent backdrop that was her inspiration for Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, and who can forget the infamous scene of Mr Darcy emerging from the lake in the BBC version?

There have been quite a few BBC adaptations, but of course she is referring to the 1995 version where Darcy is played by Colin Firth. I have not yet gotten around to reading the book or watching any of its adaptations, but immediately this line pinged something in my head. I was sure I’d read somewhere, many years ago, that this is an example of the Mandela Effect — that the infamous scene that none can forget was never actually in the episode!

Happily I didn’t need to go through the entire series on iPlayer because the Lake Scene is the subject of multiple YouTube videos, including at least two by the BBC itself.

Sure enough, we see him jumping in, then him swimming beneath the surface, then cut to Bennet in Pemberley’s garden, then to Darcy walking along the grassy hills still damp. The actual moment of his emergence from the water is not included.

Just three months ago there was a YouGov article describes this as a prime example of collective false memory: Their study showed 49% remembered the scene happening even though it didn’t. The televisual non-event is so famous that there was even a giant fibreglass statue of Firth erected in Hyde Park in 2013.

I wonder if anyone at Clarence House had to check Her Majesty’s speech in advance of the event. This is the sort of thing which should have been caught and corrected before it went public.