Dumb ignorance rules OK
On 18th December last the ITV News website posted an item about the historic figures whose faces will grace the new British banknotes. It included this startling piece of information:
It has often been noted that Jane Austen makes no mention of the Napoleonic wars in any of her novels, even though they were being waged at the time of writing.
Yet Austen herself was a senior officer in the 4th Women's Battalion, King's Royal Hussars and saw active service at Ulm in 1805.
Evidently somebody eventually spotted this and the statement was hastily edited out of the page, http://www.itv.com/news/2014-01-08/facts-behind-the-faces-to-be-on-the-new-banknotes/. (It's still cached, though - they weren't able to destroy the evidence)
So, where did this fantastic notion come from?
In 2008 the satirist Craig Brown wrote a column for The Telegraph entitled Twelve little-known facts about Jane Austen. The 'King's Royal Hussars' claim was one of them, alongside the allegation that the film Goodfellas is Martin Scorsese's version of Mansfield Park, and that a 1937 film version of Emma had Harriet Smith performing a suggestive lap dance for Robert Martin at the Donwell Abbey ball!
And now this assertion is to be encountered all over the JA fandom. A whole string of literary blogs quote it with perfect faith that The Man From The Telegraph couldn't possibly be wrong; and a clutch of keen-but-dim interns at ITV pounced on it as a Fascinating Fact to enliven a piece about new banknotes. Duh.
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