The Casablanca Effect and a Literary Paperchase by Griselda Heppel

A couple of months ago I promised you a particularly intriguing example of a false cultural memory, before being derailed by discovering that this phenomenon has been labelled the Mandela Effect. Well, it can just get relabelled, because I refuse to trivialise that great man by association with a group of dopey people with a shaky grasp of real life events. 

Instead, I give you the Casablanca Effect (see here if you don’t immediately get why), followed by my contribution to this rich field of research. 

Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, beautifully restored.

My husband and I visited Paris recently, and, after having admired the astonishing restoration of Notre Dame, retired to a café. The great cathedral bells began to ring, prompting me to squawk, ‘The bells, THE BELLS!’, in a mock-heroic tone, a tired old joke that still appeals. (My children will tell you how much tired old jokes still appeal to me, and by the way, that wasn’t an intentional pun. A good one though.)

Notre Dame inside - light and airy.

At which point my long-suffering husband sighed and remarked that at least I was in the right place for once. 

‘What makes you say that?’ I replied.

‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame, of course. That’s where we are,’ he added kindly. 

‘I don’t think it comes from there,’ I said. 

‘Oh come on, it must do. Quasimodo’s the bell ringer, isn’t he?’ 

‘No.’ Something stirred in my memory. ‘I think it’s from a nineteenth century play I’ve never heard of.’ 

So we looked it up. 

And discovered the cry comes from a now forgotten – but in its time tremendously popular – play by Leopold David Lewis called, er, The Bells, in which Mathias, the (anti)hero is haunted by a Jewish merchant he has murdered. The merchant had bells on his sleigh, and the sound of these signifies his ghostly arrival, hence Mathias’s increasingly hysterical shriek. Brr. It does feel quite shivery, reminiscent of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black.

By H. L. Bateman (December 6, 1812 – March 22, 1875) was the
manager of the theatre which first staged this play, and was likely
the original copyright holder of the programme. - Scanned from
Henry Irving and 'The Bells': Irving's Personal Script of the Play 
Edited by Eric Jones-Evans. Published by Manchester University
Press (1980), Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62576421

So that’s that. 

Except it isn’t, quite. 

Because it doesn’t explain how a line from a play no one in the last 100 years has heard of became attached to Victor Hugo’s famous work of 1831, where it never appears, either in the book or the many films made of it. 

And this is where the Casablanca Effect rises to a whole new level. 

The role of Mathias in The Bells was made famous by Henry Irving, an actor known for his dramatic intensity. According to this website, Jeffrey Richards shows in his biography, Sir Henry Irving: a Victorian Actor and his World,  that ‘The bells, the bells!’ catchphrase shifted in the public mind from Irving in Lewis’s play to Charles Laughton, playing Quasimodo in the 1939 film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, perhaps because Laughton’s acting style harked back to the Irving tradition. So that even though Laughton never uttered those words, people felt that he had, and therefore they must have been written by Victor Hugo, in a story that was, after all, about a bellringer. 

Thus a line from an obscure, late 19th century English play became attached to a great French classic, all because two actors two generations apart shared a similar acting style. Don’t you just love these literary paperchases?

Caricature of Henry Irving in Leopold Lewis's The Bells, by Illustrator:Frederick Waddy (1848–1901) Description British artist, sculptor, illustrator and caricaturist Date of birth/death184830 September 1901Location of birth Islington Work period1870s-1901Authority file: Q18511856VIAF: 60443987ISNI: 0000000023447658LCCN: n82228416WorldCatderivative work:  — billinghurst sDrewth - archive.org, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12458280

So next time that phrase pops into your head (honestly, it isn’t just me, a friend came out with it just last Thursday evening as we walked past St Giles during bell ringing practice), spare a thought for poor Leopold David Lewis, now remembered only for a single, four-word line that no one even realises is by him.

In other words, not remembered at all.

Find out more about Griselda Heppel here:

www.griseldaheppel.com 

https://griseldaheppel.wordpress.com/

and her children's books:

Ante's Inferno 

The Tragickall History of Henry Fowst

and

The Fall of a Sparrow