The Dennis Wheatley 'Museum' - DW's Library

Dennis Wheatley's Library - non-fiction
Napoleonic History

Nesta Webster’s ‘The French Revolution’

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Stefan Zweig’s ‘Marie Antoinette’

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Perhaps sparked by his reading of Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard stories in early childhood, DW had a huge interest in Napoleonic history. His enthusiasm was such that he kept a series of Napoleonic figures atop the bookshelves in his study at Grove Place, and it led him to place the last of his three principal heroes, Roger Brook, in the Napoleonic era.

DW was always intrigued as to why France had a Revolution in the late Eighteenth Century, and yet England avoided it and the subsequent descent into tyranny. It was perhaps this nagging and not wholly answered question that led him to consider, when writing his novel ‘Black August’ (1934) and his ‘Letter to Posterity’ (1947), whether England might merely have postponed it and that it was still to come.

Along with his interest in all the other leading personalities of that era, DW had an interest in Marie Antoinette, and was no doubt pleased when he was asked as a result to write the introduction to the Collins Classics edition of the Dumas story ‘The Queen’s Necklace’.

References : Phil Baker pp 241,438,509,512 (on Marie Antoinette), p 439 (on Napoleonic research generally)

Provenance : Private collections