Harold Acton

Who was Harold Acton?

Sir Harold Mario Mitchell Acton CBE was a British writer, scholar and dilettante perhaps most famous for being wrongly believed to have inspired the character of "Anthony Blanche" in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited. Waugh himself wrote, "The characters in my novels often wrongly identified with Harold Acton were to a great extent drawn from Brian Howard". That being said, we must also note, that in a letter to Lord Baldwin, an elucidating Waugh reveals, "There is an aesthetic bugger who sometimes turns up in my novels under various names -- that was 2/3 Brian [Howard] and 1/3 Harold Acton. People think it was all Harold, who is a much sweeter and saner man [than Howard]." It would seem, that Waugh, like many other writers, peopled his novels with composite characters based upon individuals he personally knew and that while neither Howard nor Acton can be totally identified on a one-to-one basis with any particular character, neither can their influence, in large part or small measure, be completely ignored.