ALTON firefighters visited Chawton House Library on Tuesday to recreate the iconic scene from the 1995 BBC?adaptation of Jane Austen’s popular novel Pride and Prejudice – when Mr Darcy (played memorably by Colin Firth) emerges from a lake, white shirt dripping with water.

Assisted by town mayor Dean Phillips, wielding a bucket full of water, the intrepid firefighters were giving their time, on the 200th anniversary of the death of Jane Austen, to help launch a new social media fundraising campaign, designed to support the future preservation of the house, so familiar to the author and owned at the time by her brother, Edward Austen Knight.

Dubbed #TheDarcyLook, male participants don a white shirt and are then doused with a bucket of water to create #TheDarcyLook. They then text donate to JANE03 £3 to 70070, upload the video to social media and nominate three friends to do the same.

The initiative is part of a fundraising campaign by Chawton House Library to ‘Reimagine Jane Austen’s Great House’.

For the launch of #TheDarcyLook, four members of the fire service were doused with water by Mr Phillips, Alton Town Council business development manager Julie McLatch, Amanda Jones from BBC Radio Surrey, and Helen Thirlway, communications manager at Chawton House Library.

Ms Thirlway said: “The library is appealing for local businesses to come forward if they would like to take part in the challenge for the charity, and is also asking individuals to get involved.”