Pride and Prejudice - in the view of 2026 society is Mr. Wickham simply a predator?

Gosh, so they made Willoughby much less dastardly, then. (And gave a less grim backdrop of what happened to seduced and discarded mistresses, by reducing their number.)

That’s fair. I may have misremembered her being straight out of the schoolroom - it may just be the repeated references to her youth. Certainly she is excited that Lydia is married at sixteen, which suggests that she was older than that. However it is stated very clearly that Mr B lost all affection for her (in chapter 42).

Yes -- and there's Maria Bertram (well, Rushworth's) MIL's servant who is the one threatening blackmail when she runs off with Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park. A 'bad' or even just indiscreet servant had a lot of power, as Lizzy acknowledges when she gets home after Lydia's elopement and one of her first questions is whether all the servants knew immediately. (One imagines the Bennets' housekeeper, Hill, who definitely did know because Mrs B was using her as a confidante, could have had a tale to tell...)

I agree that some sort of secondary infertility problem is most likely. They wouldn't have just given up given the stakes. We're also told that Mrs Bennet is confident for quite a few years after Lydia's birth that she will have another child, which indicates that the Bennets were still sleeping together. If we imagine that Mrs Bennet married at around 20 for the sake of argument, then she is only in her early 40s. She is probably still theoretically fertile, excluding gynaecological complications.

Spoilers!

They merged the two together - in the book, Brandon’s first love died and he took on her 3 year old daughter, who was seduced by Willoughby at 17 and had his baby (safely!) before being packed off to live quietly in the countryside.

In the film, W seduced the still very-much-alive first love, left her destitute and pregnant (apparently not knowing about the baby 🙄), and she and the baby both died in childbirth. I honestly can’t tell if they were trying to make his character more sympathetic or less with that choice. Or maybe they just thought Brandon couldn’t manage that much plot exposition in one scene.

@LawDegree” He also wants and needs to marry for money, same as the women in the story”

Mr Wickham could earn his own money (unlike the Bennet sisters and Charlotte Lucas).

The late Mr Darcy wanted him to enter the church but Mr Wickham declined. He asked for and received a lump sum of £3,000 from Mr Darcy to give up all claims to the living.

Wickham was idle and squandered money on the good life!

I think Wickham is more 3D than that. He can simultaneously actually be sexy and charming and actually quite like Lizzie and Georgiana and Lydia. He also wants and needs to marry for money, same as the women in the story - we mustn't forget his background. His plan of eloping with Georgiana was his best way of achieving this. As was the Mary King plan. He was fleeing his debts and Lydia was a willing participant and whilst this was awful for her, it doesn't make him some evil plotter, just another person who is thinking only of themselves and nothing else - he's just as silly as her. I don't think it was anything to do with wanting revenge on Lizzie or Darcy.

These days he'd be a cocklodger rather than a love scammer IMO.

Jane Austen never explicitly states Mrs Bennet’s exact age.

@Gremlinsateit “Mr B must have given up entirely when Mrs B was only in her mid 20s.”

Mrs Bennet was still hoping. She spent "many years after Lydia's birth" certain a boy would come before finally despairing of the event.

Is that in the text? I know she was probably younger than she's tended to be played, but didn't think there was anything to say she was still in her teens at marriage as opposed to say 23.

I've always assumed there was some gynaecological problem after Lydia's birth. It seems really unlikely, given the huge importance of having a son, that Mr B. would just have stopped bothering with sex, no matter how irritating he found Mrs B. Five births in not much more than five years would have taken a toll.

I always think that this is what must have happened with Mr and Mrs B. We know she married straight from the schoolroom, so if her youngest is 15, she must have had quite a few more years after Lydia to conceive a son. Let’s say she’s 17 at marriage, so is now 40ish. There’s no reference to younger babies dying in infancy.

Mr B must have given up entirely when Mrs B was only in her mid 20s.

That as well. He's received a massive shock and is probably still in 'I can't trust anyone, everyone's out to get us' thinking. And then he encounters Mrs B, who's making no secret of what her aim in life is....which is basically a better intentioned form of Wickham's fortune hunting.

Perhaps, but I have the impression that he believed he was surrounded by plebs out to get his fortune or his sister´s. Probably the Whickam affair compounded that feeling. He can´t bring himself to speak to anyone outside his party. The only one who doesn´t seem to play this role is Lizzie, he is quite aware that she is mocking him, and it disconcerts him no end.

Wickham is written as a predatory older man who takes advantage of Darcy's sister and Lydia. They are both portrayed as his victims. It is also seen as the parent's fault as they allow Lydia too much freedom when she is too young to cope with it.

However, Lydia is also an incredibly annoying and frivolous character who will probably irritate Wickham for the rest of his life and be unfaithful to him. He gets his comeuppance in that way. It is also implied that Lydia will have to pay heavily for her youthful mistakes by being married to such an awful man. I suppose that could be seen as blaming her in a way, but actually I think it is more about the reality of life. People do have to live with the mistakes they make in their youth regardless of who is to blame.

It has just occurred to me that there's another reading of his behaviour when he comes to Meryton. He has prevented his sister's elopement with a fortune hunter, and that nearly came about because of his misjudgement about the woman appointed to chaperone and protect her. Darcy was, as we find out from his housekeeper, a kind master to his servants. He probably prided himself on that and it must have cut very deep to realise that his poor choice of a governess could have ruined his sister's life. Did he realise that he's not the great judge of character he thought he was and that's why he holds himself a bit aloof until he knows people better?

That's certainly what Darcy thinks, he writes to Lizzie along the lines of 'his object was undoubtedly my sister's fortune, which is £30,000'

But Darcy absolutely loathes the man - not without reason - he wouldn't entertain the idea that there could be any good in him whatsoever.

Of course, possible motives for Wickham are purely reader speculation and what-ifs - I think Jane Austen intended her readers to interpret Wickham as a fortune hunter and a cad, pure and simple. But it's fun to speculate.

I think he felt he had failed as a brother and guardian. That he was deceived by the governess and misled as to her character. And also had it been know socially it would have been a huge scandal.

I always thought the suggestion with Darcy’s sister was that he was tricking her into marrying him so he could get his hands on her fortune!

I think it's very much a social pride rather than moral - the Bennets are beneath Darcy socially in terms of wealth and status, but more importantly aside from Jane and Lizzie, they all publicly behave in vulgar, inappropriate ways - they're a family it would be an embarrassment to marry into.

I've always imagined the Georgiana seduction as being quite calculated. Mrs Younge arranging with Wickham that he would 'bump into' Georgiana while they were out walking; Mrs Younge pretending not to know him, but encouraging Georgiana to think well of him. Georgiana perhaps confiding to Mrs Younge that her brother didn't like Wickham and Mrs Younge saying "Oooh, well, you've got to follow your heart, dearie" and advice along those lines.

I wonder whether Wickham's 'kindness to her as a child' means that once upon a time, he was a decent person, or whether he was playing the very long game and had already considered the possibility of marrying her in the future, or whether he genuinely had a soft spot for her and her fortune was a bonus rather than the driver of his seduction.

It would be an interesting 'fanfic' exercise to write an alternative version of that part of the story from Wickham's point of view where his love for Georgiana was completely genuine, and the fact she threw him over embittered him into becoming a cynical fortune hunter.

so is his pride simply being him falsely convinced of moral superiority or at least of him being morally equal to Lizzie?

@FuzzySlippers “Surely JA’s making a deeper political point about sex equality or lack of, with the Pride and Prejudice characterisations, but I can’t quite work it out.”

Austen highlights how English inheritance laws (entailment) left women financially dependent on marriage for survival, as seen with the Bennet sisters losing their home if unmarried.

With no access to professions or higher education, women had to view marriage purely as an economic necessity to avoid poverty and social displacement.

Charlotte Lucas represent this harsh truth, choosing a pragmatic, loveless marriage with Mr. Collins simply for a secure home.

Elizabeth defies the passive, submissive female stereotype of the era by using her sharp wit, voice, and critical judgment to challenge authority.

Elizabeth refuses financial security by turning down Mr. Collins's marriage proposal. Her eventual marriage to Mr. Darcy evolves past traditional patriarchal dominance into an egalitarian partnership built on mutual respect, intellectual matching, and shared affection.

I do love most period adaptations of Jane Austen but my only gripe is they never cast age appropriately. I'd like to see Mrs Bennett played by a beautiful woman in her late 30s as she likely was. I love Alison steadman and Brenda blethyn but they definitely embodied the matron. Then again Alison's daughters were in their mid 30s so 😁

But Darcy or Fitzwilliam, back in the real Regency world with brutal public morals, could not have been free to do that realistically, surely? because it would have terribly compromised Georgiana’s chance of marriage if the story came out.. Despite her being a young and lovely gazillionaire. So they are stuck.

Yes. Her willingness to run away with him (as that is how it would be viewed) would be very harshly judged.

Plus it doesn't show the Darcy recruitment policies and reference checking in a very good light. He and Fitzwilliam wouldn't want to advertise that they could be taken in by a servant.