To have just realised that Mr Collins got Mrs Collins in the family way.

[squoosh]

Have just re-read Pride & Prejudice for the first time in yonks and at the end Mr Collins mentions 'dear Charlotte’s situation, and his expectation of a young olive-branch. How had I not noticed that before?

I'd always imagined dear Charlotte avoiding that messy business by keeping him occupied with his sermon writing and his gardening and his pash on Lady Catherine.

But she was a woman who knew what she wanted so I wouldn't be surprised if she was the one who took conjugal matters in hand.

Good old P&P, the book that keeps on giving.

there's the 'great rent' in Lydia's muslin gown that she mentions after she's run away with Wickham and her hymen isn't in pristine condition now either

Ohhhhhhh!

Just found this, and feel driven to inflict on you all.

From the Inverness Courier, 14 Nov 1861:

DEATHS
At Satis House, Rochester, on the 7th instant, ELIZA FARQUHARSON, eldest daughter of the late Lewis Farquharson Innes, Esq. of Bollogie, Aberdeenshire.

What research are you doing that you keep coming across these newspaper announcements Mr Feynman ??

Wasnt the Queen Mum born at Satis House or am I imagining it? Someone of note was.

Willoughby/Wickham cad off.

Hard.

Wickham was a sex pest who took advantage of young girls who were hormonal and immature and in the middle of puberty. Let us not forget Georgiana. Though he at least did marry her, he had to be paid off to do so. Had Darcy not intervened all the sisters would have ruined and at their fathers death homeless and penniless. They may have even ended up in service.

Willoughby didn't lead Marianne on. He WAS in love with her and DID intend to propose but then he gaslighted her properly brutally. But he cannot be read only in the context of Marianne. He got Brandon's ward pregnant during his courtship of Marianne and does not make an honest woman of her, and we never find out what becomes of her (or do we??) Like Georgiana and Lydia she is 15, with JA perhaps implying, rightly, that the men who pursued the 15 yr old debutants were manipulators and abusers. There's a reason Lady C was scandalized that Lydia and Kitty were 'out' to be 'out' was to be on the market.

Wickham probably had his own score of bastard offspring so maybe it's a tie.

The only difference I see in Willoughby and Wickham was that although both of them were equally mercenary in the long run, Willoughby had at least a tinge of emotion about him. Willoughby loved Marianne and I believe would have married her (penniless as she was) until he was threatened with being cut off. And I believe he did regret having to give her up. Wickham, on the other hand, was incapable of love and would have coldly married anyone with enough money.

Did Willoughby impregnate Brandon's ward during his courtship with Marianne?!

I assumed it was beforehand, but it only became apparent after the courtship began.

This takes his cad ranking up several notches, if so - he can't have been that in love with Marianne, if he was having sexual dalliances elsewhere.

No, the ward impregnantion and abandonment was some time before marianne

There was no overlap but it was only a few months earlier.

When Brandon tells Elinor the whole story, he says that Eliza went missing nearly a year earlier, and was missing for eight months. the first news of her was the day of the Delaford outing, which was why he went haring off. He found her pregnant, and near her due date - she has had the baby by the time he talks to Elinor.

So the seduction happened about a year before Willoughby dropped Marianne for Miss Grey.

Marvellous, marvellous thread :)

I wouldn't put anything past Lydia. I've always thought her intensely selfish, unkind (look at how she rubs going to Brighton in Kitty's face), and thoroughly unlikeable. Okay, some of this is down to being a teenager, but I held the same opinion of her when I was a selfish teenager myself!

And the Bennet parents (especially Mr) are totally irresponsible - it's never too late to start saving, surely? How fortunate for them that Darcy and Bingley turned up. Although I imagine Uncle Gardiner would have rescued them all on Mr Bennet's death - and imagine how much Mrs Bennet and the younger two sisters would have loved living in London!

Lydia is thoroughly dislikeable. She is Wickham's punishment! And he is hers.

The bit about Lydia's obnoxiousness/obliviousness that used to astound me when I noticed it first was when she is visiting Longbourn after her marriage and parades up to the top of the line as the family is going in to dinner and says something along the lines of 'I must go first now and you go lower, Jane, because I am a married woman'.

Not so much the sentiment (which is pretty much of a piece with her rushing about showing off her ring to the servants, when they know better than anyone the grubby circumstances) but the fact that the Bennets, even when they are dining alone as a family, clearly line up in order of 'seniority' to walk into the dining room, and that 15 year old Lydia's married 'seniority' means she displaces Jane as the eldest in being the one to walk in after their mother.

Just family history research, Every. But I can't resist a nosy across the rest of the page.

I always thought "Satis House" was just a typical Dickens renaming of Restoration House, where Charles II stayed on his journey back from exile, but according to a local history site, there's also an actual Satis House in Rochester: Elizabeth I slept here, etc.

Anyway, the Farquharsons seem to have been there while Great Expectations was being published, 1860-61 in All the Year Round.

(I looked for them in the 1861 census, but have been distracted by discovering the nearby Army General Hospital at Fort Pitt had a large number of Soldiers (Lunatics) as well as Soldiers (Sick). This was not long post-Crimea, and I know Florence Nightingale was involved with this hospital. Interesting that the army kept men with mental health problems rather than discharging them. My retired-soldier ancestor was in a public asylum on this very date. But I digress...)

Heh, and my musings have just been interrupted by the postman at the door with an 1848 literary magazine... containing a review of the newly published Wuthering Heights.

Wickham, on the other hand, was incapable of love and would have coldly married anyone with enough money.

But Wickham didn't seem to be interested in ruining girls (and/or raping them), he was after money, but fully intended to marry the women to get the money. Lydia threw herself at him.
Granted, it is despicable, but being married to a horrible man would have been better for a woman of that time period than being pregnant out of wedlock.

While with Willoughby, we will never know if he really seduced Brandon's ward, or whether he raped her - people weren't so educated on the difference back then, and I find it hard to believe that she would have initiated anything, considering that she must know something about her mother's fate ... and Brandon certainly made sure she didn't get in contact with too many Lydia-type girls.
(She, like Marianne, might have foolishly agreed to be alone with Willoughby, but I don't think she made a move on him.)

Not so sure that "love redeems" - besides, we don't know what Wickham did off-screen. He might have been in love with a girl too poor for him to marry.

Also worth noting Wickham's taste for younger girls. Georgiana and Lydia are both fifteen when he goes after each of them. Eliza is seventeen when Willoughby seduces her.

But Wickham didn't seem to be interested in ruining girls (and/or raping them), he was after money, but fully intended to marry the women to get the money.

We're told, though, that after his elopement with Lydia becomes public knowledge that he's revealed as being in debt to half the tradesmen in Meryton and that his 'intrigues, honoured with the title of seductions, extended into every tradesman's family'.

Some of this is clearly JA conveying exaggerated local gossip - the previous sentence is about how all Meryton seemed to be 'striving to blacken the name of the man who, three months before, had been an angel of light'. But he definitely left debts in Meryton (as well as the gambling debts that he left in Brighton) so presumably we're intended to think that there was some substance to rumours of him using lower-class girls for sex, while planning to marry money, even if that kind of gossip wouldn't have been likely to circulate in the Bennets' circles? The two things are quite separate for him.

Where he screws up, really, is in assuming that the hoydenish Lydia is another source of uncomplicated sex that he can drop afterwards, rather than a girl with outraged family and friends who are prepared to pursue him. It's a stupid move on his part, I always think - does he really think the Bennets/Gardiners are just going to shrug and write Lydia off, with four older unmarried daughters to be tainted by the family disgrace? And it cuts off his chances of marrying later for money.

But I suppose you could argue that, despite Mr Bennet and Mr Gardiner's best efforts, Lydia and W would never have been found if it wasn't for Darcy's inside knowledge and drive.

From Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, 1848:

Wuthering Heights. Vols I and II. By Ellis Bell.

This novel contains, undoubtedly, powerful writing, and yet it seems to be thrown away. We want now to know the object of a fiction. Once people were contented with a crude collection of mysteries. Now they desire to know why the mysteries are revealed. Do they teach mankind to avoid one course and take another? Do they dissect any portion of existing society, exhibiting together its weak and strong points? If these questions were asked regarding Wuthering Heights, there could not be any affirmative answer given. The volumes contain glimpses of the history of three generations. The parties are farmers and small landowners, probably in Lancashire. Old Mr. Earnshaw, a farmer at Wuthering Heights, picks up in the streets of Liverpool, and carries sixty miles to his home, a vagabond little boy. They call him Heathcliff.

[Two pages of bland exposition of plot, interspersed with excerpts.]

"During all these years the third Earnshaw has been allowed to grow up on the farm, a man savageized. Finally Heathcliff dies—and the scene is given at length. A bad death it is—for the mighty sinner is unrepentant. The young lady is now necessarily restored to her own with accumulations. Earnshaw protects her, and she civilizes him. They read together, walk out together; and finally, as in their case there was not even a pebble of a relative to break the course of true love; they were married, and lived respectably and happy, we have no doubt.
"Mr. Ellis Bell, before constructing his novel, should have known that forced marriages, under threats and in confinement, are illegal, and that parties instrumental thereto can be punished. And second, that wiles made by young ladies' minors are invalid.
"The volumes are powerfully-written records of wickedness, and they have a moral—they show what Satan could do with the law of Entail."

Jane Eyre by Currer Bell, on the other hand, is "undoubtedly the best novel of the season... We have rarely had the pleasure of reading a better or more interesting work of its class. 'Jane Eyre' has already acquired a standard renown, and few circulating libraries, we should think, of any pretensions, are now without it."

Different publishers, different months, and Bell a common name – I doubt the reviewer (who may have been Tait's editor, Christian Isobel Johnstone) made any connection between Messrs Ellis and Currer.

Vestal, I think along the same lines as Marginalia. Wickham had to keep himself 'respectable', if only in outward appearance, in order to be considered eligible to marry a 'young woman of means'. If he gained a reputation for seducing young ladies of his own social class every 'marriage-minded mama' would have kept her daughter away from him, he would never have had the chance to (in Charlotte Lucas' words) 'secure her', even if 'securing' meant seduction and/or elopement (a la Georgiana). No, he had to be thought of as a 'gentleman' who respected these young women. And so he kept his philandering to the 'lower classes' and, one assumes, the servants.

As far as Willoughby and Eliza the younger, I'm not sure, but wouldn't the illegitimate daughter of a 'fallen woman' be considered as being 'not quite respectable' herself and thus 'fair game' for seduction? Certainly, unless they were the child of a great peer or an extremely wealthy or influential man, they weren't really accepted in 'polite society' or considered proper wife material, were they? Consider how Harriett Smith is on the very fringes until Emma chooses to sponsor her (because her father is 'someone') and how 'Mr E' is insulted when he realizes Emma means for him to marry her (in part to give her 'status'). Obvs Willoughby's seduction of Eliza is very wrong, but I think a man of that age wouldn't be expected to marry her if she fell pregnant. Care for the child, I suppose, but not marry the mother.

Consider how Harriet Smith is on the very fringes until Emma chooses to sponsor her (because her father is 'someone')

And even then Emma only takes her up in the mistaken assumption that her father is someone important/aristocratic, rather than the tradesman he turns out to be.

Which of course all the other characters grasped from early on. As well as Mr Elton being outraged Emma thought Harriet was a suitable wife for him, Mr Knightly is fuming that Emma made Harriet turn down Robert Smith because he could see that a respectable yeoman farmer was in fact a very good match for an illegitimate girl left at an undistinguished village boarding school indefinitely.

"I think a man of that age wouldn't be expected to marry her if she fell pregnant" - he would have been seen as a cad, but could easily have walked away. It would have been seen as a far more serious moral fault in her, to the point that she would have been unmarriageable thereafter. There is a vast and acknowledged sexual double standard at this time, and nowhere crueller than in the laws of divorce (men could divorce women for adultery, but women couldn't divorce men on the same grounds because it was simply more expected that a man would cheat, and was regarded as having no impact on succession).

Emma has to be JA at her most conventional and snobbish!

Something I don't really understand about the era...

Do we think that men went into the marriage stakes as virgins? Were Bingley and Darcy virgins? Brandon? I find it remarkably hard to believe.

Men got married a lot later. If they genuinely were expected to wait until the wedding night, then surely they - like many of the women of the time - would've been routinely getting married off aged 16 or 17, purely to satisfy their carnal lusts and desires.

But mysteriously, they weren't...

No, I don't think anyone expected that men were virgins. Hence the thriving trade in prostitution. However, there seems to have been a weird kind of moral hierarchy from sleeping with a prostitute, to sleeping with a girl of the working classes, to sleeping with a girl of the middle classes, the 'crime' being seen as proportionate to the increasing 'honour' (and property) at stake in those women. Attitudes weren't homogeneous, though: there are divisions along the lines of class, religion, and political beliefs. George IV and Wilberforce, for example, shared little in terms of their moral commitments!!

Lack of chastity in women was seen as so aberrant that it was seen as polluting not only the woman but all those around her. (Hence the unsuitability of such women to become mothers).

Dowager I think they would almost certainly have used prostitutes. There was no expectation that men would remain virgins - and Brandon was away in the East Indies where he certainly would have had access to women.

There was an extraordinary publication at the end of the 18th century called Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies - a directory of the prostitutes available in Covent Garden...

I don't think they would all have used prostitutes necessarily - this was the era of reformed Evangelical religion which would have impacted on a number of the middle and upper classes. But there were definitely situations when it was pretty much de rigueur, like the Grand Tour. [not normal Grand Tour to Italy at this point of course because of Napoleonic wars, but educational travel was still a thing].

I would put money on Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey being a virgin and James Thorpe not. Collins, quite possibly. But the Cambridge clergyman of a similar date that I did research into during my PhD had lots of stuff scrubbed out in his letters which if you looked carefully was all about mercury treatment which I think would have meant syphilis.

Mr Collins was undoubtedly a virgin. 😷