Pride and Prejudice

[Blackdog19]

Just watching the awesome Colin Firth P&P adaptation. When I first watched it as a teenager, I thought Mrs Bennett was the annoying ridiculous one. It took reading something for me to realise that Mr Bennett was as bad in his own way saving no money and leaving Mrs Bennett with the possibility of 5 unmarried daughters and no home. If I had read the book in Jane Austen’s do you think we’d have more initial sympathy with Mrs Bennett?

@Fink

Caroline Bingley would easily have been able to marry someone of Darcy's status but in need of her money, she's well educated and used to good society enough for people to overlook her trade connections. I'd say her social circle would be fairly broad: she sneers at Sir William Lucas's offers to present her at court and Mrs Bennet's saying they dined with 25 families and has clearly had a proper coming out season in London. Most importantly, when she's first introduced it says she and Louisa were in the habit of 'associating with people of rank', so Austen herself says that she mixed above her breeding.

She would have had friends from school with better connections, and she seems like the sort who would have assiduously kept up any useful contacts. She should have gone for the equivalent of a younger brother of Darcy. She could have got an Edmund Bertram or Colonel Fitzwilliam.

I'm not suggesting she couldn't have married someone like Darcy, but the fact is that Darcy himself, in saying to Lizzy that it is not only Jane's social status that made him connive with the Bingley sisters to break up Jane and Bingley, because 'the want of connection could not be so great an evil to my friend as to me' is making it quite plain he's conscious that the Bingleys are lower on the social scale than he is. Not even the fact that Bingley is his best friend, and he's spent months at a time living at Netherfield and appearing in public with him, or Caroline and Mrs Hurst's wealth, education, confidence and apparent total amnesia about their money coming from trade in the fairly recent past, makes him overlook this.

Elizabeth, while obviously from a less moneyed family than the Bingleys, ranks higher on the social scale in strictly class terms, and even then Darcy's original proposal makes it very plain that it has required a profound attraction to set aside his 'sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation'. He's just an incredibly class-conscious person.

Well Elizabeth has trade type family too, but in her case it was the maternal side. I'm not sure how much difference it might have made if her mother had the same amount of money as she does in the book, but came from the same strata as her father. It's one of the defects crossed off Darcy's list, but he probably would still have seen them as country bumpkins either way.