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

[mids2019]

So Lydia is 15 years old and to my (admittedly non literary mind) groomed by Mr. Wickham into eloping. Reading the book now it seems full of victim blaming with Lydia being blamed as much as Whickam for the inappropriate relationship. Is this too simplistic?

In the book it is made clear he has tried to do this before, and was stopped (by Darcy).

it’s only Darcy’s pride that stops him telling everyone what wickham has done and therefore protecting Lydia.

hence the title - the pride is Darcy’s and the prejudice is Elizabeth.

I find it a little difficult reading about Lydia's character being at fault when to my mind she is simply the victim of a charming older man who full well knew of her age and immaturity. It's quite shocking from a modern perspective.

He's a nasty man and certainly the sensible sisters realise they should have looked after their 'silly' sisters better. He was looking for free sex, seduced her and would have then dumped her until he was offered money, she really didn't understand the position she put herself (and her family) in. And still seemed to be infatuated by him, I doubt he was faithful.

The minimum age for marriage in England at the time was 12 for a girl and 14 for a boy.

Interesting question.

Wickham is definitely a predator and I think the book makes it clear that he's not a good person (as PP said he tried the same with Darcy's little sister).

However it's interesting how Lydia is viewed. Yes she's portrayed as "silly" to not be more careful than to take up with a man like Wickham. I was going to say that's a sign of society at the time - if a young girl ran off with a man or got pregnant that would be their downfall really. No-one would say "oh poor you, you were groomed". So girls I guess did have to be careful and take some responsibility themselves as well as the man being to blame.

I was going to say things are different today in the UK. However they're not necessarily so different. The girls groomed by grooming gangs weren't supported by our society. And a young girl who gets pregnant to a crap bloke is still likely to have a tough life.

So although it's not the girl's "fault" she's been groomed (or ended up with an unsuitable man), she still has to deal with the consequences, more so then, but still somewhat these days.

But in those days a 15 year old wouldn't be seen as a child.

Wow......Times have changed for the better. Although the language in the book is sublime I really get an undercurrent of something quite grim in terms of exploitation and especially a girl who would now be viewed as victim having to accept some responsibility.

Lydia wasn’t coerced, she happily ran away with Mr Wickham.

But it’s set when a 15 year old was well above the age of consent. Girls could marry at 12. And Lydia is, as Elizabeth tells Lady Catherine, fully ‘out’, meaning she was on the marriage market like her twentysomething sisters, socialising like an adult with the same status as any other adult. The rationale behind Wickham seducing Lydia is more obscure than his attempt to elope with the even younger but incredibly wealthy Georgiana Darcy — sex, sure, but he would have known Lydia’s family would pursue them and try to enforce a marriage.

I guess that's true to some extent. But I think it's still portrayed as pretty shocking that she's gone off with Wickham at her age.

I think it's a very nuanced book as in some ways Austen is poking fun at the social rules of the time, with (?) Lady Catherine being shocked that the younger sisters are "out" in society. But at the same time, it's suggested that maybe it wasn't a great idea for the parents and older sisters to let Lydia and Kitty go to parties with soldiers at such a young age where they don't really understand the risks.

I don’t think that is true.

the book is roughly contemporaneous with when it was written which is somewhere 1800-1830 from memory.

the 1753 marriage act had been passed by that point which I think significantly raised the marriageable age. Yes - on checking anyone under 21 needed parental or equivalent if orphaned consent to marry.

Lydia eloped and wasn’t married to wickham when discovered by Darcy they were just living together.

darcy had to pay a lot of money to get wickham to marry her.

Lydia fully believed they were running away to Scotland to get married. She wrote to Harriet Forster about going to Gretna Green.

Good point but Lydia behaves like any wayward 15 year old full of false confidence and naivety with men. Her flirtatious with attractive older men (soldiers) is behaviour we still see today but with darker connotations and obviously the men viewed as criminal.

You didn’t need parental consent in Scotland, which is where Lydia thought they were going to get married.

Ah ok, on further looking into it the 1753 marriages act said that the absolute minimum age was 12 for girls and 14 for boys and below that even with parental consent no marriage was valid.

if people wanted to get married without parental consent it was 21 though.

in England late marriage was normal and the average age at first marriage was late twenties. I remember that from studying population changes through the Industrial Revolution.

Lydia would have been seen as very young to be married.

He's what's known as an adventurer - penniless and looking for an heiress to marry. He's failed with Georgina Darcy and Miss Kingston, but despite his need for money he's IMO very attracted to Lizzie and she to him, despite her having nor nearly enough money to make her attractive as a marriage prospect. She makes it clear she's changed her mind about him after reading Darcy's letter, and he targets Lydia as a form of revenge.
Having a sister like Lydia - running away and living with a man she's not married to - would ruin the marriage prospects of the other sisters and Wickham knows it. He knows their circumstances, he knows they have to marry and deliberately sets out to ruin their chances.
And Lydia is just as much an adventurer as he is. She's not constrained by moral considerations or consequences - she does what she wants when she wants regardless of the distress or pain she causes other people.

Exactly - and this is how Lydia is portrayed - as a wayward 15 year old full of false confidence and naivety with men.

But what were the consequences? I think you're looking at it with a modern lens. Jane Austen couldn't really write "and then they brought Lydia home from London where everyone knew she'd been living with (sleeping with) Wickham and she made an excellent marriage to a well-respected and rich local man" because that just wouldn't have happened in those days.

In those days she had two choices: marry the unpleasant Wickham, or be seen as a "fallen woman" and rely on family to look after her forever, as no-one would marry her and women couldn't really work.

So the consequences of being that wayward 15 year old in those days were severe. I think Austen is blaming: Wickham for being a groomer, Lydia for being wayward, and Lydia's family for not doing more for preventing the situation.

Girls could get married at 12 but only with parental consent unless they ran away to Scotland (hence the whole Gretna Green thing).

the running away to Scotland thing was seen as a big problem in the late 1700s and 1800s as all a man had to do (like wickham intended) was persuade a rich but naive teenager that he was in love with her, take her to Gretna and then they were married under Scottish law (no parental consent needed) and he’s rich now.

if wickham had done it with Georgiana (Darcy’s little sister) he’d have been very rich.
Lydia had no money so although she was easy to entrap as Elizabeth says - why bother? Wickham isn’t going to end up rich.

it definitely was seen as predatory behaviour - “fortune hunting” and girls were warned about it.

But given the financial straits the Bennetts were in, Mrs. B. at least was actively seeking husbands for them all, even though being married before your elder sisters was not quite the done thing. The scandal in this case isn’t really Lydia’s age, but the utter harlotry of running off with a man you weren’t married to. Wickham was seen as wicked for ruining Lydia in this way - if he hadn’t eventually married her, nobody else of decent social standing would have - rather than grooming, which just wouldn’t have been a concept understood at the time. Lydia was very much seen as an adult, if a young and silly one.

Mr Bennet thought Kitty and Lydia were two of the silliest girls in the country!

The scandal in this case isn’t really Lydia’s age, but the utter harlotry of running off with a man you weren’t married to.

From Lydia's point of view, she's sitting around waiting for her elder sisters to be married with no viable suitors for ANY of them on the horizon, so she takes matters into her own hands and the hell with her reputation and that of her sisters. Look at when she cones back to Longbourne and she says to Jane that she takes precedence into dinner because she's a married woman. Not only have her actions potentially ruined the marriage chances of her sisters, she then proceeds to rub their noses in the fact that she's married.

It was the reality of the time - there were horrendous double standards & JA to my mind deserves credit for her honesty about this rather than romanticising men’s behaviour by tropes such as reforming a rake.

We see these double standards very clearly in Sense & Sensibility where there is an offstage character who is seduced & her life is destroyed. Her seducer is accepted back into society without question (although I think one of his relations tries unsuccessfully to pressure him into marrying the girl).

The word seducer does show where the guilt lies (even if there were no consequences for the men) & there were earlier books such as Clarissa & Les liaisons dangereuses, which explored the motivation behind seductions.

Re Lydia, it’s a lack of modesty & proper shame that she is criticised for all through the book - in her behaviour before the elopement, during the elopement & her lack of any shame when she returns home after being married. She was very lucky that Darcy wanted to marry her sister so was prepared to force Whickham to marry her. I think it is the lack of remorse & shame that is the difference between Lydia & Georgiana.

There’s also the responsibility of the adults looking after both Georgiana & Lydia to consider. Darcy says in his letter something along the lines of being sadly deceived in Georgiana’s governess & Lizzy tries to warn her father that Brighton is not a sensible place for Lydia but is ignored.

We definitely see things very differently now although there are still some areas of behaviour where people have zero tolerance for teens stepping outside of social norms (eg riding electric motorbikes).

The first version of it was written and set during the late 1790s, and then revised between 1811-12.

@AppropriateAdult “Mrs. B. at least was actively seeking husbands for them all”

The business of her life was to get her daughters married!

I think the book very clearly makes it clear that Lydia’s predicament is definitely not ONLY her fault - Mr and Mrs Bennet, Lizzy and Darcy are all to blame to greater or lesser degrees. But it’s nuanced, isn’t it - Lydia IS a silly, air headed girl- and so it’s not so much that Austen is blaming her for her predicament but making it clear the risks that her parents’ permissiveness on such a character led to. Lizzy says at one point that Lydia had been allowed to be idle, to fantasise over the officers, and therefore the implication is that it’s not a surprise that someone unscrupulous was able to take advantage of her.