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?

Mr Wickham wasn’t after money from Lydia’s family. He was using her for fun. He never had any intentions of marrying her.

He was going to look for a heiress to
marry!

Definitely no explicit textual evidence that Wickham knew about Darcy and Elizabeth but there were a couple of indicators it was a possibility.

1. Darcy danced with Elizabeth at the Netherfield ball. Now if this was Bingley, it would mean nothing. But Darcy dances very seldom and usually only with rich women he knows well. His decision to ask Elizabeth stands out. Wickham has grown up with Darcy and knows him well. That is probably enough to make him wonder.

2. Elizabeth tells him she got to know Darcy better in Kent at the regiment farewell party when the regiment leaves for Brighton. IIRC, Wickham then must think he has been at least partially rumbled because he then avoids Elizabeth for the rest of the party. Darcy wouldn't have told just anyone the details about his involvement with Wickham so it is a strong signal that something happened between Elizabeth and Darcy in Kent.

I think putting these things together, Wickham probably has a strong suspicion that Darcy is interested in Elizabeth. He's having to abandon his regiment because he can't pay his debts and he's annoyed with Darcy for having thwarted the elopement with Georgiana and preventing him from being very rich indeed. Lydia is there for the taking. He may enjoy the idea of permanently separating them. Not his main purpose but icing on the cake.

Only a theory but there is some indirect evidence I think. Otherwise it is a weaker part of the plot, but P&P went through several redrafts so I find that more unlikely.

I thought the money point was about whether they had means to pursue him or pay him off? But agree though he obviously didn't intend to marry her.

Although in the end Wickham could've made a worse match. It's not like he was having any luck with his efforts pursuing heiresses and grooming sheltered noble teens. Good looks don't last forever, and he needed to leverage them to marry someone before male pattern baldness and paunch took him out of the game. For all that him and Lydia are supposed to be each other's mutual punishment, he ended up in a marriage that allows him frequent access to all the comforts of the Bingley household as a visitor, and gets him some indirect access to Darcy's money. Beats debtor's prison! Austen once said there are more good looking women than there are men with fortunes, well the same was also true vice versa.

Can i just interrupt and tell you all how much i love this thread.

My issue with Mrs bennet isn't her ill advised and vulgar attempts to marry off her daughters, its her motivation that bothers me. Yes the entail means they must marry, and marry well, but in my reading of the novel, marrying off the girls is mostly driven by her pride and competitiveness, rather than a serious concern for their futures, and without due consideration for their feelings, or the suitability of the prospective husbands.
I am loving this discussion! One scene from the book that i would loved to have seen play out on screen in the 1995 series is when Lizzy tells Mrs Bennet about her engagement to Darcy, it would have been fabulous!

Wickham doesn't attend the Netherfield ball, though. (Which obviously doesn't prevent him from finding out that Darcy danced with Elizabeth via a third party, but it won't have been something he observed himself and thought 'Hmm. He obviously fancies her.')

I agree that he's somewhat disturbed by Lizzy saying she understands Darcy better now when they meet again after her Hunsford visit, but I don't think it necessarily implies he suspects any confidential conversation implying attraction between Lizzy and Darcy. She might have heard about Wickham and the living from Colonel Fitzwilliam or Lady Catherine, for instance, and that would be enough to make W twitchy.

Yes I see the Lydia affair as being a deliberate attack on Darcy. He never planned to marry Lydia, but he was happy that her reputation would be ruined and her sisters chances screwed because he knew darcy fancied Lizzie I think. That makes more sense than he just wanted some company on the journey.

There's just a lot of missing steps, ifs buts and maybes. And it's one thing Wickham maaaaaybe having become aware that Darcy was attracted to Lizzie, but having any intentions towards her? Not a woman from that background, with relations whose situation in life was so decidedly below his own!

in my reading of the novel, marrying off the girls is mostly driven by her pride and competitiveness, rather than a serious concern for their futures, and without due consideration for their feelings, or the suitability of the prospective husbands.

Put bluntly, the Bennet girls don't have the option of being that picky about feelings because their dowries are so small. As marital financial prospects, they don't have that much going for them. Under those circumstances, someone like Mr Collins is actually a good match; he's the heir to Longbourne, he has a wealthy patron and a decent parish with a decent house. OK, he's a pompous fool. So is Sir James Lucas, and he ended up with a title.

Mrs B is competitive because she's up against all the other mothers in the county doing the same as her, and probably a lot of then starting off with more advantages like bigger dowries and helpful supportive husbands.

“I thought the money point was about whether they had means to pursue him or pay him off?”

I always thought Lydia’s family (including the Gardeners) wouldn’t have enough money required to clear his debts and satisfy his mercenary nature! I could be wrong.

Mr. Gardiner's precise fortune is never stated.

Does the book say anything about the ages of the men?
I heard a TV documentary that pointed out how young all these characters were - early twenties for most of them, only just legal adults, rattling round the drawing room of Bingley's huge house pretending to be all grown up and mature. Hormones raging all over the place.

How much older than his sister could Darcy reasonably be? I gather he was a bit older than Bingley.
Wickham too would have been early twenties? In which case the age gap between him and Lydia was not in itself part of the scandal, but a normal age gap for the times?

Well, he only lives in ‘Cheapside’, lest we forget Miss Bingley’s comment!

@SethAndReubenTooSendGaloshes . “That makes more sense than he just wanted some company on the journey.”

That was me that said that. I always thought Wickham welcomed her infatuation as a convenient and flattering distraction while he was fleeing his debts.

“Yes I see the Lydia affair as being a deliberate attack on Darcy”

I never saw it as an attack on Darcy. It’s interesting how we all interpret him differently!

Bingley is about 23 as it says he rents Netherfield not 2 years after coming of age.

Darcy is about 28 or slightly older - he says that at the end of the book when talking to Elizabeth & it fits with him being over 10 years older than Georgiana. Whickham must be a similar age.

What isn’t clear is how Bingley & Darcy met and became such good friends.

I think generally people had to be more mature for their ages then as they had much more responsibilty earlier (either through work or through housework (which would be very arduous)). One factor in Lydia’s immaturity is that she hasn’t been expected to do much around the house - unlike the Lucas girls (Mrs B sneers at Charlotte because she suspects she went home to look after the mince pies) or Jane (who looks after the Gardiner children). Whickham is equally idle as he flits between different jobs.

I think Darcy was 28 and Georgiana 15 but I'm not sure where I got those ages from!

Those ages are in the book. Wickham is 26.

I just can’t agree with the suggestions that W knew about E and D and therefore seduced the gushingly compliant L to put a spanner in D’s works, as it were.

And regarding E and W, she was (due to her damaged pride and resulting prejudice) an easy ear for W to spread his lies about D to. Had she not been such an eager ear, initially, I doubt he’d have had much interest in her otherwise, as her financial situation was almost certainly common knowledge in the town.

“I just can’t agree with the suggestions that W knew about E and D and therefore seduced the gushingly compliant L to put a spanner in D’s works, as it were.”

Same. I don’t think Wickham was even thinking about Darcy when he ran away with Lydia. It wasn’t about revenge. He was flattered by Lydia’s infatuation, and he was going to have some fun with her before dumping her in London.

Worth noting as well that people didn't live anywhere near as long in the 18th Century as they do today - the average life expectancy was only about 40. Of course it was probably higher than that for affluent people who made it beyond infancy, but it would still be nowhere near the present averages. So people would have been 'middle aged' much younger.

I never really considered that Wickham was exacting revenge on Darcy. Even Lizzy's family weren't aware of Darcys feelings for her, Charlotte suggested it, but couldn't quite make up her mind if he really had an inclination for her or not, even later on when she saw them together a lot. I think that Wickham (rightly) thought Darcy a snob, and unlikely to connect himself with the Bennets. We will never really know though, there are so many layers in Austen's writing, she was a genius!

If you reached adulthood in 1800 England, you could typically expect to live into your mid-50s to late 60s, a stark contrast to the overall life expectancy at birth of about 35 to 40 years.

Yes, it's one of the reasons Mrs B is so bitchy about Charlotte Lucas, who, being plain and almost aged out of the marriage market at 27, Mrs Bennet could be patronising about, long before she manages to bag Mr Collins.

Bluntly, she thought her girls ranked way above Charlotte Lucas in the matrimonial stakes, and is mortified when not only does CL bag the chap Mrs B had mentally dedicated as Lizzy's, but bags the chap who will inherit Longbourn when Mr Bennet dies, and who thus symbolises all of her worst fears about the future.

ETA Sorry, quoted wrong post. That should have been in response to @MrsDanversGlidesAgain 's post about Mrs Bennet as competitive mother competing against all the other county mothers with marriageable girls.

On the age gap between Darcy and Bingley I've always wondered if B was D's fag at school - would be about right.

Bingley is 22 and Darcy is 28 so they wouldn’t have met at school, as you start at 13 at schools like Eton and Harrow. I’m guessing Darcy would’ve gone to a top
public boarding school.

Yes, I've seen that suggested too -- it would make sense of Colonel Fitzwilliam agreeing with Lizzy's semi-sarcastic claim that Darcy 'takes a prodigious deal of care of' Bingley in areas where he needs it, and also fits with Darcy separating him from Jane and Bingley getting 'permission' from him to return to her. There's definitely a leader/follower thing going on.