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?

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.

@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!

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.

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.

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...)

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).

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.)

Absolutely - have you read Longbourn? One of the better Austen/P&P spin-off novels, telling the story of pride and prejudice through the eyes of the Longbourn servants. Very insightful and historically accurate, well written, would recommend...

I suppose the question to ask is, what was the point in taking Lydia then? It made it more likely he'd be pursued, caught and that any possible consequences might find him. If it were just about sex, there were plenty of prostituted women around. So I always thought there was probably some motive, though not necessarily as complex as trying to get at Darcy and/or Lizzie.

But that doesn't preclude him continuing to have dutiful sex with her to try to conceive the son that would prevent the estate going to Mr Collins...

It's also possible that even after he recognises he's made a dreadful mistake in marrying her that he continues to find her sexually attractive.

I mean, as other people have said, actresses playing Mrs Bennet have often been cast as far too old and costumed to look older still, which means that Mr Bennet's line about how Mr Bingley might prefer Mrs Bennet to any of their daughters is usually played for laughs because we can't imagine Bingley fancying Alison Steadman screaming away in a mob cap over beautiful 22-year-old Jane or witty, pretty Lizzy..

But it's actually possible that Mr Bennet was somewhat ruefully acknowledging that his wife is still very good-looking aged 40-ish.

We don't know Mrs B's age, but we know they've been married 23 years. If she married at 18, she's only 41. Is it possible, given how much she clearly worries about her husband's death, that it's also in her mind that she might remarry after he does?

No, I hate spinoffs/contemporary sequels in general! The only one I've ever liked is Mansfield Revisited by Joan Aiken, in which she does a very good simulacrum of JA's style, and, crucially, gets rid of the righteous but dull Edmund and Fanny (who are in Antigua sorting out Sir Thomas's affairs after his death), and has as the main characters Susan, Fanny's sister, and Tom Bertram, and a returned Mary and Henry Crawford, with a comically awful turn from Julia Bertram who essentially turns into Aunt Norris. I very much recommend it to any fans of Mansfield Park.

“I suppose the question to ask is, what was the point in taking Lydia then?”

I think Wickham saw Lydia as a temporary distraction, and when he’d had his fun, he would abandon her in London.

I think Lydia had attached herself to him and he couldn't be bothered to shake her off. He had to leave to flee his creditors and an 'elopement' provided an excuse to do so - no, of course I'm not trying to get out of paying you, I'm in love and we're eloping. Lydia offered the benefit of sex along the way - which I assume is what Austen was alluding to when she said Wickham wasn't the type to turn down the opportunity of a 'companion'.

Agreed, I disliked death comes to pemberley for instance, most modern sequels are trash, but Longbourn very much a cut above most others in terms of the quality. Worth checking out!

I think that's certainly what the novel asks us to believe, but I always think it's a slightly weak link plotwise.

There was no way Lydia, however tenacious, could make him take her with him, even if she knew he meditated absconding from his debts, and he'd have to be a more short-sighted character than he seems to actually be not to recognise that taking Lydia along for a spot of NSA sex is potentially going to land him in a lot of extra hot water, not just with her family, but also with his militia regiment, as she was the houseguest of his colonel.

OK, he doesn't know that Darcy is in love with Lizzy and will dedicate himself to tracking Wickham down, and, as Lizzy says, he may think Mr Bennet is too indolent to dedicate much energy to the pursuit, but it still strikes me as too much potential trouble for some temporary pleasure to seduce a girl from a gentry family.

We're told specifically that his seductions and 'intrigues' in Meryton, once the story gets out, have been all in 'tradesmen's' families, ie, he's been fooling around with girls below his own class. Or the class he usually passes as (if we class his own estate manager father as 'trade'?)

Yes, I do agree it's a plot weakness - sorry, I'm bringing in Mansfield Park yet again (can you tell MP is my favourite?) but Wickham taking Lydia is not a million miles from Crawford taking Maria, in terms of it's not clear exactly why either of them did it. Crawford gained absolutely nothing by running off with Maria, and would have known it would end his chances with Fanny. I can understand Crawford wanting to woo her again for the sake of his own vanity, but he'd proved himself once she was flirting with him again, why run off with her?

Wickham is a predator indeed.
Not much, if any really, has changed in all these years.
Yes, men who target females of 15-18 or 19 are seen in a worst light. Girls will not be done and dusted for a relationship at this age. But it is always the girls who have the most to loose. If she gets pregnant, a teen broken heart and feeling disrespected, used and even dirty, sadly, is still a thing. Her life will be affected, most likely in a negative way and more than his, who is likely to walk away unscathed. We still need to instigate self protection in young teens, lay the consequences and keep an eye on them till they are mature enough to really judge by themselves. Which Lydia's family failed to do.
I think the book places guikt in all the parties and it does much apply today.
It is not by coincidence that most of the abused and groomed girls had not much family support.....

Lacking moral restraint or a strong sense of virtue, Wickham simply took advantage of Lydia's absolute devotion and foolish willingness to run off with him.

Definitely! I recommended it above.

I too am on Team Plot Weakness with Wickham. Notwithstanding the well written explanations of what JA was trying to do from posters upthread, it just doesn't make a lot of sense for him as a character or based on what we know about how things would've worked at the time. But I suppose 'person who is usually more sensible does objectively stupid thing' is a common enough human behaviour, isn't it? Maybe he just had an episode of being a fuckwit, however badly that fits with the rest of his actions.

But I do think this is a bit different to Mansfield Park, because Austen spells out how much Henry adores having power over women. That's his motivation. Maria not letting him get in the way of her planned marriage and independence was her taking back a bit of her power, he'd have preferred she call off the wedding and pine away at home instead. So he's trying to reassert himself.

I think as well they're supposed to be incredibly physically attracted, so maybe neither of them had enough restraint to stop themselves. The sex was probably mind blowing. And they might have expected to get away with it too- there must've been any number of cases like that where the servant got paid off and knew which side their bread was buttered.

Then Austen sort of explains later in the book that his relationship with Fanny was in the process of changing him for the better, and probably would've if he'd stayed away from London, but he's not far enough along that path yet. He still cares more about exercising that power and amusing himself than he does about the love of a good woman. It's about mutual self-sabotage I think.

Yay! Another MP fan. It's my favourite, too. (I would be very happy if someone made a good multi-part adaptation, though I also see all the reasons why there isn't a run on adapting it compared to P and P, Emma, S and S and Persuasion.)

I agree completely that this is also a plot weakness in MP. Mary Crawford exclaims that it was a silly, unnecessary thing for Henry to do (implicitly saying they could have had a discreet affair while she was staying with her Twickenham friends while Mr Rushworth was away without anyone being any the wiser), and she's not wrong.

It's one of the reasons I like Joan Aiken's Mansfield Revisited, because she actually explains it (and actually exonerates Henry, who, in her sequel, never marries and had genuinely been in love with Fanny) as the result of a smear campaign by a spurned, angry Maria.

Henry turns her away from his door when she shows up after she leaves Rushworth and tells her he's in love with Fanny and isn't interested, and Maria determines that as her reputation is now totally ruined, she''ll blacken his too and ensure he can't marry the woman he loves. So she writes to Sir Thomas and says she's under Henry Crawford's 'protection', everyone believes that adultery with him was the reason for the end of her marriage, and, having lost Fanny, he doesn't bother contradicting them, and retreats to his estate and lives quietly.

I loooove MP!

“Maybe he just had an episode of being a fuckwit, however badly that fits with the rest of his actions.”

He harbors a deep, consuming jealousy toward Mr. Darcy, blaming Darcy for his own self inflicted downfall rather than accepting responsibility for squandering his opportunities.

His life is driven by reckless greed, endless debt, and a bitter resentment of his own failures.

I think the plot weakness in MP is not that Henry Crawford and Maria Bertram/Rushworth might have an adulterous affair, only that it didn't make a lot of sense for Maria to leave her husband for him when they in fact had plenty of opportunity for a discreet affair about which no one was any the wiser, IF Henry was even interested in any more than a one-off shag, as he'd always made his fundamental indifference to Maria pretty clear.

He does but I just don't see textual evidence that Wickham knew about Darcy's love for Lizzie by that point.