Some Thoughts on Pride and Prejudice
I recently saw a theory in a Pride and Prejudice Facebook group that has not only frustrated and angered me, but definitely makes me wonder about the ways readers interpose their personal theories and conjectures over books for no other reason than to try and be clever.
The theory is regarding why Wickham chooses to elope with Lydia. This question has baffled readers for a long time because there does not seem to be a clearly defined motivation for Wickham to elope with a young woman who has no dowry. When Wickham elopes with Mr. Darcy’s younger sister, it is explicitly for money; Georgianna has an inheritance of 30,000 pounds and Wickham is horrible with money. (To give an idea of just how much money that is, by today’s standards with inflation, it would be the U.S. equivalent of nearly $3,000,000.00.) But Lydia has no such sum of inheritance and certainly, while her family is not poor, they are definitely not wealthy.
The woman who posted the theory said she believes Wickham eloped with Lydia because he knew that Darcy would rescue her reputation out of his love for Elizabeth; that it was a calculated moment of blackmail.
I want to start by saying that this theory is nothing more than conjecture — no matter how fiercely the woman wants to defend it — and that there is no basis or foundation from the text itself to even remotely confirm this as a possibility, let alone an actual fact. And while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having fun with ideas like this (it’s how fanfiction ideas come about, after all), I think there is something wrong with making these theories and acting like the text supports them, which is what this woman said. She thinks this is a founded and substantiated theory with, at least, moments of subtext to support it.
She’s wrong.
I know I don’t typically write things so rigidly, but this is my favorite novel of all time and I just wrote a thesis on it. Moreover, my studies in my M.A. in Literature were specifically focused on 19th century British Literature, so this is my area of expertise.
Now that I’ve established that, I’m going to explain why this theory is wrong.
Firstly, for Wickham to effectively blackmail Darcy, he would have had to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that what he had on Darcy would work.
Wickham flees Brighton with Lydia and abandons his regiment — which is his sole source of income, by the way — to avoid his creditors. He has an enormous amount of debts in Meryton as well as in Brighton, and those debts are coming due. In that day, if you couldn’t/didn’t pay your debts, you went to jail. He flees to London to try and avoid his debtors so that he can, perhaps, salvage his financial situation, and he brings Lydia with him.
The theory of blackmail means that Wickham would have chosen Lydia intentionally to get to Darcy and exploit his weakness for Elizabeth, and yet Wickham has no reason to believe that any of the Bennets mean anything to Darcy. Wickham never once witnesses any interactions between Darcy and Elizabeth and, aside from one remark from Elizabeth when she returns from her stay with Charlotte and Mr. Collins where she says she believes that “Mr. Darcy improves on closer acquaintance,” he has no reason to believe that anything more than civility exists between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy.
Why, then, would he ever see Lydia as any kind of connection to Mr. Darcy’s fortune? Why would he even suspect that Mr. Darcy would pay out any sum of money to restore Lydia’s good reputation by essentially bribing Mr. Wickham to marry Lydia?
Secondly, for this blackmail to even come about, Wickham would have to contact Mr. Darcy directly.
Blackmail can’t be blackmail without contact between the person committing the blackmail and the person whose money is being extorted. We know from the text that Wickham is intentionally hiding from everyone. He does not write to Darcy, he does not contact Darcy in any way because he knows doing so risks being discovered and, therefore, facing the consequences of his debts. Moreover, we know from Mrs. Gardener, Elizabeth’s aunt, that Mr. Darcy worked tirelessly to find Wickham and Lydia when even Mr. Bennet had all but given up hope of finding them himself.
How can it be blackmail when Mr. Darcy went looking for them of his own accord? Now, I recognize that here, things get a little blurry. We know from Mrs. Gardener’s account to Lizzie that Mr. Darcy insisted on doing everything he could to bring about the marriage, up to and including paying off Wickham’s debts. He tells Mrs. Gardener that he believes the elopement to be his fault because he felt it was beneath him to talk about his private affairs openly to the general public, which, according to him, is what allowed the elopement to take place at all. If he had exposed Wickham, Mr. Bennet would never have allowed Lydia to go to Brighton and Lydia would never have run away with Wickham.
But the specifics of what happens after Darcy finds Wickham and Lydia but before the wedding itself, is less clear. Could Wickham have refused to marry Lydia until Mr. Darcy pays off his debts? Certainly. This is actually quite likely considering that Wickham has no reason to marry Lydia without money, but it does not count as blackmail, especially when Mr. Darcy would 1) have already known of Wickham’s debts, and 2) would also already have suspected that he’d have to put down a great deal of money to bring the marriage about. Mr. Darcy was no fool. From the moment that he went looking for the two of them, he knew that it was going to cost him quite a lot of money to get them to marry. To say that this was blackmail is the same as saying that Darcy went into the whole situation with naivete and ignorance, which we know he didn’t. He knew what would be expected of him and, moreover, he took on that responsibility purposefully.
Thirdly, if this was blackmail, whether through a letter written to Mr. Darcy or through arguments with him after Darcy had uncovered them in London, it would mean that Mr. Darcy’s entire character arc throughout the novel is utterly pointless.
If Mr. Darcy only goes looking for Wickham because of blackmail, or if Mr. Darcy only pays of Wickham’s debts because of blackmail, then it means that Mr. Darcy’s motivations for bringing about the marriage are selfish. It means he doesn’t do any of it for Elizabeth, but rather for himself, restoring Lydia’s reputation so that if Elizabeth did agree to marry him, his family name would not be as tarnished. Which also means that he lies to Elizabeth at the end of the novel, making him just as manipulative as Wickham.
The whole reason that it’s such a big deal that he is the one who pays out the money necessary for Wickham to marry Lydia is specifically because he is, in no way, related to the Bennets. There isn’t an understanding of affection or a connection between Darcy and Elizabeth. He proposed to her and she rejected him. Whatever increased tenderness has arisen between them since she rejected him is of no real consequence because he has no pressed his suit a second time, and nor has she made any of her new feelings apparent to him or to anyone else. By all accounts, it’s only friendship and kindness that exists between them now, so for him to take on such a personally mortifying responsibility is the sign that he now deserves Elizabeth’s affection.
Making it blackmail changes all of that and reduces the greatest sign of his changed behaviors and attitudes to nothing more than a change of appearances. Whereas in the actual text, Mr. Darcy is not motivated by personal goals or desires; rather, he is motivated by a genuine desire to not only fix what he sees as a circumstance caused by himself, but also to restore Elizabeth’s family to proper standing in their community. He does this not for himself or his own advantage, for again, there is no understanding between himself and Elizabeth. For all he knows, she still does not wish to marry him. For all he knows, she could still reject him and go on to marry someone else.
But none of that matters to Darcy, which is why his growth as a character is so immense. If we are to believe it’s only blackmail, then his development is absolutely pointless. It means he lies to Elizabeth at the end of the novel just to trick her into marrying him, which we knew he does not do.
I understand that people like to have their hypotheticals. And there’s nothing wrong with posing these possibilities and theories so long as we recognize that unless something can be substantiated with the text itself, it remains nothing more than a theory. The woman who posited this idea called it a theory, and yet tried adamantly to deny that anything in the text disproves it, which is not only patently false, but it’s also a direct misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the story Austen gave us. This women also tried to act like she had more authority on the matter given her age and the number of times she’s read the book, but as someone whose focus in my second masters has been 19th century British Literature, and considering that my masters thesis is specifically about Pride and Prejudice and Mr. Darcy’s development as a character, I can say with absolute confidence that Mr. Darcy was not blackmailed by Mr. Wickham to marry Lydia. Bribed with money? Absolutely, but that was also by Mr. Darcy’s design.
I sometimes wonder if people are so desperate to land on some new revelation regarding Austen’s works just because they want to feel important, or if they genuinely misunderstand the characters and their choices. Either way, I was upset by this theory. No, not the theory itself, but the woman’s insistence that she was right, her refusal to accept when she had been definitively proven wrong, and the implication of Darcy’s character that her theory requires. I was upset by these things.
You might find this post a pointless rambling of a woman with nothing better to do. But I felt this was a necessary post to make in response so that I don’t have to sit and fume over it all for the next several hours while I’m at work.
