Mr Wickham Redeemed in Lost in Austen

In Lost in Austen, Mr Wickham’s character is redeemed in a bold but fairly plausible way, at least on first viewing. Amanda Price discovers that Georgiana Darcy is not as innocent as Jane Austen would have had us believe. After refusing Georgiana’s sexual advances toward him, Mr Wickham chooses to hide this truth and allows Mr Darcy to believe that he had ‘ravished’ her. He also comes to the aid of the injured Mr Bennet. At this point Amanda declares – ‘Wickham, you are a bastard but you’re the right bastard at the right time.’ Is this version of his character believable? Jane Bennet tried to believe that neither Darcy’s nor Wickham’s account could be quite correct; that the moral reputations of both men could be left intact. It’s a nice idea that she could have been right.

A cad and a rake, or just misunderstood?

However, Wickham did extort the equivalent of more than one million dollars from Mr Darcy, which he gambled and otherwise wasted away. He also lied to anyone who would listen about his dealings with the gentleman. When the militia moved to Brighton, Wickham left with another mountain of debt, having conned his way into credit agreements with various traders.

Mr Wickham’s decision to elope with Lydia was a strange one. The Bennets have no money, so his motivation could not have been financial. He had no intention of marrying Lydia, it is said, so perhaps he was being led purely by his sexual desire. If so, then why run off with a gentleman’s daughter? Less troublesome encounters would surely have been possible for an officer stationed in a famous ‘gay bathing place’ like Brighton?

In any case, at the end of the book, where Jane Austen describes the future of Lydia and Mr Wickham, there is little to redeem his character. They stay together of course, but in time become bored with one another. They live a restless life, never able to live to their means and dependent on the charity of Mrs Elizabeth Darcy.

So while it’s a nice idea in Lost in Austen, in the novel the cracks of ambiguity in Wickham’s moral character are very slight indeed. I do find his elopement with Lydia a little hard to rationalize, but overall he’s pretty much a straightforward 19th Century villain – a superficially charming, yet amoral hedonist.

Are you willing to believe, like Jane, that Mr Wickham ‘is not so undeserving’ as we might have thought. Or is he, as we always believed, in possession of ‘neither integrity or honour?’

Lizzy