Pride and Prejudice, chapter sixteen.
We’re going to do a bit of time traveling today.
In chapter sixteen Mr. Wickham makes himself more known to the Bennet family and in particular to Elizabeth, who proves herself an attentive audience for Wickham’s favorite subject: his own suffering at the hands of Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth is primed to hear anything bad about Darcy; Wickham could not have picked better. I want to focus on one element of what he tells her, and compare it to something we (and Elizabeth) will only find out later. Because Wickham is canny in what he tells Elizabeth here, and mostly lies by omission. There is, though, one exception.
We won’t go over all of Wickham’s allegations, or all of the ways he is leaving important things out, but I want to note one odd bit of business. When explaining his relationship to the Darcy family, Wickham says this:
“Mr. Darcy often acknowledged himself to be under the greatest obligations to my father’s active superintendence; and when, immediately before my father’s death, Mr. Darcy gave him a voluntary promise of providing for me, I am convinced that he felt it to be as much a debt of gratitude to him as of affection to myself.”
He says old Mr. Darcy – and it must be old Mr. Darcy, because Wickham specifically says the man felt affection for him – made a promise to care for Wickham “immediately” before old Mr. Wickham’s death. Immediately. There is no way to read this as meaning anything but that old Mr. Darcy outlived old Mr. Wickham. The construction gives an obvious implication that the death and the promise are connected; that old Mr. Darcy made the promise to care for young Wickham in the understanding that young Wickham would soon be fatherless, with no one but the Darcy family to provide for him. Let’s take note of that, and then let’s skip a bit of time to look at Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth. When Darcy explains to Elizabeth that he did not, in fact, mistreat Wickham at all, he writes this: “his own father did not long survive mine.”
There is no way to read this as meaning anything but that old Mr. Wickham outlived old Mr. Darcy, albeit briefly. Promises may have been made, but they could not have been made “immediately” before old Mr. Wickham’s death, because by that point old Mr. Darcy was dead himself. To be sure, Wickham could conceivably concoct an excuse for this discrepancy; maybe his father was ill, solicited a promise from his employer, and then his employer himself unexpectedly died first. It’s possible. But that “immediately” is very definite, and I think quite clearly meant to make us (and Elizabeth) infer a definite timeline: old Wickham dies, leaving his son an orphan dependent on the Darcy family, then at some point old Darcy dies, leaving his son in charge of managing that dependence.
So, what does this mean?
First, let’s assume that it is not a mistake on Austen’s part. That is not to say that Austen was above making mistakes; you can certainly find them in her novels, and you can find scholars debating their meaning and import. But she does not tend to make mistakes in matters like this; they tend to be errors in detail relating to setting or number, like the apple trees in Emma that famously blossom in June when they ought to be green. And scholars debate these errors because though they exist, they are quite rare; Austen was generally speaking not a sloppy writer.
Let’s also assume that Wickham is the one fibbing here, not Darcy. Austen was not in the business of tricking her readers, at least not for long and not like that. Plenty of her characters lie or deceive themselves, even virtuous ones, but she lets the reader know before long if that is the case. It is possible that Darcy’s version of events has its own inaccuracies based on his perceptions and biases but to the extent that it does, Austen herself points them out and allows Darcy to examine them himself. His letter is most interesting for the way Darcy clearly changes while writing it, from anger and a need to justify himself to sadness, guilt and concern for Elizabeth’s wellbeing. The letter is an exercise in introspection for him as much as an explanation for her, and I believe Austen would not overcomplicate it by adding an element of unreliability. If there were anything in Darcy’s account that we should not trust, Austen would say so.
So why would Wickham lie about the order of deaths? What purpose does it serve? It’s important to remember that while Elizabeth is learning about Wickham, he is also learning about her. What does he learn? He puts feelers out, first of all, for the generally held opinion of Darcy in the neighborhood before he says anything. You have to assume that Wickham was terrified when he saw Darcy there; he doesn’t know yet what Darcy has shared about him, if anything, but he knows that if their true history were generally known Wickham would not be welcome among the respectable people of Meryton. He wants to figure out what Elizabeth knows, and through her what other people know. He quickly relaxes when he finds that Darcy is much disliked, and he learns that Elizabeth is eager to believe badly of him.
He also learns that that Elizabeth is no fool, and this is important. Bullshit artists traffic in vagueness; they are good at giving people a general picture of what they wanted to believe anyway, but their stories tend to fall apart when you press them on specifics. Elizabeth does begin to press Wickham here. She notices that his story does not quite fit with what she knows of Darcy, even while she still dislikes him. She even calls attention to inconsistencies, and causes Wickham to backtrack a bit:
“Yes—the late Mr. Darcy bequeathed me the next presentation of the best living in his gift. He was my godfather, and excessively attached to me. I cannot do justice to his kindness. He meant to provide for me amply, and thought he had done it; but when the living fell, it was given elsewhere.”
“Good heavens!” cried Elizabeth; “but how could that be? How could his will be disregarded? Why did not you seek legal redress?"
“There was just such an informality in the terms of the bequest as to give me no hope from law. A man of honour could not have doubted the intention, but Mr. Darcy chose to doubt it—or to treat it as a merely conditional recommendation, and to assert that I had forfeited all claim to it by extravagance, imprudence, in short, anything or nothing.”
Wickham states outright that he was bequeathed the living “in his gift,” that is, in old Mr. Darcy’s will. Elizabeth asks why he did not sue Darcy when the bequest was denied, and Wickham admits that it was not, actually, a true bequest, just an informal understanding. That’s a pretty large reversal, and it is notable that Elizabeth is not picking up on it. I’d argue that she is unconsciously aware that something is not quite right here, hence her questions. A Lydia or a Mrs. Bennet – even a Jane – would likely not have asked. Elizabeth is not quite using her brain here; a pretty face in the person of someone who flatters her vanity is causing her to stumble and see what she wants. But she is still capable, more than a lot of people, and Wickham can see that.
Hence his lie about the order of deaths. Because of course, the Elizabeth who remembers to ask about lawsuits would probably say some version of “wait: where was your father in all this?” Because indeed, where was old Mr. Wickham? Surely if his own son was disinherited by his boss, he might have an opinion about that. Wickham has to dispense with him; he has to remove his father from the narrative to forestall any questions about him. If his father is dead, Wickham is more vulnerable; Darcy isn’t just some guy who steals inheritances, he steals them from orphans. In this version, the Darcy family is all he has. He is not just a godson, but a surrogate son, completely dependent on a family that cruelly casts him off.
If Wickham has a living parent, however, he is not so helpless. He had other sources of support, even if they were only moral support. If you pick at the thread of his presence, the entire story falls apart, and Wickham realizes that. By his account, old Mr. Darcy promised to provide for Wickham on his friend’s deathbed. If old Mr. Darcy could not have been at that deathbed, did any promise even happen? If his father was still alive at this point, why was he not himself capable of shepherding Wickham into a career – he was a lawyer, after all, an educated professional. If he couldn’t do that, why couldn’t he? Why didn’t he? If he was an attorney, acting as old Mr. Darcy’s steward, he might have even taken a role in helping to draft his will. Why wouldn’t he help to make sure its terms were honored? There might be any number of answers here that might make sense, and they might make Darcy look even worse, but they would also require spinning out a much more elaborate story. The only answer Wickham can give that will make sense to an intelligent person is this: his father played no role because his father wasn't there to do it.
If Elizabeth were operating at full capacity, she’d realize all of this. It will take her a while to turn her intellect in this direction; when she does, she’ll be ashamed of how much she ignored.