What became of Mr Wickham?

 

The famous question in literary criticism “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” is falsely attributed to A.C. Bradley and was never asked seriously.  It was posed by F. R. Levis in the 1930s as an attack upon the growing preoccupation with the unknowable matters of anterior and posterior activity surrounding a text. While this seems to represent a common sense approach for an academic, any actor must nevertheless still decide his or her character has been before they enter a scene and where they are going when they leave it. This information is not always and must therefore be inferred. Context is key in this case and research may be required in order to construct an environment within which a given text can authentically “speak” and provide answers. New critical perspectives and fresh historical evidence can alter this process radically and reveal previously hidden or suppressed spaces for fruitful narrative speculation.  Nothing is necessarily fixed therefore in a given text, particularly where omissions and silences are concerned.    

What happened to Mr Wickham and Lydia?

It is the object of this short article to suggest that Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, given it's powerful context and notable silences, unequivocally instructs us as to the eventual fate of Mr Wickham and Lydia.  This conclusion is supported by a further analogous use of context by Austen to create circumstances and behaviours that are in fact key features of her text but which nevertheless remain largely unexpressed.  They exist instead as the  textually “given” as circumstances obvious to the nineteenth century reader but potentially lost to contemporary audiences.  In  this case, Austen's final novel, Persuasion, will also be used to frame the central argument of this article by providing further inter-contextual evidence as to how “background” and “setting” often come to exert silent, extreme and atemporal influences across an author's body of work.  

What have others surmised?

At the end of Pride and Prejudice we are told that Wickham has taken a commission in the regular army and has been dispatched to Newcastle with his new wife, Lydia.  This is the end of their official textual life. However, in her novel Death Comes To Pemberley, P.D. James takes this rather open textual finishing point to extrapolate the further adventures of Wickham.  Eventually, Wickham and Lydia set off for America, in all likelihood never to return. Similarly, in her novel The Murder Of Mr Wickham, Claudia Gray constructs an alternative life and demise for her eponymous character directly from the apparent scope generated at the conclusion of Pride and Prejudice for Mr Wickham's textual afterlife.   However, this potential is not as broad as it may seem.  Context is, in fact, everything and sometimes because it is everything, because it saturates a text so thoroughly, it is almost invisible; standing “outside” of a text pushing in. Without this literary force we cannot recreate the historical text and we can not access the past.  Our attempts to do this may be flawed but we know the basic difference between “then” and “now” and that most acts of  artistic production silently incorporate contemporary conditions. It follows that when we want to read an historic text, certain aspects of its content must be teased into focus because they are either wholly or partially absent.  

For example, Mrs Bennet fears Mr Collins because of his right of “entail” to Longbourn.  He stands to inherit the estate from Mr Bennet upon his death because he and Mrs Bennet have no son to inherit the property directly.  Mrs Bennet states this clearly “I can not understand how anyone could have the conscience to entail away an estate from ones own daughters” (Chapter 23, p.171).  The complicated and pervasive law of “entail” is mentioned but never fully explained in Pride and Prejudice, contrary to its open exposition in George Eliot's 1866 novel, Felix Holt.  Instead, it is left to linger in the background of Austen's text even though it is the major shaping force of the novel and raises Levis-like questions concerning Mrs Bennet and her desperate behaviour. It  helps beg the question, for example, whether or not Mrs Bennet, apart from having four daughters, ever gave birth to a son that did not survive infancy. An outcome that could further explain the obvious rift between Mr and Mrs Bennet.  

Such a proposition is not “made up”, it is based upon what the novel tells us as readers and what we can discern from history. The fate of Mr Wickham is the same.  If we estimate the action of the novel takes place between 1811 and late 1813, it may be possible to draw some general conclusions from the information Austen gives us about Wickham's movements.  He is commissioned into the regular army and then  moves from Brighton to Newcastle taking Lydia, now his wife, with him.  

A posting to Newcastle during this time could involve policing the local population who were increasingly unhappy about moves to mechanise traditional working practises.  This often resulted in violent confrontation and the risk of injury or death.  Regiments were also frequently dispatched directly from Newcastle to fight in the Peninsula war.  Helena Kelly in her book Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, concurs, suggesting that Wickham is indeed “liable to be sent overseas”. In this context, it can be argued very strongly that Austen is telling us we can expect Mr Wickham to be killed while fighting during the Peninsula War. 

Persuasion tells us more.  While it is not contemporary with the action of Pride and Prejudice,  Anne Elliot makes mention of  "The dread of future war (being) all that could dim her sunshine” and the prospect of having to pay “the tax of quick alarm"(Chapter 24, pp.272) brought on by sudden hostilities.  Such pervasive anxieties demonstrate a general awareness towards the fortunes of war and the possible negative impact it may have upon ones “sunshine” which surely must include death In this case Wickham's fate should also be read as code. We are being given the liberty to speculate that Lydia will be released from an otherwise abusive marriage and set free to love again, more wisely
Gary Williamson writes for the Dickensian and Dickens society blog. He has a connection with the Sir John Soane Museum and may be involved in a small exhibition this December.  This is his first piece about the work of Jane Austen. 

Works Cited

Britton, John.  A. C. Bradley and those children of Lady Macbeth.  Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol 12. No.3 (Summer 1961). pp 349-351 

Austen, Jane.  Pride And Prejudice (Ed) Tony Tanner. Penguin Books, 1972

Austen, Jane.  Persuasion (Ed) D.W. Harding.  Penguin Books, 1998

James, P.D.   Death Comes To Pemberley.   Faber And Faber 2011

Gray, Claudia. The Murder Of Mr Wickham. Random House 2022

Eliot, George.  Felix Holt (Ed) Peter Coveney.  Penguin Classics  1972

Kelly, Helena.  Jane Austen, The Secret Radical.  Icon Books 2024