(Right now, I incline to the view that P&P must take place when billeting a company of soldiers or militia upon a town was still common practice, ie, before 1796, and the date of Mr. Collins’s initial visit to Longbourn – Monday, November 18 – implies that the story starts somewhere in autumn of 1793. When I talk about certain events happening 23-25 years before P&P, that means a timeframe around 1768-1770.)

I start here with Mrs. Bennet because we know comparatively more about her background. Old Mr. Gardiner was a very prosperous attorney, with two daughters and a son younger than either of them. Mr. Phillips (spelling varies by edition) was his clerk, who married what was probably the eldest daughter(1), and inherited the business. Mrs. Phillips(2) seems to be hospitable and good-natured, if vulgar enough to be rather a tax on Darcy’s forbearance late in the book. She has a rather naïve snobbery that makes her enthusiastic about the glories of Lady Catherine De Bourgh when Mr. Collins brings them up in her hearing. His nieces think Uncle Phillips broad-faced and stuffy, and there’s a suggestion that he drinks too much. (There do not appear to be any Phillips children,(3) and possibly his alcoholism contributes to this).

Young Mr. Gardiner was apparently apprenticed to a merchant, perhaps a relative, and did very well for himself. His wife is described as “several years younger” than Mrs. Phillips or Mrs. Bennet, implying the sisters are close in age and the sister-in-law maybe 5-6 years younger than them. The upcoming production of The Other Bennet Sister casts Indira Varma as Young Mrs. Gardiner, and I will say that it’s plausible-ish to imagine a well-traveled English merchant of this period coming home with a South Asian or East Asian bride, but nothing in the book really indicates this is the case for Mrs. Gardiner (who grew up in Lambton). The younger Gardiners have two daughters, age six and eight at the time of their parents’ trip into Derbyshire, and two son younger than that, indicating that Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner married around 1785-1786 at the latest.

Mrs. Bennet has a bit of a fetish for men in uniform, and at one point recalls that 25 years ago, she “cried for two days together when Colonel Miller’s regiment went away.” Assume that her delight in seeing Lydia married at sixteen to a military man is rooted in some fantasies about a military man Mrs. Bennet wanted to marry at sixteen.

This makes Mrs. Bennet eighteen when she married Mr. Bennet (23 years ago), and forty-one at the start of the novel. She is said to have had, twenty-three years ago, “youth, beauty and that appearance of good humour which youth and beauty generally give,” also a “weak understanding and illiberal mind.” This means that yeah, she’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but also that she is a spiteful, selfish person whose blinkered outlook is at least partially willful.(4) There is a snarky comment from her husband which can be taken to mean that she is still an attractive woman, in the timeframe P&P takes place. I am inclined to take it that way myself, but remember: he is a snarker, and could be saying the exact opposite of what he means there.

She doesn’t have “anxiety problems” in the sense that her modern defenders sometimes claim, rather she is a hyperemotional drama queen whose joy is as exaggerated as her grief. Her repeated successful pregnancies, spaced one or two years apart, and her initial callousness at the prospect of Jane getting sick, are consistent with a physically healthy woman. Her anger at Darcy dismissing Elizabeth’s looks seems to be more about the potential damage to the Bennet Beauty [TM] brand than about Elizabeth’s feelings getting hurt. The narrator tells us that she would have been genuinely grieved if Jane had been seriously ill, but this too could be chalked up to the risk of losing the crown jewel of the Bennet Beauty[TM] brand.

When confronted with a chance to save her position by marrying one of her daughters to her husband’s plain, pompous cousin, heir to the entailed Longbourn estate, Mrs. Bennet rightly steers the cousin away from Jane, whom she has other plans for, but she doesn’t think that gee, Mr. Collins spouts off about the same things Mary does, maybe I could get the plain one off my hands. She also doesn’t go away and try to convince her alter ego Lydia that it would really be a fine thing to be mistress of Longbourn. Instead, she endorses Collins’s plan to pursue her least favorite daughter, Elizabeth.

In other words, she herself would never choose a charmless, unattractive man for his present or future wealth, and she would never expect someone she actually liked to do so either. Therefore, Mr. Bennet, at the time she met him, was probably a fairly attractive and charming man, likely somewhat older than her but not twenty years older than her, and probably not the 14+ year age gap between Lydia and Wickham(5) either.

This means all the people crying for a “hot” Mrs. Bennet, “no older than her early forties,” are hypocrites if they are not also crying for a “hot” Mr. Bennet, who is a maximum of ten years older than Mrs. Bennet, and probably more like three or four years her senior. Note his irritation when she starts talking about him like he has one foot in the grave. He retorts that it is possible that he might survive her; it is consistent with a small age gap between the spouses, not a large one.

In the book, he can be very amusing and not without charm when he wants to be, and it’s easy to imagine that he was more so as a young man around Bingley’s age, heir to two thousand a year, with his life in front of him. It’s not surprising Young Mr. Bennet had his head turned by a woman, with, say, Jane’s looks and Lydia’s disposition, glowing with delight in being the belle of every ball. But it’s also not surprising Miss Jane Gardiner, as she was then, had her head turned by a clever, infatuated, attractive young gentleman of fortune, paying her the kind of compliments only a clever, infatuated man can.

We are told that he is fond of books and of the countryside; and people always, always, ALWAYS overlook the countryside part of the equation. He is to be found in the library…when he is at home. He shoots birds when they are in season, he’s consistently up to speed on what’s happening with the home farm which produces their food (“[The carriage-horses] are wanted in the farm much oftener than I can get them”), and neither his daughter, confronted with all the splendors of Pemberley, nor the narrator, ever imply that Mr. Bennet has failed in his duties towards his tenant farmers and the crops they produce. In other words, he and his steward (if any) are no Mr. Darcy and steward, but they manage the Longbourn estate in a reasonably competent fashion. (I can hear you getting ready to jump on me about him not saving money for his daughters; that’s a separate problem, and we’ll deal with it in a bit.)

I am neither a hunter nor a farmer, but I’ve been adjacent to both at different times, and I’m going to let you city slickers in on a little secret: they both get up early. If Mr. Bennet is out hunting,(6) or checking in with the tenant farmers or the home-farm laborers before they get to work, he is also getting up early. In that case, the somewhat disgruntled gentleman, whom we usually seem to meet mid-afternoon or rather later in the day, has been awake for a minimum of 7-8 hours, dealing with the kind of catastrophes you see on Clarkson’s Farm, with less technology but hopefully more expertise, and now just wants to sit and chill with his books for a bit. I’m not saying that he’s right to tune his family out, but I am saying that Austen is perhaps assuming the reader understands what else he has going on off-page.

In connection with this, it seems a safe bet that he is the one who taught Jane to ride, and that her riding-horse pulls double duty as his. (Yes, he probably rode something feistier until he realized one of his daughters liked to ride, and then he sold the feisty mount off in favor of something a lady could also handle). The younger daughters, from Elizabeth on down, probably got their enthusiasm for walking in general (and Elizabeth her enthusiasm for the countryside) from him. “The prettyish kind of wilderness” that Lady Catherine De Bourgh damns with faint praise and which echoes the grander preservation of nature that Elizabeth sees at Pemberley more likely reflects his taste (or his ancestors’) than his wife’s.

The idea he and his wife had, that if they have enough children they will evetually get a son who can help them break the entail, seems hair-brained to us, but these people knew a lot less about how sex determination works, and Mrs. Bennet came from a family where the son was born last. Mr. Bennet is obviously the only surviving son in his family, because that’s how he inherited the estate and why it will pass to “distant relation” Mr. Collins. But Mr. Bennet’s dislike of doing anything he finds unpleasant (like arguing with family members) is also consistent with spoiled younger child behaviors, so possibly he has older sisters who married gentlemen in another county. This in turn would encourage him and his wife in the belief that they would eventually have a son.

So, let’s talk about the entail, and what it implies about Mr. Bennet’s family. People who know more about this stuff than I do claim that the third generation of this kind of entail was the earliest that the heirs could break it. This suggests Mr. Bennet’s grandfather put the entail in place, perhaps in response to some imprudence on the part of Mr. Bennet’s father, which in turn means that Mr. Bennet’s father might have married “badly” in the worldly sense. If so, the marriage itself went well enough, as a marriage, to where Mr. Bennet did not see a need to run in the opposite direction. I imagine Mr. Bennet’s parents as an easy-going Bingley type, maybe a bit more bookish, married to a sort of Harriet Smith with a more respectable pedigree: either very bottom of the gentry (about the level of Miss Bates/Jane Fairfax) or a merchant’s legitimate daughter. In any case, Mr. Bennet’s mother was (in my headcanon) a good-looking, good-natured, loving but somewhat ditzy woman. Any courtship-era qualms Mr. Bennet had about Miss Jane Gardiner’s stupidity were thus quashed by the memory of his parents’ relationship. Hadn’t they rubbed along pretty well together? But he doesn’t have his father’s upbeat disposition, and Miss Jane Gardiner is not as kindly a person as his mother.

Mr. Collins is not a first cousin, given the “distant relation” line. He is a male line descendent of Mr. Bennet’s grandfather or great-grandfather (maybe further back), and somewhere along the way one of the intervening generations got fostered out to a prosperous family named Collins, who made him their heir and required him to take the name Collins. Mr. Collins’s father is said to be miserly and ignorant, and he and Mr. Bennet bitterly quarreled at some time in the past, I assume due to miserly/ignorant bully taking Mr. Bennet’s snark the wrong way. Collins’s groveling pretenses about books and erudition may be him trying to live up to what he perceives Mr. Bennet to be, or perhaps to a tradition on his side of the family of what the “Bennets of Longbourn” are like.

This is as good a time as any to talk about the library of Longbourn. The estate has been in Bennet hands for a minimum of three generations, as indicated above. As with the Darcys, they have presumably added to their library over those generations. Can we stop with the meme of “ZOMG, Mr. Bennet is buying a bazillion books instead of providing for his daughters’ future”? There is supposedly one instance, ONE, of him opening a package of newly purchased books in the novel, but I couldn’t find it when I searched on Gutenberg. The narrator doesn’t hesitate to chalk up the Bennets’ excessive spending to Mrs. Bennet having “no turn for economy” and credits Mr. Bennet with at least keeping the family out of debt. Let’s talk about the economics of how their household works.

Wages, rents, and by extension, bills, were all paid quarterly in rural England in this period, and in between times, people to a large extent lived on credit. Mr. Bennet is thus receiving around 500 pounds in rent money a quarter; his wife has five thousand pounds(7) invested in government bonds, probably at five per cent, so 250 pounds a year, or 62 ish pounds per quarter. Their gross income is thus 562 pounds a quarter. Mr. Bennet would have been responsible for purchasing, on credit, things relevant to his interests: books, hunting equipment, etc. If he had a steward (which there’s no evidence of one way or another in the book), the steward would have been in charge of purchasing things necessary for the house, the home-farm and the estate: livestock, seed or equipment for the home-farm; repair materials for tenants’ houses or for the main house, that kind of thing. Without the steward, Mr. Bennet would purchase these things himself. Again, on credit.

The wife of the house, or her housekeeper, would be responsible for purchasing raw materials for women’s clothing, bed and table linens, everyone’s underclothes, lighting (wax or tallow candles), furniture in the parts of the house that were not specifically the husband’s, and any food the estate could not supply. Given that Mrs. Bennet prides herself on setting a fine table and is frequently hijacking the horses used on the home-farm, I think she is probably buying at least some food that is either too “luxurious” for their station, like fish or turtles, or that the home-farm would be better able to supply if she didn’t want the carriage-horses so often. And again, the wife or housekeeper is buying on credit.

When the bills come in, Mr. Bennet can pay them, or try to repudiate them. The latter can cause legal issues, scandal and all kinds of hysterics in his home, but it’s possible he’s threatened it as a nuclear option at least once, and that keeps Mrs. Bennet from exceeding their income. More likely, since everyone in this society seems to know everyone else’s income pretty clearly, the tradespeople of Longbourn and the more important market town of Meryton probably know that the Bennets bring in 562 pounds a quarter, that X amount of their income goes to paying wages for their servants, the workers on the home-farm, etc, and therefore Y amount of their quarterly income is up for grabs, so to speak. Each of the (let’s say) 7-12 tradespeople can therefore hope for at most Z(7.5) amount of the Bennet’s net quarterly income. When the Bennet family “tab” at a given establishment approaches Z, the establishment starts politely ignoring them, dragging their feet about serving them, maybe flatout telling them “no more credit.”

In this scenario, the Bennet family bills are somewhat self-regulating. There may have been a point in the past where they exceeded their income and Mr. Bennet had to frantically do what he could to pay the bills off. The family custom of having carriage horses who also work the home-farm probably dates to some such period of belt-tightening. He then either threatened his wife with the nuclear option of repudiating her bills, or sat down with the tradespeople to negotiate some limits on what credit his family could carry with them. Note that even if he tries to set that credit limit lower than Z fraction of his income, in the hopes of saving some money from year to year, the tradespeople have no motivation to hold the credit limit significantly below the level of Z, which they know he can pay. As long as Mrs. Bennet does not charge more than Z to her tab, the establishment will be happy to serve her.

Is there anything else Mr. Bennet can do? Well, there’s no evidence of extravagance on his part, so he’s not actively contributing to the spending problem. He’s not some kind of tyrant who’s going to imprison, starve, or beat his wife into submission. She’s not someone who takes orders from anyone, or even much in the way of suggestion, especially when unhappy: I think Jane persuading her mother to go to her own room and lie down in the aftershocks of Lydia’s elopement is the only time anyone gets an unhappy Mrs. Bennet to do anything she doesn’t wholeheartedly want to do. I suppose Mr. Bennet could give the housekeeper orders to be less extravagant, but Mrs. Bennet’s just going to spend the money herself the moment his back is turned.

Maybe, if he had been a more stubborn kind of person who systematically reviewed the bills every single quarter with his wife and shot down all her stupid nonlogical excuses, the repeated negative stimulus would wear her out and convince her to comply with his wishes. But if his wife weren’t a selfish drama queen, he wouldn’t have to, so it’s a vicious circle. Either they’re both to blame for not correcting their own character flaws, or neither of them are. The book indicts them both, and people who try to get the Mrs. off the hook because they identify with her or assume the man is always and solely wrong, are missing the point.

On his failings as a father, it’s conventional to assume that he started losing interest in parenting sometime before Mary was old enough to notice his love of books and that she is trying her own intellectual pretensions on to impress him. That is a valid take, but it’s not the only one. I personally feel like he teases Kitty with more interest and affection than he shows towards Lydia, but in a way that would work better with a younger child. Preteens, in my experience, can be somewhat tolerant of parents and grandparents trolling them, especially once they get the joke, but teenagers, awash in hormones and identity crises, are more self-serious and usually don’t like this.

So, Mary reached the age of being able to read grownup books, and instead of developing her own opinions on them like Jane and Lizzie, she instead turned into a smug little NPC spouting off about the brittleness of a woman’s reputation. She wanted to be teacher’s pet, but Teacher didn’t want that kind of a pet.(8) He may have made some perfunctory efforts to turn her interests in another direction (Drawing! Riding! Nature!), but if so, he failed. He’s not wrong to withhold his approval from Mary’s mindless parroting and virtue-signaling, but he doesn’t seem to have worked very hard at correcting her either.

From that point on, he focused his attention on Jane and Elizabeth as the fellow Responsible Adults in the house, and on Kitty as the Fun Little Girl. This would have been five-ish years ago, when Mary(9) was maybe 14 and Kitty was 12. Meanwhile, Jane was 17, Elizabeth was 15, and Lydia was 11. Then Lydia began to grow: in height,(10) in force of personality, in ego, in her mother’s love. Kitty faded into being only Lydia’s minion, in both her parents’ mind and her own mind. There may even have been some vicious family row about some Lydia escapade or other, in which Mrs. Bennet told Mr. Bennet that the girls were her responsibility,(11) and he washed his hands of being anything more than a pal to his children, and that mostly to his two eldest daughters. But when he pays any attention to Kitty, he’s remembering the little girl who used to giggle when he teased her.

Mrs. Bennet’s parental failings are more obvious and don’t require explanation at such great length. Jane and Elizabeth and possibly Mary were products of a period when their parents were probably on better terms, and they have dim memories of a less stressful time in the household. Jane would have been seven when Lydia was born, and her mature, peacekeeping personality would have been shaped by that painful, mutually blame-throwing period when it became clear to the parents that they weren’t going to have a male heir.

In any case, this was an era where the education and guidance of girl-children fell primarily on the mother and whatever governesses she hired. We’re told Mr. Bennet was willing to hire masters in whatever subjects were wanted, so there’s no reason he would have objected to a governess, which means that the lack of them for the Bennet girls rests with Mrs. Bennet, who probably didn’t have them growing up but would have noticed the other people close to their level hiring governesses. Did she feel threatened by the idea of an adult woman smarter and more genteel than her in the house? Whatever the reason, that failure rests with her, as with the entirely wrong-headed decision to put the fifteen-year-old and sixteen-year-old out on the marriage market alongside the older sisters. About 70%-80% of what goes wrong in the course of P&P(12) starts with those two (female) decisions, and Mr. Bennet cynically allowing Lydia’s trip to Brighton, which seemingly no one else in the Longbourn/Meryton area has a problem with except Elizabeth, is merely the last straw that leads to the final catastrophe.

I guess this turned into more of a Longbourn: The Early Years post, but I think the gist of the Bennets’ early relationship is clear: a whirlwind courtship of a cheerful, gorgeous queen bee by a dashing, snarky gentleman who was socially rather out of her league, both of them blinded by lust and youthful high spirits. They were probably downright adorable, if you didn’t know anything about how it turned out.

(1) Mrs. Bennet gives off spoiled younger daughter vibes to me, and her mini-Me/alter ego/favorite is youngest daughter Lydia, which I find suggestive.

(2) It’s probable that Mrs. Bennet’s first name was Jane and her eldest child was named after her. It’s possible that Elizabeth, Mary or Catherine came along at a time when it became clear that the Phillipses could not have children, and were named after Mrs. Phillips. Assuming the Gardiner sisters were close in age, I think Catherine/Kitty is the likeliest to be named after her aunt.

(3) This seems to support the fanon, popular in some circles, that history will repeat itself and the clerk Mary Bennet marries will inherit the law business from Mr. Phillips. However, the lore handed down by Austen’s family only mentions that Mary was wed to one of her uncle’s clerks and became a star in Meryton society.

(4) Compare with the none-too-bright, but good-natured and open-minded, Harriet Smith from Emma.

(5) To all the idiots claiming that Wickham is “younger than” or “the same age as” Darcy, I refer you once again to the frigging book. Wickham is described at his initial introduction as being in his early thirties, while Darcy describes himself as having been 28 when Elizabeth rejected him at Hunsford. Do the math. Wickham is 2-6ish years older than Darcy, although the various mentions of them growing up together probably means the age gap is on the smaller side.

(6) Gamebirds, deer, and foxes were, by the way, seen as threats to the tenant-farmers’ crops and chickens. Culling them was a responsibility of the (armed) ruling class, going a long way back in English and European culture. Even if you disapprove of sport-hunting, what Bingley et al. were doing in this period was more complicated than that.

(7) Four thousand from Old Mr. Gardiner, plus an additional one thousand apparently settled on her by the elder Bennets in the marriage-articles. Mr. Collins, proposing to Elizabeth, makes reference to her inheriting a thousand invested in the four per cents, but I *think* this is because a thousand pounds is below the threshold for investing in the five per cents, whereas the five thousand should be over it. My impression is that Mrs. Bennet’s five thousand are invested in the five per cents, and upon her passing, the amount would be liquidated, split among her surviving daughters, and reinvested in the four per cents. I could be wrong though, often am.

(7.5) Note that Z is not necessarily the same amount for each tradesman, seamstress, milliner, etc. In this discussion, Z stands for the amount that each business has reason to believe, based on past experience, that Mr. Bennet will pay with a minimum of fuss and temporizing.

(8) Or she was aiming to be a pet of a different teacher: was there maybe a very good-looking but pretentious curate serving the Longbourn parish at the time Mary was 14-15?

(9) She’s younger than Lizzie (who’s twenty at the start of the book) and older than Kitty (sixteen at the start of the book), but whether Mary is eighteen or nineteen is never stated.

(10) It’s possible, although not said in so many words, that puberty hit Lydia early and hard.

(11) Which, yeah, on a day-to-day basis, they were, by the standards of that culture.

(12) The financial strains are the joint failure of both parents, but although those financial strains raise the stakes of the plot, they have comparatively little direct influence on it. Let’s say that Mr. Bennet somehow managed to save up thirteen thousand pounds, put three thousand into an emergency slush fund, and divided the rest evenly among his daughters to be part of their inheritance. I don’t think that slush fund would make him or Mr. Gardiner any more successful at tracking down Mr. Wickham. I’m pretty sure Darcy and the Bingley sisters would not be any more impressed with Jane Bennet if her inheritance came to 120 pounds a year (3000 in the four per cents) than they are in the actual book, where her inheritance comes to 40 pounds a year. I know for a fact Lady Catherine would not be anymore impressed with Elizabeth if she had 120 pounds a year coming to her instead of 40 pounds.