(Note: as previously established, I believe Pride and Prejudice takes place in 1793. Most of the couples in this section have children in the 27-30+ year old range by the time of P&P, so imagine these courtships as taking place around 1763 or somewhat earlier).

Welp, after that endless dissection last week of the Bennets, their backgrounds, economic situation, and parenting skills, loosely framing and providing context for some speculation about what they were like as a courting couple, I will probably have to cover every other set of parents introduced or mentioned in P&P to equal it in length. Here goes…

-Elder Bingleys: We don’t have a firm fix on the ages of most of their children, and even the birth-order is a little wobbley. Bingley is not quite 22 when he comes to Netherfield, and it’s not clear what the references to Mrs. Hurst as “the elder sister” and Caroline as Bingley’s “younger sister” mean. Either Bingley is a middle child (possible, he has the peace-making disposition for it), or he is the youngest child with Mrs. Hurst as the eldest child (and elder of the sisters) and Caroline as the middle child (and younger of the sisters). I am inclined to think that Bingley is the youngest, with Mrs. Hurst around the age of Charlotte Lucas (27), and Caroline in her mid-twenties. For all her character failings Caroline just feels older and more poised than Elizabeth Bennet to me; easily four or five years older.

–Papa Bingley, we are told, came of “a respectable family in the north of England.” His fortune was acquired by trade. There was apparently a locksmith outfit with a name of Bingle or Bingley in Jane Austen’s time and apparently some people think the Bingleys of P&P were a reference to them. Papa Bingley thought about but never quite got around to buying his own estate. This is supposedly more typical of the second/third generation of a fortune made in trade but Sir William Lucas is said to have made his own fortune in trade and then turned around and sold his business to buy Lucas Lodge, so obviously there were exceptions. We could think of Papa Bingley as fairly good-looking, approachable guy, a bit like his son Charles,(1) but mechanically inclined, the younger son of country gentry Up North. His parents are pressuring him to go into the army or the clergy, but he would rather make locks.

–In the nearby market town, he befriends a fairly prosperous, socially ambitious locksmith, along the lines of the heroine’s father in Heyer’s A Civil Contract but in a different line of work. This man desperately wants Papa Bingley, with his genteel connections and surprising knack for locks, as part of his business and his family. He encourages his daughter(2) to take an interest in the young man, she initially rebels, but something he does makes a favorable impression on her, and from that moment she was firmly in his corner. Mama Bingley was probably a cynical, hard-hearted social climber surrounded by fortune hunters, but she loved Papa Bingley, and she and her father probably did a good job of protecting him from people who wanted to cheat him. There may have been some seemingly sweet but manipulative young woman from the lower gentry who was her rival for Papa Bingley’s affections, and some dimly remembered retelling of this love triangle shapes her daughters’ attitudes towards the Bennet girls. Mama Bingley was a good wife to her husband, and meant to be a good mother to her daughters, but ultimately wasn’t, since what she mostly passed onto them was the desperate importance of acting posh and moving up the social ladder.

-The Lucases: Sir William Lucas had quite a lively career before the start of P&P. He built a fortune in trade in Meryton, was elected mayor of Meryton at some point, and he got knighted on the strength of a speech he made before the king as mayor. Then he sold his business(3), and bought Lucas Lodge, in the vicinity of Loungbourn and Meryton.

–As of the start of the novel, he has two sons; one and probably both of them preteens(4), a daughter named Maria who seems to be newly “out” and around Kitty’s age (so sixteen-ish) and an older daughter named Charlotte, aged 27 and a friend of Jane Bennet (five years her junior) and Elizabeth Bennet (seven years her junior). I suspect Charlotte was born within a couple of years of her parents’ wedding, and that the decade-long gap between her birth and Maria’s conception had more to do with then-Mr. Lucas traveling a lot on business than any health problems on then-Mrs. Lucas’s part. Their younger children seem fairly close together in age, and it would be surprising for a woman in an era with such poor healthcare to become more successful in her pregnancies as she got older. Usually it’s the reverse.

–We have only two clues about how long ago Sir William was knighted; the novel says “some years ago” and Mrs. Bennet claims that the Lucas girls, shock horror, help out in the kitchen! Assuming she’s exaggerating instead of inventing, and with Mrs. Bennet that’s always an open question, then possibly Charlotte was raised to help in the kitchen and Maria was not. This implies that Charlotte was already fairly grownup when her father was knighted. If she was, say, twenty when the family became gentry, and came out into society then, her relatively advanced age (16-18 seems have been more usual) would have told against her, along with her “plain” looks and middle class background.

–William Lucas is an agreeable, obliging man with a tendency to foot-in-mouth syndrome that the local gentry probably tolerated better when they were buying stuff from him than when he became their social equal. He seems to have been a competent businessman, so either he was good at the pounds and shillings stuff or had amazing instincts about who to hire and delegate to. In spite of his naïve admiration for high-status people, I could see him being shrewd about people below him in status, so I incline to the latter.

–We hear less of his wife, although the impression I always come away with is of a practical, polite woman who has nothing against the Bennet girls but privately rather dislikes their mother. If Charlotte is a mirror of Lady Lucas, then Lady Lucas is a much more cynical and hard-headed sort of person than her husband. I think Lady Lucas was possibly the product of the marriage between a middle-class philanderer and a rather weepy, useless woman. She grew up with a poor opinion of men and a determination not to be a wimp like her mother. Young William Lucas, socially ditzy but business-savvy and notably un-sleazy, had a serious crush on her, proposed to her, and she accepted him because she didn’t like her other prospects. They’ve had a solid but fairly unromantic partnership ever since.

-Old Mr. Wickham and his wife: There are a couple of contradictory age indicators for Wickham, which make it hard to pin down when his parents married. On his initial appearance in Meryton, the narrator describes him as being in his early thirties…but we eventually learn that he leads a pretty dissipated lifestyle, which might make him look older than his chronological age. He claims to Lizzy at one point in the book that two years ago, when the Klympton living came available, he was “just of an age to take it up, which would make him twenty-four at the time (this being the youngest an Anglican clergyman of the period could take up a living) and twenty-six in the present-day of the novel. But he is of course the kind of guy who would try to shave a few years off his age. 28-yr-old Fitzwilliam Darcy merely says he and Wickham were “close in age,” which is is compatible with any age for Wickham in the four-year spread from age 26 to age 30. I tend to favor the idea of him being thirty, just because that’s the first thing said about his age. I also kind of like the idea of young Fitzwilliam Darcy seeing through Wickham and refusing to be guided by him even though Wickham is slightly older. It just seems to work with Darcy’s unbending temperament.

Old Mr. Wickham seems to have started out as a solicitor (Wickham explicitly compares his father to Mr. Phillips) but apparently became the very model of a manager of estates; probably the current steward of Pemberley was his assistant or apprentice back in the day. His employer, Old Mr. Darcy, was probably named George, since he stood godfather to George Wickham and godsons were at that time often named after the godfather. In any case, Old Mr. Wickham never built up much of a fortune due to the demands of an extravagant wife.

–It is occasionally speculated that George Wickham is the illegitimate child of George Darcy. I will say that it is the kind of thing that happened in that era, and the timeline sort of works: young, wealthy, unmarried country gentleman has a fling with a beautiful young woman who has an eye for the main chance, and he can only get her off his hands by settling money on her and marrying her off to his steward. Couple years later, country gentleman marries Lady Anne Fitzwilliam, who ignores any hints on the subject out of existence and makes sure her son never hears anything of the kind. Thirty-mumble years after the affair, the only living person who knows the truth is the illegitimate son himself. There are also vague parallels to the Earl of Gloucester subplot in King Lear, where the Earl is deceived and blinded by his illegitimate son and saved by his legitimate son.

—That being said, Jane Austen was a clergyman’s daughter, and although not shocked to meet an adulteress in society, she was horrified to see one taking communion. She seemed to feel that there are sinners everywhere, but one must not pretend that they are not sinners. I don’t think she would have let Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy’s unironic praise for his father stand, if George Darcy were the kind to father an illegitimate child. Also it puts a really horrifying spin on the Wickham/Georgiana near-elopement, which in this interpretation would be A LOT more sensationalistic than anything else she ever wrote. It is however possible that the “illegitimate Darcy son” narrative is one that George Wickham personally believes or half-believes, and insinuates as delicately as he can when the opportunity presents itself.

-As for Mr. George Darcy himself, once you dispose of the “fathering illegimate sons” accusation, there’s not much to be said about him. He was apparently a wealthy, wholesome, well-liked country gentleman, maybe not as polished as his son, but certainly with gentler, friendlier manners and a less judgmental mindset. He was probably one of the “many generations” who contributed to Pemberley’s mighty library. He was probably also tall and good-looking, and his surname suggests that his male-line ancestors came over with William the Conqueror.

-We actually know more about Lady Anne Darcy, born Lady Anne Fitzwilliam, than we do about her husband. Also, her sister Lady Catherine didn’t name her daughter (Anne) after herself, and it’s hard to imagine her granting that honor to anyone but her sister. We know Fitzwilliam Darcy’s mother would have been styled Lady Firstname because her sister Lady Catherine is as well, and this is a privilege they received as daughters of an Earl because that was how the protocols worked. We DO NOT know what her father the Earl was Earl of – Austen deliberately left that blank, and I’m not quite sure whether “Earl of Matlock” is an Andrew Davies invention (like Mrs. Bennet being named Fanny) or pure fanon.

–Lady Anne was possibly the oldest child, since she is deceased at the start of the novel but has two siblings living: Lady Catherine De Bourgh; and the current Earl,(5) father to Colonel Fitzwilliam and the latter’s older brother. The somewhat weird decision to give her maiden name as a first name to her son suggests that 27-28 years(6) before the start of the novel, her brother was seriously ill/injured and expected to die without issue, and so her son was christened Fitzwilliam in order that the name would carry on in some form. This in turn implies that Colonel Fitzwilliam and his brother were born only a couple years apart and are rather younger than Fitzwilliam Darcy. The fact that Colonel F. has a (bought and paid for) commission, in what is probably a ceremonial rather than a combatant regiment, means that his family has some money to put towards supporting him. The fact that he’s hanging out for a rich wife suggests that they don’t have tons of money to put towards supporting him. In other words the Earl’s family is potentially rather like the Bennets: not exactly the best financial minds of their class.

–If this was also going on in the previous generation, it explains a lot about Lady Anne and Lady Catherine’s marriages: they were encouraged to seek out wealthy gentry, who were a few steps below the ladies’ own social rank,(7) but who were eminently respectable and able to maintain the ladies in the style to which they were accustomed. In the case of Lady Anne Fitzwilliam and George Darcy, I think it was an actual romance, kind of a “nice guy defrosting the ice queen” scenario. I don’t think their son would have been capable of anything so crazy as proposing to a portionless girl on the lower end of the gentry, twice, if he hadn’t been brought up to believe that love matches were a real (if rare) thing, and a good thing so far as they went. Lady Catherine does not appear to be capable of romantic love, but people have a way of surprising you. I personally think she married Sir Lewis for purely pragmatic reasons. The De Bourgh refusal to entail property away from the female line possibly suggests that the family has a lot of trouble producing offspring who survive childhood, and can’t afford to be picky; this lines up with the fact that Anne De Bourgh is in poor health compared to her Fitzwilliam and Darcy cousins.

–In terms of personality, Lady Anne was probably midway between her arrogant sister and her easy-going husband. As a young single woman, she was perhaps something like her son: proud and reserved but with a fundamentally kind heart and a strong sense of responsibility. By the time of young Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth, his father has been dead about five years, and there is no suggestion that his mother was still living at that point, but when and how she died is not at all clear. Given the implication that the son is more like her and her sister in personality than his father, I think she must have been a fairly prominent part of Fitzwilliam Darcy’s life at least until he was a teenager or young adult. Therefore, she may have predeceased her husband by two to four years, but not much more than that. I don’t know what to make of the twelve(?) year age gap between Fitzwilliam and Georgiana. Possibly a period of bad health on Lady Anne’s part or her husband’s, or a period where there was a lot going on in her family (birth of Ann De Bourgh, for instance, possibly the death of Lewis De Bourgh) and she felt obliged to travel around and visit her relatives while her husband stayed put and looked after the estate with the help of Old Mr. Wickham. Someone invested in the idea of George Wickham as George Darcy’s by-blow could point to this as the period where she found out about the affair and was estranged from her husband, but that doesn’t have to be the reason, if you don’t want it to be.

So, there you have it: the rest of the parents from Pride and Prejudice. Try saying that five time fast!

(1) By the way, Papa Bingley was probably also named Charles, given the naming conventions of the period.

(2) probably a Louisa, like Mrs. Hurst.

(3) I would like to think he sold out to Young Mr. Gardiner, Mrs. Bennet’s brother and the Bennet daughters’ uncle, but I don’t know if the timeline supports that.

(4) Mrs. Bennet squabbles with one of them after he expresses a desire to be a hunting and drinking man when he grows up. The only thing we know about the other is that Mrs. Bennet has never mentioned him as a prospect, suitable or otherwise, for her daughters, and if he were of marrying age I’m sure the subject would have come up somewhere in the novel.

(5) At the time of Lady Anne’s marriage, this brother would probably have been Lord So-and-So or Viscount So-and-So, since their father was presumably still living.

(6) Darcy says towards the end of the novel that he was twenty-eight when Elizabeth rejected his first proposal at Hunsford, several months after the start of the novel.

(7) Note, however, that De Bourgh, like Darcy, is an Anglo-Norman name; in both cases the implication is that the families have been important people for six or seven hundred years.