What Did Lydia Bennet Get for Marrying Wickham?

Austen gives the price herself, in a letter from Lydia’s aunt, and follows Lydia past the wedding to the last chapter of the novel. The rest of the record comes from William Blackstone’s statement of English law, the army pay table of 1800, historians of marriage law, and Ellen Turner, a real girl taken by almost the same method in 1826. Every modern value is converted the same way, explained in note 1.¹

How old was Lydia when she ran off with Wickham?

Sixteen. Austen introduces her in chapter 9 as “a stout, well-grown girl of fifteen,” but the trip to Brighton comes about a year later, and when the marriage is announced her mother says “she was only sixteen last June.”² Ellen Moody’s calendar of the novel agrees.³

The girl in the story who really was fifteen is Georgiana Darcy, whom Wickham nearly carried off at Ramsgate the year before. “She was then but fifteen,” Darcy writes, and Wickham’s “chief object was unquestionably my sister’s fortune, which is thirty thousand pounds,” about £2.7 million, or $3.5 million, today.⁴ Next came Mary King, who had just inherited £10,000 (about £900,000, or $1.15 million, today) and was courted until she went to stay with an uncle in Liverpool.⁵ Both girls had money, and both had a relative paying attention.

Who was meant to be watching her in Brighton?

A bride barely older than she was. Lydia went to the militia camp at Brighton as the guest of Mrs Forster, the colonel’s wife. “This invaluable friend,” Austen writes, “was a very young woman, and very lately married.” Lydia had known her for three months and been close to her for two.⁶

Did anyone warn Mr Bennet?

Yes, and in detail. Elizabeth went to her father and set out “all the improprieties of Lydia’s general behaviour,” and the likelihood of worse “at Brighton, where the temptations must be greater than at home.” He heard her out and answered:⁶

“Lydia will never be easy till she has exposed herself in some public place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with so little expense or inconvenience to her family as under the present circumstances.”

When she pressed him, he added that Colonel Forster would keep Lydia out of real mischief, and that “she is luckily too poor to be an object of prey to anybody.”⁶

The law had already described the danger. Blackstone, whose Commentaries were the standard statement of English common law through this period, gives a parent’s duties as “maintenance, protection, and education.” Protection meant, first, “protecting his children from the snares of artful and designing persons.”⁷ A father’s authority lasted until a child turned twenty-one. Blackstone ties the duty to maintain a child to a legal remedy, but gives none for the duty to protect one. A father who failed at it answered to his family and to no court.

How much did it cost to make Lydia respectable?

More than £2,000, and Darcy paid all of it in secret. Mrs Gardiner’s letter to Elizabeth gives the terms: “His debts are to be paid, amounting, I believe, to considerably more than a thousand pounds, another thousand in addition to her own settled upon her, and his commission purchased.”⁸

The debts were owed to creditors in Meryton and Brighton.⁹ The settlement was a deed, drawn up by an attorney, that usually placed the sum with trustees, apart from the husband’s direct control.¹⁰ The commission moved Wickham out of the militia, the county home-defense force, into the regular army, where an officer’s place was bought for cash. Austen never gives its price. A regulation table of 1837 put an ensign’s commission in an infantry regiment at about £450 (about £40,000, or $52,000, today), an estimate carried back a quarter of a century.¹¹

The money at a glance

With the commission counted as an estimate, the rescue came to roughly £2,450 to £2,500, about £220,000 to £225,000 (or $281,000 to $288,000) today. The family were told Mr Gardiner had paid. Mr Bennet’s own share was Lydia’s £1,000 of the family settlement, payable only after both parents died, and £100 a year while he lived. He reckoned he “would scarcely be ten pounds a year the loser,” since her board and pocket money had cost nearly as much.¹²

Wickham’s pay shows why the marriage had to be bought. A militia ensign drew 3s 8d a day on the official 1800 table, about £67 a year.¹³ (A shilling, written s, was a twentieth of a pound; a penny, d, a twelfth of a shilling.) The debts he left behind came to roughly fifteen years of that pay.

Was Lydia still ruined after the wedding?

No. Austen’s last chapter says that “she retained all the claims to reputation which her marriage had given her.”¹⁴ The wedding itself was lawful and ordinary. Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, in force from March 25, 1754, had ended the trade in quick marriages by prison clergymen. After it, an English marriage took place in a parish church, after banns read on three Sundays or by license, which gave no public notice.¹⁵ Austen does not say which the Wickhams used.

Why did they go to Newcastle?

Because it was far away. Mr Gardiner’s letter reports the promise of “an ensigncy in General––’s regiment, now quartered in the north,” and hopes that “among different people, where they may each have a character to preserve, they will both be more prudent.”⁹ Afterward Mrs Bennet tells Bingley, “They are gone down to Newcastle, a place quite northward it seems.”⁹

Newcastle was a real garrison town, though its barracks at Fenham, finished in 1806, were built for cavalry and artillery, and Austen never names Wickham’s regiment.¹⁶ The army did not house officers. Barracks held the enlisted men and a few soldiers’ wives, chosen by drawing lots to go “on the strength” of the regiment. An officer found lodgings in the town and paid for them himself.¹⁷ Austen’s account of what followed is short:¹⁸

“Their manner of living, even when the restoration of peace dismissed them to a home, was unsettled in the extreme. They were always moving from place to place in quest of a cheap situation, and always spending more than they ought.”

Could the Bennets have sued Wickham?

Not on the grounds people usually name. Breach of promise needed a promise and a refusal, and once the wedding happened there was nothing to sue over. Criminal conversation was a husband’s action against his wife’s lover, and Lydia had no husband when she ran away. The Tudor statutes against abducting a minor were triggered by the girl’s inheritance, and an eventual £1,000 was far below what they were written to protect. The age of consent stood at around eleven until reforms in 1875 and 1885.¹⁹

The one tool a father had was a suit for seduction, brought as “loss of services.” The legal fiction was that the daughter was her father’s servant and the seducer had cost him her work.²⁰ A gentleman’s daughter had to be treated in law as household staff before the case could be brought. Mr Bennet brought nothing.

What did marriage take from her in law?

Her separate existence. In Blackstone’s words, “by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law.”²¹ A wife could not own property, sue or make a contract in her own name, and what she brought to the marriage became his. Her one lever was buying household necessaries on his credit, and he could cancel even that by publishing a notice.²²

Suppose you had married a man like Wickham in these years and wanted out. England had no divorce court until 1857. A church court could separate you, without the right to remarry, if you proved adultery or cruelty. A full divorce took a private Act of Parliament, and of 318 granted before 1857, four went to women. Walk out without any of that and you lost your claim to support and had no claim on your children.²³

What happened to the real girl taken the same way?

Her father went to law. Ellen Turner was fifteen, the only child of a wealthy Macclesfield silk manufacturer, at school in Liverpool. In 1826 a forged letter said her mother was gravely ill. Edward Gibbon Wakefield drove her north under a false name, told her that only marrying him could save her father’s business, and married her at Gretna Green under Scottish law. At Carlisle the inn staff described her as “a picture of misery.” Her sworn words, reported in The Times on May 27, 1826: “it was against my will and inclination; but I told him, if it was the only thing that would save my papa, I would consent.”²⁴

William Turner did not pay anybody off. Both Wakefield brothers were tried at Lancaster in March 1827 and sentenced to three years. No English church court could undo a valid Scottish marriage, so Turner went to Parliament, and the Act annulling it passed on June 14, 1827.²⁴ In January 1828, at seventeen, Ellen married Thomas Legh, a member of Parliament, of Lyme Hall in Cheshire.²⁵ She died in childbirth about three years later, aged nineteen, and left a daughter, Ellen Jane.²⁴

Lydia’s afterward is one paragraph. Wickham’s “affection for her soon sunk into indifference: hers lasted a little longer,” and she visited Pemberley “when her husband was gone to enjoy himself in London or Bath.”¹⁸

The film ends by asking which mattered more to a girl of sixteen, the reputation or the marriage, and whether the answer would hold at thirty. That conversation is open in the comments on YouTube.