Pride & Prejudice, ch. 25: We Need A Little Christmas

We begin with possibly the greatest gift of all: Mr. Collins goes away. Not permanently—he’s getting his house in Hunsford ready for its new mistress, and then he’ll be back to actually marry her. Though this tiding may give Charlotte some comfort, it brings zero joy to anyone else. 

Then we get some new faces, as Uncle and Aunt Gardiner from London pop over to spend the holidays with the Bennets. We like them because Mr. Gardiner is more with it than his sister, Mrs. Who Needs A First Name Bennet, and Mrs. Gardiner has a strong bond with the two best Bennet daughters (sorry, middle sister Mary and the tweebs). There’s a small aside here that Lizzy and Jane visit the Gardiners, and thus London, “frequently.” To my mind, this means that their world isn’t as small as Meryton and Hertfordshire and that Lizzy’s claim from several chapters ago that she had yet to meet “an accomplished woman” even in a place like London has some additional merit. You have to wonder if she’s encountered women like Miss Bingley instead—and if those women are all she’s ever encountered. This throws new light on Lizzy’s powers of observation and her experience with women from a more elegant background.

Mrs. Gardiner gets to hear Mrs. Bennet’s version of the daughters’ disappointing love lives, but knows better than to indulge her sister-in-law, which ensures that we like her even more. Aunt Gardiner feels bad for Jane and poo-poos Lizzy’s description of Bingley as “violently in love.”

Lizzy the Great Debater returns. Her opponent: the practical and slightly wiser Aunt Gardiner, who’s a bit more pointed than Jane in her argument, though no less respectful. Aunt Gardiner wasn’t around to witness Bingley’s “general incivility” to others as he grew more enamored with Jane, and as described by Lizzy … it’s not her strongest argument, measuring one’s infatuation with one’s disregard of others. Aunt Gardiner, unconvinced, proposes to invite Jane to London so that she might get out of her own head (and maybe get over Bingley), making it explicit (unlike certain movie and TV adaptations) that Jane shouldn’t expect to run into Bingley.

Lizzy fumes at the idea of Darcy not letting Bingley anywhere near a place like Gracechurch Street (as it’s so close to where the middle class—gasp!—conduct their financial affairs). And I’m racking my brain and leafing through the pages to try to suss out when exactly Lizzy first formed the hypothesis that “Mr. Bingley never stirs without [Mr. Darcy].” Is she basing this on the fact that she has almost always seen the two together? Darcy has been Bingley’s guest, though, not the other way around. As to Bingley bending to Darcy’s will, she herself actually witnessed the opposite: Bingley shut down a dispute Darcy was having with Lizzy. Even Wickham, her main source for Darcy’s backstory, talks about how Darcy likes to please others (though you can argue that that has a different context; in any case, it makes him sound a bit subservient). She’s even argued that the Bingley sisters share more of the blame than Darcy. Unless our intrepid Regency-era gumshoe eavesdropped on a very specific conversation, she has no direct basis for this new claim.

To be clear: the book proves that she is more right than she knows. Darcy does indeed heavily influence Bingley to stay away from Jane (for a not-wrong-but-still-unfair reason that we will discuss later). My point is that based on their interactions so far, Lizzy has at best circumstantial evidence that Darcy would influence Bingley (the conversation about the power of friendship being the primary bit of evidence). 

This is either an anger-fueled, misplaced, ill-judged accusation … or an incredibly on-the-nose conclusion meticulously drawn from observations about the men’s characters and shared dynamic over the course of several weeks.

Or both.

While Jane accepts the London invitation (hoping that she might see Caroline) and Mrs. Bennet is the hostess with the mostest (trying to prove to her elite relations that Longbourn is a hip and happenin’ place?), the festivities continue. One of the frequent guests is Wickham, whose “preference” for Lizzy is obvious to at least Aunt Gardiner. Our favorite aunt watches the two of them closely. You kind of get the feeling that she wishes she’d been around to see the progression of Jane and Bingley’s courtship, because she decides to have a talk with Lizzy later about “the imprudence of such an attachment” to Wickham. 

Anyway, it also turns out that Aunt Gardiner once lived in Derbyshire and that she and Wickham both have similar memories about the place. She’s seen Pemberley itself and remembers the elder Mr. Darcy with fondness (though they never met). After hearing Wickham’s story of mistreatment at Darcy’s hands, she searches for, and finds, a memory of “having heard Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy formerly spoken of as a proud, ill-natured boy.” It’s not exactly a smoking gun, but hey—with a conversationalist like Wickham and all this partying going on, it’s good enough. Right?

Soon to come: A positive female friendship, Charlotte extends an invitation, and letters from London.