Mrs. Fitzpatrick knows a lot of stuff, useful and useless alike, and Miss Ball and Miss Osborne are fond of asking for her scholarly opinion on all sorts of things. Now you can too, using the contact form on the About page. Send us your questions! Ask Mrs. Fitzpatrick will answer anything related to the world of the books, the books themselves, P.G. Wodehouse, math, or Star Trek. Jane Austen (deceased) will comment on your personal problems in What Would Jane Do? We’d love to hear from you!
Miss Osborne: Miss Ball’s recent Jane Austen Fight Club post got me thinking about duels in the Jane Austen world. Duels were going on during that time period (the Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton duel was in the early 1800s), so why didn’t Mr. Darcy call out Wickham for a duel? Clearly, Darcy had the right. Were most duels just between equals? Or are there other reasons why dueling would not be an appropriate response to Wickham’s treachery? (It’s not like Darcy had to worry about looking like a dork—á la Mark Darcy versus Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones’s Diary—when all he has to do is walk a few paces and pull a trigger.)
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Ah, dueling. I was once hailed by a passing stranger as “the swordsman’s girlfriend,” so I’m well-fitted to answer this. And the swordsman himself dumped five books on the history of dueling in my lap the instant I mentioned this query. The romance of the sword lives to this day, even when the sword is a gun (if you follow).
By the time Jane Austen was writing, dueling in Europe was an upper-class game of machismo on its way out—it was a game only among equals, though, yes, and taken seriously as a show of honor among them, though ridiculed in the press. In America, actually, dueling was much more serious (we had the Old West to prepare for, remember), and people died a lot more, like poor Hamilton. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it in 1831, “In Europe one hardly ever fights a duel except in order to be able to say that one has done so. . . In America one only fights to kill. . .”
In Sense and Sensibility, Colonel Brandon fights just such a European duel with Willoughby over his seducing Miss Williams (Col. Brandon’s not-daughter). “‘I could meet him in no other way. . . We returned unwounded, and the meeting, therefore, never got abroad.’ Elinor sighed over the fancied necessity of this; but to a man and a soldier she presumed not to censure it.” Some people have seen this duel as the crux of the plot, and it is part of the 18th century side of the novel, along with the seduction itself, Marianne’s dramatic illness, and Willoughby’s drunken declaration of love.
In Pride and Prejudice, remember, there is a question of somebody fighting Wickham, but it isn’t Mr. Darcy—it’s the ironical Mr. Bennet, framed nicely by his adoring wife: “And now here’s Mr. Bennet gone away, and I know he will fight Wickham, wherever he meets him, and then he will be killed, and what is to become of us all?” Nine pages later, “Sure he will not leave London before he has found them. Who is to fight Wickham, and make him marry her, if he comes away?”
Mrs. Bennet’s always so silly that I don’t think we’re supposed to take either proposition seriously. Pride and Prejudice has much less of 18th century flavor than Sense and Sensibility. Yet I really can’t tell whether Mr. Bennet himself would have wanted to duel Wickham or not, though I’m inclined to think not. He was too sensible, and the whole idea was to hush the thing up, anyway.
And this, I think is our answer to why Mr. Darcy doesn’t challenge Wickham over the honor of Georgiana. He did have the right, and he was of the class (and, I imagine, the temperament) to be dueling, but, he tells Elizabeth, on discovering the proposed elopement “You may imagine what I felt and how I acted. Regard for my sister’s credit and feelings prevented any public exposure. . .” Unless this is a coded indication that they did fight (as the fanfic authors no doubt go off on), his love for his sister overcame his ideas of his station in that way, just as (guess what!) his love for Elizabeth later overcomes his ideas of his station in another way.
Plus, imagine the scandal if it all did come out—too shocking! Mr. Darcy never revealed anything to anyone if he could help it.
For more on dueling, see The Code of Honor, by John Lyde Wilson, 19th century governor of South Carolina and avid duelist.
austenacious 
Many thanks, Mrs. F! I’m so embarrassed that I don’t recall any mention of a Brandon-Willoughby duel that I’m grabbing Sense and Sensibility off my shelf to start re-reading tomorrow. I think I’ve only read it once. (I know…for shame. What the hell kind of Austen fan am I?)
Also, you must thank Mr. F for his kind loan of dueling books. I suspect that you simply mentioning that you needed info about dueling made him love you all the more. 🙂
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Thank you! Most enlightening. I figured it was probably because a duel would have been far too public.
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You’re welcome, Sandra. The funny part was I had deduced all this, and then went to look in P&P where Darcy’s talking about it, and he says it flat out. 🙂
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Cool post! I was just reading the second volumne of the annotated P&P when I came across this post. The editor provides several details as related to duels, which I thought I’d add here because I found your post really interesting. The notes are as related to Lydia/Wickham and Mrs. Bennet’s concern about Mr. Bennet fighting Wickham, but they are more generally able to be related to Mr. Darcy/Wickham (we’ve already seen Colin Firth’s sporting a sword in P&P2). In Vol. II, Chapter V, note 8, the editor states that often duels did not result in wounds or death, but were fought to force the offending party to remedy the wrong, or marry the woman he had seduced. Of course, Georgiana’s relationship with Wickham hadn’t made it to that point, so Mr. Darcy certainly wouldn’t have wanted to force Wickham to marry her, and there was little to be done to remedy the wrong. It was better to let is pass unnoticed by others. (which of course, is just what you said above!)
Also, in chapter VI, note 22, we’re told that dueling was considered illegal, but that it was still socially acceptable and that most British “authorities would have turned a blind eye,” especially in the case of a woman’s virtue. Shapard, the editor, points to several references of dueling in 1808 and 1809, including one between the Secretaries of War and Foreign Affairs over a war policy dispute. Ah, the good old days – wish our American government would duel with swords for a bit. It’d be more exciting than the constant war of words.
Oh, and Miss Osborne: I didn’t remember the duel being mentioned in S&S – but the 2008 S&S adaptation has a full scene of the duel, which feels wildly out of place, despite it being mentioned in the text.
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Lannie, thanks for all the additional info! Fascinating.
I never saw the 2008 S&S, but I can see the duel *would* feel out of place – all that stuff is very much in the background for Austen. We don’t *see* Willoughby off seducing unfortunate maids or any of that stuff.
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Lannie – If the US government took up dueling, C-SPAN would be SO much better. I approve.
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I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who completely missed any references to a duel when reading S&S. When I saw that scene in the new movie adaptation, my first thought was “How ridiculous and out of place. Why on earth did the screenwriter put that in there?” Now it appears I owe said screenwriter an apology.
Despite the Alexander Hamilton affair (and I love that you have the link to that commercial, because that’s where I first learned about the duel when I was younger) I’d never really thought about the fact that dueling was still done and that Darcy could have fought Wickham. I just thought that Mrs. Bennet was being melodramatic and old-fashioned when she talked about Mr. Bennet fighting Mr. Wickham. Knowing that Darcy could have fought that cad twice but didn’t makes me like him so much more. What a gentleman.
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