Readers, let’s chat.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick sent me this listing from Etsy, prompting a moment of daydreamy bliss followed by the sharp shock of reality. (It’s a hard world in which we live, people.) Heaven knows we at Austenacious are fans of Brooke and her shop, and this is a really cool shirt—but a teeny, tiny, whispery voice of dissent persists. While any gentleman wearing this sort of t-shirt on the street would, obviously, get the automatic “how you doin’?” treatment from this lady, two things stand out:
1) Mr. Darcy would never actually wear such a shirt. And I don’t mean because it has short sleeves and no collar and—gasp!—words on it; I mean that half the reason Mr. Darcy is Mr. Darcy is that he isn’t into self-promotion. This is a man who swears everybody to secrecy anytime he does anything nice, which is surprisingly often—and if he’s willing to go to all that trouble just to hush everybody up about the occasional midnight douche-hunting expedition, somehow a braggy t-shirt doesn’t seem…quite right.
2) I don’t care if he’s alone: there’s no way this guy’s single. There just isn’t.
austenacious 
For no good reason that I can think of, I keep hearing the words “I am Spartacus!” in my head now. Perhaps it’s just time to go to bed.
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To give credit where credit’s due, my friend Mrs. Collins sent me the link. 🙂 (And no, she doesn’t need any sympathy! Her Mr. Collins is VASTLY superior to Jane Austen’s!)
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On the other hand, so many of us would be thrilled to meet a gentleman who actually knows who Mr. Darcy IS, that we’d be willing to overlook small things like silly self-promoting shirts.
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It’s an adorable picture, but I just can’t think of any guy that would be willing to wear the shirt!
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But maybe Mr. Darcy would appreciate the fact that this shirt means he doesn’t have to introduce himself to people he doesn’t know; he does, after all, feel that he is ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers. 🙂
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