Was Lydia Bennet Kidnapped? Part One: the "Kid" in Kidnapping and the Age of Consent
A legal perspective on Pride & Prejudice's infamous elopement
The 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride & Prejudice imagines Lydia and Wickham hiding away in London together before their eighteenth-century equivalent of a shotgun wedding: Lydia, very self-satisfied, and Wickham, clearly anxious and already regretting his choice to run away with such an annoying girl. Lydia fondly runs her fingers through Wickham’s hair, tugging at the roots, as she stands behind him and smilingly declares,
Lord, it makes me want to burst out laughing, when I have done what none of my sisters has. And I, the youngest of them all!1
Wickham’s grave expression, contrasted by Lydia’s elation, presents a heavy scene rife with sexual implication. Oh, Lydia, what have you done, at sixteen years old, that none of your sisters has?
For the modern reader, Lydia and Wickham’s elopement can create a lot of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, Lydia absconds with Wickham willingly, even gleefully; Andrew Davies, the screenwriter for the 1995 adaptation, clearly took inspiration for this hotel scene from Lydia’s letter to her Brighton hosts. She writes, “What a good joke it will be .. [w]hen I write to [my family] and sign my name ‘Lydia Wickham.’ … I can hardly write for laughing.”2 On the other hand, she turned sixteen only a month prior to the elopement.3 My modern conscience tends to see Lydia as just a kid, incapable of deciding to elope with anyone—let alone a man at least ten years older than her.
But what about Austen’s (not-modern) readers? The tone of the text and the reactions of the Bennet family make it clear that this is a scandal. Why? Because the pair ran off without getting engaged? Because the parents didn’t bless the marriage? Because it creates ambiguity about Lydia’s chastity? Or was she, to Regency-era people as well as to us, just too young?
My research suggests that while Lydia would not be considered a child (and therefore not a victim of pedophilia) by eighteenth-century standards, Austen’s portrayal of the elopement flew in the face of contemporaneous ideas about sexual maturity and readiness for marriage. Ultimately, the text implies that sexual maturity is an insufficient metric to determine the prudence of marriage for girls and women, and that emotional maturity must be taken into consideration.
The Boundaries of Childhood and Delineating Consent
Without question, the law in the long eighteenth century sought to protect children from sexual abuse.4 Sarah Toulalan, in her article “‘Is He a Licentious Lewd Sort of Person?’ Constructing the Child Rapist in Early Modern England,” asserts that “[s]ex with a child was … understood as both physically and morally abusive” even though “explicit ideas about child sexual abuse” had yet to be articulated.5 Before I started researching this topic I had no idea how recent the concept of pedophilia is: the word “pedophile” did not even enter the English language until 1904.6 When reading Austen, it’s important to remember that she literally did not have the vocabulary available to her to discuss the perverse and predatory phenomenon of attraction to children.
Today, statutory rape and minimum marriage age laws use intellectual readiness as the marker of ability to consent. Do you know what you are saying yes to? is the essential question of modern consent law.7 In the early modern period and throughout the Regency, however, the question of consent centered on physical readiness, positing the question Is your body capable of producing children? Because sexual maturity was the metric of a girl’s ability to consent, the age of consent was set to 12 years old—the youngest age at which a girl could possibly achieve maturity by starting puberty. Toulalan writes,
Girls under the age of 10 were understood to have not yet arrived at sexual “ripenesse”: the changes of puberty that brought the growth of breasts and pubic hair, the onset of menstruation and the first stirrings of sexual feelings were thought to usually occur around the age of 14, sometimes at 12 but very rarely (and unusually) before that.
Marriage to twelve-year-old girls, then, was not seen as perverse, inappropriate, or abnormal, as long as “the bride … [had] undergone the physical changes of pubertal development.”8
By this standard, Lydia could unequivocally consent to marriage. The text makes clear that Lydia is at a minimum pubescent by describing her as “stout,” “well-grown,” and “‘the tallest [of the Bennet sisters].’”9 Physically, Lydia was not a child; and while there are no explicit references to sexual feelings (unsurprisingly), Lydia is a characteristic flirt. When she imagines what her trip to Brighton will be like, Lydia “[sees] herself seated beneath a tent, tenderly flirting with at least six officers at once.”10 By hinting at her pubertal development and sexual desire, the text leaves little room to question Lydia’s readiness for marriage as defined in this period.
Austen Redefining Consent as Cognitive
Lizzy naming Lydia’s age as a factor in her decision to elope simultaneously confirms that she can consent and implies that she should not be able to. When asked if she thinks Lydia could be convinced to live with Wickham without marrying him, she responds,
"[I]t is most shocking indeed … that a sister's sense of decency and virtue in such a point [would be in] doubt. But, really, I know not what to say. Perhaps I am not doing her justice. But she is very young; she has never been taught to think on serious subjects; and for the last half-year, nay, for a twelvemonth—she has been given up to nothing but amusement and vanity.11
Lizzy is reverse engineering the fallen dominoes that led to this moment: Lydia is young, she is emotionally immature, has been allowed to continue in this immaturity, and now has made a terrible decision that follows naturally from such a sequence. Austen reveals the disconnect between physical and intellectual maturity to assert that allowing emotionally immature girls like Lydia to consent puts them at great risk.
To conclude her train of thought about Lydia’s age and immaturity, Lizzy pivots to a discussion of her seducer, stating, “‘[W]e all know that Wickham has every charm of person and address that can captivate a woman.’”12 Revisiting his appeal underscores how little chance Lydia stood against him. If he can captivate Lizzy (assuredly the “woman” she refers to here), how much more capable is he of captivating a foolish girl like Lydia?
I should clarify that Austen’s stance is not wholly modern. She depicts several happy partnerships between individuals with large age gaps, some larger than that between Lydia and Wickham (e.g., Marianne Dashwood (16) and Colonel Brandon (35)). To Austen, age factors into a larger calculation that includes physical, intellectual, and emotional readiness. The text also does not support a reading that a woman of any age who is “ready” for marriage could reasonably hitch herself to some ancient guy. The depiction of Lydia and Wickham’s elopement concerns itself more with the lower limit of eligibility for marriage because the law did not provide adequate protections for young women.
In the next article of this miniseries, I’ll be discussing what options would have been available to the Bennets for legal action against Wickham. Did they have a case for abduction, seduction, or both? The standard of consent established in this article, alongside further textual evidence and caselaw, suggests that Mr. Bennet could have sued Wickham for “seducing” Lydia. Yes, seduction was a thing you could sue over, and yes, you heard me right, Mr. Bennet could sue (not Lydia). I’ll elaborate in the next piece!
I’ve thought about this for a long time. I will be following the other articles!
This was so interesting to read - it feels difficult to pinpoint what is going on with Lydia, and therefore all the more worth trying!