Agnes Beatrix Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I think there is a difference between Mr. Collins
> saying Lydia should be shunned and excluded from
> the family because receiving her would be "an
> encouragement of vice", a cold-blooded,
> hypocritical, uncharitable attitude, and Mr.
> Bennet not wanting to see her because he was angry
> with her (not a very noble sentiment but
> understandable). Anyway, he was softened (because
> Jane and Elizabeth persuaded him that it would do
> better for the family's reputation to pretend that
> the marriage was accepted by the family), and by
> the time Lydia and Wickham arrived he didn't act
> on this anger at all.
If you are suggesting that perhaps as a father betrayed by a daughter's infamy and disregard for any values he thought he had taught her, Mr. Bennet had more right to be upset with Lydia and to wish her not soon in his sight, he can be better understood than Mr. Collins, whose justification could be only mean-spirited self-righteousness -- yeah, I see that.
I still think that as a father, Mr. Bennet, who ignored his daughters except to call them silly and did not spend time improving their minds as it was in his power to do, is not a good example of a responsible and caring patriarch. If his family's reputation had been ruined by Lydia's impulsive and self-destructive elopement, it would really have been Mr. Bennet's fault. The barely 16-year old Lydia, who could have been left high and dry by Wickham in London had Darcy not intervened, was the gun blowing the family reputation to smithereens, but Mr. Bennet's indolent disregard was the finger on the trigger.
Mr. Collins as as painted by Jane Austen is no prize. He is not cuddly, cute or in any way admirable. Should the Bennet family have treated him nicer because he was the heir to family home? Should they have bowed and scraped and offered up one of their daughters because he had been told by Lady Catherine to find himself a wife? Well, it would have been in their mercenary self-interest. As it was, he probably ended with a better wife than he deserved in Charlotte. We can only speculate how their marriage fared over the years.
