I don’t know that anyone can read both Nicholas Nickelby and Pride and Prejudice without comparing the maternal figures featured in each. In the cozy, but substantial niche of “embarrassingly foolish mothers,” these two reign supreme as the most prominent and perhaps most troublesome. But the question remains; which one is worse?

For my part, and somewhat to my surprise, I have to say that I find Mrs. Nickelby exponentially more irritating than Mrs. Bennet.

Superficially, I think you’d have to call Mrs. Nickelby the more pleasant character, in that, ditzy as she is, she’s at least reasonably polite and well-bred and is capable of flashes of remorse and self-reflection (I can’t picture Mrs. Bennet letting Smike stay ten minutes without non-stop grumbling). Even so, I find Mrs. Bennet to be much more palatable and even more sympathetic.

Partly this is because the former is written by Charles Dickens and the latter by Jane Austen, and Miss Austen simply was better at creating real, fleshed-out people than Dickens. Dickensian characters are famously delightful, but they’re delightful as exaggerations, caricatures, types. Austenian characters are delightful as fully-fledged human beings. What eccentricities or oddities they have are firmly within reasonable limits. At least that’s my assessment.

And really, these two are a good example of this, being more or less the same character type breathed through two different hands, each of which belonged to a genuine literary genius.

Mrs. Nickelby is foolish, but she’s more than foolish; she’s so vain and susceptible and obtuse that most of the time she seems only somewhat aware of what’s going on around her. Mrs. Bennet is foolish too, but hers is a less extreme, more naturalistic foolishness. I can’t picture her failing to see that the man throwing vegetables into the garden is obviously a lunatic just because he flattered her vanity, for instance.

In both books there’s a sequence where the heroine is pursued by a thoroughly unworthy suitor whom the mother perfectly approves of. In Nickelby, Kate is subjected to the officious and leering attentions of the evil Sir Mulberry Hawk (arguably the most monstrous character in the book, and remember this is the one with Dotheboys Hall). Mrs. Nickelby, taken in by the extremely obvious flattery of Hawk and his cronies and delighted with any prospect of Kate’s making a good match, thoroughly approves, being completely blind to her daughter’s misery (partly that’s because Kate doesn’t simply tell her, but we’ll let that be).

In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth is pursued by Mr. Collins, her bootlicking clergyman cousin. Mrs. Bennet is delighted because that would solve two problems at once; marrying one of her adult daughters off quite advantageously and securing the entailed estate within the family circle. The fact that Lizzy regards Mr. Collins with thoroughly justified contempt fails to enter into her calculations.

In the former case, Mrs. Nickelby is contributing to a genuinely dangerous situation for her daughter – whom she does love – out of her stupidity and vanity. In the latter, Mrs. Bennet is pushing her least-favorite daughter to accept an unhappy marriage on the grounds that it will solve real, practical problems (and, at the end of the day, Mr. Collins is only an idiot, not a villain). The latter situation is less serious and Mrs. Bennet has stronger reasons for her actions, while also being better aware of what she’s even doing, which to my mind makes Mrs. Bennet come across as the more sympathetic.

The point isn’t whether Mrs. Bennet would or would not have fallen for Sir Mulberry’s false face (probably she would have, but Lizzy wouldn’t have scrupled to undeceive her). The point is that what each story actually gives the character to work with leaves Mrs. Bennet coming off by far the better.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that the whole situation in Nickelby is, ultimately, Mrs. Nickelby’s fault, since she’s the one who pushed her husband into speculating with their savings, resulting in his losing it all. Not only does she never acknowledge this, but she’s always blaming him for not taking her advice. This is played more for laughs than anything, but it nevertheless adds to how irritating she can be and sinks her considerably in my mind.

Mrs. Bennet, on the other hand isn’t directly responsible for the situation in Pride and Prejudice (unless you count her failure to produce a son). She makes it worse and nearly spoils their chances of getting out of it, but the whole mess is not her doing in the first place as is the case with Mrs. Nickelby, and she’s at least keenly aware of the problem (if anything too aware of it). Nor, so far as I recall, does she ever blame her husband for it, even though he acknowledges his own part in it by failing to save more.

That’s the sort of thing I mean; both characters are annoying, troublesome, and are usually a loadstone upon the protagonist’s neck, but Mrs. Nickelby is much more directly and emphatically so, while Mrs. Bennet is more incidentally so. Put it this way; if Mrs. Nickelby had died a year or so before the story began, the central problem would never have arisen at all. If Mrs. Bennet had died a year or so before, the same issues would have remained, just with fewer obstacles to their solution.

This is why, for all that if you met them in person, Mrs. Bennet would almost certainly be the more unpleasant, I find her a much better character than Mrs. Nickelby. Mrs. N’s antics are so troublesome that, to me, they suck most of the entertainment value out of her ramblings. Mrs. B only rarely gets that extreme (e.g. the Lydia episode); most of the time I find her drama-queen irrelevancies to be hilarious.

In any case, I think it makes for an interesting comparison.