Mr. Collins is one of Jane Austen’s most wonderful creations. We see her genius for comic satire at its best in the actions and words of this pompous, puffed-up parson.
He is presented as a ridiculous churchman more interested in living well in his “valuable” new position and kowtowing to aristocratic benefactor Lady Catherine de Bourgh, than in devoting his life to spiritual matters.
He is a caricature of a proud and conceited person. Full of vanity and self-importance, he enters the record books for making the worst marriage proposal in English literature to Elizabeth Bennet. When he fails there, he simply switches attention to Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte Lucas and marries her instead.
His unsuitability as a clergyman is shown by his unsympathetic letter to the Bennets following Lydia’s elopment with George Wickham. In it he cruelly suggests: “The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this.”
Writing in the British newspaper The Observer, literary editor Robert McCrum described Collins “a vile, self-centred social mountaineer.” He called his opportunism “gruesome – and ludicrous.” Mr. Collins one of the most universally ridiculed characters in literature and film.
Five key Mr. Collins quotes with analysis that help explain the pompous parson:
“Mr. Collins was eloquent in her praise. The subject elevated him to more than usual solemnity of manner, and with a most important aspect he protested that he had never in his life witnessed such behaviour in a person of rank – such affability and condescension, as he had himself experienced from Lady Catherine. She had been graciously pleased to approve of both of the discourses which he had already had the honour of preaching before her.”
“In spite of your manifold attractions, it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made to you. Your portion is unhappily so small that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications.”
“An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.”
“Mr. Collins is a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man; you know he is, as well as I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who married him cannot have a proper way of thinking.”
“”You ought certainly to forgive them as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing.”