“It is a great satisfaction to us to hear that your Business is in a way to be settled, & so settled as to give you as little inconvenience as possible.” This remark reminds me of Mr. Bennet’s thoughts “could Wickham be prevailed on to marry his daughter, it would be done with so little inconvenience to himself” in P&P.

If everyone has already noticed this I apologize, but I only noticed it at this moment. The name Wickham might be a clue to his “wicked” ways and his penchant to “ham” up a story to his own benefit. To prove it I started searching the net and came up with the following:

wickham
English: habitational name from any of various places so called, for example in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Hampshire, Berkshire, and Oxfordshire. It has been established that wicham was an Old English term for a settlement (Old English ham) associated with a Romano-British town, wic in this case being an adaptation of Latin vicus. Childswickham in Gloucestershire bears a British name with a different etymology. The surname is now also common in Ireland, where it was taken in the 17th century. (Surname Guide at Surname Web)

Vicus: Collectively, a row of houses in town or country, a quarter of a city, a street or A village, hamlet, a country-seat: (Perseus Project on Line Latin Lexicon)

Ok, ok—I was only foolin—I did know that ham meant town but when I saw vicus I thought well-well, but was finally crushed to see that Wickham is really just sort of town-hamlet or town-village or some such rubbish. :)