If you like Pride and Prejudice, you probably remember Mr Collins? He’s the odious clergyman who asks lovely heroine Elizabeth Bennet to marry him. She refuses.

He’s one of the most ridiculed characters in English literature. Jane Austen portrays him as dull, foolish, toadying, awkward and pompous. He makes inane remarks (“what excellent boiled potatoes”) and can’t dance. The woman who eventually marries him, Charlotte Lucas, does so not out of love but because she’s fast becoming an old maid...