Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

first woman doctor to graduate from Glasgow University, a name only known to historians of the suffragette movement nowadays, though she had once written a Fabian pamphlet on public health.

Bella/Victoria Baxter McCandless

By 1974 . . . surviving members of the McCandless dynasty will have two grandfathers or four great-grandfathers, and will easily laugh at the aberration of one. I cannot laugh at this book. I shudder at it and thank the Life Force that my late husband had just this single copy printed and bound. I have burned . . . the original manuscript and would have burned this too, as he suggests . . . but alas! it is almost the only evidence left that the poor fool existed. He also paid a small fortune for it. . . . I do not care what posterity thinks of it, as long as nobody now living connects it with me.

So, he doesnt stay wth Bella like the movie AND is an unreliable narrator!

I have also insisted on renaming the whole book POOR THINGS.

TITLE

Furthermore, no book needs two introductions and I am writing this one.

Period

I also told Donnelly that I had written enough fiction to know history when I read it. He said he had written enough history to recognize fiction. To this there was only one reply—I had to become a historian.

I have collected enough material evidence to prove the McCandless story a complete tissue of facts.

Victoria Hattersley three years earlier, and neither her legal separation from him nor her death were ever recorded.

Is her name Victoria and not Bella in this?

and Bella Baxter,

The woman who married Archibald McCandless M.D. under the name Bella Baxter, enrols in the Sophia Jex-Blake School of Medicine for Women under the name Victoria McCandless.

AHHHH so shes Victoria, tben Bella, then takes back her given name. And denies this account because of tbe details of her creation.

and will gradually fit in by a process of instinctive imitation.”

Godwin Baxter was the only one I talked with as an equal because (I still believe) we were the two most intelligent and least social people attached to the Glasgow medical faculty.

“Sir Colin’s lack of interest in female beauty was legendary,” one of the gossips told me, “but his offspring proves he had a peculiar appetite for female ugliness.”

wow what a yo mama joke

does life mainly evolve through small gradual changes, or through big catastrophic ones?

“Medicine is as much an art as a science, but

Morbid anatomy is essential to training and research, but leads many doctors into thinking that life is an agitation in something essentially dead.

“The public hospitals are places where doctors learn how to get money off the rich by practising on the poor. That is why poor people dread and hate them, and why those with a good income are operated upon privately, or in their own homes.

They drove poor Semmelweis mad, he committed suicide through trying to broadcast the truth.

Really loving how historically accurate and intertwined the knowledge of the times is here.

“They have indeed—thanks to good nursing. Our nurses are now the truest practitioners of the healing art.

Shoutout Shawn

The one in my hands suddenly felt terribly precious. I set it carefully down on the grass and gazed at Baxter with awe, admiration and a kind of pity. It is hard not to pity those whose powers separate them from all the rest of us, unless (of course) they are rulers doing the usual sort of damage. I think there were tears in my eyes as I said, “How did you do it, Baxter?”

“If medical practitioners wanted to save lives,” said Baxter, “instead of making money out of them, they would unite to prevent diseases, not work separately to cure them. The cause of most illness has been known since at least the sixth century before Christ, when the Greeks made a goddess of Hygiene.

Makes me think of the Jewish diaspora in England during the Black Plague due to their cleanliness and hygiene practices surrounding religious rituals, ie hand washing.

“Exactly! So until we lose our worldwide market British medicine will be employed to keep a charitable mask on the face of a heartless plutocracy.

Commentary on capitalistic gain under the guise of public health endeavors AND a global marketplace!

All you hunger for will be obtained: wealth, respect, companions and a fashionable wife.

Foreshadowing

A cold grue went through me—I was unable to touch such a hand. I shook my head wordlessly at him, and he suddenly smiled as he had done in earlier days when I winced at the sound of his voice. He also shrugged his shoulders and shut me out.

He pitied him for his otherness, and continually tried to force Baxter to let him in, yet when confronted with his otherness/weirdness can't help but judge.

This was twenty years before Jannsky identified the main blood groups, so we could not even transfuse blood.

“Partly, yes, but the greatest part is a skilfully manipulated resurrection.”

he wanted her to enjoy seeing, hearing and handling as many things as possible.

Baxter is characterized as being advanced in medicine, but also showing here child brain development

“You reason beautifully, Bell,” said Baxter, “but have still to learn that most names are not reasonable.

A fantastical riff on Frankenstein merely in the way of resurrecting human life. All other aspects ESPECIALLY the care in which Baxter takes to care for and nurture Bella are a complete 180 from the neglect and hubris of Shelley's Dr F

“Either she was carrying the child of a husband she hated or the child of a lover she had preferred to her husband, a lover who abandoned her.”

I knew nothing about the life she had abandoned, except that she hated it so much that she had chosen not to be, and forever!

Glasgow—second city of Britain for size and foremost for infant mortality—few parents can afford a coffin, a funeral and a grave for every dead wee body they own.

When we last met, Baxter, you boasted in the heat of a quarrel that you were devising a secret method of getting a woman all to yourself, and now I know what your secret is—abduction! You think you are about to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages: the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman.

Why should I seek elsewhere for a compatible brain when her body already housed one? But you need not believe this if it disturbs you.”

I am a collector of childhoods since that collision destroyed all memory of my own.”

Bella has all the resilience of infancy with all the stature and strength of fine womanhood.

That message means she is not disturbed by an event which would upset you or me. Rather than thwart her you trusted her to Duncan Wedderburn. Better trust her to herself, now.”

Yes, Goethe and Irving knew that Modern Man—that Duncan Wedderburn—is essentially double: a noble soul fully instructed in what is wise and lawful, yet also a fiend who loves beauty only to drag it down and degrade it.

My affair with Bella was Faustian from the start, the intoxicating incense of Evil was in my nostrils from the moment you foisted me onto your “niece”. Little did I know that in THIS melodrama I would play the part of the innocent, trusting Gretchen, that your overwhelming niece was cast as Faust, and that YOU! YES, YOU, Godwin Bysshe Baxter, are Satan Himself!

All things are possible for a witch. Suddenly she said, “Promise when you get to Glasgow that you tell God I will soon want the candle.” I promised, although I thought the message gibberish—or more witchcraft. This letter discharges that promise.

Mephisto Baxter,

Cackling

In Venice I collapsed, rolled down the steps of San Giorgio Maggiore into the lagoon, thought I was drowning and thanked God for it. I woke up in bed with Bella again. I was seasick. We were in a first-class cabin of a ship cruising the Mediterranean.

HAHAHAAAHAAA

Yet I still thought her kind! GUFFAW! GUFFAW!! GUFFAW!!! Yes, you damnable Baxter, let the violence of your laughter split your damnable sides! I still believed my Angelic Fiend was kind!

Im cracking tf up

“How astonishing to see you Lady Blessington, when did you arrive? Why did you not call on us at once? Do you not remember me? Surely we were introduced four years ago, at Cowes, on board the Prince of Wales’ yacht?” “How wonderful!” cried Bella. “But most folk call me Bell Baxter when I’m not with my Wedderburn.” “But surely—surely you are the wife of General Blessington who I met at Cowes?”

A glimpse into Bella's real past

YOU know, and I NOW KNOW what it REALLY is—a witch mark. Yes! The female equivalent of the mark of Cain, branding its owner as a lemur, vampire, succubus and thing unclean.

Hes lost it

So I know who your niece is now, Mr. Baxter. The Jews called her Eve and Delilah; the Greeks, Helen of Troy; the Romans, Cleopatra; the Christians, Salome. She is the White Daemon who destroys the honour and manhood of the noblest and most virile men in every age. She came to me in the guise of Bella Baxter. To King Louis she was Madame de Maintenon, to Prince Charlie she was Clementina Walkinshaw, to Robert Burns she was Jean Armour et cetera and to General Blessington she was Victoria Hattersley.

Out witted, out sported, and not needed by a woman ~must~ make her evil... Poor old DW, what a sad man

Lucifer Baxter?

Please 😭✋🏻

You would have been burned as a warlock for that when Scotland was a Spiritual Nation, GOD-SWINE BOSH BACK-STAIR, BEAST OF THE BOTTOMLESS PIT!!!!! You probably do not know you are Antichrist, for none are as deluded as the damned, so the Father of All Lies is condemned to know himself least of all.

The Scarlet Woman on the Beast’s back holds a golden cup full of abominations. I do not exactly know what the cup is nowadays because Bella disliked wine and spirits, but if you and I meet and discuss the matter calmly surely we will find something?

lol

I never drank alcohol in my Casanova days, for a devotee of Venus must abjure Bacchus.

“Can we do nothing to save that poor fellow’s sanity?” “Nothing,” said Baxter crisply.

He's Icharus

poor creature. Bell is not.”

Title