16. Most visitors to Odessa know the great flight of stairs down the cliff to the harbour front. The granite stairway in Glasgow’s West End Park (erected in 1854 at a cost of £10,000) is equally substantial and handsome, but unfortunately in a corner where it is seldom seen and not much used by the public. Had it been erected nearer the central slope from Park Terrace it would have confronted Glasgow University across the narrow valley, and appeared to greater advantage.
17. The Russian gambler’s speech which starts: “Well,” he said with a rueful smile, and ends: “bed bugs too must have their unique visions of the world,” shows he was steeped in the novellas of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Bella could not have known this, as the great novelist had died the year before (1881) and was not yet translated into English.
18. According to The Scots Kitchen (by Marian McNeill, Blackie and Son, Bishopbriggs, 1929) this recipe omits two vital ingredients: half a teaspoonful of baking powder and a moderate amount of heat.
19. A meticulous search through the public records and newspapers of the period has unearthed no evidence that “Harry” Astley ever existed. All Scottish and several English readers will have raised their eyebrows on reading that he claimed to be a cousin of “Lord Pibroch”. Pibroch is the Gaelic name for bagpipe, and the Scottish College of Arms, like the English, insists that all titles are taken from place names. To a foreign ear, however, all decidedly Scottish names sound equally plausible, which indicates Astley was an impostor. No firm of sugar refiners called Lovel and Co. is listed in the commercial registers of the period. Who could Astley have been? Our only clue is in his undoubted links with Russia and his history lectures to Bella. These prove that behind his English façade lay no love of the British Empire. He was probably a Tsarist agent, visiting London to spy on the emigré Russian revolutionaries who sheltered there. Herzen and (much later) Lenin were the most famous of these. It is a good thing Bella refused Astley’s offer of marriage.
20. A midinette is a French work girl, especially a young milliner or dressmaker. Their wages were low but they often knew how to dress well, so moneyed men regarded their class as a source of cheap mistresses.
21. Charcot, Jean Martin (1825–93), French physician, born in Paris. He graduated as M.D. of Paris University in 1853, and three years later he became physician of the Central Hospital Bureau. In 1860 he was appointed professor of pathological anatomy in the medical world of Paris, and in 1862 he began his connection with the Salpêtrière which lasted all his life. He was elected to the Academy of Medicine in 1873, and in 1883 was made a member of the Institute. He was a good linguist and had an excellent knowledge of the literature of other countries as well as his own. He was a great clinical observer and pathologist. He spent much of his time in studying obscure morbid conditions such as hysteria in relation to hypnotism. His work at the Salpêtrière was chiefly in the study of nervous diseases, but besides his labours in the field of nerves he also published many able works on the subjects of liver and kidney diseases, gout, et cetera. His complete works came out in nine volumes between 1886 and 1890. He was extraordinarily successful as a teacher, and his many followers were most enthusiastic in their work. Dr. S. Freud was among his pupils.
Everyman’s Encyclopaedia, 1949, editor Athelstan Ridgway
22. This phrase means ‘blown up by my own bomb’. Shakespeare used it.
23. Bella misunderstood Mme Cronquebil’s dialect. The poor lady probably said ‘hole’.
24. This etching does not portray Professor Jean Martin Charcot, but Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac.
25. A scramble is a Scottish custom which operated thus: children would gather outside a house from which a bride or groom would be leaving to get married. When they did so the bride’s escort or the groom was expected to fling a handful of money into the crowd—if they did not the crowd would chant “Hard up! Hard up!” indicating that the person who had disappointed them was too poor to do the right thing. If a handful of coin was flung a wild crush would follow in which the strongest, most violent and ruthless children would grab the money and the weakest and smallest be left weeping with trampled fingers. This custom still prevails in parts of Scotland. Some modern conservative philosophers will think it good training for the world of adult competition.
Anyone who cares to try the experiment can easily walk from 18 Park Circus to Lansdowne Church in less than ten minutes by way of the park. The building (designed by John Honeyman) is of cream sandstone in the French Gothic style, with the most slender spire (in proportion to its height) in Europe. The sight of it so impressed John Ruskin that he burst into tears. The interior retains an unusual arrangement of boxed pews, and has two important stained glass windows by Alfred Webster relating biblical scenes to contemporary Glasgow. Both church and congregation date from 1863.
26. The popularity of George Geddes is proved by a comic song once performed in Glasgow music-halls. It describes a disastrous outing on a Clyde pleasure-steamer and ends with the line: “Send for Geordie Geddes ’cause the boat’s gawn doon.”
27. This story has been told and retold in so many nineteenth-century anecdotal histories of Glasgow that the original sources have themselves become the subject of an exhaustive monograph by Professor Heinrich Heuschrecke: War Frankenstein Schotte?, Stillschweigen Verlag, Weissnichtwo, 1929. Those who cannot read German will find the argument neatly summarized in Frank Kuppner’s Garscadden’s Gash, Molendinar Press, Glasgow, 1987.
28. The career of this once famous soldier began as well as ended under a cloud. At Sandhurst in 1846 a fellow student fell to his death in a prank Blessington initiated, though it was probably not he who untied the victim’s boot-laces. His family connections with the Duke of Wellington perhaps led to him being reprimanded instead of expelled. In 1848 the Duke was Lord High Constable of England and organizing the military against the Chartists in London. He employed Blessington as an aide, but found him unsuitable. Rigby in his Memoirs records the Duke saying to Lord Monmouth: “Aubrey is a brave and clever soldier, but only feels alive when killing people. Unluckily most soldiering is spent waiting to do that. We must send him to frontiers as far from England as possible. We should keep him there.”
The Duke died in 1852 but his advice was heeded. Blessington’s frontier victories (often won with the help of native troops) delighted the British newspapers. George Augustus Sala called him “Thunderbolt Blessington” in The Daily Telegraph. Though not popular with his own social class he was honoured by the Queen: in other words, Palmerston and Gladstone and Disraeli recommended him for honours. Meanwhile Parliament voted him thanks and money, though a radical M.P. sometimes suggested that he “pacified” territories with undue ferocity. Most writers liked him. Carlyle called him:
a lean skyward-pointing pine tree of a man, scraped branchless by storm yet every straight inch of him stretched heavenward because rooted in Fact. Good wood for a lance! Words are less than wind to him. Not strange, then, to find him dispraised in the pow-wows of the Westminster talking-shop. Would that the lance became a lancet to cut open the boil of putrescent parliamentary verbifaction and relieve the body politic of fever-inducing poisons!
Tennyson met him at a public banquet in support of Governor Eyre and was so impressed that he wrote The Eagle. Though many people know it, few realize it is a romantic portrait of the author’s friend:
THE EAGLE
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
But the finest poetic tribute to Blessington is by Rudyard Kipling, who believed the General had been hounded to his death by parliamentary criticism:
THE END OF THE THUNDERBOLT
The trappers round the Hudson Bay
don’t fear the half-breeds now.
In peaceful Patagoni
a the farmers drive their plough.
The wily Chinese traders pursue their gains in peace
Under justice dealt out cleanly by unbribable police;
While the founder of this industry, the giver of this gain,
LIES DEAD UPON THE GUN-ROOM FLOOR—
A BULLET IN HIS BRAIN.
There’s always room in parliament
for nincompoop and knave,
And sentimental radicals who do not love the brave.
A host of lukewarm “realists” like things the way they are,
But feel the men responsible have “often gone too far”.
Then there are men responsible,
the men who get things done,
And some, like Kitchener, we cheer;
some curse, like Blessington!
Let radical and “realist” sleep soundly in their bed.
BLESSINGTON’S ON THE GUN-ROOM FLOOR—
A BULLET IN HIS HEAD.
Many a peaceful settlement that Englishmen call home
Was once a howling wilderness where nomads used to roam.
Many a half-tamed tribesman
mines ore, shears sheep, breaks colt
Because his savage forebears were struck by Thunderbolt.
Yes, we scorched them with The Thunderbolt
but would not sniff the reek.
We lashed them with The Thunderbolt
but did not like the shriek.
We split them with The Thunderbolt and,
deafened by the crash,
We smashed them with The Thunderbolt.
Some shuddered at the smash.
Our kindly English stay-at-homes
like things genteel and fair;
They prefer the Danes to Nelson,
the blacks to Governor Eyre.
But argosies are bringing England
meat, wool, ore and grain.
SIR AUBREY’S ON THE GUN-ROOM FLOOR—
A BULLET IN HIS BRAIN.
After such eulogy it is not unfair to quote two less friendly references to him. Dickens was writing Dombey and Son in 1846 when he heard about Blessington’s lethal Sandhurst prank. It gave a hint for the conversation on the front at Brighton where Major Bagstock asks Dombey if he will send his son to public school:
“I am not quite decided,” said Mr. Dombey. “I think not. He is delicate.”
“If he’s delicate, Sir,” said the Major, “you are right. None but the tough fellows could live through it, Sir, at Sandhurst. We put each other to the torture there, Sir. We roasted the new fellows at a slow fire, and hung ’em out of a three pair of stairs window, with their heads downward. Joseph Bagstock, Sir, was held out of the window by the heels of his boots, for thirteen minutes by the college clock.”
Lastly, Hilaire Belloc’s caricature of an empire builder—Captain Blood—was based as much upon General Blessington as upon Cecil Rhodes:
Blood understood the native mind.
He said: “We must be firm but kind.”
A mutiny resulted.
I never will forget the way
That Blood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound,
Cast his lethargic eyes around
And said beneath his breath:
“Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.”
29. Had Dr. McCandless waited patiently until putrefaction had set in, his friend Baxter would have lost the rigor mortis, and in such a flaccid state could have fitted comfortably into a conventional coffin. But perhaps Baxter’s odd metabolism defied the normal process of decay.
30. Four books by Dr. McCandless apart from this one were printed in his lifetime at his own expense. Unlike Poor Things he sent copies of the following works to the Scottish National Library in Edinburgh where they are catalogued under his pseudonym, “A Gallowa’ Loon”.
1886 Whaur We Twa Wandered
Verses inspired by places in Glasgow associated with the courtship of his wife. One of these (headed “The West End Park Loch Katrine Waterworks Memorial Fountain”) is quoted in Chapter 7 of Poor Things and is by far the best.
1892 The Resurrectionists
This five-act play about the Burke and Hare murders is no better than the many other nineteenth-century melodramas based on the same very popular theme. Robert Knox, the surgeon who bought the corpses, is treated more sympathetically than usual, so the play may have influenced James Bridie’s The Anatomist.
1897 Whauphill Days
Reminiscences of childhood on a Galloway farm. Though purporting to be autobiography, this says so little about the author’s father, mother and friends that the reader is left with the impression that he never had any. The only character to be described in affectionate detail is an atrociously harsh “dominie” whose approval of the author’s scholastic abilities never mitigated the severity of the beatings inflicted on him. The bulk of the book describes the delights of “guddling” trout, “running down” rabbits and smaller vermin, and “harrying” birds’ nests.
1905 The Testament of Sawney Bean
This long poem in “Habbie” stanzas opens with Bean lying in the heather on the summit of the Merrick, from which he surveys the nation which has both enticed and driven him into cannibalism. The year is 1603, shortly before the union of the crowns. Bean is suffering from food poisoning, for he has recently eaten part of an Episcopalian tax-collector on top of a Calvinist gaberlunzie. The symbolism, not the comedy of this intestinal broil is emphasized. In his delirium Bean harangues apparitions of every Scottish monarch from Calgacus to James the Sixth. Figures from Scotland’s past and future appear: Fingal, Jenny Geddes, James Watt, William Ewart Gladstone et cetera, with finally, “a poet of futuritee, | Who loses, seeks, finds Scotland just like me, | Upon that day.” Here it becomes plain that Bean and his hungry family (soon to be arrested by the royal army and burned alive in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh) symbolize the Scottish people. The main difficulty with the poem (apart from its great length and dull language) is knowing what the cannibalism symbolizes. It may represent bad eating-habits which Dr. McCandless thought were once common in Scotland, for he addresses the reader as if the Bean clan had existed. A little research would have shown him it is neither in Scottish history or legend, folk tale or fiction. It first appeared in the Newgate Calendar or Bloody Malefactors’ Register printed in London around 1775. The other stories in the book were factual accounts of gruesome English murders committed in what was then living memory. The Sawney Bean story was told in the same factual style but set upon a wild Scottish coast nearly two centuries earlier. It was a fiction based on English folk tales: tales told by the English about the Scots during centuries when these peoples were at war with each other, or on the verge of it.
I have described these four worthless books in detail to discourage others from wasting time on them. They do, however, prove that Dr. McCandless had no creative imagination or ear for dialogue, so must have copied Poor Things out of highly detailed diary notes. The manuscript burned by his wife would certainly have proved this.
31. There is reason to think he had afforded it for fourteen years. In Chapter 22 Blaydon Hattersley is quoted as boasting that he was “employing half the skilled work-force of Manchester and Birmingham” ten years after he “smashed King Hudson”. George Hudson—known as the Railway King—was a very successful shares and property speculator until the railway mania of 1847-8 plunged him into ruin. This means Bella’s father became a millionaire when she was three.
32. The patent of the MacGregor Shand twin reciprocating gubernator sockets gave Blaydon Hattersley’s Steam Traction Company a lead over its competitors which lasted until 1889 when the Belfrage popper valve made gubernators obsolete. MacGregor Shand died of consumption in the charity ward of Manchester Royal Lunatic Asylum in 1856.
33. Dr. Victoria is mistaken. This anonymous folksong was neither written nor collected by Robert Burns.
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34. If Dr. Victoria had loved her husband more she would easily have seen why he wrote this claptrap. Archibald McCandless obviously wanted her to edit his book for publication. This, the only part of it which she had the experience and medical training to correct, was his way of asking for her collaboration. But she could not see it.
35. Bella Baxter’s later life was passed under the name Victoria, for in 1886 she used that name to enrol in the Jex-Blake women’s medical school of Edinburgh, and was made a Doctor of Medicine under that name by Glasgow University in 1890. In 1890 she also opened the Godwin Baxter Natal Clinic in Dobbie’s Loan near the Cowcaddens. It was a purely charitable foundation, and she ran it with a small staff of local women trained by herself. These were continually leaving and being replaced, for she employed nobody more than a year after she had trained them. To a devoted employee who did not want to leave she said, “You are a great help to me but there is nothing more I can teach you. I enjoy teaching my helpers. Go away and help your neighbours, or work for a doctor who can teach you something new.”
Several of her helpers enrolled as nurses in the city hospitals, but not many did well because (as one ward sister said) “They ask too many questions.”
Between 1892 and 1898 Dr. Victoria bore three sons at two-yearly intervals, each time continuing her clinical work until the last two or three days of her pregnancies and starting again very soon after. She said, “That’s how the poor women I treat have to do it—they cannot afford to be horizontalists. And I am luckier than most of them. I have a very good wife in my husband.”
The Fabian Society published her pamphlet on public health in 1899. It was called Against Horizontalism, and said that many doctors wanted patients laid flat because it made the doctors, not the patients, feel stronger. She agreed that rest in bed was essential to the healing of many diseases, but said childbirth, though painful, was not a disease, and came more easily in a squatting posture. She advocated birthing-stools of a sort used in the eighteenth century. She also said horizontalism was a mental as much as a bodily state. It assumed that the inner workings of the body were sacred mysteries only doctors could understand, so good patients should have unquestioning faith in them. She said:
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