1880s

In Poor Things, the 1880s are the decade in which a drowned woman’s story becomes entwined with medical practice, marriage, and women’s education. Its dated milestones move from the recovery of an unidentified body in 1881 to Bella Baxter’s enrollment in medical training as Victoria McCandless in 1886, while the surrounding scenes question who has authority to define health, identity, and professional competence.

Chronology and Turning Points

The sequence begins just before the decade: on 29 August 1879, Archibald McCandless enrolls at Glasgow University as a medical student, where Godwin Baxter works as an assistant in the anatomy department. On 18 February 1881, a pregnant woman’s body is recovered from the River Clyde. Godwin, acting as police surgeon, certifies death by drowning and records her as about twenty-five, tall, dark-haired, blue-eyed, fair-complexioned, and well dressed, with hands unused to rough work. Though her body is advertised, no one claims it. The novel’s later account identifies the woman who came to consciousness at Godwin’s home as someone other than the wife General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington recognizes; reports discussed in the story attribute her amnesia to a skull injury and the loss of an unborn child. A civil marriage contract dated 10 January 1884 records Archibald’s marriage to Bella Baxter, a spinster of the Barony Parish. The ceremony takes place at 18 Park Circus, where the bride, groom, Godwin, and housekeeper Ishbel Dinwiddie all reside. The record fixes a public, legal identity for Bella within the same household where the drowned woman’s story began. On 2 September 1886, the woman who married under the name Bella Baxter enrolls at the Sophia Jex-Blake School of Medicine for Women under the name Victoria McCandless. The change of name and the move into medical education make the decade’s chronology a hinge between her uncertain beginnings and an independent professional future.

Medical Authority and Hospital Practice

The decade’s events unfold alongside a sharp critique of Victorian medicine. Godwin argues that public hospitals train doctors to obtain money from the rich by practicing on the poor, and that patients with means instead seek private treatment or care at home. He recalls that his father, Sir Colin Baxter, operated in the family’s town house in winter and country house in summer, boiled instruments, and sterilized the operating theatre when hospital boards were still rejecting or denouncing aseptic practice. Godwin presents such resistance as evidence that professional standing and public medical practice do not guarantee good care. His account invokes Ignaz Semmelweis, whose antiseptic practice in a Viennese maternity hospital reduced the death rate from twelve per cent to one and a quarter per cent. The note on Semmelweis records that his superiors rejected his conclusions, forced him out, and that he died of septicaemia in a mental hospital in 1865. This earlier history gives Godwin’s criticism a concrete precedent: medical knowledge can be resisted by the institutions it would reform. Godwin also elevates nursing over the medical profession, claiming that if doctors and surgeons in Scottish, Welsh, and English hospitals suddenly died, eighty per cent of patients would recover so long as nursing continued. The novel presents this as his forceful judgment, not as a neutral statistical finding. It nevertheless clarifies why he would have Bella begin in nursing before advancing to medical study: in his view, practical care is a foundation that the profession has wrongly subordinated.

Women’s Education and Professional Ambition

The 1880s chronology gives particular weight to the obstacles facing women who sought medical training. Godwin says that only four women doctors are then practicing in Britain, all with degrees from foreign universities. He connects the prospect of change to the Enabling Bill of 1876 and the work of Sophia Jex-Blake, noting that Dublin University has opened its doors to women and predicting that Scottish universities must soon follow. Victoria’s 1886 enrollment supplies a specific institutional outcome to that broader account. Godwin’s proposed route is deliberately practical. He offers to return to work in the charity wards of an east Glasgow infirmary if Bella will enroll as a trainee nurse, and says that strong performance could lead to work as his theatre nurse. He argues that doctors and surgeons should be recruited from nursing or begin their careers in it, and insists that manual work should form the primary training for every British profession. His plan treats education not simply as access to lectures, but as experience of patients and the labor of care. The ambitions attached to this training are also specific. Bella wants to help little girls, mothers, and prostitutes, and intends to teach women modern contraceptive methods. Godwin and Archibald advise her to keep that intention private until she can practice, and to wait until she has several years of clinical experience before arguing publicly for birth control. The advice exposes a tension within the decade’s movement toward professional inclusion: the route into medicine may create opportunities, while the social risks of openly advocating reproductive knowledge remain substantial.

The Decade as Documentary Frame

The book’s date-stamped records present the 1880s as an evidentiary structure as much as a setting. Births, deaths, marriages, and enrollment are placed beside reported speech and disputed accounts, so that dates appear to stabilize a story whose central identity remains contested. The marriage contract establishes Bella Baxter in law; the 1886 school record identifies the same woman as Victoria McCandless. Rather than making the two names interchangeable without remainder, the chronology lets the reader see how a public record can certify a name while leaving the history behind it unresolved. The decade thus gathers the novel’s medical and social conflicts into a sequence of institutions: the anatomy department, the police surgeon’s report, the hospital, the marriage register, and the women’s medical school. Each records or classifies a life, but none alone explains it. The movement from an unclaimed body in 1881 to a woman entering medical education in 1886 gives the period its decisive significance: it traces both the power of official forms to define people and the possibility of using medical knowledge to contest the limits placed on them.