Freedom

Freedom in Poor Things is not a secure possession but a contested measure of power: who can refuse, who must submit, and who profits when another person is called free. Harry Astley argues that liberty has meaning only in relation to slavery, then follows that definition through household life, labor, empire, and trade. His critique strips patriotic language of its comfort, while Bella Baxter’s resistance to his cynicism prevents his account from becoming the novel’s final word.

Astley’s Definition and Its Limits

Astley tells Bella that the idea of freedom arose only after slavery had been invented. He points to the ancient Greeks, who debated monarchies, aristocracies, plutocracies, and democracies while keeping slaves, and to the Roman republic and the squires who founded the United States. Across those varied political systems, formal differences did not remove the underlying condition of ownership. For Astley, freedom’s surest definition is therefore non-slavery, not a country’s preferred constitution or its claims about itself.

That definition turns the patriotic refrain Rule, Britannia! into an uncomfortable test. Its promise that Britons will never be slaves sounds less like proof of universal liberty than a declaration whose meaning depends on who counts as a Briton and whose bondage is ignored. Astley traces that contradiction through British conduct: in 1562 Sir John Hawkyns began the British slave trade by taking enslaved Africans from the Portuguese and selling them to the Spanish in the New World. Parliament made the trade a criminal offence in 1811, and Bella welcomes the later abolition of slavery in the United States. Astley immediately distinguishes legal abolition from economic independence. Modern industry, he argues, prefers to hire workers only for the days or weeks they are needed; when work disappears, those workers must beg other masters for employment, giving employers power to lower wages.

Education, Poverty, and Compelled Dependence

Astley also treats the lessons children receive as preparation for unequal social relations. Very poor children learn to beg, lie, and steal because survival may require it. Children of prosperous families, by contrast, are taught that such acts are wrong, then educated through institutions that celebrate conquerors and rulers who killed and plundered. In his account, schooling does not simply transmit moral rules: it helps make an unjust world seem normal, even as the powerful who benefit from it condemn the conduct poverty forces on others.

His explanation of unemployment makes the same material point on a national scale. After the Napoleonic war, widespread hunger and joblessness led a parliamentary committee to consider the possibility of revolution. Robert Owen proposed that businesses earning profits above five per cent should use the surplus to improve workers’ food, housing, and schooling instead of undercutting competitors. Astley contrasts this proposal with Malthusian reasoning that better-fed poor people would have more children. He presents hunger, disease, and infant mortality not as accidental failures of the system but as conditions that weakened the poor and reduced the likelihood of revolt. Military barracks, police forces, jails, and deliberately grim poor-houses complete his account of a society that manages poverty through coercion and deprivation. Freedom is hollow where people’s alternatives are shaped by hunger, separation from their families, or fear of punishment.

Trade, Empire, and National Liberty

Astley challenges the idea that economic freedom is automatically a common good. He describes Britain’s parliamentary version of free trade as the liberty to buy cheaply and sell dearly anywhere, backed by the army and navy. That freedom belongs chiefly to merchants and the state that protects them; its effects fall on the people whose livelihoods are displaced. Indian weavers, once makers of fine cotton cloth and muslin, lost markets as British merchants first excluded French competition and then used cheaper machinery-produced cloth to dominate trade. British industry sought Indian cotton and Angora wool while restricting the sale of Indian cloth. Astley recalls a governor’s report that the plains of Dacca were strewn with weavers’ bones, making the human consequence of commercial advantage impossible to disguise.

Ireland offers a related example of property and policy overriding people’s need to live. Eight out of ten Irish people, Astley says, depended on potatoes, while rent went to landlords descended from English conquerors who owned the rich land where corn grew. When disease destroyed the potato crop, a proposal to close Irish ports until Irish grain had fed the Irish people was voted down in the name of free trade. Soldiers ensured that grain reached ships instead. Nearly a million people starved, and one and a half million left the country. In Astley’s telling, the language of national liberty cannot redeem a system in which people are denied food because their poverty makes them unprofitable customers.

Gender, Work, and the Possibility of Agency

Astley’s critique of freedom also enters the household. He describes wealthy wives as public ornaments and private sources of pleasure whose children are cared for by servants, separating them from both paid labor and much of the work of motherhood. His comparison with women laboring in Lancashire weaving-sheds makes clear that class changes the form of women’s constraint without guaranteeing autonomy to either group. He proposes marriage to Bella while acknowledging that law would make her his slave, even as he claims she would not be one in fact. The proposal exposes a sharp limit in his argument: a personal promise cannot erase the legal inequality built into marriage.

Bella’s prospects for medical training offer a more practical, though still conditional, route toward action. Baxter says there are only four women doctors in Britain, all trained at foreign universities, but notes that the Enabling Bill of 1876 and Sophia Jex-Blake’s work have helped open medical education to women. He proposes that Bella begin as a trainee nurse in an east Glasgow infirmary, then assist him in the operating theatre if she succeeds, so that later lectures will rest on practical experience. Bella wants to care for little girls, mothers, and prostitutes and to teach women modern contraception. Baxter and Archibald McCandless advise her to keep that intention private until she can practise, and to delay public argument for birth control until she has qualified and gained clinical experience. Her agreement is not unconditional: they accept that the length of any waiting period must be her choice. The exchange places freedom in the concrete questions of professional access, bodily knowledge, and who has authority to set the terms of a woman’s work.

Bella’s Counterargument and a Broader Measure

Astley sorts people into the innocent, the complacently optimistic, and the cynical: those who see suffering and explain it away, and those who recognize life as fundamentally painful. Bella rejects the choice between innocence and cynicism, telling him that she is no longer innocent but hates what both he and Dr. Hooker believe. That refusal matters to the concept of freedom. Astley is incisive about the structures that make dependence look like choice, but his conviction that suffering is the permanent truth risks making opposition seem futile. Bella’s insistence on another possibility leaves room to identify injustice without accepting it as inevitable.

Across Astley’s lessons and Bella’s developing ambitions, freedom is measured less by declarations than by material power: the ability to eat, to keep one’s livelihood, to learn a profession, to direct one’s work, and to resist another person’s control. The novel’s examples repeatedly show that a legal or national promise of liberty can coexist with coerced labor and restricted choices. They also suggest that freedom is incomplete if it names only independence from a master and ignores the conditions that let people care for one another and shape their own lives.