London

London functions in Poor Things less as a destination than as a threshold: a place where journeys are arranged, expectations collide, and a woman’s possible escape is weighed against the material conditions of her life. It connects Duncan Wedderburn’s account of elopement and travel with Victoria McCandless’s recollection of the marriage and medical crisis that preceded her arrival in Scotland.

A Junction in Duncan Wedderburn’s Account

In Wedderburn’s account, London marks the point at which his hopes of marriage and his plans for a continental honeymoon become entangled. He believed Bella Baxter would soon become his wife and had obtained a passport naming them as husband and wife, intending to make travel easier. He insists that he expected no financial gain from marrying her; what he hoped for was a modest annual allowance that would let him maintain the style of life Bella had enjoyed with Godwin Baxter. The passport therefore embodies both practical planning and Wedderburn’s mistaken confidence that he understood Bella’s intentions. His proposed route also reveals how readily he treats the journey as a prelude to marriage. He had persuaded a registrar in Kilmarnock to wait up and marry them during a break in their train journey. Before they reached Crossmyloof, however, Bella told him she could not marry him because she was engaged to someone else—not someone from her past, but someone in her future. London-bound travel thus carries Wedderburn toward a ceremony he has arranged without securing Bella’s agreement. The reversal is not merely a delay in his plans: it exposes the gap between his possessive certainty and Bella’s independent understanding of their relationship. At the southern terminus of the Midland line, Wedderburn again asks Bella to marry him, supposing that their recent intimacy may have changed her answer. She instead recalls her refusal and turns to the immediate business of food and rest, ordering an ample breakfast of porridge, bacon, eggs, sausages, kippers, buttered toast, and sweet milky tea. Wedderburn has not slept for twenty-four hours and stumbles as they approach reception; Bella, by contrast, seems as fresh as when they left Glasgow. The station hotel is consequently a pause in the journey but not a romantic resolution. Bella notices his exhaustion and arranges for breakfast to be served in their room, while her refusal remains unchanged.

Travel Arranged, Expectations Reversed

Wedderburn’s intended quiet stay in a Breton fishing village gives way to the prospect of Amsterdam when Bella asks where they should go first. He chooses the destination, then falls asleep. By ten the next morning, Bella has gone to the Thomas Cook agency with his wallet, arranged an afternoon boat to the Hague, paid the hotel bill, packed their bags, and carried them to the foyer. Only Wedderburn’s dressing case and a fresh suit remain. The practical details make London a staging point for departure, but they also reverse the roles implied by his plan: he has imagined himself directing a honeymoon, while Bella takes charge of its arrangements. That reversal continues when the tired Wedderburn demands breakfast in bed. Bella tells him that breakfast will be downstairs shortly and lays out the successive stages ahead: cab, train, boat, another train, and another cab. Her brisk itinerary treats the journey as a chain of manageable connections; his fatigue makes each one feel like an ordeal. London’s importance lies in this contrast between the elaborate future Wedderburn has presumed—a marriage, a honeymoon, and financial support—and the concrete travel Bella actually organizes. The passage presents neither a settled homecoming nor a marriage ceremony there, but a departure whose direction and pace are increasingly hers.

London in Victoria McCandless’s Earlier Life

Victoria’s recollection gives London a different, more consequential association: it is where medical advice and marital authority converge. After three hysterical pregnancies, she begs for a clitoridectomy. Dr. Prickett tells her that a skilled Scottish surgeon in London might perform it; the procedure is one her husband, General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington, wants for her. Godwin Baxter visits her, hears her account of childhood, schooling, and marriage, and challenges the assumption that an operation will solve her predicament. He tells her that she has been badly treated by men, while also observing that they have themselves been badly educated. He advises her not to undergo the operation and promises to explain his view to Prickett, while making clear that Prickett may reject it. The scene places Victoria’s body at the centre of a dispute over who is entitled to define its problem and prescribe its treatment. The proposed operation appears to Victoria as a response to a life shaped by other people’s demands, rather than as a remedy she has freely chosen. Godwin does not simply offer an immediate escape: when she asks where she can go, he warns that leaving her husband without money, work experience, or a friend to shelter her would be suicidal. His answer makes material dependence part of the crisis, even as his intervention gives Victoria a different account of her suffering and a possible future source of refuge.

From a London Promise to Refuge in Scotland

Victoria tests that possibility by asking whether Godwin could refuse shelter to a homeless, desperate, friendless woman who came to his home in Scotland after he had once treated her kindly. He says he could not. She leaves knowing that his address, which she expects to find in a British medical directory, is the practical detail she still needs. The exchange turns a hypothetical question into a conditional plan: Godwin cannot remove her from her circumstances at once, but his promise establishes a destination beyond the marriage. Two months later, Victoria arrives in Glasgow after learning that the husband who would not give her a child is about to have one with a servant ten years younger than herself. Godwin receives her without questioning her and brings her to Mrs. Dinwiddie, introducing Victoria as a badly treated lady who will stay until she can afford a home of her own. His welcome gives material effect to the earlier promise. London therefore stands at the beginning of a route from medical and marital constraint toward refuge, while the account’s movement to Scotland supplies the consequence that the London conversation could only propose.

Narrative Significance

These London episodes belong to distinct strands of the book: Wedderburn narrates the failed marriage plans and outward journey, while Victoria later recounts the circumstances that led her to Godwin. Their juxtaposition makes the city a point of passage between presumed dependence and practical agency. Wedderburn arrives with a passport that presents Bella as his wife before she has consented; Victoria leaves a conversation with Godwin carrying an address that may let her escape a marriage she cannot safely leave without help. In both cases, plans and promises acquire meaning through what happens next: Bella directs the travel rather than accepting Wedderburn’s marital script, and Godwin’s offer of shelter becomes real when Victoria reaches his Glasgow home. London’s narrative significance rests in these divergent departures and in the distance between what others arrange for a woman and the choices she makes for herself.