Victoria McCandless (Bella Baxter)—Blaydon Hattersley

Victoria McCandless (Bella Baxter)—Blaydon Hattersley is a father–daughter relationship shaped by violence, economic power, and the training of women for service to others. Victoria recalls Blaydon as the father who cracked her skull with his fist, while his household taught her that a daughter’s prospects could be arranged around obedience and marriage. Her later insistence on learning exposes the small but consequential opening through which she begins to imagine a life beyond his authority.

Family Authority and the Household

In Victoria’s account, Blaydon’s authority is apparent not only in his treatment of his daughter but in the way he directs the whole household. When her mother asks whether he has obtained the patent, he does not explain the matter to her; instead, he tells her to sit down, stop twisting her hands, and wait. He orders brandy for himself and sherry for his wife, then leaves her with the assurance that what he has secured is solid. The exchange places his business and decisions beyond the family’s discussion, while his wife’s nervous question and uneasy compliance show how little room she has to challenge him.

Blaydon’s handling of Victoria’s brother Noah makes the same authority more unsettling. When Victoria asks whether she can see him, Blaydon says that nobody sees Noah now and that there is little left of him to see. He offers no further explanation. Instead, he rebukes Victoria’s mother for failing to behave in a ladylike manner and tells her to ask Mabel to teach her how to sit, dress, stand, walk, and speak. He praises the housekeeper’s influence, even claiming she has taught him a few new tricks. The scene gives the household’s female members roles to perform, while Blaydon retains the power to decide what may be known about Noah and when the conversation is over.

Violence, Neglect, and the Request to Learn

A fortnight later, Victoria encounters her father on the stairs and tells him that her mother drinks every day because she has nothing else to do. Blaydon dismisses the distress behind the report: if his wife wants to kill herself in that way, he says, he sees no reason to object, provided she does it quietly in her parlour. His response treats her decline as acceptable so long as it remains private and does not inconvenience him. When he asks what Victoria wants from him, she answers that she wants to read books and learn about things. The request is strikingly modest beside the neglect she has just described, but it asserts a desire of her own rather than another household duty.

Blaydon agrees, and a week later Victoria is taken to a convent school in Lausanne. That agreement changes her circumstances, but it does not erase the violence that has preceded it or make the education she receives emancipatory. Looking back, she distinguishes the lessons imposed by her mother from those imposed by the nuns: one prepared her to be a working man’s domestic slave, the other to be a rich man’s domestic toy. Her father’s permission thus opens a route out of the home without freeing her from the social arrangements that have made her useful to others.

The Body as a Record of Their Relationship

Victoria’s recollections of childhood give Blaydon’s power a physical history. She remembers her fingers aching after she scrubbed filthy clothes in freezing water, and her head aching after her father cracked her skull with his fist. These memories sit beside the repeated piano exercises and memorized passages demanded by her convent education. The experiences are different in setting and purpose, she insists, but pain connects them. Her father’s violence is therefore not an isolated detail in an otherwise orderly childhood; it belongs to a broader life in which her body and attention are directed by other people.

The doll’s house through which Godwin Baxter later helps Victoria interpret these memories makes the connection explicit. He sets the scullery maid, who scrubs and mangles laundry, beside the master’s daughter at the piano. The girls could be the same person, he observes, if their dress and hair were changed, but their positions in the household keep them apart. Asked what they share, Victoria answers that both are used by other people and are allowed to decide nothing for themselves. The lesson does not excuse Blaydon’s violence or collapse the differences between the girls’ lives. Rather, it gives Victoria a way to connect the domestic labor and bodily punishment of her early home with the polished training intended to make her an ornament and future mother in another household.

Wealth, Education, and the Relationship’s Afterlife

The patent that occupies the early household exchange later acquires a wider significance. A retrospective account says that the patent for the MacGregor Shand twin reciprocating gubernator sockets gave Blaydon Hattersley’s Steam Traction Company an advantage over competitors until the Belfrage popper valve made gubernators obsolete in 1889. The same account infers from Blaydon’s later boast that he employed half the skilled workforce of Manchester and Birmingham that he had become a millionaire while Bella was three. This later information places the family’s private hierarchy beside the industrial wealth that supports it: Blaydon’s decisions have consequences far beyond the parlour, whereas the women’s assigned roles remain domestic and dependent.

Victoria’s eventual education also changes how the relationship can be narrated. The adult voice does not present the child’s suffering as a series of unrelated hardships; it remembers particular work, lessons, and blows, then uses them to identify a shared condition of being directed by others. Blaydon’s brief permission to attend school is real, but it follows his control of the household and does not undo the harm he caused. The enduring significance of the relationship lies in that tension: he can open a door when asked, yet Victoria’s later understanding of freedom begins with recognizing how thoroughly her life—and the lives of women around her—has been arranged without their consent.