Victoria McCandless (Bella Baxter)—Archibald McCandless

Victoria McCandless (Bella Baxter)—Archibald McCandless is a marriage marked by unequal attachments and changing accounts of the past. Its beginnings are a kiss in West End Park and Victoria’s sudden decision that Archibald might be a suitable husband; its later shape is a shared household, three sons, and a medical partnership. In Victoria’s retrospective telling, however, marriage never means that the three of them love one another in equal measure. She presents Archibald’s affection for her as entangled with his earlier, unreturned love for Godwin Baxter—and argues that envy eventually drove him to rewrite their lives as a story of equality.

Meeting and the Proposal

Victoria’s account places Archibald’s first meeting with Godwin Baxter in the university anatomy department, where Godwin gave demonstrations when the regular lecturer was ill. She describes Archibald as small and awkward, and says he fell passionately in love with Godwin. His love for her, in her interpretation, was bound up with seeing her as Godwin’s female counterpart: someone he could embrace and enter. Godwin did not return Archibald’s first great love. Archibald repeatedly joined Godwin on his Sunday dog walks, until his insistence on entering Godwin’s home led Godwin to ask for more privacy. Thereafter, they met only by chance or when Godwin invited him in.

Victoria says she first encountered Archibald through those visits. Later, after she had returned from travelling with Godwin, the two men met again by the memorial fountain in West End Park. Godwin sat on a bench and asked Archibald to walk Victoria around the park. Looking back, Victoria understood the request as Godwin’s attempt to escape the demanding company she had become. At the time, she entertained a different possibility: that Godwin was introducing her to a self-effacing husband who would accommodate her closeness to Godwin rather than compete with it.

As they walked, Archibald spoke about his poor childhood, his achievements as a medical student, and his work as a house doctor at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Victoria paused to look at him more closely. He kissed her, shyly at first and then ardently. She had not previously been kissed by a man; her earlier amorous experience had been a relationship with her piano teacher in Lausanne, whom she had loved but eventually turned against because the teacher loved others too. The pleasure she felt in Archibald’s kiss astonished her. When he proposed, she agreed and wanted to tell Godwin immediately, assuming Godwin would welcome the prospect of greater privacy. That assumption proved wrong.

Unequal Attachments and Interrupted Courtship

Godwin nearly fainted when Victoria announced the engagement. He asked the couple to wait at least a fortnight before deciding, and they agreed. Victoria later judged her own response selfish: she had assumed that a husband would make it easier for Godwin to resume his former life, not recognized that adding Archibald to the household might be precisely what Godwin did not want. The episode establishes the central imbalance in the relationship. Victoria’s affection for Archibald was genuine, but her plans initially treated marriage as a way to arrange her closeness to Godwin; Godwin, meanwhile, had not intended to share his home with a husband he did not greatly like.

During the following week, Victoria repeatedly thought about the kiss and wondered whether the pleasure came from Archibald in particular or whether another man might intensify it. She seduced Duncan Wedderburn to test the question. In her account, she regarded the proposed elopement as an experiment to discover how suitable Archibald was, and did not understand that Wedderburn meant it to involve marriage. She explained her plan to Godwin, who told her he could not teach her about love and asked her to be gentle. This detour makes the courtship less a conventional progression toward marriage than an unstable attempt by Victoria to understand desire while keeping her bond with Godwin at its centre.

Marriage, Family, and Shared Work

When Victoria returned to Park Circus, Godwin was already dying. Archibald was present in Mrs. Dinwiddie’s parlour, standing behind Victoria’s fiancé. As Godwin’s illness advanced, he needed medical help with some bodily functions that his mother could no longer manage. The approach of death also, Victoria says, displaced his earlier dislike of Archibald. Godwin asked Victoria to marry Archibald and offered her everything he owned, while entrusting the care of his dogs to the couple. His final practical instructions imagined them continuing the Sunday walks together and asked that one of their sons bear his name. He also asked that Mrs. Dinwiddie treat the McCandless children as grandchildren.

Archibald administered an injection that made Godwin sensible for a few more minutes. Godwin then gave the couple a detailed itinerary for walks around Glasgow, naming routes by the canal and Clyde and places including the Cathkin Braes. Victoria helped him drink the medicine, pressing her lips to his in the only kiss they shared. The scene gives Archibald and Victoria a common act of care at the threshold of their married life: he provides medical assistance, while she supports Godwin as he drinks. Godwin’s request that they care for his dogs and children binds the future household to his memory rather than resolving the emotional inequalities among them.

The later family life is documented in more practical terms. Between 1892 and 1898, Victoria bore three sons at two-year intervals while continuing clinical work until the final two or three days of each pregnancy and returning to work soon afterward. She explained that poor women could not afford to remain horizontal, and described herself as fortunate to have a very good wife in her husband. The remark presents Archibald’s support as consequential: Victoria’s ability to sustain demanding medical work alongside pregnancy depended in part on his contribution to their domestic life. Their marriage thus became not only an intimate bond but part of the working arrangement that enabled her public and professional commitments.

Envy and the Marriage Rewritten

Victoria’s later account disputes the equality Archibald allegedly gave the three central figures in his version of their story. She describes him as still carrying the injury of having been a poor and exploited child, and argues that his envy could have served social reform if directed toward the unfair ordering of society. In their private relationships, however, she says, his envy was directed at the two people he loved and who could tolerate him: Godwin and Victoria.

In Victoria’s interpretation, Archibald resented Godwin’s famous father and tender mother, and Victoria’s wealthy father, convent education, social ease, and famous first husband. Most painfully, she says, he envied the care Godwin gave her and the strength of her love for Godwin. She characterizes what she and Godwin felt for Archibald as friendly goodwill, tempered in her own case by sensual indulgence—not the equal romantic devotion Archibald’s story bestowed on him. She therefore reads his final fictional account as compensation: it gives Archibald and Godwin equally deprived childhoods, makes Victoria a child rather than herself when she first meets Archibald, and recasts her as loving him at first sight. Victoria says Archibald knew that this was a lie and took amusement in how cleverly the fiction outwitted the truth. The marriage consequently survives in two forms: as the family and working partnership they built, and as the contested story through which Victoria explains the unequal love she believes Archibald could never accept.