Working-class poverty

Working-class poverty in Poor Things is a structural condition, reproduced through the distribution of labor, education, health, and power rather than explained by personal defect. It appears in the cramped domestic spaces of servants, in industrial hunger and unemployment, and in the social arrangements that train some people to command while requiring others to serve. Bella Baxter and Victoria McCandless encounter this order not only as an object of argument but through remembered hardship, medical practice, and efforts to make knowledge and care more widely available.

Labor, Housing, and Class

Godwin Baxter makes the division of class visible through a doll’s house. Its servants occupy the coldest and most crowded rooms, in the basement and attics; their sleeping bodies help keep their employers comfortable on the central floors. The scullery-maid scrubs and mangles clothes, with access to hot water dependent on her employers’ generosity and her treatment dependent on the kindness of those above her. In the parlour, a girl of similar age and body practices Beethoven’s Für Elise, trained to become a rich husband’s social ornament and the mother of his children. Their circumstances differ, but both girls are used by others and denied the power to decide for themselves. The house turns class hierarchy into an everyday arrangement of rooms, labor, and bodily comfort.

Bella’s recollections give that arrangement a personal history. She remembers aching fingers from scrubbing filthy clothes in freezing water, and a piano teacher who made her repeat Für Elise nineteen times without stopping after a wrong note. She also recalls her father cracking her skull with his fist and being made to memorize Fénelon’s Télémaque. Baxter argues that these apparently disconnected injuries belong to the same social world as the doll’s house: the poor girl’s exhausting domestic work and the more privileged girl’s disciplined preparation for marriage both constrain female choice, though in sharply unequal forms. His lesson is that class experience can be obscured by treating each hardship as an isolated misfortune.

The contrast extends beyond the home. Baxter describes wealthy women as ornaments and private pleasure grounds of affluent men, separated from the care of their children after childbirth, while working-class women endure years of slow suffocation in Lancashire weaving-sheds. The comparison does not erase differences of wealth; it shows how gendered dependence crosses class boundaries while taking distinct forms. Poor women’s labor is directly exploited, while wealthy women may be confined by marriage and denied meaningful maternal or personal autonomy. In both settings, other people’s interests shape women’s bodies and work.

Education, Wealth, and the Uses of Poverty

Baxter’s account of education connects poverty to the standards by which society judges conduct. Very poor children learn begging, lying, and stealing as means of survival, while prosperous parents teach children to condemn those acts and gambling as vices. Yet the educated are also taught to admire conquerors, and are prepared for a society in which parliamentary acts deprive poor people of homes and livelihoods, stock-market gambling increases unearned incomes, and property owners can work least while enjoying hunting, horse-racing, and war. The apparent moral distinction between respectable wealth and poor people’s survival strategies is therefore unstable: elite conduct receives cultural honor even when it depends on dispossession and speculation.

Baxter also traces industrial expansion to war. During the Napoleonic Wars, heavier taxes burdened the poor while government purchases of uniforms, boots, guns, and shipping helped create factories. With able-bodied men serving abroad, machinery enabled employers to use the cheaper labor of women and children. Increased profits could then be invested in railways, ironclads, and empire. In this account, industrial growth is inseparable from public expenditure, gendered and child labor, and the unequal distribution of its returns.

The end of war did not bring security to the people whose work had sustained production. Baxter describes widespread unemployment and hunger serious enough to prompt a parliamentary committee and fears of revolution. Robert Owen proposed that businesses earning profits above five per cent use the surplus to improve workers’ food, housing, and schooling rather than undercut competitors. Malthusian arguments opposed better provision on the grounds that it would encourage the poor to have more children. Baxter’s account goes further: hunger and disease weaken the desperate, while infant mortality reduces their numbers; police forces, jails, and deliberately grim poorhouses help contain the consequences. In poorhouses, children are separated from parents and husbands from wives. The system’s effectiveness, in his telling, lies not in ending poverty but in managing and disciplining the poor.

Care, Training, and Medical Work

The novel sets these social arrangements against forms of practical care. After returning from abroad, Baxter establishes a small veterinary clinic and offers free treatment to sick animals brought to his back door. Bella works as receptionist and assistant, meets visitors, and learns to stitch wounds. Baxter values her clinical skill and argues that excluding women from intricate medical work has cost lives and limbs. The clinic gives her a route from service work into skilled practice, and makes training a direct response to the restriction of women’s access to professions.

Baxter later describes a path into medicine that begins with nursing. He says that only four women doctors in Britain have degrees from foreign universities, while the Enabling Bill of 1876 and Sophia Jex-Blake’s work have begun to open medical education to women. He proposes that Bella train as a nurse in an east Glasgow infirmary, gain experience in the operating theatre, and later attend medical college. His broader argument is that doctors and surgeons should be recruited from nursing or begin their careers in it, and that manual work should form the foundation of professional training. This proposal challenges both class distinctions between manual and learned labor and the gender barriers that keep women from medical authority.

When Baxter asks whom she wants to help, Bella names little girls, mothers, and prostitutes. She wants to teach patients modern contraception, but agrees to keep that intention private until she is qualified to practise. The discussion links poverty and health to women’s ability to control reproduction and obtain care from someone whose experience is closer to their own. Baxter and Archibald McCandless advise caution about public advocacy, but Bella accepts that the timing of any public argument must ultimately be her choice.

Victoria’s Practice and Its Public Meaning

Bella later lives and works under the name Victoria. In 1886 she enrols at the Jex-Blake women’s medical school in Edinburgh, and in 1890 receives a Doctor of Medicine degree from Glasgow University. That year she opens the Godwin Baxter Natal Clinic in Dobbie’s Loan, near the Cowcaddens. It is a charitable foundation staffed by local women whom she trains. She does not keep trained employees indefinitely: when a devoted helper has learned what Victoria can teach her, Victoria sends her to help her neighbors or to work for a doctor who can offer further instruction. Several former helpers enter hospital nursing, although some struggle because they ask too many questions. Training is treated as a resource to circulate, not a means of keeping workers permanently dependent on the clinic.

Victoria’s own working life refuses the separation of professional care from the pressures borne by her patients. Between 1892 and 1898 she gives birth to three sons at two-year intervals, continuing clinical work until the last days of each pregnancy and returning soon afterward. She explains that poor women cannot afford to lie idle, and that she is fortunate to have a supportive husband. Her experience makes visible the material conditions behind advice about rest and recovery: women’s capacity to stop working is governed by their means, not simply by medical instruction.

In her pamphlet Against Horizontalism, Victoria argues that childbirth is painful but not a disease, and advocates birthing stools and a squatting position. She criticizes doctors’ preference for keeping patients flat when it serves the doctor’s sense of authority rather than the patient’s needs. Her challenge also concerns who is permitted to understand medicine: patients should not be expected to surrender their judgment to professional authority. She wants basic nursing taught in primary schools and basic medical training in secondary schools, so that people can care for one another, recognize when doctors can help, and understand how unhealthy housing and working conditions damage individuals and communities. Medical knowledge, in this program, is a tool for resisting the conditions that produce illness, not merely for treating its effects.

Public Provision and the Limits of Reform

Victoria’s later work gives these principles a concrete setting. A reporter finds the clinic entered from a back lane, with rhubarb growing along the path. The waiting room contains heavy mid-Victorian furniture, old posters for the Scottish Workers’ Republican Party, and a padlocked box inviting people to contribute what they can. Its notice tells hungry visitors not to steal but to speak to Victoria, because hunger is curable. Half the waiting patients appear poor and old; the others are mostly children who have brought animals. In the surgery, a gas-lit kitchen, soup simmers on the range beside animals resting in corners, while Victoria sits among books, papers, and medical instruments. Charity, food, medicine, and animal care occupy one working space.

The politics surrounding Victoria’s writing expose the limits of reform. In a review of A Loving Economy, Tom Johnston objects that her call for working-class parents to have fewer children distracts from immediate hunger and homelessness, especially during lockouts, reduced wages, and campaigns for work rationing. The disagreement is not simply over whether poverty matters, but over whether reproductive reform can address urgent deprivation or risks postponing its remedy. Victoria, meanwhile, argues that commercial contraceptives can fix attention on the genitals and displace affection and intimacy. Her position joins bodily autonomy to an ideal of ordinary, sustaining care, though it draws criticism from both religious opponents and advocates of birth control.

Across these episodes, poverty is at once material deprivation and a political arrangement: exhausting work, inadequate housing, unemployment, limited access to education and medicine, and dependence on the goodwill of employers or institutions. The novel’s recurrent contrast between those who perform care and those who command it makes the distribution of labor central to its class analysis. Victoria’s clinic and educational proposals do not dissolve that structure, but they show what resistance can look like in practice: training that travels beyond its institution, care offered without payment, and knowledge intended to help people challenge the conditions that make them ill.