Author: Biblioklept

Four books by Dr. McCandless apart from this one were printed in his lifetime at his own expense. Unlike Poor Things he sent copies of the following works to the Scottish National Library in Edinburgh where they are catalogued under his pseudonym, “A Gallowa’ Loon”.

1886 Whaur We Twa Wandered

Verses inspired by places in Glasgow associated with the courtship of his wife. One of these (headed “The West End Park Loch Katrine Waterworks Memorial Fountain”) is quoted in Chapter 7 of Poor Things and is by far the best.

1892 The Resurrectionists

This five-act play about the Burke and Hare murders is no better than the many other nineteenth-century melodramas based on the same very popular theme. Robert Knox, the surgeon who bought the corpses, is treated more sympathetically than usual, so the play may have influenced James Bridie’s The Anatomist.

1897 Whauphill Days

Reminiscences of childhood on a Galloway farm. Though purporting to be autobiography, this says so little about the author’s father, mother and friends that the reader is left with the impression that he never had any. The only character to be described in affectionate detail is an atrociously harsh “dominie” whose approval of the author’s scholastic abilities never mitigated the severity of the beatings inflicted on him. The bulk of the book describes the delights of “guddling” trout, “running down” rabbits and smaller vermin, and “harrying” birds’ nests.

1905 The Testament of Sawney Bean

This long poem in “Habbie” stanzas opens with Bean lying in the heather on the summit of the Merrick, from which he surveys the nation which has both enticed and driven him into cannibalism. The year is 1603, shortly before the union of the crowns. Bean is suffering from food poisoning, for he has recently eaten part of an Episcopalian tax-collector on top of a Calvinist gaberlunzie. The symbolism, not the comedy of this intestinal broil is emphasized. In his delirium Bean harangues apparitions of every Scottish monarch from Calgacus to James the Sixth. Figures from Scotland’s past and future appear: Fingal, Jenny Geddes, James Watt, William Ewart Gladstone et cetera, with finally, “a poet of futuritee, | Who loses, seeks, finds Scotland just like me, | Upon that day.” Here it becomes plain that Bean and his hungry family (soon to be arrested by the royal army and burned alive in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh) symbolize the Scottish people. The main difficulty with the poem (apart from its great length and dull language) is knowing what the cannibalism symbolizes. It may represent bad eating-habits which Dr. McCandless thought were once common in Scotland, for he addresses the reader as if the Bean clan had existed. A little research would have shown him it is neither in Scottish history or legend, folk tale or fiction. It first appeared in the Newgate Calendar or Bloody Malefactors’ Register printed in London around 1775. The other stories in the book were factual accounts of gruesome English murders committed in what was then living memory. The Sawney Bean story was told in the same factual style but set upon a wild Scottish coast nearly two centuries earlier. It was a fiction based on English folk tales: tales told by the English about the Scots during centuries when these peoples were at war with each other, or on the verge of it.

I have described these four worthless books in detail to discourage others from wasting time on them. They do, however, prove that Dr. McCandless had no creative imagination or ear for dialogue, so must have copied Poor Things out of highly detailed diary notes. The manuscript burned by his wife would certainly have proved this.

From Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things.