Michael saw that both book and letter might repay closer attention, so put them with other material to be concentrated on when he had time.
And there they lay. That afternoon he learned that Glasgow University’s old theological college was being cleared out for renovation by a firm of property developers. (It is now luxury flats.) Michael found it contained over a dozen large framed oil paintings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scots clergy, and these too would have burned in the municipal incinerator at Dawsholm Park if he had not cut them from their stretchers (they had been screwed to the wall at a prominent height) and taken them to the municipal art gallery in Kelvingrove, where space was found for them in the over-crowded store. Over a decade passed before Michael Donnelly had time to sit down and investigate social history in a leisurely way. He left the People’s Palace in 1990 when Glasgow had been declared the official Culture Capital of Europe by Margaret Thatcher’s Minister of Arts, and on the way out pocketed again the book and letter which (he was sure) would mean nothing at all to whoever replaced him — if anyone did.
I first met Michael Donnelly in 1977 when Elspeth King had employed me in the People’s Palace as an artist-recorder, but when he contacted me in the autumn of 1990 I had become a self-employed writer who dealt with several publishers. He lent me this book, saying he thought it a lost masterpiece which ought to be printed. I agreed with him, and said I would arrange it if he gave me complete control of the editing. He agreed, a little reluctantly, when I promised to make no changes to Archibald McCandless’s actual text. Indeed, the main part of this book is as near to a facsimile of the McCandless original as possible, with the Strang etchings and other illustrative devices reproduced photographically. However, I have replaced the lengthy chapter headings with snappier titles of my own. Chapter 3, originally headed: Sir Colin’s discovery — arresting a life—“What use is it?”—the queer rabbits—“How did you do it?”—useless cleverness and what the Greeks knew—“Good-bye”—Baxter’s bulldog — a horrible hand: is now simply called “The Quarrel”. I have also insisted on renaming the whole book POOR THINGS. Things are often mentioned in the story and every single character (apart from Mrs. Dinwiddie and two of the General’s parasites) is called poor or call themselves that sometime or other. I print the letter by the lady who calls herself “Victoria” McCandless as an epilogue to the book. Michael would prefer it as an introduction, but if read before the main text it will prejudice readers against that. If read afterward we easily see it is the letter of a disturbed woman who wants to hide the truth about her start in life. Furthermore, no book needs two introductions and I am writing this one.
I fear Michael Donnelly and I disagree about this book. He thinks it a blackly humorous fiction into which some real experiences and historical facts have been cunningly woven, a book like Scott’s Old Mortality and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. I think it like Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson; a loving portrait of an astonishingly good, stout, intelligent, eccentric man recorded by a friend with a memory for dialogue. Like Boswell, the self-effacing McCandless makes his narrative a host to letters by others who show his subject from a different angle, and ends by revealing a whole society. I also told Donnelly that I had written enough fiction to know history when I read it. He said he had written enough history to recognize fiction. To this there was only one reply — I had to become a historian.
I did so. I am one. After six months of research among the archives of Glasgow University, the Mitchell Library’s Old Glasgow Room, the Scottish National Library, Register House in Edinburgh, Somerset House in London and the National Newspaper Archive of the British Library at Colindale I have collected enough material evidence to prove the McCandless story a complete tissue of facts. I give some of this evidence at the end of the book but most of it here and now. Readers who want nothing but a good story plainly told should go at once to the main part of the book. Professional doubters may enjoy it more after first scanning this table of events.
29 AUGUST, 1879: Archibald McCandless enrols as a medical student in Glasgow University, where Godwin Baxter (son of the famous surgeon and himself a practising surgeon) is an assistant in the anatomy department.
18 FEBRUARY, 1881: The body of a pregnant woman is recovered from the Clyde. The police surgeon, Godwin Baxter (whose home is 18 Park Circus) certifies death by drowning, and describes her as “about 25 years old, 5 feet 10¾ inches tall, dark brown curling hair, blue eyes, fair complexion and hands unused to rough work; well dressed.” The body is advertised but not claimed.
29 JUNE, 1882: At sunset an extraordinary noise was heard throughout most of the Clyde basin, and though widely discussed in the local press during the following fortnight, no satisfactory explanation was ever found for it.
13 DECEMBER, 1883: Duncan Wedderburn, solicitor, normally resident in his mother’s home at 41 Aytoun Street, Pollokshields, is committed to the Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum as incurably insane. Here follows a report from The Glasgow Herald, two days later: “Last Saturday afternoon members of the public complained to the police that one of the orators in the open forum on Glasgow Green was using indecent language. The constable investigating found the speaker, a respectably dressed man in his late twenties, was making slanderous statements about a respected and philanthropic member of the Glasgow medical profession, mingling them with obscenities and quotations from the Bible. When warned to desist the orator redoubled his obscenities and was taken with great difficulty to Albion Street police office, where a doctor pronounced him fit to be detained, but not to plead. Our correspondent tells us he is a civil lawyer of good family. No charges are being pressed.”
27 DECEMBER, 1883: General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington, once nicknamed “Thunderbolt” Blessington but now Liberal M.P. for Manchester North, dies by his own hand in the gun-room of Hogsnorton, his country house at Loamshire Downs. Neither obituaries nor accounts of the funeral mention his widow, though he had married twenty-four-year-old Victoria Hattersley three years earlier, and neither her legal separation from him nor her death were ever recorded.
10 JANUARY, 1884: By special licence a civil marriage contract is signed between Archibald McCandless, house doctor in Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and Bella Baxter, spinster, of the Barony Parish. The witnesses are Godwin Baxter, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and Ishbel Dinwiddie, housekeeper. The bride, the groom and both witnesses are all residents of 18 Park Circus, where the marriage takes place.
16 APRIL 1884: Godwin Baxter dies at 18 Park Circus of what Archibald McCandless M.D. (who signs the death certificate) describes as “a cerebral and cardiac seizure provoked by hereditary neural, respiratory and alimentary dysfunction”. The Glasgow Herald, reporting on the burial service in the Necropolis, mentions “the uniquely shaped coffin”, and that the deceased has left his entire estate to Dr. and Mrs. McCandless.
2 SEPTEMBER, 1886: The woman who married Archibald McCandless M.D. under the name Bella Baxter, enrols in the Sophia Jex-Blake School of Medicine for Women under the name Victoria McCandless.
Michael Donnelly has told me he would find the above evidence more convincing if I had obtained official copies of the marriage and death certificates and photocopies of the newspaper reports, but if my readers trust me I do not care what an “expert” thinks. Mr. Donnelly is no longer as friendly as formerly. He blames me for the loss of the original volume, which is unfair. I would gladly have sent a photocopy to the publisher and returned the original, but that would have added at least £300 to the production costs. Modern typesetters can “scan” a book into their machine from a typed page, but from a photocopy must type it in all over again; moreover the book was needed by a photographic specialist, to make plates from which the Strang etchings and facsimiles of Bella’s letter could be reproduced. Somewhere between editor, publisher, typesetter and photographer the unique first edition was mislaid. These mistakes are continually happening in book production, and nobody regrets them more than I do.