Things in Jars

Jess Kidd

Allen & Unwin/Canongate

Otago Daily Times, July 20th 2019

Not only was the 19^th Century the heyday of an empire that remains the heart of British identity today, it was a time of change and contrast that has long been fertile ground for the imagination. Rapid advances in science and medicine coexisted with – and fed – a fascination with spiritualism, superstition and freaks of nature. The Industrial Revolution led to a national outpouring of techno-optimism. It also condemned many workers to grinding poverty, the squalor of their lives alongside the sumptuous opulence of the upper classes ripe for romantic re-interpretation. Little wonder, then, that Victorian London has provided the perfect setting for everything from steampunk to gothic horror.

In Things in Jars, 1860s London provides a colourful backdrop for a pastiche of one of the most popular genres of the time, the penny dreadful. The novel’s indomitable heroine, Bridie Devine, has progressed a long way from her origins as an Irish street rat. Having spent her childhood as the ward of a succession of medical men, she is highly adept in matters anatomical with a particular talent for reading corpses. She now offers her expertise in domestic investigations and minor surgery (discretion guaranteed), as well as taking on the odd case for an old friend who works at Scotland Yard. Until recently, this business has enabled Bridie to maintain modest independence, but her reputation and confidence have been shattered by her last case, in which she was unable to prevent the death of a kidnapped child. So when she asked to locate the six-year-old daughter of a local baronet, she has little option but to take the case, ably assisted by her Brienneasque maid Cora Butter and the flamboyant and incorporeal pugilist Ruby Doyle, who may or may not be a by-product of her favourite medicinal tobacco. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the missing girl is far from normal and may have already met her end in a carnival sideshow or an anatomist’s studio. The search for her will force Bridie to lay the ghosts of her own childhood –both literal and figurative – to rest.

 Although ostensibly a detective story, it is the novel’s characters rather than the plot that make the novel come alive: Bridie with her ‘spectacularly ugly’ bonnet and carefully cultivated veneer of marginal respectability Ruby, whose permanent state of partial undress is almost as frustrating as the fact nobody but Bridie can see his glorious tattoos, and Cora ‘the only, and most terrifying seven-foot-tall housemaid in London’. With its colourful cast and increasingly implausible plot, Things in Jars is a rollicking read as funny and irreverent as its pipe-smoking, flame-haired heroine.