Summary

In the introduction, Alasdair Gray explains the origin of Poor Things. In the 1970s, a local historian named Michael Donnelly found public health officer Archibald McCandless’s account in a pile of refuse from “a defunct law office” in Glasgow (x). A letter from McCandless’s wife, Victoria, was included. Donnelly contacted Gray while he was working for “the People’s Palace as an artist-recorder” and asked him to edit the text, believing it “a lost masterpiece which ought to be printed” (xii). Gray agreed to help if Donnelly let him control the editing.

McCandless’s account asserts that in 1881, “a surgical genius used human remains to create a twenty-five-year-old woman” (ix). Gray has extensively researched the account. In publication, he preserved the majority of McCandless’s writing, but changed the chapter titles and renamed it Poor Things.

In Chapter 1, “Making Me...