Things in Jars: Reflections
Jess Kidd’s stunning romantic Gothic mystery, Things in Jars, is a magnificent blend of spooky, haunting, suspenseful, and tender. This was the first novel I successfully read after completing my master’s degree — although it wasn’t without its false starts, as I actually started the book well over a year ago. I picked up this book at Book Warehouse on West Broadway in Vancouver, about a week before the COVID-19 pandemic completely uprooted me from my life. The events of this year, unfortunately, prevented from letting me get farther than about 30 pages into the book. The fault here lies solely with me, as Kidd’s prose is, quite frankly, brilliant. In fact, although the cover of the book is what caught my eye, the first line of the book is what made me put it in my basket. “As pale as a grave grub, she’s an eyeful.” And the book only gets better from there.
The protagonist of the novel is exactly what I wanted in my Gothic-romance-meets-modern-sensation-novel. Bridie Devine, an Irish orphan-turned-detective in an alternate mid-nineteenth-century London, is a woman who values her work and doesn’t take any shit. The periodic descriptions of her – namely her smoking habit and her tendency to wear her lacings as loosely as modesty allows – is a welcome change from the seemingly perfect detective heroines of the actual sensation novels of the style period Kidd writes in.
“A little after dawn Bridie stirs from her bed. She taps the contents of last night’s pipe into the fire and reaches for her pouch of Prudhoe’s Bronchial Balsam Blend. It is empty. Then she searches for her other supplies, the twist in the parlour cupboard, the stash in the umbrella stand, the packet in her petticoat pocket. All smoked.” (305)
“This woman is made of boot polish and pipe smoke, clean cloth and the north wind. And as for the dead man walking behind her, well, he means no harm. He smells only faintly of the afterlife, cold and mineral, like new snow.” (52)
The detective plot in Things in Jars is brilliantly interwoven with the supernatural, invoking elements of Celtic folklore and mythology with a Victorian kidnapping plot in a way that kept me burning the midnight oil to finish the book. This, of course, after I finally got going with it – once the COVID situation was more stable and I was able to concentrate on reading for leisure and not for work. Kidd’s descriptive work is beautifully done – evidence of her PhD in creative writing to be sure. The moody, foggy, cloying setting she creates is a perfect Gothic vessel for the plots she weaves, which left me nostalgic for a nineteenth-century London I know is far less savoury in history. The reality of Victorian London’s waste disposal systems alone is enough to make one cringe at the thought of experiencing it first hand, and although Kidd doesn’t shy away from these realities, she weaves them into the more aesthetic descriptions of the city so that they form a realist backdrop to her settings, instead of detracting from them entirely.
“A deluge of rain and the roads have become a slippery quagmire; mud, in prodigious quantities, keeps the crossing-sweepers busy on every corner and the pedestrians busy staying upright.” (235)
Additionally, Kidd’s attention to ghosts solidifies the novel as a neo-sensation novel in the Gothic mode, at least for me. Bridie’s ability to see and speak to ghosts not only aids in her detective work but also adds a layer of melancholy to her characterization that draws in a touch of romance that draws the book from pure sensation to something deeper, more impactful. Bridie’s relationship with death, from her perspective, is cold, calculated, and logical: completely at odds with the heartfelt reality of her connections with the ghosts she speaks with.
I’ve always been a sucker for a Gothic romance, and this is partly why I think Things in Jars made such an impact on me. Bridie’s relationship with the ghost of a champion boxer is poignant, sorrowful, and humorous. Ruby Doyle is perhaps one of the only characters in literature that has made me cry, as his transient presence throughout the novel strikes a fine balance with the stoicism of Bridie’s character.
“Toward dawn, when she begins to mutter in her sleep, Ruby is there. When she calls out, her brow furrowed, Ruby is there. He speaks low and kind to her through her troubled dreams... Just before she wakes, before she starts to stir, Ruby Doyle will sink into the wall with his hat in his hand and a new liquid brilliance to his dark eyes.” (100-101)
The ill-fated romance struck a chord in me, and although it is by no means the focus of the novel (which I’m purposefully obscuring for the sake of avoiding spoilers), it is one of the most resonant aspects of it for me. Although I’m tempted to wax poetic about the literary implications of love and ghosts, I think I will leave that up to those of you who read it for yourselves – and I do hope this piece helps convince you to read the book. I’m not quite done with my thoughts on the book, but the rest of them get a tad scholarly as it pertains to the research I did on my master’s thesis, so if you’re here for more of a book review on Things In Jars, consider this your custom conclusion: this is a beautifully written, heartfelt, interesting, and impactful book, and if you’re interested in ghosts, mysteries, or just enjoy a good moody adventure book, I can’t recommend it enough.
On to the academic stuff! I wrote my master’s thesis on gender nonconformity in 2 of Wilkie Collins’s novels: The Law and the Lady and Poor Miss Finch. I couldn’t help but superimpose that research onto my reading of Kidd’s novel, as it seemed to me to read as a sensation novel for the twenty-first century, a re-imagining of that short-lived Victorian genre, which thrilled me. I have evidence for this reading as a neo-sensation novel, too – it’s not just subjective.
There is Bridie’s assistant, a 7-foot tall, masculine-coded maid Bridie rescued from a Victorian circus (or “freak show”) named Cora. I read this is a clear shoutout to Collins’s The Law and the Lady, where Ariel, the maidservant in that novel, is described as “a strange and startling creature” who threateningly claims both masculinity and femininity in her presence. Ariel’s deep voice, dark facial hair, and preference for discarded men’s army clothing codes her as explicitly genderqueer, and Cora’s deep-voiced, lumbering servitude is a clear allusion to that foundation in sensation fiction’s history. I’m not the only one to notice this connection, I’m sure, as Kidd offers a clear nod to Collins’s creation of the sensation fiction genre with his publication of The Woman in White in the 1860’s, alongside Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
“This is the client’s reading list, all fiction.’
‘What sort of fiction?’
‘Popular: Likes a bit of sensation.’
‘Who doesn’t?’
‘Kidnapped heiresses, Gothic houses, heinous crimes – that sort of thing?’
‘The Woman in White has been requested several times. Lady Audley, she’s been in and out on this ticket.’” (234)
It’s refreshing to see an author so obviously well-researched on the genre they are emulating, and as a scholar, I was appreciative of the attention to literary history Kidd paid in the crafting of her novel. As I’ve studied the period so deeply, I am completely enamoured with her evolution of it, her attention to detail, and her inadvertent support of my thesis that gender nonconformity and “trans possibilities” are well-established in nineteenth-century popular fiction, and are so reflected in contemporary understandings of that literature. All in all, this is a book I thoroughly enjoyed, and I hope to revisit it again in the future, as I’m sure this story will only get more generative with time and experience.
Next week is a deep dive into Eurocentrism in the Gothic (and the problems inherent in that trend), and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on Things in Jars and the issues I raise in next week’s post.
You can buy Things in Jars from King’s Co-Op Bookstore in Halifax here. Please check your local bookstores and libraries if you’re interested in obtaining the book, and avoid big-box book retailers at all costs. Independent stores deserve your business, and I will only ever encourage purchasing books from them in any feature I post on my blog.
