74 pages • 2 hours read
The Lost Apothecary
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Symbols & Motifs
Nella’s Calfskin Register
Nella records the names of all serviced customers, sold ingredients, and intended victims in her calfskin register. However, she places particular importance on recording the names of the women who purchase mixtures from her, adamant that their names are not forgotten by the world around them. Nella’s register can be read as a response to a world whose forgetfulness she has experienced firsthand, as she has no siblings or friends, never knew her father, and lost her one blood relative with her mother’s death. At the beginning of the novel, Nella has no close companions to hold fond, profound memories of her. Though her clients may remember her once she passes, the transient nature of their interactions do not enable intimate recollections of Nella’s life or the person she was. Nella’s relentless recording of these names can be further read as her way of preventing such a fate for others, even if she cannot prevent it for herself. Though the register does mark temporal movement with each additional entry, it ironically stands for Nella’s desire to stagnate time. Nella’s register also reveals her naivety, as she does not fully recognize that her register could actively harm these women until Eliza brings it up in the wake of Lady Clarence’s threat. The completed register is also the product of multigenerational literacy among middle- and lower-class women, a distinct marker of liberation in a historical era when the only women likely to receive any formal schooling belonged to the higher, wealthier social classes.
Eliza’s Blue Vial
This translucent, sky blue vial sets off Caroline’s investigation and triangulates the stories of all three women, as it was technically Nella’s vial, was once filled with Eliza’s brew (then thrown into the Thames by her), and is later found by Caroline. As it is one of the Back Alley apothecary shop’s unmarked vials, engraved with only the symbol of a bear on all fours, it is pulled straight from the portion of Nella’s life where she dispensed poison. It perpetuates just the sort of misdirection her unmarked vials achieved during her lifetime by frustrating Caroline’s search. While it connects the two timelines, it also partitions them by rendering clear the key role that technology plays in Caroline’s search. It would have been incredibly difficult for 18th-century authorities, let alone regular people, to locate the origin of this nondescript container, yet Caroline uses technology (primarily the British Library’s catalogue of historical documents and its manuscript database) to do just that. The vial’s presence in the Thames, in place of Eliza and Nella’s bodies, also signifies that what took place on Blackfriars’ Bridge in the 18th century was more a redemption than a sacrifice, a cleansing that favored both Nella and Eliza’s lives.
Daytime
In literature, nighttime and its associated darkness are typically traced to morally dubious actions that must be done in secret; daytime is usually taken as a moment when things can easily be seen, a moment incapable of housing secrets. But Eliza visits Nella’s shop at daybreak for the poison that kills Mr. Amwell, and she serves it to him at breakfast; Lady Clarence brings her request to Nella at 10 in the morning; and, notably, many of Nella’s customers do business with her in the daytime, allowing her to intersperse her peddling of benign cures with the distribution of her poisons. These characters use the unassuming nature of the day to cover work that would draw negative attention, reconfiguring daytime into a veil that obscures what they would like to keep hidden.
Poison
Though poison is often regarded as inherently nefarious because it causes the death of another living being, Nella’s poisons sometimes operate as instruments of protection for the women who use them. The positive use of poisons to eliminate potentially dangerous male threats complicates the notion of death by making its immediate consequences safety and a measure of liberation for the women who poison their abusers. In the 18th-century narrative, poison also empowers women to protect their loved ones, as seen with Ms. Amwell, who resolves to kill her lecherous husband to protect Eliza from his advances. Nella, however, links poison to her own bodily pollution, troubled by the belief that the toxins she sells are rotting her from the inside out. Through Nella and the other characters who associate with poison, we realize that things that are fatal are also fateful, just as capable of steering a life toward unencumbered safety as they are of steering a life toward daily mental torment.
Poison is also painted as impartial, equally as capable of harming one’s intended target as it is of accidentally killing someone else. When Nella first grinds the cantharides for Lady Clarence, she warns that it is only safe to be around the mixture “so long as [Lady Clarence doesn’t] touch it” (108). Nella warns Eliza to take special care when serving the poisoned eggs to Mr. Amwell, as there is a very real possibility she could accidentally serve them to her mistress. Lord Clarence dies from ingesting a toxin not meant for him, prompting Lady Clarence to admit in her deathbed confession that that event “did not happen as [she] intend’d” (72). Poison repeatedly reveals itself to be a substance that demands control, but even then it might prove uncontrollable. Poison is also paired closely with food and drink, as many of Nella’s clients administer their poisons at mealtimes. The consumption of poisonous food and drink supplants the expected nourishing comfort with disturbing anguish, much as these men often replaced the tender support women expected from their spouses with treacherous abuse.
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