“Love inscribes the body—and this is a process as excruciating as it sounds. For some of us it is literal, Kafkaesque. A selbst-verlusting that is both terrifying and pleasurable. The body does not pre-exist love, but is cast in its fires.”

Voth’s ideas about love are central to the love present in the manuscript and in his own life. The selbst-verlusting (“self-loss”) in love paradoxically leads to self-discovery. Jack loses his old, inauthentic self in loving Bess and only finds his new identity as Jack through his love with Bess. Jack’s body is symbolically made intelligible to him through love.

“London is a place of individualists. No longer busy with simple folk—sheep milling, beer being quaffed, folks picking herbs for sustenance. All gone. Now, a Body be gaoled for perambulating the town without occupation, folks afraid to walk the streets in fear of being arrested for Idleness and even the open Sewers and the trash piles prohibited—property of the newly formed Nightsoil Concerns, authorized by the Lord Mayor himself.”

The preacher’s words reflect the rapidly changing nature of London in the 18th century. With the advent of imperialism and colonialism abroad, London and its surroundings became focused on wealth production and privatization. London once had common areas for grazing, but in the 18th century, those commons replaced with factories and wage work. This shift in understanding of common spaces and productivity is called “possessive individualism.”

“This Something—what he thought of as his something—made his servitude, while a miserable confinement, a hidey-hole too. His whole life was some hidden, rank place. And so his confinement became the door inside him between his waking life and something still unwoken, something lying close-packed like a bomb at his core, poised to shiver into a coruscated, glinting shower of—of—of what, he knew not. But there was Something just beyond the door inside him. Some difference within him that he did not yet want to know.”

The descriptive language around Jack’s Something makes it seem very dangerous. The “unwoken bomb” is antithetical to the productive life Jack leads under Kneebone’s tutelage. The repetitive stuttering of “of—of—of” is an example of free and indirect discourse, or a narrator speaking directly in the syntax and dialect of a character’s internal thoughts. Jack’s inability to complete his description of the Something makes it seem larger than life and indescribable.