Straw bears, lost love and murder: marmalade as a literary preserve

The appearance last week in my birth county of Cheshire of a giant straw Paddington Bear got me thinking – as perhaps only a marmalade maker born in the seventies would – of the significance of this superior preserve in literature. Marmalade, I am pleased to report, appears as both a symbol of domesticity and nostalgia and an opportunity for an inventive plot twist.

In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, marmalade sits quietly on the breakfast table, its presence a counterpoint to the swirling complexities of the characters’ inner lives, while Paddington Bear treasures marmalade as both sustenance and comfort, a reminder of safety and love lost. 

Children’s author Lucy Coats describes the diminutive Peruvian bear a little less romantically as ‘the arch example of profligate marmalade eating’. In her blog An Awfully Big Blog Adventure, Coats notes how DH Lawrence turned to marmalade making during a bout of the blues: 'It's amazing how it cheers one up,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘to shred orange and scrub the floor’. How I agree — well at least on the first point!

Creator of another eminent bear, AA Milne, asks in his poem The King's Breakfast, 'Would you like to try a little marmalade?' The king does not, preferring instead just ‘a little bit of butter’ on his bread. Refusing marmalade? Think what this implies about the king’s character!

In the works of Agatha Christie, marmalade’s appearance is sometimes a clue, its sweetness masking darker undertones, as ordinary objects so often do in the world of literary mystery. In her 1953 detective novel A Pocket Full of Rye, the murderer’s first victim is given poison hidden in orange marmalade consumed at breakfast.

And marmalade is a perennial interest to lexicographers, who continue to question whether its roots lie in a Portuguese mess of fruit (mermelo being the word for a quince) or as a doomed queen's cure for seasickness (a corruption of Marie est malade). I cannot help but prefer the romance of the latter, however questionable. I like to think of the pale, listless Scots Queen Mary reclining miserably in the state cabin of a roughly rolling medieval ship, her worried ladies-in-waiting imploring her to try a morsel of bread with some spicy orange jam. 

Whatever your literary bent, marmalade serves as a bittersweet metaphor for the layers (or perhaps shreds?) of human experience, reminding us that within the quotidien and mundane so often lies something profound and memorable.

Alex McWilliam-Brice, August 2024