The Dress Lodger
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3.8 • 8 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book from the author of A Stolen Tongue: A tale of crime and survival in nineteenth-century England "as unsettling as it is brilliant" (The Washington Post Book World).
In Sunderland, England, a city quarantined by the cholera epidemic of 1831, a defiant, fifteen-year-old beauty in an elegant blue dress sells her body to feed her only love: a fragile baby boy. When the surgeon Henry Chiver offers Gustine a different kind of work, she hopes to finally change her terrible circumstances.
But Chiver was recently implicated in the famous case of Burke and Hare, who murdered beggars and sold their corpses for medical research. And soon, Gustine's own efforts to secure cadavers for Chiver's anatomy school will threaten the very things she's working so hard to protect . . .
"Reminiscent of Wuthering Heights . . . or the novels of Dickens . . . An even better book than Holman's first, with prose that's more limber and vivid—and with, appropriately, even more heart." —The New York Times Book Review
"As unsettling as it is brilliant. Holman attempts Herculean feats of plot and character, and the resulting novel is seamlessly crafted." —The Washington Post Book World
"Holman seduces you. Her prose, tart, racy and somber, will sing in your soul a long while." —Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes
"Holman's style is risky and direct . . . with unflinching emotional precision. This dazzlingly researched epic is an uncommon read." —Publisher Weekly, starred review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scrawny and tough, only 15, Gustine is the heartrending protagonist of Holman's brilliantly stark portrayal of 19th-century urban life, class warfare, cruel medicine and encroaching pestilence in the English city of Sunderland. With remarkable breadth and depth, the narrative vividly portrays the human suffering spawned by the early Industrial Revolution. Inhabitants of city slums endure oozing sores, infections, lice--not to mention the devastating cholera morbus making its lethal way through Sunderland's population. Gustine works two jobs to support her beloved illegitimate infant, who was born with his heart outside his chest cavity. By day she's a potter's assistant, but to earn enough to live, by night she walks the streets wearing an expensive, elegant blue gown supplied by her pimp/landlord as a ploy to attract higher-class tricks. Pimp Whilky Robinson employs a deaf-mute, one-eyed old woman to follow Gustine constantly, to protect the dress, his treasured investment. Gustine hates the old woman, called "The Eye," but cannot shake this all-seeing symbol of mortality and fate ("Does not old age always dog youth? Does not monstrosity forever shadow beauty?"). Seeking medical help for her ailing child, Gustine strikes up an alliance with surgeon and anatomist Dr. Henry Chivers. The doctor needs corpses for dissection and since Gustine stumbles upon plenty of dead bodies in her night work, she becomes a resource for the ambitious, depraved doctor. The cholera epidemic, graphically and tirelessly described, entwines the lives of the doctor and Gustine, even as Dr. Chivers grows reckless in the resurrection business, eventually inviting violent retribution by impoverished citizens who discover their loved ones' pauper-graves exhumed. Holman (A Stolen Tongue) delivers a wealth of morbid, authentic detail, as well as an emotional pivot in her captivating Moll Flanders-like heroine. The major characters are buttressed by a vivacious cast of minors: Whilky's cowed daughter, Pink; a troupe of traveling thespians; pawnbrokers; rat catchers; and sailors. Holman's style is risky and direct, treating scenes of Gustine's quick, humiliating back-alley couplings as well as the doctor's hypocritical sleaze, with unflinching emotional precision. This dazzlingly researched epic is an uncommon read.
