Was it the street urchin with a heart of gold, a lad prevented from warning of danger only by the most random of acts? He obsessively follows Iris around town, imagines an intimacy between them that never existed and vows revenge when she “rejects” him. But Silas always lurks in the background. Yet Iris risks it when he offers to teach her to paint. Of course, this is really damnation for her since a model is little better than a whore, however noble Louis’s intentions may be (and his intentions are noble, tiresomely so). Salvation arrives for Iris when the artist Louis Frost asks the shy woman to model for him. She spurns Iris but they must work shoulder to shoulder all day long at the doll factory.
Iris is the homelier of the two until smallpox afflicts Rose, robbing her of both her beauty and her beau in one fell swoop. She spends her best effort on the twin sisters Iris and Rose. Nonetheless, Macneal sets up her story well enough. At the climax of the tale, all that’s missing is a moustache for the villain to twirl and a train to barrel down the tracks where a heroine wails for help. And the longer they go without surprising us, the more two-dimensional they seem until the entire plot is fit only for a melodrama performed on the stage. The characters never surprise us for a moment, never truly spring to life. It’s a Dickensian novel, with a clutch of promising characters like the laudanum-addicted owner of the doll factory, a street urchin who finds dead things and sells them to the taxidermist, and, of course, two sisters trapped by fate in their miserable jobs and straitened lives.īut the more time we spend with these people, the less interesting they become.
Another man, Silas, is obsessed with displaying his taxidermy skills at the Great Exhibition and adding Iris to his “private collection.” One of the artists in the PBR becomes determined to paint Iris, bewitched by her unusual looks and, soon, her talent. She wastes her talents by crafting dolls in the window of a little store, on display side by side with her pox-scarred sister. Iris, a striking and talented would-be painter who is trapped by circumstance, connects the two worlds. Debut novelist Elizabeth Macneal sets The Doll Factory in Victorian England, with the backdrop of both the Great Exhibition of 1851 and an artistic revolution led by the self-dubbed Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
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