We want her, like real historical bonnet touter Lizzie Siddal (painter’s muse to the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) to follow her dream of painting, to shake off her Victorian sensibilities. She is an honest girl, ‘so unlike those squawking bonnet touters on Cranbourne Alley,’ but we do not want her to be honest. We have a similarly modern response to Iris. A dog-skin purse, a fan made of whale’s lung tissue, ‘a pocket of air escapes, gamey, sweet and putrid.’ Elizabeth Macneal is needling us, making us squirm. Looking over Silas’ shoulder we relish each telling detail of Victoriana, but we are conscious all along of our present-day squeam. The Doll Factory toys with our reader’s sensibilities from the outset. A taxidermist of subtle skill, he runs a middling successful Shop of Curiosities, but is forever ‘hounded by doubts, by the ache for more.’ A few streets away, Silas harbours a comparable ambition. She longs to escape the drudgery, to learn to paint properly. Iris paints porcelain faces, ‘threads hair through the holes in the scalp, sometimes curls it with irons heated in the coals,’ in Mrs Salter’s Doll Emporium.
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