The Dress Lodger (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Dress Lodger is engrossing historical fiction. As in the best of its genre, Sheri Holman's atmospheric, miasmic tale set in cholera-stricken Sunderland, England, circa 1831 is based on fact. Its epigraph from Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary--"Grave: A place where the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student"--casts the novel's thematic lodestone, steering the reader into a deathly plot pursued through streets emanating the sounds, insufferable smells, humor, adversities, and disease of an early-19th-century industrial city.

Fifteen-year-old Gustine--the dress lodger--is a potter's assistant by day, prostitute by night. Her overbearing pimp and landlord has her permanently shadowed by an indefatigable, mysterious old woman "called Eyeball or Evil Eye or Gray Sister by boys who have read their Homer, but mostly called just plain Eye." Otherwise how could he guard his investment in the startling blue dress in which Gustine rents herself? Her trade, he explains, "works on this basic principle: a cheap whore is given a fancy dress as a higher class of prostitute, the higher the station of the clientèlle; the higher the station, the higher the price." Gustine's garment beckons Henry Chiver, an ambitious young surgeon who has fled Edinburgh, having been implicated in the convictions of infamous pioneer anatomists Burke and Hare for murder and grave robbing. For this doctor, desperate to reestablish his tarnished reputation through medical discovery, the heart is the favorite organ, "the singular fascination of his life." But to further his researches, and quell the increasing demands of his paying students--who are restless for induction into the arts of the scalpel--Henry requires dead bodies for dissection, to the horror of his naïve, philanthropic fiancée. But the Anatomy Act, which allows doctors to obtain corpses legally, has yet to pass through Parliament, and a suspicious public is terrifying itself with stories of murderous "burkers."

Street-smart Gustine, a pragmatist trapped in unrelenting poverty, is all heart for her nameless little son who wears--literally--his heart on the outside. His rare case of ectopia cordis is just the sort of anatomical anomaly whose study would make a name for the doctor. Amid the gathering momentum of the cholera epidemic, Henry and Gustine strike up a fatal pact: life for her son in exchange for a fresh supply of dead bodies for Henry's dissection. With mordant Dickensian wit and Elizabeth Gaskell's deft touch for gutsy outcast women seizing control of their destiny, Sheri Holman carves out a rich, imaginative adventure as incisive and as gruesomely fascinating as a 19th-century operating theater. --Rachel Holmes

From 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, liceAnot 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. Agent, Molly Friedrich. 40,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB selections. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 291 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Pr; 1st edition (January 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871137534
• ISBN-13: 978-0871137531
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (170 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,174,116 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Strong Stuff!, December 20, 1999

By	Beverley Strong (Australia) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The story of a pretty,young prostitute who hires a glamourous blue ball gown from a pimp,to attract customers.She is the mother of a baby who was born with his heart outside his chest cavity,and attracts the attention of a young doctor who was involved in the infamous Burke and Hare scandal of body snatching and the murder of indigents to supply cadavers for medical schools. The prose is wonderful and the stench of filth,poverty and death remains in ones nostrils.This is life at its most degrading and the thought that people really lived like this is unbelievable!You'll need a hot bath a a good hair scrub after reading this!

42 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Would Scare The Dickens Out Of Charles D.!, January 26, 2000

By	taking a rest - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

Dickensian, or so and so meets Dickens, is probably a publicist at work. This authoress writes in a style that is her own, so if a label is to be attached how about "Holmanian". That this books take place in the 19th century does not require a comparison to Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, or Anthony Trollope. If her next book takes place in the 21st century will she be compared to Isimov?

This book is well written; an interesting tale, some history, and I would happily have read it were it twice as long. This Authoress's very harsh, foul, and all 5 sense offending England, makes many descriptions that others have written, descriptive of a city that while not perfect, is tolerable, and tolerated.

This book rubs the reader raw, nothing is embellished, think of something that you fear, and then imagine it has been brought to the page with a beautiful turn of phrase. This Authoress writes what other authors, and other readers may have been thinking. Many have mentioned topics in the book in their reviews, if they make you shift a bit in your seat, Sheri Holman will keep you there as going to bed and dreaming of her characters would be exponentially more frightening.

I enjoyed the book enough to go and pursue her first, and subsequent works will be added to my reading as well.

Good read, you would not be disappointed, just a bit unnerved.

40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars historical fiction at its best, March 21, 2000

By	Karen Kirsch "blazerlib" (Novi, MI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Such a strange coincidence that the 2 books I bought at Border's included Ambrose Bierce...the quotation by him to begin "The Dress Lodger" and the title of the other..."Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades." Caleb Carr's "The Alienist" got me intrigued with life during the 19th century. I have since looked for books that dealt with this period of time. I read a review of "The Dress Lodger" in the Detroit Free Press and knew that I would be fascinated by it. I was not disappointed. Gustine and Dr. Chiver led me on a historical jaunt through an England that was beset by cholorus morbus...the deadly cholora. Holman gripped me in the first chapter. Her way of telling this story seemed quite unique to me. While the book is quite morbid in its content, her characters are well drawn-out. I could empathize with Fos, Pink, and especially Gustine. I've passed this on to a friend and purchased Holman's first, looking forward to another great story. At 54 years old, I'm learning about the history that I didn't learn in school. I have purchased non-fiction books on Teddy Roosevelt, WWI (about the flu that killed millions of people that I never heard about), and now cholera. Maybe I can share with my students the facts that I wasn't aware of.