Cooking with Gaslight

Two new books prowl the alleys of Victorian London, looking for fresh material.

by Justin Bauer

The Dress Lodger

By Sherri Lodger
Atlantic Monthly, 291 p., $26

The Unburied

By Charles Palliser
Farrar, Straus & Girous, 400 p., $24

Apparently, dead bodies go better with gaslight. At least, that seems to be an article of faith for a growing group of writers who have tapped 19th-century settings at the close of the 20th. Last year saw a slew of period pieces, which ran from serious literary novels to pulpy suspense potboilers. And this year opens with another chunk of Victoriana, in Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger and Charles Palliser’s The Unburied.

Victorian England provides a setting tailor-made for intrigues, all dark alleys and choking fogs, flickering streetlights and shady characters. The period did, after all, give us the very real Jack the Ripper and the birth of the detective novel. Gaslight and carriages have become standard trappings for our own modern Gothic tales; they’re familiar enough not to impose too much distance, but foreign enough to encourage sufficiently strange stories. Underneath the grime and down the unlit alleys, we can imagine amoral masterminds exploiting prodigies and freaks, directing conspiracies, where such things seem foreign to our halogen-lit, sanitary present.

The Dress Lodger plays the Victorian setting for all it’s worth. Less a mystery than a story about dirty secrets and unspeakable practices, Sheri Holman’s sophomore novel concentrates on the relationship between a teenage prostitute and a dubious surgeon, set against the backdrop of a cholera outbreak in industrial Sunderland.

Factory girl Gustine has been imprisoned by her poverty and by her child, forced into working as a "dress lodger" — a prostitute dressed to pass for a lady of a higher class — and guarded by a silent old woman called "The Eye," who shows more interest in safeguarding her landlord/pimp’s investment in Gustine’s dress than watching out for her well-being. Her son’s birth defect prompts her to seek the aid of Henry Chiver, a young surgeon whose scandalous past has left him stealing cadavers on which to perform his research. Gustine solicits his help, providing cadavers through trickery and impersonation, until Chiver’s greed to study her child and his condition brings disaster on them both.

Holman’s greatest strength is her use of historical material and authentic, if sordid, situations: Gustine’s life as factory girl and white slave; Chiver’s disgrace in the Burke and Hare scandal, where beggars were murdered and sold for anatomy studies; and the lengths he goes to for his medical research, stooping to grave robbing and braving cholera. Holman’s settings overflow with detail, showing formidable research, and she cinches fact closely to her fictional characters and their dilemmas.

However particular and realistic her Sunderland seems, though, the novel as a whole hits some odd notes. Her broad thematic base doesn’t match the way she tells her story. Her themes are heavy ones — the luxury of morality, the problems of prostitution and poverty, the balance between scientific advances and the sanctity of the dead. But her novel mistakes sentimentality and bathos for weight and reverence, and her twin heroes become simplistic symbols of the dilemmas in which they have been caught. They carry on explicit internal debates, leaving little work for the reader to do; they justify themselves to other characters repeatedly and interminably. And any complexity of character gets lost in relentless, studied historical accuracy.

For instance, The Eye provides one of the book’s eeriest symbols, a silent, eternally watchful old woman. But Holman sacrifices her impact to exposition, reducing her vigilance to merely another example of the reach of poverty. What had been mysterious and unsettling becomes merely another example from a litany of the horrors of Victorian poverty, a powerful symbolic figure reduced to another sop to sentiment.

For all of her attention to historical accuracy and detail, Holman winds up using history to simplify matters; she nails down her plots and characters with historical causes, and uses her setting to make complications simple. Charles Palliser works in the opposite direction.

Palliser’s best-known book, The Quincunx, set out a willfully difficult plot, full of obscure connections and odd contingencies, lost legal papers and hidden illegitimate children. In length and complexity, it rivals the most bloated of Victorian novels, and insured that Palliser would be pigeonholed as a kind of Victorian revivalist, constantly labeled as "Dickensian."

The Unburied starts from that point, conjuring the spirits of Dickens and especially Wilkie Collins in its opening hints of unsolved mystery and scandalous crime. But the book is at once more labyrinthine and more subdued than those hints suggest, content to pose almost academic conundrums and create complex characters rather than produce a simmering plot. In fact, for all of its hints of being a whodunit, the murder that ties its multiple plots together doesn’t occur until the second half of the book.

History doesn’t simplify anything for Palliser or his characters. Unsatisfied with a single puzzle, he multiplies histories and documents; the book encompasses three separate murders in three centuries. The bulk of The Unburied purports to be an Oxford historian’s recounting of a murder in the cathedral town of Thurchester. But this narrator, Courtine, has come to Thurchester to solve his own mystery, hunting down an account of a pre-Conquest martyrdom that may or may not exist, and whose discovery depends on the solution of a 17th-century scandal. Palliser’s simple murder becomes an elaborate and involved wild-goose chase.

For all of the intricacy of the plot, though, the book’s greatest asset lies in its principal narrator, and in the skill with which Palliser creates his characters. Donnish, repressed Courtine serves as both scrupulous witness and clearly interested party. The other characters exposed, both in his account of the central murder and encased in the archives he paws through, energize a set of plots that could have become merely a logical exercise, and repay the effort necessary to work through the conflicting stories and accounts of all the various crimes the book describes.

The crucial difference between these morbid period pieces, in the end, is merely a matter of lighting. Palliser seems perfectly happy to settle for the gaslight, and has his fun playing in the shadows. Holman, instead, casts about for ways to turn it into a searchlight, which illuminates more details but bleaches out the background color.