The Dress Lodger

The Dress Lodger by Sheri Holman

The setting is 19th Century Sunderland England.  A young girl is destitute and without a decent family.  By day, a potter's assistant, hauling mud and clay to the potters wheel.  By night, a dress lodger, or a prositute, owned by a man with a fancy dress.  Watched by an old woman, "The Eye",  who dresses her nightly in the "blue dress", and follows her around the foggy streets to be sure she is earning her rent.  At home in a filthy lodge, her only relative, her tiny bastard baby who was born with his heart on the outside of his body, is being tended to by a small girl who can barely take care of herself.  On one of her nightly rounds, she meets Dr. Henry Chiver, who steels bodies from the streets to perform and teach his students of the human anatomy.  Once the Doctor learns of her deformed child, he decides that his days of body thieving are over, obsessed by the wonders of this child with the blue heart.  He must have it, he must study it, and decides to take the child from her.  But before he gets the child in his clutches, the baby dies of the cholera morbus.  A deadly disease that has been ravaging the continents and killing mostly the poor.  He steals the body of the child from the graveyard, takes the childs heart, and buries the rest of the body in his backyard.  The dress lodger knows because she has been to the graveyard daily to mourn her child.  Immediately upon discovering the missing body, she goes to the doctors study to accuse him and retrieve her child.  But the townspeople have figured him out also.  They know that he has taken their loved ones bodies also.  They come in a mob to exact revenge.  Bodies of people, old and young alike are retrieved from the doctors soil.  This is a time when people would not let their bodies be studied.  Doctors had no other way to discover cures and learn of the diseases.  They had to resort to murder and thievery.  "Grave: A place where the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student."-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

I found this book intriguing in a Dickenson sort of way.  We learn of the culture of the people of England during a time of death, we learn of medical history and we see how we have come a long way in studying disease and finding cures, and we learn of those who were sacrificed so thatmedicine might advance.  This book was published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in New York and was copyrighted in 2000.

Also, I find it interesting that the story seems to be told by the ghost of a lodger who lives in the same house as the dress lodger and has died from the cholera.