There are worse ways to spend a dark and gloomy evening than with The Doll Factory, a solid slab of Victoriana. Adapted from the bestselling novel by Elizabeth Macneal, this six-parter follows the fortunes and misfortunes of Iris Whittle, a young woman who works as a painter of porcelain dolls. It sends out its gothic bat signals from the start. Many of the dolls are painted as likenesses of children, and most are commissioned by grieving parents as memorials to their deceased offspring. Iris and her reclusive sister Rose recreate these faces from photographs, keeping themselves amused with a game of “dead or alive”. They need some relief from the drudgery: both are employed by a harsh and parsimonious shopkeeper, Mrs Salter, who ensures they remain under the debt of gratitude to her for taking them in.
But Iris is a plucky sort. She speaks out of turn, for which she is docked a day’s wages. She is kind to street children, and she holds her own against her social superiors, surprising them with how articulate she is. She harbours ambitions to be an artist in her own right, which, for a woman of no means in London in 1850, is little more than a daydream. Women’s bodies are the dominant theme here, where they are parcelled up and consumed by men. At a model of The Great Exhibition, soon to be arriving in the city, Iris and her cascading red hair – do any Victorian heroines have a plain brown bob? – attract the attentions of Silas Reed (Éanna Hardwicke, so vividly evil in The Sixth Commandment earlier this year), who runs a curiosity shop and has a sideline in vivisection and taxidermy. Dream-like flashbacks hint that Iris reminds him of a former flame.
Silas is not the only man in London interested in the doll-painter. Enter the Pre-Raphaelites, here portrayed as a Bullingdon-esque band of brothers who maraud around the city, taking particular interest in its underbelly. They are rude, loud and brutish, frequenting pubs and brothels as they look for women to enjoy, in more ways than one. They bully Silas, whom they nickname Cadaver. The most mysterious member of this fellowship, Louis Frost, spots Iris and decides that he must have her as his life model. It’s the red hair that does it for him, too.
Iris wishes to be free of the shop, free of Mrs Salter and free of her oppressive sister, who was badly scarred by smallpox at the age of 16 and now hides from the world beneath a mourning veil. Rose undermines Iris and pours scorn on her creative ambitions. When Iris is offered this new position, she points out the plain facts: modelling is social death, at that time akin to sex work. Yet Iris sees the potential to strike a bargain with Louis. If she allows him to paint her, will he teach her to paint in return? She has the chance of an education that she would not get anywhere else. Still, women keep going missing, and Louis and his sister Clarissa look suspiciously like they might be in the frame for it. Iris could be walking into a lion’s den.
It certainly seems that way at the start; however, like a good Sarah Waters novel, this twists and dances around our expectations of what will happen next. It is a little bit Perfume, a little bit The Miniaturist, with a great dollop of Dickens. It is a slow burner, though, only really picking up the pace by the end of the first episode, by which point it may have lost viewers. It drifts around atmospherically, nudging all the pieces into place, while gathering a creeping sense of dread. What it lacks in zip, though, it makes up for in vivid imagery: specimen jars, in particular, make its themes clear. By episode two, it ratchets up the tension, and the stifling oppression of Iris’s world begins to feel palpable. It is gruesome, at points, earning its goth badge with honours. The men take an anatomy class at university, and the timed severing of a human leg is depicted in great detail. It was too much detail for me.
But I liked its painterly flourishes, which often drift into fantastical scenes. Characters imagine taking violent revenge, before we cut back to a more staid reality. By the final episode, it goes all-out on the theatrics, and if it starts out as a steady and familiar period drama, it certainly doesn’t end that way. This saves it from the dreary doldrums, and, coupled with great performances, particularly from Esme Creed-Miles as Iris and Hardwicke as the shadowy Silas, it makes it well worth a flutter.
The Doll Factory is on Paramount+
