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.
