THE JOURNAL OF DORA DAMAGE
London, 1860. Dora Damage illicitly takes over her ailing husband’s bookbinding business, only to find herself lured into binding expensive volumes of pornography commissioned by aristocratic roués. Her indefatigable spirit carries her so far through this rude awakening, but when a mysterious fugitive slave arrives at her door to whom she is duty-bound to offer an apprenticeship, she realises she has become entangled in a web of sex, money, deceit and the law, which only grips tighter the more she struggles against it.
The Journal of Dora Damage whips up a vision of London when it was the largest city in the world, swamped by the filth produced by a swollen population; its sweat, stench and misery are both the details and the bigger issues of the book. Against a backdrop of power and politics, work and idleness, conservatism and abolitionism, it explores the many ‘binds’ operative at all levels of society – the restrictions of gender, class and race, and the ties of family and love – and examines the price at which freedom can be obtained by the transgression or acceptance of society’s rules and taboos.
Despite – or perhaps because of – its setting, The Journal of Dora Damage is an unashamedly modern novel, whose themes seem just as relevant today, and which seeks to prove A.N. Wilson’s assertion that we are all still living in the Victorian age. Belinda Starling
The Journal of Dora Damage is due to be published in November 2007.
Click here for more information about the book andherefor the book’s publisher, Bloomsbury.
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