Dora Damage was a bookbinder’s daughter
before she became a bookbinder’s wife so she’s steeped in the trade and can
tell that her husband’s business is on the decline. He’s not well, struggling
with arthritic hands and painful joints, so she needs to help; but in
nineteenth century London the guild rules are strict and use of un-apprenticed,
non-union, and heaven forbid female, workers risks exclusion from the market.
However behind closed doors who is to say
who has produced the goods, and her clandestinely backed notebooks, with their
feminine finish, prove popular with the ladies and earn a crust or two. But
when one publisher discovers her secret, instead of exposing her, he uses it to
persuade her to exercise her skills on books of a disreputable nature for a
group of wealthy men with unconventional tastes.
Thus she is drawn into the fringes of an unfamiliar
society of free-thinkers and liberals, rubbing shoulders with men of influence
and ladies of leisure. As a favour (not to be refused) to one of the ladies she
takes on a freed Negro slave to help in the workshop, which increasingly
becomes a model of equality and diversity with the boss man disabled, the
apprentice gay, and a newly appointed servant girl pitching in when needed.
Dora’s troubles (she also has a young
daughter who fits) and travails are related first hand in her journal with
candour and they chronicle her developing confidence and capability in a man’s
world. Her emancipation, and that of the other equally down-trodden characters,
is the real story and a quite uplifting one it is too. The period detail is
atmospheric and the bookbinding techniques and materials exude a convincing
authenticity.
The volume I read was hardback, nicely bound
of course with appropriately patterned endpapers, tooled spine, period dust
jacket and ribbon bookmark. Its format and content provide a fitting and
lasting legacy of the young author who died shortly after she finished writing
this, her first, and sadly only, book.
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