A Very British Murder (7 page)

And Thurtell continued to entertain, and to warn by his bad example, even after he was dead. He would soon achieve immortality in wax, in the collection of Madame Tussaud.

‘Methinks it is of ill Consequence that there should be a Murderers’ Corner, wherein a Villain may look to have his Figure put more certainly than a Poet can look to a Statue in the Abbey.’

‘Mr Pips his Diary’, in
Punch
, 1840

IN 1802, A
41-year-old French woman who spoke no English crossed the Channel without her husband. She was accompanied only by her four-year-old son, and a collection of 30 life-size human portraits in wax. In London, she set up her collection at the Lyceum Theatre in the Strand, and sold tickets for entry to the ‘Grand European Cabinet of Figures’. It was the first venue in what would turn out to be a very lengthy tour, and the lady herself would become intimate with England and its ways. Her journey around the nation, with her show in tow, lasted for the next 30 years.

Marie Grosholtz (as she was born) was in 1802 at the lowest ebb of her fortunes. Her profession was an old one, which had the noble aim of bringing the dead back to life. Westminster Abbey
contains the earliest and best British models, in wood, and then wax, of kings and queens. In the days before effective embalming techniques, a stand-in figure of the deceased was often made to represent his or her body at the funeral.

These effigies provided a focus for the crowds who gathered to pay their last respects to a king or queen. Placed on top of a coffin, and carried in procession, the effigy allowed them to feel that they were seeing their former monarch for the last time. Some of those at Westminster Abbey today are quite astonishingly old. You can see the face of Edward III, presumed to be taken from his death mask, and carved in wood: he died in 1377. Anne of Bohemia, the wife of Richard II, who died in 1394, still presents us with her long and mournful visage. In 1904 Max Beerbohm described their curious, dignified and moving aura in resonant words: ‘They were fashioned with a solemn and wistful purpose. The reason of them lies in a sentiment which is as old as the world, lies in man’s vain revolt from the prospect of death.’

The figures in Westminster Abbey that date from the seventeenth century onwards are modelled in wax, rather than wood, and their purpose was slightly broader than for use in a funeral procession. During Charles II’s funeral in 1685, his coffin was topped merely by his crown, rather than an effigy. A wax figure was made nevertheless, and put on show for the edification – and, in due course, for the entertainment – of visitors. The figures of his successors, William and Mary, are likewise waxworks in the modern sense: for show, rather than for use in a funeral. In 1685, Johann Schalch, a German showman, received a licence from the Lord Mayor of London to display royal figures, and toured a tableau featuring Queen Mary II
on her deathbed. It was said to contain a wonderfully accurate face taken from her death mask.

The desire to show what celebrated, usually royal, people looked like in an age before photography was one impetus behind modelling in wax; the other was the medical profession’s growing desire to have wax models of bodies and their organs for teaching purposes. Interestingly, most of the eighteenth-century wax figures made for anatomical purposes were female, often adorned with wigs and eyelashes, and made so as to open up to display wombs and sometimes growing foetuses inside. It was much less common for wax modellers to produce a full-length male figure, and male organs were often fashioned to stand alone. The female models, known as ‘Venuses’, were venerated as beautiful and even erotic objects, while the masculine gender less often suffered the indignity of being reproduced naked in wax for the scrutiny of medical students.

The effigies of Westminster Abbey fell into neglect in the eighteenth century, were piled up and left semi-abandoned in a side chapel. They became known by the pupils at Westminster School next door as ‘The Ragged Regiment’. Out in the wider world, though, the eighteenth century saw waxworks become a popular part of mainstream culture and entertainment.

Exhibitions of waxworks, for which tickets were sold, were by then a solid commercial enterprise. They were connected to the new rationalism of the Enlightenment, which encouraged the classification and codification of human beings, a continuous search for knowledge, and, as Pamela Pilbeam, historian of waxworks, puts it, ‘an acknowledgement of the potential of the individual’.

At Mrs Salmon’s gallery in the Strand, Georgian London’s most famous waxworks venue, one could see kings and queens but also curiosities, such as the famous, hairy, feral child known as ‘Peter the Wild Boy’. You could also readily commission a waxwork of yourself or your family: from the 1690s, Mrs Mills, a rival proprietor to Mrs Salmon, who displayed her work at Exeter Change in the Strand, announced to her visitors that they, too, ‘may have their Effigies made of their deceas’d Friends on moderate terms’.

In 1770s Paris, the young Marie Grosholtz’s mother was working as housekeeper to a Swiss doctor, Philippe Curtius, who had discovered that he had a talent as a maker of wax anatomical models. He would refer to Marie as his ‘niece’, but it is likely that she was his illegitimate daughter. In due course Curtius opened a ‘cabinet de cire’, or wax museum, in Paris. Marie entered into an apprenticeship in wax-modelling under Curtius, and evidently showed much skill. She completed her first head – Voltaire – at the age of 17.

It was the start of what would prove to be a tremendous career. In pre-Revolutionary France, Marie later claimed, she had won the patronage of the French royal family, and even visited Versailles to give lessons to the doomed Louis XVI’s sister Elizabeth. But it has to be said that her memoirs, written many years later, and with the help of a ghost writer, probably exaggerated her royal and aristocratic connections.

Dr Curtius’s gallery, however, was a great commercial success and he found his services in demand even after the Terror began. The Parisian mob required wax heads of their heroes, to carry on sticks through the streets, and they also wanted their decapitated enemies, fresh from the guillotine, to be recorded in wax. It was
Marie who undertook this gruesome task for the Convention, and in 1793 she took death masks of the executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Her model of the murdered Marat was displayed in Paris in a tableau with the celebrated bath and the assassin’s dagger still sticking out of his body.

But the years following the Revolution did not prove kind to the waxworks business. Curtius died in 1794, Marie found it hard to stay on the right side of the Revolutionary authorities and visitor numbers declined. She had married one Monsieur Tussaud in 1795, but nevertheless within ten years had made her way alone to Britain.

Late Georgian London was a good choice of destination for Marie Tussaud. It would prove to be a paradise for showmen and performers of all kinds. The promenade – walking up and down, observing the fashionable folk and the clothes they wore – had become the pastime of the age, and visitors to pleasure gardens like Vauxhall liked nothing more than to ogle other people. Even better, then, to visit a waxworks: here it was not impolite to have a good stare.

But Madame Tussaud did not at first have a permanent venue. She kept her show on the move around Britain, rarely sticking to schedule because an announcement that departure from (say) Birmingham had been delayed due to excessive numbers still visiting was an excellent way to drum up business. Eventually, as Marie entered her seventies, the show settled down, permanently, in premises in Baker Street, London. It had three main themes: France (because of Madame’s background), Royalty and, of course, Horror.

What would become the notorious ‘Chamber of Horrors’ was known, at first, as simply ‘the Other Chamber’. It specialized in
Revolutionary horror from France: the models of guillotined heads that Marie had brought with her and a small replica of the guillotine itself. But these were supplemented over time, not only by representations of British murderers but also by artefacts belonging to them. Tussaud’s agents were quick to arrive during trials and after executions to make financial offers for items of interest.

In its permanent, Baker Street, home, Madame Tussaud’s flourished. In her history of the institution, Pamela Pilbeam points out that its surge in popularity coincided with the reduction in the number of public hangings, as if people turned to wax to replace a lost pleasure. She also notes how carefully the Waxworks was positioned to take advantage of the burgeoning travel networks of London. Horse-drawn buses could bring people to the door from all the railway stations on the ‘New Road’: Paddington, Marylebone, Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras. None of them was more than two miles distant, and a trip to the Waxworks, while not cheap, made a convenient day out in the capital for the suburban dweller.

Marie Tussaud died in 1850, but still remains present in her own gallery in waxen form. Her family continued to run the business. As the century wore on, though, a certain middle-class disapproval of the ghoulish nature of the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ began to be expressed. It was heightened by the acquisition of a celebrated collection of instruments of torture in 1872. ‘It panders to a morbid, unhealthy, unfeeling curiosity,’ one pressman moaned.

And yet, horror and murder made financial sense to Madame Tussaud’s. In 1890, a new model of Mrs Pearcey drew 31,000 visitors on Boxing Day alone. Eleanor Pearcey had bludgeoned the wife and child of her lover to death in Kentish Town. Madame Tussaud’s had
acquired the child’s pram and even – a touch of genius – the sweet the baby had been sucking at the time of its death.

Punch
magazine regrets the British tendency to hero-worship murderers, in a caricature of Madame Tussaud’s gallery.

Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks tried to hide its financial success behind an educational fig leaf, and certainly learning lay somewhere in its mission. Marie Tussaud had aimed to convey the authentic flavour of a person, for example presenting her figure of Napoleon alongside a real tooth of his, real hair, and various other personal possessions. The exhibition’s catalogues were instructive in tone, and claimed to ‘convey to the minds of young Persons much
biographical knowledge – a branch of education universally allowed to be of the highest importance’. Madame Tussaud would have been pleased by an early press review of her gallery which did indeed advise those in charge of ‘young persons to take them to see this exhibition, as the view of so many famous characters in history must make them desirous to open the pages of history’.

Unlike earlier waxworks shows, there were no nude figures or erotica, and in 1842
Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal
reported that ‘you must not allow yourself to associate [Madame Tussaud’s] in your mind with those tawdry and tinselled spectacles which are often seen in provincial towns; there is nothing paltry, or mean, or got-up looking about it, but, on the contrary, everything bears evidence of the excellent judgement of liberality of the indefatigable conductor, Madame Tussaud’. Indeed – the ultimate sign of respectability – ‘the linen, laces, etc.’ are changed ‘every week or two, so that they are all beautifully clean’.

But what determined whether a model would stay, or leave the display, was careful observation of the number of visitors who stopped before it for a closer look. Very few of the models were placed upon pedestals, and visitors could get close enough to touch. This pattern of stoppage was carefully monitored, with various wildfire celebrities or ‘ephemerals’ being retired after a few weeks. Other, perennial favourites (‘immortals’) were constantly retouched, refreshed and occasionally remodelled over many years. Queen Victoria was the most popular figure of all.

The ‘Other Chamber’ was renamed the ‘Chamber of Comparative Physiognomy’ in 1860. This gave it the gloss of the contemporary pseudo-science of phrenology, the now discredited Victorian practice
of deducing people’s characters from their physical appearance and physiognomy, and for measuring the bumps of the cranium to diagnose temperament and mental abilities. But its popular name was the ‘Chamber of Horrors’, and its fame, fear and mysterious magnetism became so great that during the First World War, trainee soldiers were frequently set the ‘initiative test’ of hiding and spending the night there. This caused such inconvenience that Madame Tussaud’s was forced officially to ask the War Office to stop the practice.