Kate Berridge (24 page)

A neighbouring attraction and rival to Mrs Salmon was Rackstrow's museum at 197 Fleet Street. Founded in 1787, this mind-boggling display of crazy curating challenged the constitutions of visitors until around 1808. An eclectic selection of natural curiosities–animal, vegetable and mineral–camouflaged the main attractions, which were explicit anatomical models in wax of the female pelvic organs and ‘anatomical representation (in wax) of the urinary bladder and penis of a man'. These were arranged alongside pathological specimens that would have done Damien Hirst proud: endless pickled human organs, including ‘a penis injected to the state of erection', and stomach-turning aberrations of nature, all preserved in spirits. What is particularly striking is the juxtaposition of items–a bust of George III and death masks of Oliver Cromwell and Sir Isaac Newton alongside ‘a bone of the penis of the sea bull'. And all this was presented in the guise of an educational experience. The only concession to sensibility was that female visitors were offered the opportunity to view the exhibits without men being present, with the assurance that ‘a gentlewoman would attend them separately.' This pathological-peep-show style of waxworks proliferated in the nineteenth century, in contrast to Madame Tussaud's version of respectable family entertainment.

Another waxworks that had long been a feature of London life was within Westminster Abbey. The core of the collection of wax figures here was the remains of effigies crafted for ceremonial purposes. These relics of ancient funerary ritual related to royalty and people of noble birth. A wax double of the deceased dignitary was positioned on a hearse–historically, a platform on which the wax figure was attached, and draped with hangings and laudatory verses. From the fourteenth century onward these likenesses had been the focal point of solemn processions that ended in the Abbey. The decrepitude of the collection spawned the nickname ‘the ragged regiment'. A description in a guidebook published in 1708 hints at the aptness of the name, describing Edward III as ‘a broken piece of wax-work, a battered head, and a straw-stuffed body not one-quarter
covered with rags'. In the mid eighteenth century attention was deflected from the sorry remnants of the regiment that included bashed-up Edward III, Charles II and Elizabeth I when a series of new full-length wax figures was installed with commercial, not ceremonial, intent–as Horace Walpole complained, ‘to draw visits and money from the mob'. To install full-length wax figures with seemingly no other purpose than to satisfy and profit from public curiosity stands out as a daring and dubious use of the consecrated space of a place of worship. It also hints at the potency of lifelike representations of historical characters and people in public life in a culture where there was no collective visual frame of reference. The new figures included Queen Anne, William and Mary, a made-over Elizabeth I and Lord Chatham (Pitt the Elder), with an admission charge of 6
d
. The figure of Chatham was commissioned from Patience Wright, an intriguing American artist who moved in the upper echelons of late-eighteenth-century English society.

This charismatic woman represented the more rarefied and elitist genre of wax modelling. Like a society portrait painter, she largely fulfilled private commissions for her privileged circle of contacts. While Marie was coming to England yoked to a commercial showman, Patience Wright, who came from Philadelphia, had been introduced into English society by Benjamin Franklin. The doors of the smartest addresses had been opened to her, and she once caused a sensation in an aristocratic drawing room by placing there a brilliantly executed likeness of a housemaid which it did not take long for someone to be duped into addressing, much to the delight of those present. But, beyond her parlour pranks, her work received the highest encomiums. The
London Magazine
regarded her as a prodigy, ‘reserved by the hand of nature to produce a new style of picturing superior to statuary and peculiar to herself and the honour of America, for her compositions in likeness to the originals surpass paint or any other method of delineation; they live with such a perfect animation, that we are more surprised than charmed, for we see art perfect as nature.' Her figure of the Earl of Chatham, which can still be seen at Westminster Abbey, was immensely popular.

However, Mrs Wright got one thing wrong in the eyes of her English hosts. Her relaxed American familiarity clashed with stiff
English formality, and those who witnessed it almost melted with embarrassment when, as if they were her new best friends, she addressed the King and Queen as ‘George' and ‘Charlotte'. This puts Marie's supposed chumminess with Louis and Marie Antoinette in the shade. She controlled access to her work by exhibiting by appointment only at her residence in Cockspur Street.

Patience Wright died in 1786. Although Marie therefore had only the legacy of the talented American's reputation to contend with when she came to London, there had in one sense already been rivalry between them. Evidently Patience had identified the potential for wax in the decadent days of
Ancien Régime
Paris, and in 1779 she wrote to Benjamin Franklin asking for his help to set her up in business in the French capital. He deterred her, because he felt the wax-portraiture market was already well supplied. Presumably his direct experience of Curtius's talent was the basis on which he made his assessment.

The closest anyone in England came to Curtius was the Irish-born Samuel Percy, who set a new standard of excellence for wax portraiture. He confined his work to miniatures and half-figures, and like Curtius he enjoyed aristocratic patronage, in his case from the Earl of Shaftesbury. Appealing to the aesthetic taste and vanity of ‘the nobility and gentry', his exquisitely detailed portraits displayed in dust-proof boxes, gilt frames, and on convex glass mounts represented the top end of the consumer market. Hand-tinted and occasionally embellished with seed pearls and glass beads, they were of exceptional intricacy. His facility for texture also put him in the Curtius class, but whereas Curtius excelled in mimicking the human complexion, Percy's signature skill was the intricacy of his chiselling of wax accessories such as lace ruffs. His wax-medallion portraits graced stately homes and even royal residences: the collection of HM the Queen at Windsor Castle includes historical character studies by Percy. Whereas Marie catered to the shilling-a-pop general public, Percy drew those with guineas to spend. His distinguished clientele often ordered copies, made by an assistant from Percy's mould, and these unsigned inferior reproductions were distributed to friends and relatives. Those who baulked at the guinea-and-a-half fee for a coloured miniature portrait could opt for the less expensive plain-white relief
style, ‘after the manner of Roman coins'. Percy's career represented the medium of wax as fine art, for the privileged consumption of the private collector or those who frequented the Royal Academy, where at various times between 1786 and 1804 Percy's works were on display.

There was a polarity in Georgian London between waxworks as general entertainment and waxworks as a small, respectable seam of Establishment culture. This dichotomy echoed a more general chasm between entertainment and education. Marie quickly recognized the potential to plug this gap by using the medium to promote her unique and innovative blend of ‘infotainment'. When she first arrived in London there was no National Gallery, and the British Museum was interested more in protecting its collections from the general public than in making them accessible. Endless draconian rules such as no browsing and the presence of bossy guides watching visitors' every move were the Establishment equivalent of a ‘trespassers will be prosecuted' notice.

Prejudice against the general public was deeply engrained. In the early days of the Royal Academy, for example, a concern of artists was the prospect that on general display their work ran the risk of appraisal ‘by kitchen maids and stable boys'. To prevent such insufferable indignity, admission fees were devised ‘to prevent the room from being filled by improper persons'.

The commercial entertainment sector, by contrast, wooed the public with a constantly changing programme of mechanical inventions, menageries, ‘mathemagicians', strongmen, pig-faced ladies, and every conceivable sleight-of-hand illusion. Marie was one of the first to appreciate the value of a printed catalogue as an important part of customer care, and of course an additional source of income. Given so many rival attractions, advertising was essential, and the first indication that Marie was not on safe ground with Philipstal came on arrival, when she learned that he had not included her exhibition in any of the advertisements for his own entertainment. The exception was a token mention on a poster of 7 December 1802 of ‘A Cabinet of Wonders'.

Aware that pre-publicity was a crucial part of creating the hype on which opening days depended, this must have been very
demoralizing. Moreover, since she did not speak English, she was completely reliant on Philipstal to help promote her. She could not have had clearer proof that he regarded her very much as the supporting act, and not an equal. Undaunted, she set up her thirty or so exhibits, interspersed with the model of the Bastille, the model of the guillotine, the blood-stained shirt of Henry IV and an Egyptian mummy.

In assessing the plight of a forty-one-year-old woman in a foreign country, with no money, no fallback, a small boy in tow, and a show about which the public were largely unaware, the minuses were daunting. But there were some pluses, chiefly her pluck and enterprise. After a presumably lonely Christmas in modest lodgings in Surrey Street, near the Strand, Marie showed her mettle early in the new year, when she seized the opportunity to add a topic of hot news to her exhibition. Her coup was to display a post-mortem likeness of the traitor Colonel Despard, whose trial and subsequent execution in February 1803 enthralled the nation.

Since Ireland had been formally annexed to Great Britain, by the 1800 Act of Union, becoming, as one historian put it, ‘a half-alien dependency', it had seethed and hissed with dissent. Vehemently opposed to the merger, Despard had for years fought with the United Irishmen for the freedom of his country. This organization had secretly sided with the French during the Revolutionary wars, and had given backing to the invasion plans of 1798. These allegiances were the background to Despard's audacious plot to bring down the English Establishment.

Despard was seen as a despicable traitor of such daring he made Guy Fawkes look timid. Not only had he set his sights on seizing the Houses of Parliament, but he was also plotting to take the Bank of England and the Tower of London, with the help of his thirty-two accomplices. Most dramatically, he was planning to assassinate the King–or, as the
St James's Chronicle
with palpable outrage reported it, ‘The leading feature of the conspiracy is of so shocking a description that we cannot mention it without pain and horror. The life of our beloved Sovereign it appears was to be attempted on Tuesday next by a division of the conspirators, while the remainder were to attack the Tower and other places.' The
dastardly ambitions of the would-be King-killers were punctured in the prosaic setting of the Oakley Arms, a pub in Lambeth, where they were apprehended by a party of Bow Street Runners.

The trial transfixed the nation, and courtroom drama quickly turned into sensational melodrama when Lord Nelson was subpoenaed as a character witness, on the basis of shared military service abroad some twenty years earlier. Not even a glowing testimony from Nelson could sway the jury to spare Despard the sentence of being hanged, drawn and quartered. However, after what our press would call an ‘emotional appeal' from his widow to intervene, Nelson succeeded in getting the sentence reduced to hanging and decapitation after death. Thousands of people watched the prolonged and ritualistic degradation of Despard's body, and broadside presses spewed accounts of his death. Executions were a staple subject of mass-produced and inexpensive woodcuts that enjoyed huge sales. These primitive representations, many of which relied on modifying existing stock blocks, were poor in quality, and early on Marie realized she could capitalize on the hunger to see better likenesses.

In the context of the precarious peace with France, the wax head of Colonel Despard was a good talking point. It was also much easier to view close up than from among the suffocating crowds at Newgate. Although of course it was a talking point on which Marie could not as yet converse, as she gratefully pocketed the shillings at the entrance. If she had been able to engage her customers in conversation, it would have been interesting to hear what she told them about modelling this macabre exhibit, for unlike with the French death heads and Revolutionary relics, that were the blood-thirsty core of her exhibition, she could not claim coercion as the reason for dabbling her ladylike hands in this sanguinary business.

In stark contrast to the calm atmosphere of Marie's cabinet was the spectral extravaganza offered by Philipstal in the upper room of the Lyceum. Since his earlier experimentation with the magic-lantern genre in Paris, his show had evolved to an altogether more sophisticated technical level. This was in no small measure down to the refinements to the magic lantern that had been made by a star pupil of Monsieur Charles's brother the professor, a man called Etienne Robert. It was the fun of fear that Philipstal was providing for his
audiences. The biggest thrill that he pioneered was sitting people in pitch darkness, for in eighteenth-century London congregating in the dark with strangers gave a frisson of daring to the experience of going to the theatre. Rivals tried to market this as a negative and announced on their publicity that at their shows ‘total extinction of light in the theatre is unnecessary', but they were rather missing the point.

Sir David Brewster (writing in 1832) gives a blow-by-blow, or rather flash-by-flash, account of fright night at the Lyceum in 1803: