Kate Berridge (27 page)

Once again she enjoyed healthy returns, while Philipstal floundered. In May he was forced to concede defeat and put his magic-lantern apparatus up for sale, His advertisement suggested that ‘any gentleman of a scientific and mechanical turn will find this an object worth his attention: either for gratification of private society or, in its present successful connection with the public, as a source of profit.' His short-fuse personality is even evident in his sale notice: ‘No person applying either from idle curiosity or a view to making improper discoveries can possibly be attended to.' Covering his professional dignity with the pretext that important business in England was calling him away, he made his excuses and left.

Marie never heard from Philipstal again. During their overlapping months in Dublin in early 1804 she was finally able to pay him off, and buy her artistic freedom. She communicated this news to her family in early March. Letters from this period have a cool, formal inflection. They are studded with boasts about the daily crowds and public acclaim. Instead of the former endearments and sentimental affection, there is a new sense of confidence bordering on defiant self-reliance: ‘My son and I are very well indeed. Have no doubts I shall do very well for the time and I hope to succeed seeing that I now work only for myself and my children.' She talks about working hard in order to give her children a good start in life. But most dramatically–perhaps emboldened by public approbation, long queues and ledgers recording day after day of good takings–she reveals that commitment to her professional path has eclipsed her personal ties to her husband and any joint ventures in Paris as her priority. ‘The day I finished with M. Philipstal my enterprise became more important to me than returning to you.' Yet although she bid him a melodramatic adieu, in reality it was more
au revoir
, because this was not her last contact with François.

In his final weeks in Dublin, one of Philipstal's automata that he was exhibiting as a supporting act was called the Self-Defending Money Chest:

This exhibit is a good mechanical metaphor for Marie's newly hardened mercenary bent, and sense of self-protection. Her experience at the hands of Philipstal had been a harsh lesson about unscrupulous exploitation of her earning power, and that and the slow-drain dependency of her husband on her financial resources seem to have led to a hardening resolve to be autonomous.

One of her early letters from Edinburgh had highlighted her disadvantaged position in her partnership with Philipstal: ‘His business is in a bad way, and he has only my Cabinet on which to rely.' Resentment had crystallized into outright animosity, and this seems also to have tainted her perception of her husband. By the time she reached Ireland she had discovered her own capability, and she realized she wanted to be accountable to no one, but to make enough money so that her children could count on her for their future security. This feeling was reinforced by the realization that, in François, her children were missing a reliable provider. She would take on this responsibility. Like the Self-Defending Money Chest, from here on she would fiercely protect her assets, and no one and no circumstances would sway her resolve or deplete her reserves.

In Ireland Marie's trail becomes obscured. There is a hiatus in correspondence, and the irregularity of her letters precludes precise calibration of her fluctuating feelings towards her husband. But the significance of the backdrop of war should not be underestimated. Post took far longer, putting even more strain on long-distance communication, and ports were closed. In this context, what appear to be inconsistencies in Marie's intentions expressed to her family in
sporadic bulletins make more sense. After what had sounded like a declaration of intent to secure her children's future financial position by remaining abroad and touring with the exhibition, a later letter from Dublin dated 27 June 1804 makes a non-specific reference to her return to Paris: ‘When I return let there be no reproaches.' Her vagueness is not straightforward ambivalence: to a large degree the decision to return to Paris was out of her hands–she was stranded by the conflict. In the same letter Marie advises her husband of her new address in Dublin, and yet, while this suggests open lines of communication, this is the last letter she is known to have written to him.

The four years she was to spend in Ireland were an important watershed. This period (1804–8) sees her shedding all vestiges of victimhood, getting even with Philipstal, asserting her authority from afar with her husband, and asserting her own credibility as a commercial artist. Like someone whose life is changed by religion, in Ireland Marie's fervour is directed to self-sufficiency and independence, which from now on would be the tenets of her life.

Marie is a regular presence in the Dublin press for much of 1804, amid the advertisements for malt whiskey and horse hospitals, and patriotic notices such as that assuring the King that the Wicklow Sea Defensibles ‘wish to express our great willingness to march at any moment to meet our enemies wherever they shall dare to invade our coast'. Any frustrations about being marooned by the war were tempered by her exhibition coming into its own in the context of the conflict. She had a great advantage with her core French theme, and now, with unprecedented interest in him, she could capitalize on her figure of Napoleon as never before. In an advertisement in the
Freeman's Journal
of May 1804 she announced, ‘In order to gratify a very general curiosity at the present crisis, the Proprietor submits to the Public of these kingdoms a most correct portrait of the present despot of France BONAPARTE with those of his consular colleagues M. Cambecérès and Lebrun.'

The crisis to which she refers is fear of invasion, which peaked to paranoia in the pre-Trafalgar period. For the British public in England, Scotland and Ireland, Napoleon personified the enemy. The British people were not fighting France: they were fighting ‘Boney'. Anti-Napoleon propaganda was pasted to tavern walls, pinned on
trees, left on pews in churches; there was a glut of broadsides and handbills, prints and caricatures. There were even mock posters styling the invasion as a production coming soon to the ‘Theatre Royal of the United Kingdom'. Napoleon was a tyrant, a despot, a Corsican upstart, a megalomaniac monster hell bent on renaming London ‘Bonapartopolis'. Most alarming of all, he was attacking the British people where it hurt them most, by threatening their national dish. It was claimed that under his rule beef would be banned in favour of roasted frogs. This was the ultimate punch in the stomach. While the fathers of Britain feared he would alter what they ate, children were threatened that unless they behaved he would eat them. A popular nursery rhyme at this time went:

In the glut of imagery, Napoleon was morphed into every conceivable manifestation of menace, and in the torrent of print every imaginable character defect was conveyed, including accusations that he was a devilish incubus with his birth chart analysed in the light of the Book of Revelation. The might of this vast propaganda machine, like a juggernaut that rumbled for years, was directed to making Napoleon larger than life. Marie's trump was that in her cabinet he was utterly lifelike. The allure of this was at its highest in a cultural context where, so great was the longing for physical information about him, many cartoonists were reluctant to caricature his face.

Another selling point for Marie was that, while the mass-produced propaganda fed a diet of atrocities and sensational stories to the public, she satisfied curiosity within a more genteel format. If her own English was still not very fluent, no doubt she could get the interpreter to regale visitors with her reminiscences of how Joséphine, her former cellmate and friend, had asked her to make Napoleon's likeness, and how she had been summoned early in the morning to the Tuileries to undertake the task. They would then have heard about the straws put in the great man's nostrils as liquid plaster hardened on his features.
Such enthralling stories became a vital part of her self-propaganda. Like the liquid plaster that was the start of her modelling process, so it was with the truth, which she sculpted for her public in the touring years. From it a convincing story of her life was set that has lasted for years.

The country where Marie found herself in temporary exile was a febrile mix of factions and pockets of disaffection. Its status as Napoleon's potential back door to England and the residual tension following the controversial Act of Union meant there was a current of pro-French feeling pulsating beneath the surface. But these circumstances also meant that the country was overrun with troops, and it is from this vast audience of soldiers, garrisoned in towns all over Ireland, that Marie sought her custom in the years following her separation from Philipstal. In a climate of curfews and caution, and jittery landowners who habitually asked their servants to hand them their guns with their hats when they went out, she brought a welcome diversion, a relaxing and sociable entertainment that cast a new light on current affairs. Having once been a favourite sans-culottes entertainment, she was now bringing light relief to British troops billeted in towns the length and breadth of Ireland, proving herself very much her mentor's protégé in her capacity to adapt according to commercial opportunities.

Throughout 1805 the progress of the exhibition can be tracked in the dense small print of provincial newspapers–like
Finn's Leinster Journal
in Kilkenny, and the
New Cork Evening Post
. As she moves around the country, she introduces new attractions. At Kilkenny, for example, there is an intriguing addition: ‘curious and eccentric models that are drawn by a Flea'–for the first time a flea circus, which is dangerously close to the folksy stuff of the fairground. For two years, 1806 and 1807, no documentation is available to support a clear picture of her travels, but she may well have been on a prolonged tour, for she reappears in Belfast in May 1808 and for the first time is advertising under her own name:

Madame Tussaud

Artist of the grand European

Cabinet of Figures

Modelled from life

In almost five years to the day she had progressed from being seasick, homesick and helpless as a victim of Philipstal to commercial success in her own right. She had given birth to herself as a brand.

M
ARIE'S DECISION IN
the spring of 1808 to drop the Curtius connection and to trade under her own name had been born out of positive circumstances, chiefly a growing confidence in her own credibility as the proprietor of a popular entertainment. Local papers were fêting the ‘celebrated artiste Madame Tussaud'. The rebranding was a symbolic separation from the past, signifying that she was no longer merely the protégé of the great Curtius of Paris, preserving his fame: she was making her own. But by the end of the year she had to endure a much crueller cutting off from the original exhibition, which was as painful to her as it was unplanned.

It transpired that, while the provincial newspapers of Ireland were singing her praises, back in Paris François was sinking her assets. He had been slipping deeper and deeper into debt and was falling behind with loan repayments. Eventually he had no recourse but to sign over the entire Salon de Cire to his principal creditor, Madame Reiss. In the legalese that makes a precision instrument of words, a document dated 18 September 1808 details the settlement: ‘François Tussaud cedes to Mademoiselle Salome Reiss all the objects comprising the salon of figures known as the Cabinet of Curtius. These objects include all the wax figures, all the costumes, all of the moulds, all the mirrors, lustres and glass, which she may deem fitting. M. Tussaud hereby renounces any right in this regard.' These few short sentences would have long-term consequences. It is not an exaggeration to say that they reoriented Marie's life.

For a second time, while still savouring her hard-won freedom from contractual chains to Philipstal, she found herself a victim of legal process. It is hardly surprising that, as a white-haired grandmother, she cautioned her successors against the legal profession. Her
great-grandsons recalled her favourite axiom: ‘Beware the three crows, the doctor, the lawyer and the priest.'

Precisely when Marie heard about her husband's financial crisis is hard to establish. But the disposal, presumably without consulting her, of what had been her core asset, and in its heyday a leading attraction in Paris, seems to have been a point of no return for her marriage. And the loss of the family home magnified the emotional cost of her husband's financial folly, for with the power of attorney that she had conferred on him he also downsized the household to the smaller rental property in the Rue des Fosses, which meant losing what had been a modest source of regular income. But almost outweighing emotional ramifications was the fact that his action deprived her of prime-location premises to which she could return to resume the family business. If this had been her original hope, then it was irredeemably dashed.

In one of her early letters home Marie had stated that the initial objective of her travels in England was to procure ‘a well-filled purse'. This implies that she had intended to return to Paris to reinvigorate the business with fresh funds. Yet it is interesting that, while she sent François bulletins about her takings, she never sent him any cash. She regaled him with impressive figures, but there is no record of her ever having sent anything back home from the day she left to the day she died. Perhaps his action was in part retaliation for a perceived lack of trust in his ability to handle money and a dwindling sense of pulling together as partners. Given his track record, though, her actions seem sensible more than selfish. Her one lapse of judgement was in granting him power of attorney. But, whatever their individual culpability in this turn of events, there was never a reconciliation. Marie never returned to Paris; she saw neither her mother nor her husband again, and little Francis–the son she had left aged two–would be a man of twenty-two before they were reunited in England.

At the age of forty-seven, then, with Joseph (Nini) now a boy of ten by her side, Marie's quest for autonomy took on a different dimension. From 1808 onward she had new determination to secure the future of her sons, over and beyond her personal success. To this end she committed herself to the punishing lifestyle that was the lot of travelling showpeople. Although her fame peaked in the years when
she settled in London, her twenty-seven years on tour, visiting and revisiting Scottish cities and significant market towns and large cities throughout the length and breadth of England, established her as a regular fixture in the cultural landscape. The future format of the exhibition evolved during this time, when she assumed her part in the constant colourful cavalcade of entertainers who lurched and lumbered on bad Georgian roads, bringing welcome bursts of entertainment to communities lacking the amenities of London. Importantly, this period marks Marie's development as a doughty matriarch, and the emergence of ‘Madame Tussaud and Sons' as a family business.

Her years on tour happened against a backdrop of social unrest. Popular discontent was exacerbated by the vanity and extravagance of the Prince Regent and his brothers, who inspired ridicule rather than respect. This played into the worst fears of those who felt the reverberations of the French Revolution were in danger of toppling the pedestal on which kingship was now perceived as being rather precariously placed. This insecurity resulted in a hard-line response to crowd control, of which the St Peter's Field incident in Manchester in 1819 was a notoriously dramatic example. Some fifty thousand people had assembled to hear a radical speaker airing views on workers' rights, and democracy. The sheer size of the crowd had alarmed the authorities, and troops were sent in. Their heavy-handed approach resulted in several fatalities and many more horrific injuries. A local paper called the debacle ‘The Peterloo Massacre', a term which spread into wider circulation, and the name has stuck.

The crowd that might become a mob was a source of almost paranoid anxiety for many at this time, and even spontaneous gatherings fuelled anxieties. The small news stories of everyday life illustrate these fears, for example when a rumour that a house was haunted drew a fascinated crowd of would-be Georgian ghost-busters special constables were deployed to break it up, an event reported as ‘A great number of people assemble about a ghost.' Caution prevailed, and that trouble was expected was evident in the standard announcement whenever a fair or public gathering had taken place without incident of ‘Perfect order was maintained'–like a sigh of relief. The British Museum, like many other institutions, took no chances: from 1780,
when the Gordon rioters went on the rampage in Bloomsbury and razed Lord Mansfield's house to the ground, until as late as 1863 there was a military presence at the gates.

Fear of the crowd was especially evident in attitudes to traditional entertainments, and a killjoy movement to suppress fairs, spearheaded by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, started to gather momentum. (In an article in the
Edinburgh Review
Sydney Smith, a friend of Charles Dickens, suggested that this society would be more aptly called the Society for Suppressing Vices of Those Whose Incomes Don't Exceed £500.) The perceived danger was that the unbridled fun of workers en masse might erupt into civil disorder. The form that people's pleasures should take was further complicated by the radical change in how people lived. The quickening pace of industrialization, concentrating vast numbers of workers in cities, also undermined the customary rural entertainments.

Imperceptibly, a great grey smog of earnestness starts billowing through these decades, turning entertainment more and more into an educational experience, engulfing the free spirit and pure fun of the traditional fairground pleasures. Creeping legislation, policing and finally calls for the suppression of fairs altogether signified a middle-class crusade. The battle cry was ‘rational recreation', and those championing this cause became more numerous and more vociferous throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.

Marie's own version of ‘utility and amusement' was in perfect sync with the growing middle-class concern that pleasure should have a purpose beyond its own reward. She built her fortune on this belief as, in the Victorian era, it gradually developed from a preoccupation into an obsession. Rather as Curtius had been in the right place at the right time in pre-Revolutionary Paris, Marie shaped her own business in accordance with the gentrification of pleasure that was happening in Georgian and Regency England. With her carefully targeted marketing, there was no danger that her visitors would encounter anyone other than people like themselves. Her assurance of segregation and protection from the rowdy mob endeared her to the middle-class market that she was aiming at.

The England she toured was the land that William Cobbett, an acerbic commentator and critic of the existing social order, portrayed
in
Rural Rides
: a place where corruption in politics was rife and reform deeply contentious. The oligarchic ethos was such that even public interest in the political process was regarded with suspicion, let alone the idea that ordinary people had the right to a participatory role. Of an adult population in England and Wales of around 7 million, fewer than 450,000 could vote. The inequality of the electoral system was taken up by writers. Whereas Cobbett used the
Political Register
to vent his spleen, Thomas Love Peacock used satire. His novel
Melincourt
described two types of borough: the city of No-Vote, a manufacturing town of over fifty thousand with no parliamentary representative, and the tiny community of One-Vote, ‘a solitary farm, of which the land was so poor and untractable, that it would not have been worth the while of any human being to cultivate it, had not the Duke of Rottenburgh found it very well worth his to pay his tenant for living there, to keep the honourable borough in existence'.

The reform issue sharpened political debate, and as and when the key opponents and supporters were in the spotlight they took up their places in Marie's exhibition. For the second time in her life, the figures were indirectly contributing to debates about democracy. Her model of Cobbett had the rare distinction of a moving head, and the biographical description that went with the nodding figure summarized his self-made success: ‘Born of humble parents and by his own unaided genius raised himself to the highest station as a political character'. One feels that Marie would approve of that.

Her early years on the road were comparatively tranquil, yet physically testing. Her travels around Georgian England spanned the heyday of stagecoaches, inns and milestones, but the reality of transport at this time was markedly different from the nostalgic idyll which, with the addition of snow, has inspired endless Christmas cards and place mats. Most roads were slow and badly maintained. Turnpikes regulated only a small percentage of the total mileage, and mismanagement of cross-country roads was a constant gripe of the public. The improvements on major roads introduced by John McAdam from around 1816 were a catalyst for more efficient stagecoach services, but even these were uncomfortable and expensive, and the fact that rival companies took to dangerous racing on certain routes also made them hazardous. Marie and Joseph had to endure long cold journeys in
winter, and dusty ones in summer. They sped ahead to be in time to take delivery of the figures, which were transported under canvas tarpaulins on sturdy freight wagons by the private carrier companies, who charged by weight, and transported such diverse cargo as flour, tallow, blacking and bones, and even the occasional painting dispatched by John Constable. Given the demands of nomadic existence and the rigours of setting up and publicizing the exhibition and producing new figures, as well as maintaining the existing ones, often damaged in transit, Marie's sheer stamina seems to have been the underpinning of her success.

Notwithstanding the increased number of stagecoach services between London and major cities in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, England before the steam age was a country characterized by communities more cut off from each other than connected. Journeys between the principal cities took days, when in the railway era they would take hours. The mail coach speeding through a town was often the main source of news from London. For most of the population, the capital felt as faraway and unfamiliar as a foreign city, existing in their minds as somewhere as exotic as it was remote.

For most people in the provinces news was old, unreliable and in short supply, and in this context Marie's topical exhibition was a welcome arrival. To understand quite how prized news was, one only has to consider the circulation of newspapers. There were no daily newspapers published outside London until as late as 1855. The trade in second-hand newspapers was brisk, and many in the provinces paid to have old copies of the London papers sent to them. Subscription clubs were another resource for newshounds, and families would club together and share readership. These clubs ranged from ad-hoc affairs to more formal arrangements with proper reading rooms where subscribers could go to get their news fix for a guinea or so a year. W. H. Smith has its origins as a subscription club in the Strand. This thirst for the topical was a boon for Marie. Her colourful cast of people making the news was an immensely popular visual supplement to eyesight-challenging black print in a newspaper. It was also an enjoyable first-hand experience, as opposed to reading a newspaper that was not second-hand but more commonly twelfth-hand by the time it got to you.

The physical and cultural isolation in the provinces created a market for all manner of travelling shows. Their seemingly inexhaustible supply of wonders was a welcome respite from humdrum everyday life, and for a few days or weeks they brought colour and vibrancy, spectacle and novelty to communities starved of the types of entertainment that were in such rich supply in the capital. Londoners might relish the jewel in the crown of commercial entertainment that was William Bullock's Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, but there was nothing comparable to this Georgian equivalent of a multiplex outside the capital. Small market towns with limited facilities were reliant on the more rudimentary and less varied diversions that passed through, setting up in the marketplace. A doctor in a small town in Essex gives a flavour of what came round: ‘An exhibition on our right of a Giant, a Giantess, an Alibiness [
sic
], a native of Baffin's Bay and a Dwarf very respectable. We had a Learned Pig and Punch on our left and in front some theatrical exhibition. All in very good order.' There was clearly scope for enterprising showmen to supply more sophisticated entertainments. By prioritizing towns, Marie and the other commercial entertainers exploited the gradual shift of focus away from the rural communities, which had been the hub of the great fairs, to a growing urban audience with money to spend and time to spare.