Waxwork

Rachael Weaver November 11

Today, waxwork is more commonly associated with the plastic celebrity replicas at the infamous Madam Tussaud’s in London. Yet throughout the 19th century, the practice was commonly used for more ghoulish purposes – to recreate the bodies of criminals and their victims for travelling shows and museums. It was an industry that thrived on horror, violence, fear and notoriety. In the September issue of Meanjin, Rachael Weaver retraces this dark history, from the bloody days of the guillotine to Tussaud’s original Dead and the beginnings of Australia Waxworks Exhibition in Melbourne. A short extract is below. You can read the full essay on our editions page.

The first principle of a wax model is not just verisimilitude, but to be lifelike, though wax reproduction is a form obsessed by death. The affiliations between wax and mortality seem intuitive and easy to trace. Everyone has observed, or at least heard about, the waxy complexion of a corpse. Morticians and embalmers have much in common with waxwork artists; they all strive, in various ways, to display death to its best advantage. The associations come to us automatically. When startled by some commonplace ghoul—a stranger lurking unexpectedly, perhaps, in the back room of a poorly lit junk shop—it’s his waxy skin we remember later. Lifeless, glassy eyes are nearly always set off with a deathly waxen pallor. Cadaverous traits are often expressed in terms of the strangely neutral medium of wax, which carries nothing of the stink of the grave, of decomposition, of leaking fluids or parasitic infestation, though it does have a kinship with grave wax, or adipocere, the crumbly white substance that sometimes forms from the fatty tissues of a rotting corpse. The process is known as saponification and can protect the flesh indefinitely from further deterioration, preserving body parts and facial features and sometimes even organs in a naturally occurring cast.

As well as transporting many models and historical relics from the original collection to her new quarters in the Strand, Tussaud took with her the guillotine used during the Terror, to be employed as a symbol of authenticity in future wax displays. In the first decades of the nineteenth century she toured the English countryside, exhibiting waxworks in provincial theatres and town halls. Following complaints about propriety by an Oxford scholar in the 1830s, the criminals were separated from royalty and the Chamber of Horrors—known initially as the Dead Room—was born. As the century progressed, the trade in murderers’ relics greatly enhanced the gallery of villains and victims with the weapons and personal artefacts of notorious killers such as Maria and Frederick Manning, James Greenacre, and the poisoner William Palmer included in the exhibits. William Calcraft, one of London’s longest-serving executioners, would often use his privileges to supply Tussaud’s museum with a murderer’s final set of clothes.

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