Waxwork

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.

Wax’s pliability and luminosity as well as its surprising durability have made it the ideal material for replicating and exhibiting the dead, in death masks and waxwork effigies, most popularly, of crime victims and their murderers. The early works of legendary waxworks proprietor Madame Tussaud accomplished this almost at the moment death occurred. Under the careful tutelage of her uncle Curtius during the French Revolution she drew inspiration as well as many of her subjects directly from the guillotine. After the severed heads were cast the victim’s real hair was sometimes added as a finishing touch, along with vivid splashes of artificial blood. Tussaud continued her work long after her uncle’s death from suspected poisoning, carrying on his legacy at the Cabinet du Cire with her husband until their separation in 1800, and a short time later she left France for England, never to return.

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.

Famous murder trials always led to press and public speculation over the prices paid for particular items, such as Hampstead murderer Mary Pearcey’s ominous black perambulator or the kitchen where Frederick Deeming killed his wife and children at Rainhill. The museum also received a cast of Deeming’s head as a gift from Australia, taken after his execution at Melbourne Gaol in 1892. Murderers’ relics and death masks share similar powers: they derive their potency from a residue of intimate contact with the dead. As Marina Warner writes in Phantasmagoria (2006), ‘the crucial character of a death mask depends on its status as a relic, as the nearest remnant that can be preserved of a body before its disintegration’.[1] In celebrated cases, though, time was also pressing, so that living subjects were sometimes modelled and revealed to the public for exhibition moments after death, a kind of instant reincarnation in wax.

Convicted felons often took pleasure in their future as wax celebrities and approached the drop courageously to perform their final words. Colonial waxwork entrepreneurs were as quick to claim the corpses of hanged felons as the wax artists of the great metropolises, lining up to wait with the anatomists while capital sentences were carried out. At a triple execution in Melbourne in August 1864, one of the condemned, Christopher Harrison, used his dying speech to offer his corpse to Professor Halford, a local medic, while another, William Carver, sought a place in the waxworks, with a request that ‘his history should be published throughout the world’.

The cosmopolitan glamour of prurience and sensation offered by the waxworks was evident to aspiring subjects and audiences alike. In 1879 a man named Hilton threatened to knock his wife’s brains out to secure a place in the Melbourne waxworks, while local theatre critic and coroner Dr James Edward Neild noted with wonder and pleasure ‘how such things find their way out here to this new city where in general our home friends look upon us as dwelling in tents, and feeding on mutton, tea and damper’.[2] In a similar spirit of metropolitan sophistication, ‘Mrs Jarley’ conducted waxwork installations touring Queensland and Western Australia, a homage to the seedy waxworks proprietor from Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop. Such associations appealed to a fascination with the macabre inherited from Britain and Europe, but in the early 1890s one colonial speculator established a floating waxworks to offer the old world something in return.

Marketed to audiences as a convict ship, the Success was originally a passenger barque, built in the East Indies in 1790, and used for trade by the British. After a helmsman was killed at the wheel, a small wooden coffin was inlaid in its deck, marking the Success forever as a ship of death. On arrival in Melbourne in 1853, the crew abandoned sailing for the goldfields, and the ship was recommissioned as one of five new prison hulks moored in Port Phillip Bay, with seventy-two cage-like cells installed to contain 120 of the growing numbers of criminals—many of them ex-convicts—attracted to Victoria by the discovery of gold. After a prison gang murdered John Price, inspector general of penal establishments, in 1857, the hulks were abolished and the ship became a prison for seamen, a women’s prison, and a boys’ reformatory.

In 1890 the Success was resurrected as a show ship and filled with wax figures of convicts from different eras. Models of bushrangers such as Henry Power, Captain Moonlight and the Kelly Gang were locked up alongside Price’s killers, author–criminals Owen Suffolk and Henry Garrett and many others. Instruments of punishment and torture such as the ‘necklet’ and the ‘coffin bath’ were also shown, with lecture tours telling ‘gruesome stories of atrocious horrors committed long ago’. Protests against airing such sordid colonial histories led to the vessel’s deliberate sinking at Sydney’s Port Jackson, but after six months on the ocean floor it was rehabilitated and the barnacles removed. Denied clearance by customs, the prison hulk finally left Australia for London surreptitiously in 1895, embarking with its cargo of wax criminals on a voyage of transportation in reverse. It remained on exhibition in the Thames for several years, a kind of floating monument to the return of the repressed.

The longest-surviving waxworks museum in Australia was in Melbourne’s Bourke Street. Opening as ‘Madame Lee’s’ in 1857, it was taken over and expanded by wax artist Ellen Williams the following year, who added several topical new displays including effigies of the notorious murderers Chong-Sigh and Hing Tzan, who had recently killed a woman named Sophia Lewis, slashing her throat with a razor and almost cutting off her head. Williams also amalgamated the collection with the phrenological museum of her partner (soon to be husband) Professor Philemon Sohier, and they began utilising the overlaps in their professions. Their ‘Australian Waxworks Exhibition’ soon became one of the city’s most popular amusements, offering a comprehensive catalogue of local and international murderers and other criminals, as well as a range of more tasteful subjects, such as a tableau of the explorers Bourke and Wills. A growing cast of live performers and freaks came to enhance the plastic displays, replacing an earlier series of subtler ‘drawing room entertainments’.

By the late 1860s the family had become wealthy enough to sell off all their Australian interests except the Sydney branch of the waxworks, for which they were unable to find a buyer. They retired to France for several years before setting out on the return journey to Australia in August 1870, accompanied by 100 wax models, a dwarf, a giantess, two or three albinos, and ‘other nameless horrors’ to replenish the Sydney show. But in sympathy with the kinds of tragedy and darkness that come so naturally to waxworks, the Sohiers never made it. Their ship, the City of Sydney, went missing in the southern Indian Ocean, somewhere around the Crozet Islands, and was thought to have struck ice, the corpses of its drowned passengers and crew floating in the bitter waters surrounded by all those waxen bodies, which probably outlived (or at least outlasted) them.

In 1873 when signs of life were detected on nearby Amsterdam Island, Sohier’s brother in Nantes raised hopes that some of those aboard the City of Sydney may have survived. The British Admiralty was called on to investigate, and crew members of HMS Pearl soon discovered a neat cabbage garden and a well-made hut stocked with a range of domestic utensils on the island, but no castaway population. The remote place had been carefully cultivated, tidied and mysteriously abandoned.

The Melbourne waxworks continued operations under Sohier’s partner Maximilian Kreitmayer, a German medical modeller who had bought into the company in 1863 and become sole proprietor in 1869. He went on to merge the waxworks with his Bourke Street anatomical museum, adding lurid (essentially pornographic) specimens and models of diseased body parts to the galleries of royalty, politicians, criminals and victims, and increasing the Vaudeville-style entertainments.

But the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ remained the waxworks’ centrepiece, working—like Madame Tussaud’s or Paris’s Musée Grévin—as a kind of three-dimensional newspaper, in which contemporary and historical atrocities were re-created. The published catalogue shows the way child killers Francis Knorr and Sarah Makin were lined up near ‘homicidal maniacs’ such as William Colston and Deeming, while the usual cast of colonial Australian bushrangers kept company with urban murderers such as Thomas Dooley, Robert Landells and George Dean. Adding to the general feeling of violence was a model of the gallows from the Melbourne Gaol in nearby Russell Street, as well as a set of torture devices such as the ‘pitch boot’ and the ‘iron broom.’

The popular desire for proximity to wax murderers has sometimes extended to criminals and their friends: the Melbourne Herald reported in October 1866 that Bourke the Bushranger visited the waxworks as his only outing when living as a fugitive at a pension in Lonsdale Street (he thought the place should be blown to pieces). In 1880 while Ned Kelly was being held at Melbourne Gaol, the Kelly women supposedly visited the waxworks after calling by the prison, to critique models of their relatives as they were being created.

Wax effigies themselves have also been known to invite violent or criminal acts. At a Liverpool waxworks in August 1883 three men destroyed the wax figures in a display representing the Phoenix Park murders in Ireland a year earlier, in which Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke were assassinated. In Melbourne in May 1892 a woman attacked a likeness of Frederick Deeming with her walking stick, while as late as February 1954 a man smashed models of lords and politicians including Winston Churchill and the British home secretary with a hammer in Madame Tussaud’s grand hall.

The kind of visceral power sometimes created by such attractions is hard to name. In a way, the uncanny impact of a waxwork killer—as an arch criminal’s creepy double—is only an exaggeration of the sinister potential already possessed by such a being. Perpetrators of incomprehensible violence such as motiveless murder may display all of the outward characteristics of an ordinary human, but the moral blankness and brutality suggested by their crimes renders them unfamiliar, literally inhuman. Perhaps this is where the thrill of the waxwork lies: in the liminal zone between human and not human, real and artificial, living and dead. There always seems to be pleasure taken in blurring these distinctions, as shown in the ‘Chamber of Horrors rumour’ described by John Theodore Tussaud (Madame’s grandson) in his 1920 book The Romance of Madame Tussaud’s. The rumour, which persisted well into the twentieth century, consists of a ‘popular delusion that Madame Tussaud’s will pay a large sum of money to any person who spends a night alone with the criminals assembled’.[3] The story goes that nobody was ever crazy enough to try it for fear the wax villains would suddenly come to life, stumble forward like zombies and strike them dead.

Notes:
1. Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006, p. 24. Back to article

2. Quoted in Mimi Colligan, ‘Waxwork Shows and Some of Their Proprietors in Australia 1850s–1910s’, Australasian Drama Studies, vol. 34 (1999), p. 86. I have also drawn on some details from Colligan’s account of Melbourne’s waxworks for this essay. Back to article

3. John Theodore Tussaud, The Romance of Madame Tussaud’s, Oldhams, London, 1920, p. 261. Back to article