David Ross Locke

ONE of the stock sights in London which every foreigner as well as every man, woman and child from the country who goes to London, does with great regularity, is Madame Tussaud’s Museum. It is known the world over and is as regular a thing to see as the Tower.

A great many years ago, some time since the flood, a Swiss woman named Tussaud, who had studied art in Paris, took the brilliant notion into her wise head that money was better than fame, and instead of spoiling marble she commenced doing some very good things in wax. She brought her figures to London and opened a museum, which she added to and enlarged as men and women became of sufficient interest to attract attention, until she got pretty much everybody of whom the world ever heard.

She died many years ago, but the collection was continued by her family, three generations of which have waxed rich and gone to join those whom they put so well in wax in life.

This wonderful museum, which actually deserves all the attention it gets, is filled with really excellent figures of the entire line of English Kings, dressed in the costumes of the period in which they lived, including arms, although court dresses generally adorn them. As the Tussaud family were, and are, artists, these figures are not the limp, misshapen, grinning effigies usually exhibited, but are in size, stature, color and general grouping, perfect.

I cannot say that the effigies of King Edward and Richard, and those other ancient marauders, are correct, for I never saw them in life. They died many years ago. But all you have to do is what Dicken’s Marchioness did with the orange peel wine: “Make believe very hard,” and they will do. The faces were modeled from portraits, and their dresses were made from actual costumes preserved in the curious repositories of which London is full. The visitor gets some notion of what the subjects were like, and that ought to be and is satisfactory.

MADAME TUSSAUD.

You see, standing or sitting, marvelous likenesses of all the great soldiers and statesmen of England, but heavens! how our poor Americans have been abused! Washington is about as like our Washington as he is like an Ohio River coal-boat captain. Ex-President Grant has good cause for action for libel, for such a face as they have put upon him could not have been on a third corporal of the poorest company in the very worst North Carolina regiment, and President Hayes and Garfield have been similarly treated. That of Franklin is a tolerable likeness of the maker of infernal maxims, but there was a malicious design evident on the part of the artists to dwarf the Americans, as I fancy there was to enlarge and exaggerate the Englishmen.

The groups are something wonderful. The Lying-in-State of the Czar, a recent addition, is a miracle of naturalness and awful beauty, as is the death of Pope Pius; and they are so natural that one cannot help feeling that he is in the presence of actual death, and not a counterfeit presentment.

The Museum contains, among other curiosities that are of interest, the identical coach used by Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo, with a vast number of other relics of the great Corsican. From the number of Napoleonic relics I fancy that the Madame was at heart a French woman, though she was making her money from the English.

Great halls are filled with correct statuary in wax of the world’s great, or notorious men, all of which have to be “done,” as a matter of course.

But the great point, and one which no visitor ever fails to visit is the “Chamber of Horrors.” You pay a sixpence extra—there is always sixpence extra in England—and you are introduced to the most cheerful assemblage of monsters that the world has ever produced.

If there ever was a murder committed of an especially atrocious description, one done under peculiarly horrifying and terrible circumstances, here is a wax figure of the murderer, and, if possible, of the victim.

There is the original guillotine which made the acquaintance of so many necks during the various French revolutions. There is the identical scaffold which was devised by a man condemned to be hung, and on which he suffered, with forty-eight others afterward, before it was retired, and there are ropes and delightful articles of that nature with which criminals have suffered, and in such numbers that we come to the conclusion that the principal business of the English and French is to kill somebody and get hung for it.

The two criminals in which I took the liveliest interest were Messrs. Burke and Hare, of Edinburgh, Scotland. These gentlemen had a contract with the medical university of Edinburgh, to furnish the students with corpses for dissection, which they did by resurrecting them from various church-yards.

Mr. Burke, who was evidently the leader in the enterprise, remarked one night to Mr. Hare,—that is, I presume he did:

“Why go out this dark and rainy night and dig in the damp earth for corpses? Digging corpses is all wrong. If the friends of the deceased should ever discover that a corpse had been abstracted it would occasion the most profound feeling. We should have more respect for the survivors than to raise their dead, and then, in the interest of science, we should give the students fresher bodies for dissection. I am inflexibly opposed to digging any more.”

“But how shall we get the corpses?” asked the obtuse Mr. Hare.

“It is far easier,” replied Mr. Burke, “to knock a man on the head than it is to dig him up, and, in addition to the other reasons I have mentioned, a sand-bag or a club is cheaper than a spade.”

And Mr. Hare coinciding with Mr. Burke, they went out that night and killed a man, and they kept going out and killing men till thirty had disappeared. The authorities finally got upon their track, when Mr. Hare turned States’ evidence and hung Mr. Burke, and he went peacefully into some other business.

It is needless to add that a careful study of the faces of the two men would not lead one to purposely encounter them in a dark alley after twelve at night. Nothing earthly could be so villainous.

A little incident that occurred the day I explored the Museum illustrates the perfection of the modeling and draping the figures. There were in the party a gentleman and lady from Pennsylvania, the former being a devotee of the alleged science of phrenology, and rather fond of discussing the subject.

A female figure was standing on the floor, which attracted his attention. This was in the Chamber of Horrors.

“I want to call your attention,” he said to his wife, “to this illustration of the truth of phrenology. Could there be modeled a more vicious face? Notice the development back of the ears, showing the head to be all animal, and the pinched forehead and the general insignificance of the front head as compared with the development of the back portion. There is murder in every line of that face. Let me see who it is.”

“Thank you,” exclaimed the figure as it moved away. It was a very estimable American lady whom the phrenologist had mistaken for a wax figure.