Kate Berridge (32 page)

There was an interesting duality to Marie's presentation of royal material. She catered to public interest by giving pride of place to the most talked-about protagonists in each new royal scandal as and when it became of national interest. But she also started to manipulate public opinion by replacing the flawed reality of the royal family as individuals by a bigger image of sovereignty that tapped into notions of national identity, the displayed scarlet and ermine of state evoking the dignified grandeur of heritage and history. Marie did George IV a particularly good service: her wax image was far more regal than the unmajestic figure he cut in real life–stout and gouty, and increasingly reliant on greasepaint and false whiskers to disguise his ruddy, hung-over face. The English-born Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth said that even when the King was well ‘He looked like a great sausage, stuffed into the covering.'

The coronation tableaux that Marie developed on tour were particularly popular, and became the basis of a segment of the exhibition that would enjoy lasting success in London. The tableau she introduced in 1821 was but one form of representation of the coronation, for there were also competing models, panoramas and, most striking, theatrical performances. In Liverpool, in December 1821, Marie was in direct competition with Mr Coleman's nightly performance of ‘the superb spectacle', which was on such a scale that in addition to the regular theatre troupe there were 200 extras. That an event which represented a solemn sacrament in the eyes of the Church was re-enacted as a play, and in Marie's case was depicted on the same premises as the heads of criminals, highlights a hunger for information that is today satisfied by extensive reporting and television coverage. Bearing in mind the controversy surrounding the televising of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, when eminent figures argued that the ceremony ran the risk of being demeaned by being watched in a public house, it is interesting to consider whether these mock-ups succeeded in bringing the public closer to a solemn rite or whether they trivialized
it. In fact Marie and Mr Coleman's versions were probably more dignified than the real thing, for according to some of those who had a bird's-eye view of the real coronation the King himself trivialized the occasion. Mrs Arbuthnot complained that he behaved ‘very indecently', and the Duke of Wellington noted, ‘soft eyes, kisses given on rings which everyone observed'. A year later Messrs Rundell, Bridge & Co. were still owed £33,000 for the regalia they had supplied. Marie's own throne-fitters, Messrs Petrie and Walker of St Ann's Street, had long since been paid.

Marie's advertisements in the Liverpool and Manchester press chart the development of her coronation crowd-puller. The earliest version, in Liverpool in July 1821 (the same week as the real event), focused on ‘the superb figure of His Majesty, on which no exertions have been spared to render it worthy of being considered a correct representation of the Illustrious Person on whom the crown now sits'. In the evenings the King's subjects could admire his likeness while a full military band played in the background. A few months later, in Manchester, she placed the King in a more elaborate setting and ‘completely transformed the Golden Lion Assembly Room into a representation of the magnificent throne room in Carlton-Palace'. The reviews were ecstatic: ‘The coronation group which is now exhibited to the public in the Exchange Room, exceeds anything of the kind ever exhibited in this town,' gushed the
Manchester Guardian
. Another paper enthused, ‘It gives such an air of reality to the scene that respect and deference is conjured up the moment the eye rests upon this imposing spectacle.'

This splendid
coup d'œil
proved so popular that Marie, knowing she was on to a good thing, continued to expand and adapt it, adding allegorical figures of Britannia, Hibernia and Caledonia. The public loved it. ‘He nearly looks a king; we felt not a little proud, when we looked at our sovereign,' the
Blackburn Mail
declared in April 1822. Spurred by such acclaim, Marie introduced a new dimension of piquancy by creating a dramatic double bill in which the ‘august coronation of his most gracious majesty George IV' was juxtaposed with the coronation of Bonaparte. The spice of legitimacy versus illegitimacy in claimants to a throne was a brilliant piece of showmanship.

Always mindful of the need for change, in order to maintain interest and justify return visits, she then introduced historical figures of the Kings and Queens of England, allowing the public ‘to walk along the plank of time' as one review put it. This duality of hot news and history that she tried out on the road, blending the sensational in the present with the pageantry of the past, was a prototype of a format that she was able to expand upon greatly when her show finally came to a halt in fixed premises. By the time it did, the life of the third English king whose reign she had lived under, and whose features she had cast, was coming to a close.

Man inspecting ‘Monster Alligator', drawing by George Scharf

L
IFE ON THE
road was always demanding, but routine hardships paled compared to some of the dramatic incidents that befell Marie in her later touring years. If 1822 saw a series of significant commercial breakthroughs, it also marked a near-miss with death. A private family memoir offers circumstantial evidence that Marie and Joseph were survivors of a disaster at sea that claimed many lives when a boat bound for Dublin was shipwrecked just outside Liverpool. The accident happened on 8 August 1822, and coincided with the King's visit to Ireland. Marie had advised the public at the end of June that she was closing owing to ‘a particular engagement in Dublin'. It is possible that, riding high on the success of the coronation tableau, she saw a good commercial opportunity to present it in Ireland with a new peg of topicality given the King's presence there. No passenger lists name Marie and Joseph as among the fifty or so people who survived the tragedy, which claimed around the same number of lives. The only evidence linking Marie to this misfortune is a reference in the ffarington family history.

The story has it that dinner at the imposing family home near Preston was interrupted by sounds of the staff answering the door and speaking to unannounced guests. ‘Mrs ffarington's curiosity was aroused and she went to the door herself, where she found the butler was being addressed in voluble French by a party of people outside. She brought them in and found them to be a little company of foreigners who had suffered shipwreck on their way to Dublin. The leader of the party was Madame Tussaud.' Bedraggled, besmirched by mud and carrying one surviving box, they apparently stayed for several days recovering. If this did happen then Marie must have been storing the moulds elsewhere and must have been travelling light, for there is no evidence
of her exhibition being diminished in any way when she returned to Liverpool. Either that or she worked extra hard to replace lost figures.

The story holds more interest for how it delayed reunion with her younger son. Marie's great-grandson told the story that has gained credence by repetition over the years that Francis, by now a man of twenty-two, came over to England at this time and, hearing a rumour that his mother had perished in a shipwreck, returned forthwith to France. The poor communications of the time were such that it took months for news to reach him that his mother and brother were alive and well, and based in Manchester. No details of the reunion remain, but Tussaud family tradition has it that the brothers and their mother met up in Liverpool and from henceforth the course was set fair for Madame Tussaud and Sons to make their mark.

Personal details are tantalizingly scarce: instead of letters and private papers there are just rumours and whispers, ever fainter over time, of strained relations between the brothers, and of François, still in Paris, continuing to be a disappointment to his family, both professionally and paternally. As for Francis, jealous of his mother's long-term relationship with her elder son and unable to establish himself securely as his equal in her eyes, one can understand the friction between him and Joseph, for ever little ‘Nini', who had been Marie's helper and the linchpin of her life in the lean years. Of Marie's mother there is no word, but, given that she would have been nearly eighty in 1822, perhaps it was her death that prompted the family reunion. A bad husband, François was no better a father. Apparently he resented paying for his second son to train to be an architect, so Francis was forced to work first for a grocer and then for a billiard-table maker. This unpromising employment actually served him well, for his skills at carving wood were later directed to making the legs and arms of the waxwork figures.

What we do know is that the sons were loyal to their mother, and whether voluntarily or by coercion they devoted their lives to the family business. They both married in the touring years–Joseph in 1822, when the exhibition was in Birmingham. He seems to have fallen for a local girl, Elizabeth Babbington, with whom he went on to have three children, the first of whom, a son, was born in 1829. Francis married later, to Rebecca Smallpage, and their first child, also
a son, was born in 1831. The younger son left in France must always have felt that his brother was their mother's favourite so perhaps in the interests of fraternal diplomacy Joseph and Elizabeth called their first son Francis, and Francis and Rebecca called their first son Joseph. By the time the exhibition was established in London there were eight new members of the dynasty, and Marie had twelve grandchildren. They would all work for the exhibition, and until as recently as 1967 there was always a Tussaud directly involved in the business.

Something that emerges clearly from ephemera relating to the exhibition is its increasingly ‘genteel' style. The long opening hours, from eleven to six and then from seven to ten, were ideal for leisurely viewing–and specifically for the promenade so beloved by middle-class respectable families. To create a pleasant mood, music became increasingly important, and over the years the number of musicians increased, from Mr Fisher on the flute to a full orchestra, with musical performers being named in the publicity. In York, in 1826, the papers were happy to report: ‘Miss Bradbury and Mr Bellamy are much improved since they came to York, the lady sings with more ease, the gentleman with more spirit.' By the time they got to Durham in 1827 there were fifteen musicians. Of many innovations, Marie seems to have pioneered background music. The strains of the instruments encouraged people to relax. The music created enough noise to encourage private conversations, and was conducive to people lingering. This novelty captured the imagination of the public and the press. In September 1833 the
Maidstone Journal
declared, ‘It is hardly possible to conceive a more interesting spot for an evening lounge, aided as the principal attraction is, by a select band of musical performers who play in a style seldom heard at an exhibition of this nature.' In 1834, when the show had triumphantly returned to London and was then in the Gray's Inn Road,
The Times
urged readers ‘to lose no time in paying an early visit to the promenade and lounge, where they will not only have their eyes delighted with faithful representation of the great and the good of times gone by; but will hear much pleasing modern music, well executed, and enjoy a high intellectual treat for half an hour.'

Encouraged by such appreciation, Marie introduced a regular programme of singing and, for five months at this site near King's
Cross, praise was heaped on this addition: ‘Excellent music and very pleasing singing (for this new feature has been added to the exhibition) render a two hours lounge here exceedingly delightful to the visitor, and forms an agreeable change to the monotony of the theatre.'

The smooth running of the exhibition was rudely interrupted in the autumn of 1831 when Marie was again ambushed by an event that jeopardized both her livelihood and her life. Nine years after her dramatic survival of the shipwreck, it was now fire that nearly finished her off on one of her return visits to Bristol. There, for the second time in her life, Marie, by now an elderly woman of seventy, experienced the full force of the mob when she found herself in the very thick of the riots that erupted at the end of October in the wake of the House of Lords' rejection of the Reform Bill some three weeks earlier.

Bristol in 1831 reflected in microcosm the widening social divisions that were evident in any sizeable city at this time. Over the next decade the rich–poor divide was documented in a spate of social-conscience novels, most powerfully by Disraeli, who described England as ‘two nations' alienated ‘as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets'. The local papers–
Felix Farley's Journal
and the
Bristol Gazette
, in which Marie announced her arrival and then waged her standard publicity campaign–reveal the two worlds of prosperity and poverty.

The tier of the prosperous, from which she drew her custom, was the target of advertisements for dancing academies and sculpture exhibitions. The insecurity of aspiration resonates in earnest entertainments exemplified by the inaugural event of the Bristol Institution's autumn programme: ‘The first of the Evening Conversazioni took place on Thursday last and was attended by a brilliant assemblage of about 600 individuals, members of the principal families in Bristol and its vicinity. The gallery of pictures and museum were splendidly lighted up for the occasion. Among the company we noticed the mayor and mayoress, the sheriffs and their ladies, the Bishop of Bristol and family etc.'

Similarly sedate and civilized was the recreation that Marie and her entourage were setting up in the assembly room, where, to the strains of a band, the well-heeled residents of the Clifton area could pass a pleasant hour or two surveying the waxen heroes, foes, royals and
renegades of both the past and the present. This was a world away from the subsistence living that was the lot of Bristol's growing under-class. Their plight was evident in sad snippets in the press, the brevity of which hid a magnitude of suffering.

While Marie's well-to-do customers could safely scrutinize the murderers Burke and Hare and look at guillotined heads in what Marie advertised here as ‘the Chamber of the Revolution', the disadvantaged in their midst–poor and hungry–were experiencing crime and punishment more directly. Shortly after Marie opened, for example, Henry Hicks, twelve, was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment with hard labour for stealing a cheese. In the same week another juvenile offender was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation for stealing a silk bag from ‘a respectable woman' on her way to Queen Square.

While Marie's gilt-and-stucco splendour was packed to capacity, the poorhouse of the city was evidently pressed for space as the local labour market was experiencing a dip. Pauperism was on the increase, and ‘poor relief' was not exactly philanthropic balm to the oppressed, being meted out in exchange for stone-breaking shifts of up to eight hours daily. But during Madame Tussaud's stay the comfortable insulation of the well-off was violently shattered. In the space of a week the local press went from reporting the enjoyment in Mr Muller's pleasure garden of a firework display for 600 people, ‘with splendid rockets crimson and variegated stars', to harrowing accounts of the whole city ablaze in three days of arson and anarchy.

In
Rural Rides
, published only the year before, William Cobbett had described Bristol as ‘a good and solid and wealthy city; a people of plain and good manners; private virtue and public spirit united; no empty noise, no insolence'. This was not how Marie and her sons experienced it. The scenes of violence and destruction that they witnessed were traumatic, and for Marie painfully familiar. As Sir Charles Greville recorded, ‘The business at Bristol…for brutal ferocity and wanton, unprovoked violence may vie with some of the worst scenes of the French Revolution.'

Marie had arrived in Bristol in early September. With a good local press and a spine of commercial affluence, it perfectly suited her business, and it was a city where she had found that repeat visits paid
off. She was not alone in identifying its profitability, and two of her stalwart companions on the travelling-show circuit, George Wombwell and his Menagerie and Andrew Ducrow with his equestrian stunt show, were vying with her for the custom of the well-heeled residents. Ever mindful of the topical, Marie was intending to present the figure of the Reform Bill champion Lord Brougham alongside the effigies of Burke and Hare, in whom public interest showed no sign of abating. Her competitors were no pushover–not merely a menagerie and a circus, they marketed themselves with considerable aplomb. Wombwell always made an impact when he arrived in town, not least because of his sixty-strong cavalcade of wagons. The elephant's mobile home was a free show in itself, being thirty feet long, nearly fourteen feet high and pulled by twelve horses. Not merely wild-beast merchants, Wombwell and his associates were ‘the wandering teachers of natural history'. Ducrow, with his superb stud, promised ‘a unique classical historical mythological entertainment of the arts and the sciences'. More precisely, he was bringing to the provinces the smash-hit bareback-riding version of Lord Byron's poem
Mazeppa
which had played to full houses for 150 consecutive nights during its London run. The elan and expense of these touring professional shows exuded superiority.

Their educational wrapping and level of professionalism were in marked contrast to the more affordable fun of the fair which had set up in the city at the same time, as was customary during the autumn assize. Marie capitalized on this distinction, and pointed out in her advertisements that her own exhibition was ‘free from the bustle and confusion of the throng of the Leather fair'. But the perceived threat of a boisterous crowd at play was insignificant compared to the violent protest that Sir Charles Wetherell's visit provoked among a group of disenfranchised young people.

Sir Charles–a much caricatured figure with a reputation for drunkenness, and no sympathy with the plight of the common people–was in Bristol to preside over the assizes, at which certain local troublemakers agitating for reform were to be tried. His arrival did not augur well. During one of his speeches in the House of Commons, the speaker commented that the only lucid interval Wetherell had was the one between his waistcoat and his breeches.
But, more than inspiring mockery, he was a highly controversial figure for his stance on parliamentary reform, to which he was vehemently opposed. Though he had held the office of recorder in Bristol for four years, he was out of touch with local opinion, reporting to the House of Commons that in Bristol ‘Reform fever had a good deal abated.' Aware that he was loathed in the West Country and a potentially provocative presence, the Bristol magistracy asked for the assize to be postponed, but their request was denied; instead troops were sent to protect Sir Charles, which merely added to the tension. Feelings were running high, and unluckily for Marie the assembly rooms that she had hired for her exhibition were perilously close to where Wetherell was being formally welcomed at a civic reception.