Kate Berridge (41 page)

Striking in the different views that we do have of Madame Tussaud is the imagery of time and money. Victor recalled her daily ritual of winding and regulating ‘a dozen or more large silver watches'. Charles Dickens wrote, ‘The present writer remembers her well sitting at the entrance of her own show, and receiving the shillings which poured into her exchequer. She was evidently a person of a shrewd and strong character.' This fed his portrayal of Mrs Jarley sitting ‘in the pay-place, chinking silver moneys from noon till night' and entreating the crowd not to miss their chance to see her show before its imminent departure on a short tour among the crowned heads of Europe, positively fixed for the next week. ‘ “So be in time, be in time!” said Mrs Jarley at the close of every such address. “Remember that this is Jarley's stupendous collection of upwards of One Hundred Figures, and that it is the only collection in the world; all others being impostors and deceptions. Be in time, be in time, be in time!” '

This imagery is apt, because time and money were crucial to the might of the middle classes in Victorian England. The increase of these commodities was what determined the growth of the commercial entertainment sector that Madame Tussaud did so much to shape, and which was entering a new era when she died.

At the time of Marie's death, in 1850, plans were already afoot for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, which was due to open in Hyde Park in May 1851. In anticipation of the vast influx of visitors her sons decided to expand the Baker Street exhibition. A staircase was widened, and the Chamber of Horrors was enlarged. This proved to be an astute move. London swarmed with sightseers. At peak times Westminster Abbey reported a record 6,000 visitors an hour. A return visitor was amazed by the sheer numbers of people descending on Madame Tussaud's–his (not entirely credible) estimate ‘belonged not to the upper ten thousand but to the lower million'. In some ways these crowds signified a vindication of the arduous years on the road, when Marie had established herself as a familiar fixture with her popular touring exhibition that blended high-minded educational value with spectacle and entertainment. At the same time, at Baker Street, 1851 marked a changing of the guard as the old generation gave way to the new. In a letter to his nephew John Theodore Tussaud, Victor Tussaud (Marie's grandson) confirmed that the Great Exhibition marked a turning point for Marie's sons. Freed from their mother's tight regulation of the accounts they could deploy profits more freely. ‘I have often heard your grandfather say that it was not until then that he and his brother had any money to call their own,' Victor declared.

On the bigger stage the Great Exhibition also symbolized one era coming to an end and a new one beginning. The mass use of trains to get there and the concept of the excursion were indicative of the altered landscape in which travelling shows were fast falling out of favour. In contrast to the waning fortunes of the bawdy, gaudy entertainments always threatening to spin out of control, that had for
centuries characterized the people's pleasures in the pre-industrial age was the rise of commercial entertainments centred on cities and shaped by the prosperous middle class. The Great Exhibition signified a shift from a rural to an urban social axis and in some ways was a coming of age for Britain's increasingly confident middle-classes. In the ensuing years, civic bodies and local worthies followed in the footsteps of a generation of commercial entrepreneurs by establishing more museums, galleries, libraries and a host of amenities, calculated in part to raise the moral and cultural standards of the broader public through exposure to the highest artistic and literary achievements, both past and present. The Great Exhibition is therefore a useful vantage point from which to survey Marie's life and assess her legacy.

From the outset the event was controversial. ‘The glass is very thin,' the Duke of Wellington observed, viewing Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace that housed the exhibits as a giant greenhouse just begging for seditionaries' flying stones. Others were worried about the weight of bird droppings that might fall through the glass. These anxieties, however, masked the real fear surrounding the event, which was the prospect of the people en masse–nothing short of a vision of apocalypse in the minds of those vehemently opposed to the event. At the planning stages a proprietary stance was evident in fierce opposition to the proposed Hyde Park site. As the natural habitat of the wealthy and fashionable, the upper echelons of society, this was thought to deserve preservation from the proletariat, and there was a digging in of well-shod heels. The pages of
Punch
chronicled such fears. In a letter of appeal to the architect Sir Joseph Paxton, ‘Mob' defended himself:

It was signed ‘Your humble and obliged servant, Mr Paxton, Young Mob, alias the Masses, alias the Million'.

For the first twenty days of the Great Exhibition, the admission charge of five shillings was an effective screen. When it was reduced to one shilling
The Times
urged readers to ‘make good use of the two days which remain before King Mob enters into possession'. Reports reek of prejudice. The
Illustrated London News
wrote, ‘The crowd of the wealthy to whom money is no object of concern, has been succeeded by the crowd of respectable people to whom shillings are a matter of importance.' There was almost a measure of surprise that ‘the rich have not abandoned the Crystal Palace because the comparatively poor have been allowed access to its treasures'. Yet the odd thing is that they did not. Even the young Queen herself freely mingled with the humbler crowds that thronged there once the price was reduced.

Odder still, however, at least in the minds of the critics, the precautions originally thought necessary to handle the masses, and to protect their social superiors from them, turned out to be unnecessary:

Not far from the Great Exhibition, in Leicester Square, the enterprising Mr Wyld had attempted to capitalize on the crowds by erecting a gigantic walk-in globe–a scale model of the world, with land and sea represented in relief on its concave surfaces. If Mr Wyld showed the world turned inside out, then at the Great Exhibition it was the inversion of the social world that was on display. In fact for many people the most impressive feature of the exhibition was neither the exhibits nor the size of the crowd, but the mix of all classes and conditions. A cartoon in
Punch
entitled ‘The Pound and the Shilling–whoever thought of meeting you here?' underscored this novelty. In October
The Times
noted, ‘The people have now become the Exhibition.' The
Illustrated London News
reported that not only were
mistresses of households giving their maids the day off to visit the exhibition, but they were talking to them about what they had seen there:

Yet despite the novelty of this situation, which everyone noted, common in all the reviews and retrospective interpretation of the exhibition's significance was amazement that there had been no public disorder.
Fraser's Magazine
noted, ‘In the event we escaped all the horrors…that had been predicted for us. London was not eaten up, the Thames was not set on fire.' It concluded, ‘We are led to the consideration of the order and decorum that reigned throughout over the largest congregation of sightseers ever brought together.'

The Economist
devoted an entire issue to ‘The multitude at the exhibition' and concluded, ‘we can say that no more orderly people ever existed than the multitude of London.' This is not something, that anyone would have said a generation or two previously.

In retrospect we can now see that the Great Exhibition was a cultural crossroads, ushering in an era when leisure was more formally allied to learning. It highlighted what Marie had in fact been demonstrating for decades: the levelling effect of curiosity, and the binding elements of human interest as the basis of popular culture. In an increasingly killjoy climate, obsessed with self-improvement and worthy enterprises, entertainment was no longer simply about having fun. Rather it turned into ‘recreation'–a purposeful way of using one's time. ‘Recreation,' thundered one clergyman, ‘is the creation anew of fresh strength for tomorrow's work.' The idea that fun could be an end in itself was becoming increasingly unacceptable. The demise of non-productive pleasures, and the didactic agenda redirected traditional entertainments as can be seen in the publicity
material for Signor Sarti's anatomical waxworks, which took a more explicitly educational approach than did Madame Tussaud's. ‘The possession of Health is all the capital that the operative classes have to depend upon their maintenance; then how necessary it becomes that they should learn all they can on this important subject. The evil effects of Tight Lacing, Excessive Use of Tobacco and Immoderate Drinking are here shown.'

In many ways, Marie's exhibition was uniquely well suited to this changed climate. For decades she had offered an educational and elevating experience, directed towards her customers' nobler interests and higher aspirations–crowned heads and their robes and regalia; statesmen; military heroes; great cultural figures. Yet at the same time, with some of the more macabre relics and gruesome displays, she had acknowledged the darker side of human curiosity. And as the figures changed, with today's celebrity replacing the forgotten celebrities of yesterday, she had also paid homage to the public desire for novelty, stimulation and distraction. With her use of elegant settings, careful lighting and musical accompaniment by Messrs Tussauds and the Fishers, she had ensured that her exhibition was the sort of place that genteel, respectable people would feel pleased to frequent–a world away from the grubby scrum of the fairs, and increasingly downmarket pleasure-grounds. She recognized a tension between popular appeal and genuine cultural value that was already a subject of concern when she was a young woman in Paris: ‘It is certain the Revolution has harmed letters and arts a great deal, and for a long time to come–one sees torrents of bad taste spilling over into this prodigious multitude of productions in every genre…Popular appeal which has at least the merit of novelty takes precedence over everything and destroys everything,' declared
La Harpe
in 1791.

Yet, whatever tension contemporaries may have detected between gentrified entertainment and mass-market interest, Marie's strategy paid off. At her death her exhibition was the height of fashion. Aristocrats and senior political and cultural figures had passed through its doors. It was an elegant resort with a museum-quality collection of
objets d'art
and a particularly strong collection of French paintings, including originals by David and Boucher. And the formula was durable. Long after the demise of its plucky founder, through the
efforts of her sons Madame Tussaud's retained its status as the first port of call for a tourist in London. The vast numbers of visitors included many famous faces. Not all were impressed, however. ‘Unspeakable and overpriced' was Verlaine's verdict when he went there with Rimbaud. Their compatriot the elder Alexandre Dumas was more generous: ‘Every personage who basks in the sunshine of fame can knock on Madame Tussaud's door and demand entry; her hospitality is practised on a most lavish scale…She exhibits not only persons but things.' As the creator of
The Three Musketeers
, Dumas was particularly interested in the Revolutionary relics. ‘Having sent so many of my heroes to the scaffold,' he wrote, ‘I feel it is the least I can do to study it at first hand. I have seen pictures of it, of course, but that is far from being the real thing. I therefore found my way to the famous guillotine of Madame Tussaud, or rather of Monsieur Sanson, as the inscription on the wall informed us.' Over the years, literary allusions to the exhibition occurred in the works of, among others, Thomas Hardy, William Makepeace Thackeray and Henry James, who refers to it in
The Golden Bowl
.

The longevity of Madame Tussaud's as an institution spotlights the paradox inherent in the international renown of her name compared with her comparative personal obscurity. The story that Marie told about her life–and in particular the remarkable shift from court modeller to unwilling handmaiden of the Revolution, and thence to cultural entrepreneur–indulged her audiences' very human craving for closeness to famous historical figures, played out through the wax likenesses that Marie displayed in her exhibition. It mattered to her early audiences that the wax on show had somehow been in contact with the world-famous figures depicted there, just as it mattered that the woman who was responsible for displaying these relics had been close to the individuals whom the relics recalled. Such closeness conferred an aura of authenticity on what might otherwise have looked like crass showmanship. The displays were not simply about history–as Dumas's reference to ‘the real thing' suggests–they were themselves part of history and valued as such by those who flocked to see them.

Today it is possible to look back on those early days with a more critical eye. In a sense, Marie's legacy speaks for itself. Yet her fame masks an even more fascinating tale. Of far more interest than her
claims to have known virtually the entire cast of the French Revolution is why she made such claims and why she told her story as she did. There is in fact no evidence to support most of her assertions about her early life. Many of them may not be true. Yet this hardly matters. The creation of the myth is an achievement in itself, just as the success of her exhibition is incontestable evidence of her commercial acumen, her understanding of the market for her work, and her brilliance as a cultural innovator.

If history is about fabricating the past in the present then it is plausible that Marie artfully crafted a story with a cast and plot that would be guaranteed to woo her audience and moreover complement the relics and figures in the exhibition. Her exhibits and her story mutually reinforced themselves. She let people get close to the famous both physically and also via her personal narrative, which, rich with anecdote, was a form of celebrity gossip–inside information about clothes, hairstyles and private moments. This particular narrative also set her apart from the competition. It was her unique selling point and an inspired marketing tool–a much more sophisticated form of the showman's spiel. In her flair for publicity she really did rival Mrs Jarley's ‘inventive genius'. The personal achievement this reflects matters more than the obscurity and improbability of aspects of her early years.