Kate Berridge - Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax

The Curious Cast of Maries Early Life

Freaks, Fakes and Frog-Eaters: An Education in Entertainment

The King and I: Modeller and Mentor at Versailles

Courting the Crowds at the Peoples Palace

Marie and the Mob

Model Citizens

The Shadow of the Guillotine

Hardship and Heartache

Love and Money

Vide et Crede! The Lyceum Theatre, London

Scotland and Ireland 18031808

Much Genteel Company

Dramas and Dangers 18221831

An Inventive Genius: Mrs Jarley, Madame Tussaud and Charles Dickens

The Leading Exhibition in the Metropolis

Bringing the Gods Down to Earth

1. The rage for hairdressing
(coloured engraving, plate 64, Le Bon Genre series, eighteenth century; Bibliothque des Arts Decoratifs, Paris; Archives Charmet / Bridgeman Art Library)

2. Change the Heads!, cartoon by P. D. Viviez, 1787
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

3. Hair-raising fashions, a caricature
(coloured etching and watercolour, late eighteenth century; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem / Bridgeman Art Library)

4. Paul Butterbrodt, giant at the Palais-Royal
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

5. Benjamin Franklin, attributed to Madame Tussaud
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

6. Marie Grosholtza rare early portrait, anonymous
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

7. Le Grand Couvert, Salon de Cire, Palais-Royal
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

8. Interior with people, Salon de Cire, Palais-Royal
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

9. Gouache by Etienne Le Sueur
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

10. This is how traitors are punished, sans-culottes carrying the heads of the guillotined, 1789
(coloured engraving, French School; Muse de la Ville de Paris, Muse Carnavalet, Paris; Archives Charmet / Bridgeman Art Library)

11. Philippe Curtius, engraving by Gilles Louis Chrtien
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

12. Copper lock depicting the siege of the Bastille
(French, eighteenth century; Muse de la Ville de Paris, Muse Carnavalet, Paris; Lauros / Giraudon / Bridgeman Art Library)

13. A Bastille valance
(copper-plate-printed cotton; V & A images / Victoria & Albert Museum)

14. The Comte de Lorges, by Madame Tussaud
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

15. The guillotine
(engraving, French School, eighteenth century; private collection / Bridgeman Art Library)

16. Guillotine blade bought from the Sanson family
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

17. The Death of Marat , by Jacques-Louis David, 1793
(oil on canvas; Muse Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels / Bridgeman Art Library)

18. The death of Marat, wax tableau
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

19. Transporting corpses during the Revolution, by Etienne Bericourt, c . 1790
(pen and gouache on paper; Muse de la Ville de Paris, Muse Carnavalet, Paris; Lauros / Giraudon / Bridgeman Art Library)

20. Madame Tussaud in prison, watercolour attributed to John Theodore Tussaud
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

21. Mrs Salmons Waxworks
(Guildhall Library, Corporation of London)

22. Letter with envelope, 25 April 1803
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

23. Wombwells Menagerie, drawing by George Scharf
( The Trustees of the British Museum)

24. Freakshow caravan, drawing by George Scharf
( The Trustees of the British Museum)

25. The Working Class notice, Portsmouth, 1830
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

26. Signor Bertolottos Industrious Fleas
(Guildhall Library, Corporation of London)

27. The Gigantic Whale
(Guildhall Library, Corporation of London)

28. Monster Alligator caravan, drawing by George Scharf
( The Trustees of the British Museum)

29. The Bristol Riots, 1831, watercolour by William Muller
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

30. Madame Tussaud with spectacles, 1838
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

31. Poster advertisement for Madame Tussaud and Sons, showing Commissioner Lin and his wife, 1841
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

32. George IV coronation tableau, from Joseph Meads London Interiors , 1841
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

33. Interior of the Bazaar, Baker Street, with orchestra
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

34. Madame Tussaud, by Paul Fischer, 1845
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

35. Marie Tussaud, by Francis Tussaud
(National Portrait Gallery, London)

36. Richardsons Rock Band
(Guildhall Library, Corporation of London)

37. Family-group in silhouette by Joseph Tussaud
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

38. Omnibus with advertising
(anonymous)

39. An Old Bill Station
(with thanks to The London Library)

40. The Ambulatory Advertiser, drawing by George Scharf
( The Trustees of the British Museum)

42. I dreamt that Napo-le-on Bo-onaparte was dancing with Madame Tee, George Cruikshank cartoon, Comic Almanack, 1847
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

43. Madame Tussauds death mask, by Joseph and Francis Tussaud
(Madame Tussauds Archives, London)

T HIS IS A story about a queue which started in Paris in around 1770 and which still snakes around cities all over the worldLondon, New York, Las Vegas, Amsterdam and Hong Kong. In London, the perpetual queue is a familiar landmark, and taking up a place in it is a rite of passage, with those who went as children returning as parents. Undeterred by long delays and London rain, people of all ages and nationalities wait patiently for their turn to pass through the doors of a vast, windowless building, purpose-built in 1884 to accommodate their rising numbers. The building has the architecture of secrecy about it, and there are no clues as to what lies inside, but if you raise your eyes above the height of the passing double-decker buses you will see a silhouette portrait of the woman whose name the building bears, with the dates of her life: Madame Tussaud 17611850.

Madame Tussaud has generally been neglected as a quaint irrelevance to mainstream history. Rather too readily dismissed as a pretentious show-woman, she has received barely a mention in the footnotes of historical record. Marginalized by the Establishment, she has been seen as only slightly more credible than a fairground entertainernot authoritative enough to be taken seriously as either an artist or an historian. To a degree, she has suffered from the prejudice that still treats popular culture as an embarrassing nouveau-riche relation to art and culture proper. The celebrity-filled waxworks presented under her name are all too readily written off as a flashy, frivolous entertainment. This is to underestimate their original function in a period with a limited pictorial reference, when they supplied a visual narrative of events.

When the notion of a personal copy of a newspaper was still a long way in the future, her wax artefacts supplied a commodity which in Georgian England was in short supply: information, the most basic unit of which was news. As visual dispatches, her figures were an accessible format of both foreign and home news. When most illustration was monochrome, and primitive woodblocks provided only poor-quality likenesses, her life-size colourful mannequins of murderers and monarchs were a source of wonder and delight.