MDDM18: The Progress of Wax Automata

[Dave Monroe]

   "The Veery Brothers, professional effigy makers,
run an establishment south of the Shambles at second
and Market Streets, by the Court House.  Mason, in
unabating search after the Grisly, must pay a Visit."
(M&D, Ch. 29, p. 289)

  "'Here, for example, our Publick Beheading Model,--'
adds his brother Damian, 'or, "the Topper," as we like
to call it.'" (M&D, Ch. 29, p. 289)

"So it's on with the old Smock, lovely visit next
door, scavenging among th' appropriately siz'd Necks
for bones and suet and such.'" (M&D, Ch. 29, pp.
289-90)

"But now Mason can ever locate those spaces most
fertile for the husbanding of Melancholy.  So now,
blundersome, in he steps, candle-less as well, relying
upon the light of a Lanthorn hanging outside the small
Window, waiting for his eyes to adjust, making out
first two Figures, then three, and at length the
Roomful, erect, crowding close, without breath or
pulse,--"  (M&D, Ch. 29, p. 290)

   "As it will prove, all the Effigies in the back
room bear Faces of Commissioners for the Boundary
Line, tho' Mason, anxiously upon the lookout wherever
in town they have to go, won't fully appreciate it
till the second Meeting, on 1 December." (M&D, Ch. 29,
p. 291)

"Those waxen Faces that gaz'd at him with such
midnight Intent,-- here are their daytime counterparts
to greet him, with the same, O God in Thy Mercy, the
same look...as if deliberately to recall the other
night.  But how could they, could anyone, know? has he
been under Surveillance ever since landing here?
And,--the Figures in that far back room, were they not
Effigies at all, but real people, only pretending to
be Effigies, yes these very faces,--- ahrrhh!" (M&D,
Ch. 29, p. 291)

   "...As the Progress of Wax automata, by ones and
twos, approaches, provoking, daring Mason to bring any
of it up, the Possibility never presents itself to
him, that all the Line Commissioners, from both
Provinces, being political allies of the Proprietors,
are natural and obvios Effigy Fodder to a Mobility of
Rent-payers,--" (M&D, Ch. 29, pp. 291-2)

>From Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978), Ch. 4, "Waxwork and
Clockwork," pp. 50-63 ...

   "While some exhibitions were bringing to
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London tangible
evidence of Nature's variety and man's ingenuity,
others depicted its illusory reality.  Hovering
sometimes on the distant periphery of the thetaer,
with antecedents rooted in earlier centuries, these
exhibitions fascinated visitors by their mimetic
effects and often, as well, by the mechanical means by
which those effects were produced.
   "Of these, wax figures of human beings had the most
enduring popularity ....  In Protestant England
waxworks were vestiges of a form of religious art
which had flourished in pre-Reformation times and
which continued to do so in the Roman Catholic nations
on the continent.  Small wax figures had then been a
kind of votive offering, and much of the early stauary
of saints had been in wax.... effigies of English
monarchs, made of wax as well as of wood, had been
carried at funerals, and since this custom di not
smack of Romish idolatry, it survived into the
Restoration.  Waxworks with more emphatic religious
associations, however, caused scandal ...." (p. 50)

   "There were secular waxworks in England as early as
the middle of the seventeenth century ...." (p. 50)

   "Not surrisingly, in view both of the early
association of wax modeling with funeral effigies and
the fact that wax more closely approximated the color
of corpses than of living human flesh, representations
of recently deceased royalty and other famous persons
lying on their biers would be a staple of waxwork
shows well into the Victorian era." (p. 51)

"... soon the waxworks' subjects came to include every
kind of person that engaged the popular imagination
....   And increasingly, the individual figures were
displayed in episodic groups: formal studio poses, so
to speak, were well enough in teh case of royalty, but
the dramatic instincts of people were most engaged by
what were, in effect, frozen theatrical scenes." (p.
52)

   "Throughout the eighteenth century small waxworks
shows came and went: here today (in a rented room or
in a booth at th fair), gone tomorrow to another
location, and quite possibly, another proprietor." (p.
53)

   "Portrait modeling in wax was no mere commercial
craft in the latter part of the century." (p. 54)

"By the end of the seventeenth century it had been
proven that expertly prepared and durable anatomical
pieces molded in wax were superior for medical
teaching purposes to the customary debris from the
dissecting room." (p. 54)

"Rackstrow's 'Museum of Anatomy and Curiosities' ..."
(p. 55)

"One of the chief attractions in the early years was a
wax model of a woman eight months pregnant.  This was
a dramatic piece indeed, because, according to a
handbill, 'the Circulation of the Blood is imitated
(by Liquors resembling the Arterial and venous Blood,
flowing through Glsss Vessels whose Figure and
Situation exactly correspond with the natural Blood
Vessels) also the action of the Heart and Motion of
the Lungs in Breathing.  The whole making a most
wonderful and beautiful appearance.'" (p. 55)

   "Whatever unwholesome instincts Rackstrow's may
have obliged ..." (p. 55)

"... wax figures moved by wound-up clockwork in
addition to the spring-actuated ..." (p. 57)

And see as well, e.g. ...

von During, Monika, et al.
   Encyclopedia Anatomica: A Complete Collection of
   Anatomical Waxes.  New York: Taschen, 1999.

Okay, trying to get out as much as possible today ...

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail!
http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/