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Updated: May 26, 2025
Webster his most famous criminal plea, and filled a shadowy corner of every museum in New England, as every shivering little man of that time remembers, with an awful reproduction of the scene in wax-figures, with real sheets on the bed, and the murderer, in a glazed cap, stooping over to deal the fatal blow we cannot help fancying that the young recluse who walked by night, the wizard whom as yet none knew, hovered about the house, gazing at the windows of the fatal chamber, and listening in horror for the faint whistle of the confederate in another street.
It has an impressive array of officials, and committees, and Boards of Direction, of Education, of Lectureship, and so on geldings, every one, shadows, spectres, apparitions, wax-figures: she is supreme over them all, she can abolish them when she will; blow them out as she would a candle. She is herself the Mother-Church.
There are a tivoli, a railway, cabinets, and booths with wax-figures, and countless other sights, besides coffee-houses, beer-rooms, and music. The gardens are planted at the sides with a number of small arbours, each containing a table and chairs, and all open in front, so as to shew at one view all the visitors of these pretty natural huts.
Neither the floor nor the ceiling of the laboratory could be seen, because of the myriads of hanging skeletons, bodies of animals, dried plants, minerals, and articles of all kinds that masked the walls; while on the floor were books, instruments for distilling, chests filled with utensils for magic and astrology; in one place I saw horoscopes and nativities, phials, wax-figures under spells, and possibly poisons.
A political or other satire might be made by describing a show of wax-figures of the prominent public men; and, by the remarks of the showman and the spectators, their characters and public standing might be expressed. And the incident of Judge Tyler as related by E might be introduced. A series of strange, mysterious, dreadful events to occur, wholly destructive of a person's happiness.
If they had any colour to them, and were dressed up in uniforms, and handsome clothes, like the wax-figures of General Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Lord Nelson, she had once seen, they would be worth looking at, perhaps. Miss Patsey wished to know, if among the statues he had seen, there were any supposed to be likenesses of the great men that we read about in history?
I succeeded so well that it ended in my inventing a whole series of automata, for which the old wax-figures furnished the materials, in part, and which became so popular and so rewarding, that I was kept seven years at the business, my employer promising me, from time to time, an interest in the business, which he quite forgot to fulfill.
The drove has some ultimate market, and individuals are peddled out on the march. Some die. The tavern-keeper in Stockbridge, an elderly bachelor, a dusty, black-dressed, antiquated figure, with a white neckcloth setting off a dim, yellow complexion, looking like one of the old wax-figures of ministers in a corner of the New England Museum.
The long-haired, meek-looking men, with their flat-crowned, broad-brimmed hats, straight coats and neutral colors, and the women with their sugar-scoop bonnets, white kerchiefs and straight waists, looked like a case of faded wax-figures, in prison uniform, that had "come down to us from a former generation."
A show of wax-figures, consisting almost wholly of murderers and their victims, Gibbs and Hansley, the pirates, and the Dutch girl whom Gibbs murdered. Gibbs and Hansley were admirably done, as natural as life; and many people who had known Gibbs would not, according to the showman, be convinced that this wax-figure was not his skin stuffed.
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