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Updated: May 4, 2025
Once I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. Poor Pip! And poor Miss Havisham! Miss Havisham had lost her fish just as she was in the very act of landing him.
Scratched and bleeding, but still upon his feet, he burst into the room, with the noise of bricks falling behind, an apparition so unexpected that the little company gathered there seemed turned into some waxwork group from the Chamber of Horrors motionless, without even the power of movement. Tavernake, in those few moments, was like a giant among a company of degenerates.
In the way of waxwork it would be hard to find anything more effective than the people in 'Esther Waters. They are clothed with an exactitude of detail which would do credit to Madame Tussaud's exhibition in its latest development. They are carefully modelled and coloured and posed.
But though he might have been a waxwork when they were within four yards of him, he jumped up like a jack-in-the-box when they came within three, and said in a deferential, though not undignified, manner: "Will you step inside, gentlemen? I have no staff at present, but I can get you anything simple myself." "Much obliged," said Flambeau. "So you are the proprietor?"
"To be sure!" chimed in Uncle Ascott, patting me good-naturedly on the head; "Master Reginald will fancy himself in Fairy Land. There are the Zoological Gardens, and Madame Tussaud's Waxwork Exhibition, and the Pantomime, and no one knows what besides! We shall make him quite at home! He and Helen are just the same age, I think, and Polly's a year or so younger, eh, mamma?"
I wouldn't have even begun this business in a novel, but what I'd have met a dark, slouching fellow in the Oxford Road, who'd have become my accomplice, and known all about how to do it, and probably broken into Michael's house at night and found nothing but a waxwork image; and then blackmailed or murdered me.
Jarley, the good-natured waxwork woman, in whose soul there would be naught save kindliness, only she cannot bring herself to tolerate Punch and Judy; Short and Codlin, the Punch and Judy men; the little misused servant, whom Dick Swiveller in his grandeur creates a marchioness; and the magnificent Swiveller himself, prince among the idle and impecunious, justifying by his snatches of song, and flowery rhetoric, his high position as "perpetual grand-master" among the "Glorious Apollers," all these, making allowance perhaps for some idealization, were personages of Dickens' own time.
He was such an unnatural colour to look at that the men of roundabouts and waxwork shows seemed gentlemen beside him; but he considered them low company, and remained aloof. Among all these squatters and folks of the road the reddleman continually found himself; yet he was not of them. His occupation tended to isolate him, and isolated he was mostly seen to be.
I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure, upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone. Once I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage lying in state.
They had pictured to themselves a coarse old man, with a damp eye and a puckered mouth, one eyebrow elevated an inch above the other to express shrewdness and knowledge of the world a man clad in velveteen and braid, with a heavy watch-chain, large rings, and horny hands, the touter to a waxwork show, with a hoarse voice, and over familiar manner.
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