Mr Treadgold’s wax figures, by A Special Correspondent
An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
This report, published in a local newspaper in 1868, describes a travelling exhibition of wax figures that had come to a market town for a week.
Mr Treadgold’s Celebrated Exhibition of Wax Figures, ‘as Shown before the Nobility of Three Kingdoms’, arrived in Marbury on Wednesday in four green vans, and by ten o’clock on Thursday morning the queue for the Guildhall reached from its steps, past the door of the Bull, as far as the town pump. We joined it, and we have seldom spent a shilling to more curious effect.
The main hall is very well done. Here is a Sleeping Beauty upon a couch of blue satin, whose bosom rises and falls by clockwork, so that elderly ladies stand before her and lower their voices. Here is a Highland chieftain in full dress, a group representing the Death of a Sailor upon a raft, and a gentleman in evening dress beside the door, of whom three visitors in our hearing asked the way before discovering that he was wax. The modelling of the hands, in particular, is so delicate that it is hard not to feel for a pulse.
Beyond a black curtain, for a further sixpence, lies the Chamber of Horrors, and it was here, we must report, that Marbury chiefly wished to be. It contains the likenesses of a dozen of the most notorious murderers of the century, each beside a card describing his crime in some detail, together with a model of a condemned cell and a rope which the attendant assured us, without a smile, had been ‘in actual use’. The queue for the curtain was three times the length of the queue for the Sleeping Beauty.
The complaints have been as numerous as the visitors. The drapers of the High Street say that the crowd has blocked their doors for four days together. A lady of Church Row has written to tell us that her housemaid fainted in the Chamber and has not slept since without a candle. Three watches were taken from pockets in the queue on Saturday alone, and in Back Lane the boys of the town have been acting out the more celebrated poisonings with a bottle of cold tea.
We do not grudge Mr Treadgold his profits; he is a clever man, and his figures are clever work. We only find it a melancholy reflection that the town which could not fill the Guildhall in March for a lecture on its own drains has filled it four times a day this week to look at the face of a man who poisoned his wife. Mr Treadgold leaves on Monday. He will take with him, we calculate, some ninety pounds of Marbury money, and leave behind him a great many bad dreams.
“The writer approves of the waxworks exhibition and the excitement it has caused in the town.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1 Section A (30%) - Reading, covering 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.