To me, this whole story is reminiscient of Pooh-Bah's description of the fictional execution of Nanki-Poo:

Now tho' you'd have said that head was dead
(For its owner dead was he),
It stood on its neck, with a smile well-bred,
And bowed three times to me!
It was none of your impudent offhand nods,
But as humble as could be;
For it clearly knew
The deference due
To a man of pedigree, of pedigree!
And it's oh, I vow,
This deathly bow
Was a touching sight to see;
Though trunkless, yet
It couldn't forget
The deference due to me!

Madame Tussaud collected these curiosities together in a museum in Paris, and in 1802 she moved to England with her sons and her wax models. She died in 1850. In 1884, the year before The Mikado premiered, the museum moved from Baker Street to Marylebone Road (Tussaud). Her museum is still open in London, and now Madame Tussaud's museums exist in a number of cities worldwide, including Singapore, etc.

Many people associate Madame Tussaud's with her Chamber of Horrors, "a name coined jokingly by a contributor to Punch in 1845" (Tussaud). Her models include not only famous criminals, however, but celebrities and statespeople of her time. For example, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI are in the Chamber of Horrors that we can visit, just as they did in Gilbert and Sullivan's day, and her own self-portrait stands in the entry (Madame Tussaud). The museums have kept up this practice of commemorating celebrity, and the famous and infamous of the intervening century, including our times, are on display now.

At the time of the writing and original performances of The Mikado, three years were still to pass before Jack the Ripper began to commit the Whitechapel murders, so he would not have been one of the exhibits in the Chamber of Horrors in 1885. Among the exhibits available to visitors during Gibert and Sullivan's day might have been models made by Madame Tussaud herself "of her great contemporaries, such as Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Horatio Nelson, and Sir Walter Scott" (Tussaud).

To Act I or Act II of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.

To the homepage of this Mikado website.

Suggestions, contributions, criticisms, questions? Email Sharon Cogdill.