There was a strange thrill in being able to look the freakish duplicate of a killer in the eye

From Murder in the First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing by Kate Colquhoun. Page 191.

Taken from life expressly for this exhibition, a model of Müller had been added to Madame Tussaud’s waxwork museum in the Baker Street Bazaar in Portman Square, open daily from ten o’clock until five, and again in the evening from seven to eleven, admission one shilling (children half-price). Established in 1843 and known first as the Separate Room and then as the Chamber of Comparative Physiognomy, the re-named Chamber of Horrors offered an alternative to the wax models of statesmen, royalty, warriors and thinkers. Here, three-dimensional likenesses of renowned ruffians and criminals catered to the Victorian appetite for the odd, the deformed and the monstrous. Indeed, all over London – in side-street exhibitions, peepshows, penny-gaffs and dank upstairs rooms – ‘living skeletons’, Siamese twins and humans with ‘enormities and deformities’ were paraded for cash, feeding a rampant appetite for morbid entertainment.

The Chamber of Horrors was, advised Cruchley’s London: A Handbook for Strangers, viewed at its alarming best in the gloomy hours of night. The public could stare at the figures of notorious Victorian murderers such as Courvoisier, Frederick and Maria Manning and James Mullins – all translated into wax within days of their arrests, trials or executions – and at bloodcurdling casts of guillotined heads from the first French Revolution. Never mind the fact that the Spectator (much like the critics of ‘sensation novels’) dubbed it all a disgrace to our nation, there was a strange thrill in being able to look the freakish duplicate of a killer in the eye.