The Art of Crime – Details, episodes & analysis

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For show notes and full transcripts, please visit www.artofcrimepodcast.com.

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Today, we're joined by Ann Foster, host and creator of the Vulgar History podcast. Gavin and Ann talk about the enigmatic Princess Caraboo, an exotic princess who washed up on English shores in 1817 and generated a sensation in the press as various observers tried to work out where she had come from. 

Make sure to check out Vulgar History here: https://vulgarhistory.com/

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For more than three decades, Madame Tussaud toured England, Scotland, and Ireland, winning nationwide acclaim. Over the years, her enterprise morphed into a family business, with both her sons dedicating their lives to the wax museum. In 1829, Madame Tussaud and Sons scored one of their biggest hits of the ’20s with controversial effigies of Burke and Hare, Edinburgh-based murderers who sold their victims' cadavers to anatomists for dissection. 

Show notes and full transcripts available at www.artofcrimepodcast.com.

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From 1803 to 1808, Madame Tussaud toured Scotland and Ireland, exhibiting her handiwork in major cities. During this time, she took drastic measures to win her freedom from her exploitative business partner, Paul Philipstahl. Tussaud went years without creating new figures related to crime, but in 1828 she introduced a likeness of William Corder, perpetrator of the infamous Red Barn Murder. This brutal homicide sparked a cultural phenomenon that lasted for the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond, inspiring books, broadsides, murder ballads, peepshows, plays, and even movies.

Show notes and full transcripts available at www.artofcrimepodcast.com.

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After marrying and starting a family, Madame Tussaud accepted an offer to partner with another showman and exhibit her handiwork in London. To her dismay, she soon realized that she had teamed up with a snake. Despite a rough start in the British capital, Tussaud scored a major hit with a wax effigy of Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, a convicted traitor who was hanged, drawn, and quartered in February 1803.

For show notes and full transcripts, visit www.artofcrimepodcast.com.

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As the French Revolution ran its course, the monarchy crumbled, and the nation descended into wanton violence. During the Reign of Terror, thousands of French citizens went to the guillotine, and Tussaud made waxen replicas of important revolutionaries’ severed heads, including that of Maximilien Robespierre. In 1793, she also created a wax tableau inspired by perhaps the most notorious crime of this period: the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat. 

Show notes and full transcripts available at www.artofcrimepodcast.com. 

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On July 12, 1789, a crowd of protestors furious over King Louis XVI’s policies swarmed Madame Tussaud and Philippe Curitus’s wax museum, demanding busts of prominent political figures. This episode led to bloodshed that same afternoon. Two days later, a mob stormed the Bastille, a medieval prison, marking the outbreak of the French Revolution. Soon after, the Den of Illustrious Thieves exhibited objects associated with the Bastille, including an effigy of the notorious Comte de Lorges, a prisoner who supposedly languished there for three decades. 

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Born in 1761, Madame Tussaud studied the art of wax modeling under Philippe Curtius, owner of the most famous wax museum in pre-revolutionary Paris. Sometime around 1780, Curtius opened a special exhibit in his establishment called The Den of Illustrious Thieves, in which he displayed wax effigies of notorious murderers. He had an early hit with a sculpture of double poisoner Antoine Francois Desrues, a struggling grocer who wanted to live the life of an aristocrat whether he could afford to or not.

Show notes and full transcripts available at www.artofcrimepodcast.com. 

If you'd like to support the show, please consider becoming a patron at www.patreon.com/artofcrimepodcast.

Introducing Queen of Crime: Madame Tussaud and the Chamber of Horrors

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