G. R. Sims.
Soon after we had decided to add Mr. Sims’s figure to the Exhibition, Mrs. G. A. Sala happened to meet him, and questioned him as to the sensations he experienced in picturing himself as a waxen celebrity.
“I feel very frightened indeed,” he promptly replied, “and more than that, exceedingly sorry that I ever promised to become a waxwork, for I have been told since that if the public grow weary of your presence, or the Tussauds get offended with you, they melt you down, and build up a more popular fellow out of your dripping. Nasty idea, very!”
Mrs. Sala said it certainly was a very nasty idea; but if there were any truth in the melting-down story, G. R. could enjoy the satisfaction of thinking that he might have arisen in his waxen grandeur from the “dripping” of someone less popular than himself.
Mr. Sims said that so long as the public only stuck pins into him, or stamped on his toes, he did not mind; but he should feel it very much if they were to bang him about the head with an umbrella, or take him by the collar and shake him.
It must have been in the early winter of the year 1891, while I was modelling him, that Mr. Sims had the following interesting and somewhat unpleasant experience, which he himself describes. He says:
“I have been penetrating the secrets of Tussaud’s lately, and had a specially quiet half-hour alone with the murderers in the Chamber of Horrors, just to see what it was like.
“The idea came to me one night when I had been sitting late to Mr. John Tussaud. I wanted to see what it would feel like to be all alone with those awful people with only one dim jet of gas lighting up their fearful features.
“After the door was shut I walked about and whistled, and stared defiantly at William Corder and James Bloomfield Rush, and even went so far as to address M. Eyraud in French. But wandering about in the semi-darkness I stumbled and fell, and when I got up and looked around me I found I was in Mrs. Pearcey’s kitchen.