The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Upon leaving the theatre, we were attracted by a loud beating of drums
to a building calling itself the "Sacred Museum." Such establishments
are usually content with the word "moral"; but this one was "sacred."
From a balcony in front, two bass-drums and one bugle were filling all
that part of the town with horrid noise, and in the entrance, behind the
ticket-office, a huge negro was grinding out discord from an organ as
big as an upright piano. We defy creation to produce another exhibition
so entirely and profoundly atrocious as this. It consisted chiefly of
wax figures of most appalling ugliness. There were Webster, Clay,
General Scott, and another, sitting bolt upright at a card-table,
staring hideously; the birth of Christ; the trial of Christ; Abraham
Lincoln, dead and ghastly, upon a bier; and other groups, all revolting
beyond description. The only decently executed thing in this Sacred
Museum was highly indecent; it was a young lady in wax, who, before
lying down, had forgotten to put on her night-gown. There was a most
miserable Happy Family; one or two monkeys, still and dejected; a
dismal, tired rooster, who wanted to go to roost, but could not in that
glare of gas, and stood motionless on the bottom of the cage; three or
four common white rabbits; and a mangy cat. Such was the Sacred Museum.
Such are the exhibitions to which well-intentioned parents will take
their children, while shrinking in affright from the theatre! It is
strange that this lucrative business of providing amusement for children
and country visitors should have been so long abandoned to the most
ignorant of the community. Every large town needs a place of amusement
to which children can be occasionally taken, and it would not be
difficult to arrange an establishment that would afford them great
delight and do them no harm. How monstrous to lure boys to such a place
as this "Sacred Museum,"--or to the "Museum" in New York, where a great
creature, in the form of a woman, performs, in flesh-colored tights, the
part of Mazeppa!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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