| Putney Family Waxworks | |
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Putney Family Waxworks is the waxwork museum owned and operated by Oscar Putney, with his wife Octavia and daughter Lavinia, in Season 2 of Penny Dreadful. Oscar handles the much of the front of the business, while his wife deals with its financial administration needs. Their daughter, who is sight blind, has developed quite a talent as a sculptress, and helps the family business shaping the features of the wax statues before they are presented for public exhibition.
History[]
Situated in London in the late 1800s, the business fell on hard times with stiff competition from Madame Tussaud's, and so Oscar looked towards increasingly more sensational scenes to spice up his dioramas. Jack the Ripper was old news, and the Mariner's Inn massacre, in which the occupants of the inn were all brutally slain one night, was still fresh in the minds of the public.
His luck changed when a man going by the name of John Clare walked into the museum looking for work. Putney was immediately taken by the man's scarred face and hired him shortly after.[1] Initially he had Mr. Clare help him construct dioramas for the museum, but secretly he put in motion a plan to exploit the man by imprisoning him and use his face for a living tableau of freaks. To that end, Lavinia helped bait the trap and trick the man into a cell built into a new area of the business.[2] Mr. Clare did not stay there for long however. The Putney's had vastly underestimated his strength, and when the two elder Putneys came to negotiate his future cooperation, he broke free and killed them both. What became of the museum after their demise remains unknown, but with the sole inheritor being a blind young woman, the museum's already dire situation would seem to have taken a turn for the worse.[3]