[LONDON; DOLLS] Meech’s Wax-Work Exhibition. 50 & 52, Kennington Road. The Automaton Flute Player. The Greatest Novelty of the Age. The Wonder of all Beholders.

Kennington Cross [London] : Merser & Gardner, printers, [1875]. Handbill, 140 x 110 mm, lithograph-printed on both sides; recto with an illustrated advertisement for the Automaton Flute Player; verso with a notice for Meech’s Wax Doll Bazaar (at the same address) ‘established over 27 years, and [containing] the handsomest collection of dressed dolls in the world’; upper margin recto with year ‘1875’ inscribed in ink by the original owner, and lower margin verso with that owner’s more precise date of March 11th 1875 in pencil (presumably recording a visit to the exhibition); fine condition.

Herbert John Meech (1833-1916) was a modeller in wax, wax figure maker, doll maker, and entrepreneur, active in London from the late 1840s until around 1911.

‘From about 1851 Meech was well-known maker of poured wax dolls, which were awarded at least six prize medals and a Doll Maker to the Royal Family (based on stamps on the objects themselves). However the fashion for wax dolls declined and their production became too expensive compared to German imports. So on 24 March 1893 Meech filed for bankruptcy. There are some examples of his dolls in the Museum of London collection (based on images on ancestry) and in the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood.’

‘Herbert John Meech’, Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011 [https://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/mapping/public/view/person.php?id=ann_1393167958, accessed 13 Jul 2026]