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The address for Titus Downing’s taxidermy shop is 24 Victoria Terrace in Royal Leamington Spa, and it’s the one on the corner, directly across from the All Saints Church, unmissable for the twelve heads of adult white-tailed deer buck, full-antlered, that hang outside the shop where perhaps a long awning should be.

Titus Downing: slim, forty and wan, is one of England’s premier taxidermists, the only taxidermist, in fact, who has received a royal warrant from Queen Victoria. In 1875, Downing is enjoying a bit of local fame, for he has recently stuffed, shaped and mounted the skin of a nearly two-ton African giraffe which has been purchased by Leicester’s New Walk Museum and now greets museumgoers in its Grand Hallway. A reporter at the Evening Standard enthused, “This giraffe is so lifelike that upon Viewing, one expects the giraffe’s legs to nimbly walk off their mount!” and traveled by train, via Birmingham, from Leicester to Leamington, demanding to know Downing’s secret: how was it possible to make a dead thing look so truly alive? “It is like magic,” he said, and Titus Downing, who believes the art of the taxidermist is not all that different from the art of the magician, replied thusly:

“You are asking me how to create beauty. The secret lies only in displaying beauty truthfully to life. The beauty must be recognized for its own sake, even by the unscientific. This is the case I advocate, and the end I have in view,” and it was the best way Downing could explain to the man that taxidermy is not about death, it’s about life. It’s rebirth, it’s religion, and every carcass that falls into Downing’s hands is actually reborn; it is Christ beckoning Lazarus to come out, out of his cave.

It began over two decades ago, in 1851, when the young Titus Downing attended the Great Exhibition in London. He paid no attention to the intricate glasswork of the grand Crystal Palace or the largesse of the Koh-i-Noor diamond or Brady’s daguerreotypes or the tempest prognosticator with its storm-sniffing leeches; Downing’s gaze was fixed solely upon forty-two-year-old Charles Darwin, there to explain the work of every taxidermist on display. Darwin had practiced the art of taxidermy on the Beagle but learned it at Edinburgh from John Edmonstone, a freed Guyanese slave who made his own living this way: teaching taxidermy.

The Guyanese, Darwin said, predominantly Hindu and Jain, knew the art of rebirth better than anyone. The atman or jiva, they believe, the immortal life-essence of each living being, is intrinsically pure, everlasting, and ever since knowing this, Titus Downing has been at practice, re-creating the appearance of a creature’s “moving skin” to awaken its precise jiva, and although he is not the first British taxidermist to stuff a giraffe, because the giraffe Downing has stuffed so honestly bears its jiva, he agreeably intuits that the reporter at the Evening Standard and so many others, they may well be correct: he is uniquely skilled (perhaps, even, the best at his craft), so it is not in the least bit surprising to Titus Downing that his talent has reached a state of refinement never before reached by the Great Exhibitors, nor by Darwin, nor even, perhaps, by the freed Guyanese slave.