Still, continues Morris, Potter’s work “was emblematic of its age. People took to it in a big way: he sold huge numbers of postcards, for example. So it’s an important part of British social history.”

Morris also believes that contemporary responses to Potter’s work are blighted by misconceptions. In the aftermath of World War Two, he explains, taxidermy went out of fashion – “quite spectacularly so,” he says, “as people valued wildlife differently to a hundred years before. Some people said it was cruel, which is stupid because you can’t be cruel to a dead animal.” Far from being eerie or macabre, Morris argues, Potter wanted his tableaux to be “tongue-in-cheek and amusing. They were intended for children and families.”

At the Morbid Anatomy Museum, Ebenstein – the co-author, with Morris, of Walter Potter’s Curious World of Taxidermy – has experienced similar prejudices. When a story about their exhibition, illustrated with The Kittens’ Wedding, ran recently in The New York Times, it provoked lots of negative comments on the museum’s website and Facebook page. “All these people were like, ‘Oh my God, this is horrible – you guys are demonic, I can’t believe these hipsters in Brooklyn are showing art made out of dead animals,’” she says. “But this is an essential misunderstanding. We may see darkness and perversion in Potter’s work, but that’s more to do with our changing attitudes towards death. In the 19th Century, animals weren’t neutered, and Potter lived in the country where kittens and puppies were routinely drowned to take care of over-population. It’s not pretty but it’s true.”