(Image taken from here.)
Right in time for Halloween, writer and faculty member for the first year London program, Lucinda Hawksley delivered a fascinating lecture on the mysterious, arsenic-related deaths that plagued England throughout the 1800s. An accomplished British author in her own right, she also happens to be the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens.
Though she has been an integral part of Skidmore’s London program since 2008, Hawksley is now touring the states with her new book: Bitten by Witch Fever: Wallpaper & Arsenic in the Victorian Home, the seventeenth book she has written.
Her event had a huge turnout of faculty and students alike, so much so that extra chairs were brought out to accommodate everyone in the small Somers room in the Tang.
Lucinda Hawksley’s presentation spanned a century of spooky Victorian history with a large focus on the poisonous wallpaper that was responsible for countless deaths. It all started, she told us, with Karl Scheele, a German scientist that developed a vibrant green pigment in the mid-1700s, but with a secret ingredient. Arsenic helped to create the bright colors that were becoming increasingly fashionable at this time, and England couldn’t get enough of it.
Soon, arsenic became a standard ingredient in all wallpapers. And, with the growing accessibility to, and popularity of, wallpaper at the time, everyone was putting this poisonous paper up in their homes. Doctors were prescribing arsenic to men for virility, artists were using it in their pants, textile workers were dying clothing with it, companies used the bright pigments it produced in children’s toys, and people often used it to add color to various foods.
The brighter the color, the more arsenic it contained.
The stuff was everywhere, and it took decades for doctors to catch onto the mysterious deaths happening all over England. Hawksley showed us photo after photo of dresses, wallpapers, paintings, and advertisements that all showed the unavoidable presence–and trendiness–of arsenic. It was even advertised as skincare: arsenic face cream to prevent pimples and dark spots.
Because of its hard-to-trace side effects that could have been indicators of a number of different health problems — like gastrointestinal issues or diphtheria — murder by arsenic poisoning was an incredibly difficult crime to pinpoint.
One of Britain’s most notorious serial killers, Mary Ann Cotton, was believed to have poisoned at least 21 people, and breezed by undetected until she killed her stepson. She was then publicly executed — of course, considering it was 1873.
An interesting story of a dangerous time to live in England, Hawksley presents shocking facts and scary tales of a nineteenth century epidemic that went largely ignored by the industries and factories that were responsible for it.
This may seem far away and long ago, but at the end, she reminds us that we continue to ignore phenomena like this to this day. How many studies do we ignore telling us the dangers of modern technology and chemicals? Of the deadly pollutants that we are constantly putting into our atmosphere?