When we think of arsenic today, it’s pretty much synonymous with poison. But in the 19th century, as much as its lethal qualities captivated the public imagination, the substance became more and more common in everyday life. Newspapers sensationalized murder trials of wives who supposedly killed their husbands with “inheritance powder,” while the average Victorian home often contained medicines, makeup, aphrodisiacs, clothing, children’s toys, and wallpaper laced with the very same chemical. So how, exactly, could a health hazard this serious remain so prevalent?
A fascinating new book, written by Lucinda Hawksley, examines this very question—but with an emphasis on one particular item: wallpaper. In the early to mid-19th century, many European countries produced wallpaper laced with arsenic. However, while Sweden, Bavaria, and others were relatively quick to recognize the problem and ban such products—England was not. And Britain was, incidentally, wallpaper Mecca in the mid-to-late part of the century. Its design prowess led to a correlating boom in demand, with a 2,615 percent increase in the production of wallpaper rolls alone from 1834 to 1874. As word started to spread about the products’ hazards, many erroneously believed that design items somehow differed from purposely toxic arsenic items, or that the issue was limited to the popular and newly created synthetic color known today as “emerald green.”
One of these skeptics was William Morris, the arts and crafts design stalwart and champion of worker rights and safety provisions. Morris, who designed some of the most iconic wallpapers of the era (that were also arsenic-laced), ironically inherited his fortune from an arsenic mine in which he still held stock for a number of years. By the 1870s, the Morris family’s Devon Great Consols mine was one of a few mines reportedly producing over half the world’s supply of arsenic. And while Morris did ultimately divest his interests in the company, questions on his apparent hypocrisy—and why he never actually visited these notoriously bad workplaces—continue to linger.
But perhaps the ultimate answer as to why arsenic-laced wallpaper continued to proliferate the market for so long lies, like so many consumer product scandals, in their undeniable aesthetic appeal. Above, we’ve featured threea of the most beautiful wallpaper samples included in this new book. (The publication’s title, Bitten by Witch Fever, is an expression Morris used to describe what he viewed as people’s unfounded fears about the chemical.) These swatches—and the complete set of 275 designs included in the book—have tested positive in the U.K.’s The National Archives’s labs for arsenic content. Dangerously beautiful yes, but with an allure that stands the test of time—and should serve as an enduring warning for all.
Bitten by Witch Fever: Wallpaper and Arsenic in the Nineteenth-Century Home (Thames & Hudson), by Lucinda Hawksley, October 11, 2016.