FASHION-DETECTIVE

Unknown, England, Dress, c.1865 (detail)
Unknown, Australia, Dress, c.1865 (detail)
By 1859 English newspapers such as Punch were satirising the extent to
which Perkin’s vivid purple shade was dominating fashionable dress. (A
novelty exacerbated by purple’s symbolic associations with aristocracy
and royalty.) But what exactly did this colour look like? While a small
swatch of silk dyed with a batch of the original dye is housed in the
Imperial College chemistry archives, London, and an image of this
can be seen on Wikipedia, records of Perkins purple are scant and
identifying the colour by the naked eye is an impossible task. Employing
chromatography and spectroscopy to analyse our holdings of mid to late
nineteenth-century purple garments and accessories, this case attempted
to locate evidence of this pivotal moment in fashion history.
‘The case of the poisonous pigment ’ concerns the widespread use of
green arsenical pigments as colouring agents in the early part of
the nineteenth century. Discovered by Carl Scheele in 1778, and in
widespread use by 1800, copper arsenate dyes such as Scheele’s Green,
and later Schweinfurt green, were exceedingly popular due to their
vivid hues. Cheap to make and chemically stable, the dyes were not
only adopted by painters, cloth makers, wallpaper designers and dyers,
but were also used to colour countless everyday goods, such as soap,
candles, children’s toys, confectionary and packaging.
By the late 1850s, after a three-year-old boy died after ingesting
pigment flakes, anxiety about the prevalence of arsenic was expressed
in British news articles, pamphlets and books. In 1862 a coroner’s
inquest found that a woman died as a result of sucking an artificial
grape coloured with Scheele’s Green. 13 At around the same time
Australian newspapers reprinted reports from British medical journals
warning of the dangers of arsenical green wallpapers (‘Put it up on
your walls and you are lining your rooms in pure death’ 14 ) and listing
the ghastly symptoms of arsenic poisoning, including ‘irritation,
gastric derangement, ulceration, inflammation, palpitations, joint pain,
irritability and weakness, and in the worst cases, memory loss, spasms
and partial paralysis.’ 15
Poisonings were also linked to the wearing of arsenical garments.
London physician George Rees found green muslins to be especially
hazardous after analysing a sample that contained sixty grains
of Scheele’s green per square yard. The pigment was so loosely
incorporated that ‘it could be dusted out with great facility’. 16
Our fair charmers in green whirl through the giddy
waltz … actually in a cloud of arsenical dust …
Well may the fascinating wearer … be called a
killing creature … she carries in her skirts poison
enough to slay the whole of the admirers she may
meet with in half a dozen ballrooms. 17
John Leech, The Arsenic Waltz. The new Dance of Death. (Dedicated to the green wreath and dress-mongers.), 1862
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