CRAZY FASHIONS

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The Arsenic Dress: How Poisonous Green Pigments Terrorized Victorian Fashion

Clothing in nineteenth-century Europe and America was so thoroughly dangerous, it’s amazing anyone survived.

That’s what you might very well take away from Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present, a lavishly illustrated chronicle of ways clothing tried to kill both creators and their customers in the Victorian era, largely in the U.K., France and North America. Author Alison Matthews David talks vivid-but-toxic dyes, cosmetics laden with lead, and flammable fabrics, pairing beautiful examples of popular styles with sometimes gruesome illustrations of the injuries they might’ve inflicted. “Fashion causes literal, physical harm to the bodies of its wearers and its makers and has done so for centuries,” she explains.

For instance: A lovely emerald green used in fabrics and popular floral headdresses alike was made, in part, of arsenic. This would become an obsession on the part of the Victorian media. The following is excerpted from Fashion Victims.

On November 20, 1861, Matilda Scheurer, a 19-year-old artificial flower maker, died of “accidental” poisoning.

The formerly healthy, “good-looking” young woman worked for Mr. Bergeron in central London, along with a hundred other employees. She “fluffed” artificial leaves, dusting them with an attractive green powder that she inhaled with every breath and ate off her hands at each meal. The brilliant hue of this green pigment, which was used to colour dresses and hair ornaments, was achieved by mixing copper and highly toxic arsenic trioxide or “white arsenic” as it was known. The press described her death in grisly detail, and by all accounts, Scheurer’s final illness was horrible.

She vomited green waters; the whites of her eyes had turned green, and she told her doctor that “everything she looked at was green.” In her final hours, she had convulsions every few minutes until she died, with “an expression of great anxiety” and foaming at the mouth, nose and eyes. An autopsy confirmed that her fingernails had turned a very pronounced green and the arsenic had reached her stomach, liver, and lungs. As Punch wrote sarcastically in an article entitled “Pretty Poison-Wreaths” two weeks later, “It was proved by medical testimony that she had been ill from the same cause four times within the last eighteen months. Under such circumstances as these, death is evidently about as accidental as it is when resulting from a railway collision occasioned by arrangements known to be faulty.” To the nonmedical public, it seemed that Scheurer’s death was predictable and entirely preventable and that her life had been cruelly sacrificed to wealthy women’s desire for fashionable adornments.

Several philanthropic organizations took up her cause, including the aristocratic members of the Ladies’ Sanitary Association. One member, a Miss Nicholson, had already visited the garrets and workshops where flowers were made and had published a shocking firsthand account of following “half-clad” and “half-starved” little girls with bandaged hands and “some cutaneous disease” as they pick up an order of leaves and turn it into bouquets. 

Nicholson wrote that one of the girls stubbornly refused to work any more. She had observed her fellow flower makers in the workshop wearing handkerchiefs soaked with blood and she herself “had been kept on [working with] green . . . till her face was one mass of sores,” and she was almost blind. Nicholson’s article alerted her readers to the fact that the young, female workers were ignorant of the nature and effects of arsenical greens and “imagine that it gives them a dreadful cold.” 

After Scheurer’s death, the Ladies’ Sanitary Association commissioned Dr. A. W. Hoffman, an analytical chemist with a worldwide reputation, to test artificial leaves from a ladies’ headdress. Hoffman shared his results with the public in a London Times article sensationally titled “The Dance of Death.”The expert concluded that an average headdress contained enough arsenic to poison 20 people. The “green tarlatanes so much of late in vogue for ball dresses” contained as much as half their weight in arsenic, meaning a ball gown fashioned from 20 yards of this fabric would have 900 grains of arsenic.

 A Berlin doctor had also determined that “from a dress of this kind no less than 60 grains powdered off in the course of a single evening.” A grain, based on the weight of a wheat grain, is equivalent to 64.8 milligrams or 1/7000th of a pound. Four or five grains were lethal for an average adult.

I hope you liked this deadly fashion and as always have a chilled day from the Viking