Throw It At Me
The Arsenic Waltz
On Saturday, 30 November 1861, the Northampton Mercury printed the findings of an inquest into the death of Matilda Scheurer, who had made artificial flowers for a living. The coroner was G. S. Brent. The medical testimony came from James Thomas Paul, surgeon, of 26 Burton Crescent. Her employer appears in the report as M. Bergerond. The cause of death, as the court set it down, was acute inflammation of the mucous membrane of the stomach, produced by the inhalation of the arsenite of copper. The metal is named, the compound carrying it is named, Scheele’s green to the trade, the route into the body is named, and the organ that failed is named, in that order, in a county paper, over a woman whose trade was tinting leaves.
I have reread that sentence until it no longer sounds like an indictment. But it sounds instead like an order I might have placed: the metal, the compound, the passage, the organ, each refinement arriving only after the delight has already been granted. I know that sequence. First decide that the green is exquisite; then ask what had to be breathed so the leaf could remain exquisite in a room after the real leaf would have browned. The coroner will not admit to this. I do.
The counting starts eight weeks later. In January 1862, Hofmann, of the Royal College of Chemistry, wrote a letter on the arsenical greens, and he counts in it like a florist itemising an order. Ten grains of white arsenic, on average, in a dozen leaves. About fifty leaves to a wreath for a ball. Then the sum, in his own words: a lady wears in her hair more than forty grains of white arsenic; a quantity which, if taken in appropriate doses, would be sufficient to poison twenty persons. Persons, not people, for it is the appropriate word a man uses once he has begun to count them.
The letter survives here through its reprint, signed and dated that January beneath the title Spiritualism and Other Signs of the Times. Its first printing, in The Times on February the First, is not the copy behind this page. This page quotes a copy. A fortnight later, the British Medical Journal repeated the forty grains and could not leave the arithmetic where it found it: enough, it said, to poison herself and nineteen friends. The same number, now with a fitting guest list.
The adjustment is elegant, which is why I distrust how quickly I understand it. Twenty persons is chemistry. Herself and nineteen friends is a room, a relation, a small society assembled around the number so that the reader might feel it arrive. I have done the same in my own particular way. Yes, I have taken a cost that meant little in the abstract, given it bodies, adjusted the light, arranged them close enough to touch, and called the result illumination. There is no innocence in knowing precisely how the sentence improves.
Then the dress. Hofmann puts a ball dress at about twenty yards of material and performs the multiplication in a single clause: these twenty yards would contain about 200 grains of white arsenic. On 15 February 1862, the British Medical Journal, unsigned, under the heading “THE WEEK,” reported Professor Erdmann of Leipsic on the green tarlatanes, their pigment Schweinfurt green, copper acetoarsenite, a separate recipe with a separate lineage from the workroom’s. The cloth could carry as much as half its own weight in pigment, the color merely laid on with starch, so that, in the journal’s phrase, “our fair charmers in green whirl through the giddy waltz actually in a cloud of arsenical dust.” Twenty yards of that, under the crinoline regime, came to about 900 grains.
Forty grains in the hair. Two hundred on the twenty yards. Nine hundred on the same twenty yards, a fortnight later, in the press of the same profession. Both figures were reached in the same manner, by multiplying outward from one unit of cloth, and they stand four and a half times apart. Neither was corrected against the other. London held two weights for one dress, printed both, and went to the ball on both.
Between the two figures, Punch answered. On 8 February 1862, page 54, under a title with the manners of a dance card: “The Arsenic Waltz. The New Dance of Death. (Dedicated to the green wreath and dress-mongers.)” A skeleton in evening dress bows to ask. A skeleton lady accepts, a wreath on her skull, her crinoline enormous, and her flounces printed all over with small skulls and crossbones.
Wellcome, which holds the print, gives the artist as possibly John Leech, and possibly is the record’s word; there is no improving on it. A derivative image archive later credited the cartoon to R. C. Kedzie, an American physician and chemist in Michigan who never drew a line for Punch. The picture of the dance of death has spent more than a century and a half changing partners with its own author.
I admit that I laughed. Kedzie is not innocent of arsenic, merely innocent of this drawing. Even Death, with the appropriate attire, can lose track of who brought her to the dance. The Arsenic Act of 1851 regulated the sale of arsenic. It did not regulate its manufacture, and it did not regulate its use in goods. The maximum penalty was twenty pounds. One killed Matilda Scheurer in a workroom. The other went dancing.
There is one more number, and it is the smallest. Hofmann does not claim it as his own; he credits a physician in Berlin who satisfied himself that no less than sixty grains powdered off a single dress in the course of one evening. Sixty grains that were on the dress at the beginning of the evening and were not on it at the end. A dress like that does not keep what it is carrying. It hands it around instead, a few grains to whoever has hold of her.
The sixty grains change hands without becoming anyone’s possession. I know the allure of making a thing so beautiful that its consequences appear atmospheric, released from the object and distributed among everyone who comes close enough to admire it; we have spoken of that before, over a completely different green. But here I have called it radiance when something I made escaped its borders and entered the people around it. Sixty grains later, the dress is lighter, the room is not, and neither am I.
By morning, the dress hangs diminished. Nothing in its color admits that it has surrendered anything. The sixty grains have merely changed their unit of measure: no longer cloth and pigment, but breath, sleeve, glove, throat. The waltz is over only for the musicians. A century and a half later there is a green called Paradise on a color chip, and another on the walls of a Prada shop that opened on Via della Spiga in 1983, a green the house has never named.
Elías Delgado
Sources:
Primary
Inquest into the death of Matilda Scheurer. Northampton Mercury, Saturday 30 November 1861. Coroner G. S. Brent; medical testimony of James Thomas Paul, surgeon, 26 Burton Crescent; employer given as M. Bergerond; cause of death as quoted. Full reproduction: https://www.jack-the-ripper-tour.com/generalnews/poisoned-by-flowers/ ; the contemporary reprint of the inquest report, from The Times, runs in The Chemical News, Vol. IV, No. 104, 30 November 1861, p. 292.
A. W. Hofmann, Royal College of Chemistry, letter on the arsenical greens, January 1862. Read whole in its signed contemporary reprint, “Spiritualism and other signs of the times,” pp. 145 to 147: https://archive.org/details/spiritualismothe00esha . The letter’s first printing in The Times of 1 February 1862 has not been read here and is not cited as read; the reprint is the source of record for the forty grains, the twenty persons, the twenty yards at 200 grains, and the Berlin physician’s sixty grains.
British Medical Journal, 15 February 1862, p. 177, unsigned, under “THE WEEK.” Professor Erdmann of Leipsic on the green tarlatanes; half the cloth’s weight in pigment laid on with starch; “our fair charmers in green whirl through the giddy waltz actually in a cloud of arsenical dust”; about 900 grains to twenty yards. The same journal’s restatement of Hofmann’s forty grains, “enough to poison herself and nineteen friends,” runs in the same fortnight. https://archive.org/details/britishmedicaljo11862brit
“The Arsenic Waltz. The New Dance of Death. (Dedicated to the green wreath and dress-mongers.)” Punch, 8 February 1862, p. 54. Held by Wellcome, which attributes the drawing possibly to John Leech; possibly is the holding institution’s word and is not resolved here. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/awbr7whm
Arsenic Act 1851 (14 & 15 Vict. c. 13). Regulates the sale of arsenic; not its manufacture, not its use in manufactured goods; maximum penalty twenty pounds. J. C. Haslam, “Deadly decor: a short history of arsenic poisoning in the nineteenth century,” Res Medica 21(1), 2013: https://journals.ed.ac.uk/resmedica/article/download/182/799/0 ; Jo Banham, “Arsenic and Old Wallpapers,” Journal of Victorian Culture Online, 14 December 2023: https://jvc.oup.com/2023/12/14/arsenic-and-old-wallpapers/
Furniture, labelled as such
The later credit of the Punch cartoon to R. C. Kedzie in a derivative image archive, cited only as the misattribution it is, never as a source for the cartoon: https://pdimagearchive.org/images/6074bbc5-7a0b-4a26-a3cd-2628a4988fdd/
Clothing, labeled as such
The images are the author’s own interpretation. The dress and the KISS boot sandals are Rick Owens, in custom colors not endorsed by the house but chosen and applied by the author; the references were the author’s own modified runway photographs. No photograph of the real garments appears on this page. The gloves are the author’s own interpretation.