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As these actions proved, artists were not the true colour innovators of the period; in the 19th century, the chemist had all but replaced the painter. Like the protean shapes of felt hats created with the help of chemical substances, science contributed a rainbow of man-made tints that was infinitely mutable and constantly shifting to suit consumer taste, resulting in frequent palette changes on men’s and women’s bodies. Colour was one scientific domain that women were encouraged to participate in, particularly as it related to dress. As Charlotte Nicklas has argued, colour science as propounded by the famous French dye chemist Michel-Eue?gne Chevreul frequently found its way into fashion periodicals aimed at middle-class women. Chemistry democratized previously expensive imported animal and mineral dyes forever, as suggested by the Victorian slang term “Totty-all colours,” meaning a woman who contrived to combine all the hues of the rainbow in her dress. Yet as with other consumer products, democratization came at a cost to health, and no colour was more toxic than the verdant pigment that killed Matilda Scheurer. After researching the ample material, medical, and chemical evidence of toxic colours in the 19th century, I find it surprising that fashion historians have not addressed this aspect of dress history. The substances used to tint dress and accessories left a trail of polluted air, water, and soil, sickening workers and consumers.

Toxic green wreaths and poisoned flowermakers made headlines, but in the 19th century arsenic and the arsenophobia it provoked were everywhere. James Whorton’s book The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain was Poisoned at Home, Work and Play beautifully demonstrates just how ubiquitous the substance was. The “arsenious acid” or white arsenic (arsenic trioxide) that went into pigments, rat poisons, and medicines was a cheap, colourless substance, a fine, white powder obtained as a by-product of mining and smelting metals like copper, cobalt, and tin. Arsenic was used by doctors to heal and by murderers to kill, accidentally finding its way into food and even beer. A child could buy it over the counter in a pharmacy. The poison equivalent of fur felt hats, it could assume so many forms that it was called “the very Proteus of poisons.” In Britain, acts like the Control of Poisons Bill of 1851 and the Arsenic Act of 1868 were passed to limit the amounts that could be sold to individuals, but it was completely legal and unregulated for large- scale use in industry. Many hundreds of tonnes went into consumer products annually.

Across the channel in France, Ange-Gabriel-Maxime Vernois (1809–1877), a consulting physician to the highest in the land, including Emperor Napoleon III, was conducting his own studies. Despite his high rank, he also had a strong interest in occupational hazards. In 1859, he had investigated artificial flowermaking workshops and found that the trade was making workers deathly ill. He described the health hazards of each operation in the trade and a chromolithograph illustrating his article graphically depicts how the toxic green dust ruined the hands and bodies of flower workers. In a workshop or factory environment, it was ground under fingernails and eaten off of dirty hands. It blistered toes peeping from holes in worn shoes, and settled on floors where it killed rats and mice. Vernois noted that flowermaking ateliers were one of the few workshops with no vermin or cats to catch them, save for one sickly feline specimen he observed. At night, workers carried the powder home on their clothes, or worse, it was spread all over the cramped apartments of “independent” piece workers.

Arsenic was considered an “irritant” poison in the 19th century. When it came into contact with the body, it functioned as an “escharotic, a substance that exerts a caustic effect on the skin, producing sores, scabs, and sloughing of the damaged tissue.” This is clear from the “ulceration” of the green hands with yellow nails, illustrated in the redness and peeling of the skin around the nostrils and lips, and deep, white-rimmed cancerous scars on a worker’s leg that look almost like craters on the surface of the skin. Skin abrasion and wounds allowed further entry to the poison; Vernois singled out the men called appre?teurs d’e?toffe as especially vulnerable: they dyed white cloth yellow with another irritant chemical dye called picric acid to create a more “natural” shade of green, brushed emerald green paste directly into the cloth with their bare forearms, and stretched it out to dry on wooden frames pierced with nails. The nails lacerated their hands and arms, allowing the poison to directly enter the bloodstream in what Vernois called a constant “inoculation” with arsenic. When men urinated, arsenic on their hands caused painful inflammations and lesions of the scrotum and inner thighs that resembled syphilis. These injuries, which sometimes led to gangrene, could take six weeks of hospital bed rest to cure. After the cloth had been prepared by the men, girls and young women turned it into leaves and bouquets. These female workers lacked appetite and were “nauseous, with colic and diarrhea, anemia, pallor, and constant headaches that madethem feel as if their temples were being pressed in a vise.” As a consequence, the French and German governments quickly passed legislation against these pigments. The British government took no action, and in 1860, only a year before Scheurer’s death, the British doctor Arthur Hill Hassall described the condition of flower workers in London as “wretched in the extreme.”

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