In his essay ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, De Quincey derides poisoning as an inferior method of bringing about the death of others. It seemed to him both sneaky and unmanly. However, the age that succeeded him was a golden age of poisoners, many of whose crimes are remembered to this day. De Quincey was wrong, or at least in a minority: everyone, except of course the victim, loves a good poisoning.
Arsenic and antimony were the elements whose compounds were most frequently employed by Victorian murderers and murderesses, but the author also considers those of mercury, lead and thallium. Contrary to the title, he deals not only with murder but with occupational and environmental diseases caused by the ignorant or careless handling and disposal of such compounds. He even recounts the health scare caused by the suggestion that the release of a poisonous gas from babies’ mattresses that were treated with an antimony fire-retardant was responsible for cot deaths.
It doesn’t take much to arouse our fears of poison, precisely because we can so easily be poisoned without realising it. Indeed, the largest mass poisoning in the history of humanity has occurred in the last two decades in Bangladesh, where Unesco-promoted and funded wells have delivered highly arsenical water to tens of millions of people, untold numbers of whom are now suffering from chronic arsenic poisoning. None of them suspected anything until it was too late. Furthermore, it is always possible that chemicals currently deemed harmless might turn out to be poisonous. The possibilities for neurotic anxiety about toxic chemicals in the environment are clearly endless.
A compendium such as this book must deal with individual cases in a rather superficial and perfunctory manner. We do not learn, for example, that Dr William Palmer was known as the Prince of Poisoners, or the extent to which his nefarious activities, especially the poisoning of an unknown number of his own children, relatives and friends, enthralled and transfixed mid-Victorian England. Accounts of his trial sold by the scores of thousands. He was hanged in front of Stafford gaol before a festive crowd of 30,000 (the town itself had only 10,000 inhabitants at the time). As he approached the rickety scaffold, Palmer is said to have asked, ‘Is it safe?’ An exhibition of what is known to aficionados as Palmeriana, including the Staffordshire pottery figurines of him produced just after his trial, was held recently in Stafford, and to this day some of the pubs in Stafford have his picture and other mementoes on their walls. In the 1950s, Robert Graves wrote a novel about him, trying to establish his innocence, whose title, They Hanged My Saintly Billy, was a quotation from his mother; and books are still written about him from time to time. His contemporaries in his birthplace, Rugeley, were rather less fond of him, and sent a delegation to the Prime Minister to ask his permission for them to rename the town that had become so synonymous with Palmer. The Prime Minister agreed, on condition that they renamed the town after him — Palmerstone. It is difficult to imagine a prime minister daring to be so wittily robust nowadays.
The famous Victorian poison cases were so richly gothic, and so fascinating in their social history, that it is a pity to read of them in the inevitably filleted form in which they appear here. Nevertheless, it is useful to have the cases assembled in one place, if for no other reason than to serve as a reminder that, while most murderers kill for an obvious reason, some, like the late Dr Shipman, kill for a mysterious and obscure gratification they derive from the act of killing itself. Helene Jegado, for example, poisoned up to 30 people with arsenic without a clear motive. When it comes to human evil, there is nothing new under the sun.
This book is written in straightforward prose. It is about a fascinating — even a morbidly fascinating — subject. Unfortun- ately, there are quite a few errors in it. Irritable bowel syndrome, for example, is most definitely not the same thing as Crohn’s disease. And the copy-editing of the book would disgrace a commercial publisher, let alone an academic one. Council appears for counsel; on page 228, we learn that Palmer managed to kill John Parsons Cook, his last victim, in 1865, nine years after he was hanged. And the book is printed on nasty paper, cheaply bound.
This is not the author’s fault, of course. But a little mission statement at the beginning of the book demonstrates just how far the Press’s standards have declined: ‘[Oxford University Press] furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, and scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide…’ When it was a great academic press, it needed to say nothing. Its books spoke for themselves.