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Victorian-Era Horror: There Must Be Something in The Water (Poison. It’s Poison)

Have you have ever wondered why the dark and horror literature written or published during the Victorian era is so potent? Rain-slick cobblestone shining wet with the spill of blood as an unseen supernatural force follows your every footstep; vampire castles, windy moors, and dilapidated mansions crumbling under the weight of terrible family secrets like a near-palpable sickness; mystery, madness and terrible curses that make one question the inner workings of both body and mind.

A possible answer to the above question is, quite literally, poison. Poison was practically everywhere and readily available during the Victorian era, from grocery shops to apothecaries, to people’s own homes.

Arsenic was particularly common as it was used in everyday items, especially ones containing pigment (Scheele’s green). Alcohol, sweets, candles, household pesticides, clothing, even children’s stuffed toys were also manufactured using materials that contained arsenic. A person’s home could be wallpapered entirely in significant traces of arsenic and they wouldn’t even know it until it was too late and low-level poisonings were already a common occurrence. This brings to mind the 1892-published short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in which a woman suffering from an “affliction of the nerves” becomes obsessed with her room’s wallpaper, believing it to be malignant, ill, and hiding a trapped woman inside it. Even William Morris, whose vibrant wallpapers of birds and flowers are famous to this day, had painted those artworks originally using green paint with arsenic compounds. Photographers also used cyanide to produce their daguerreotypes (as well as mercury fumes emitted during the process).

With the easy availability of arsenic and other lethal substances for household uses, poisoning became an art that was almost impossible to trace—or the poisoner’s culpability to prove. Examples of famous poisoners were women like Adelaide Barlett, who used chloroform to poison her husband, a death surrounded by an air of mystery that intrigued the press and public, since the autopsy showed liquid poison in his stomach, but no traces in his mouth, esophagus, or lungs. Madeline Smith used arsenic to poison the man she had had an affair with after he threatened to show her fiancé the erotic letters she wrote addressed to her illicit lover. The odorless arsenic had been poured into a cup of hot chocolate. And, of course, called Britain’s Mass Murderess, Mary Ann Cotton had poisoned four of her husbands with arsenic to get their life insurance money, as well as several of their children. She was young and well-regarded, and at times worked as a nurse which gave her a good standing in the community, as well as an alibi. Despite that, a doctor grew suspicious of her activity, and a while later she was tried, imprisoned, and hanged.

Eventually, laws were introduced to limit the ease of purchasing poison. This was in the form of the poisons register, in which anyone who bought arsenic, strychnine, and other substances had to sign their name. By then there was a certain glamor and sensationalist element around the use of poisons as a murder method, but also as medical gaslighting—convincing a loved one that they are sick in mind or body, when you yourself control that sickness through the administering of the toxic substance.

Books written around that time often features female figures that were labeled as “madwomen,” locked away, thought to be suffering from hysteria and paroxysms of bad judgment, loosening morals, hauntings or possession. You have women that kill their family members, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where Madeleine murders the brother who deprives her of the outside world, artistic expression, and socialization. You have women locked in attics (such as in Jane Eyre, where Bertha is revealed to be the “mentally disturbed” first wife of Mr. Rochester). And you have the gothic tradition of increasing malaise, supernatural phenomena, ghost hauntings, and muddled faculties that appear as pervasive, all-encompassing, and intangible manifestations throughout the narrative.

The connection of the gothic tradition (particularly the disturbed woman and the unseen haunting) to the prevalence of poisoning in the Victorian era is not easily provable. You could argue that the vampire novel is inspired by a fear of poison, or that the poison itself is a metaphor, a fear of change, of the Other; a bigotry suffusing the upper echelons of society. But no matter the interpretation, Victorian-era literature is rife with depictions of malaise and madness, spreading slowly and thoroughly like a trickle of poison through the bloodstream, or inhaled like air blighted by an arsenic-laced wallpaper.