In the spring and summer of 1871, Brighton was gripped by a series of mysterious poisonings. Chocolate creams from Maynard’s, a local sweet shop, had made several people ill. A metallic taste in the mouth was the first sign that something was wrong, followed by a burning sensation in the throat, vomiting and muscle spasms.
The symptoms quickly passed, however, and no one thought to take it any further. No one apart from Christiana Edmunds, who confronted Mr Maynard in his shop, complaining about the taste and her upset stomach. She even took a sample to a chemist, who analysed it and found that it contained a metallic poison. But still no action was taken.
That changed on 12 June. Four-year-old Sidney Barker ate one of the chocolates and began to shiver and spasm uncontrollably. Within half an hour he was dead. Had the chocolate been contaminated by some industrial chemical? Was Maynard a psychopath?
The truth was far stranger than anyone could have imagined. It turned out that Edmunds, apparently one of the victims, had been deliberately dosing the chocolate creams with strychnine as part of an elaborate attempt to cover up an earlier crime. The previous autumn, she had tried to murder the wife of a man she was in love with by giving her an arsenic-laced sweet. The woman became seriously ill, and her husband confronted Edmunds, who blamed it on Maynard’s. The poisoning spree was her breathtakingly callous attempt to prove to him, the object of her obsession, that the shop really was at fault.
This and tens of other horrifying cases are set out in macabre detail by Linda Stratmann in her new book The Secret Poisoner: A Century of Murder. They make you goggle at the inhumanity people are capable of when the incentives are there and the means at hand. There are tales of parents enrolling their children in burial clubs, a form of insurance meant to cover the cost of funeral expenses in an era of high child mortality, only to poison them to reap the proceeds. Husbands murder inconvenient wives, servants murder masters, sisters murder brothers to inherit more. This was the brutal crime that threatened every unhappy household, no matter how outwardly civilised. As the author points out, “Magistrates, medical men and politicians who were confident that they would never be stabbed to death in a drunken brawl knew that they could still be poisoned by a daughter or a wife or a cook, and felt threatened and vulnerable.”
Stratmann’s portrait of the age of arsenic (by far the most frequently used poison) is more than a string of grisly tales, and more relevant to our age than you might think. Two hundred years ago, lethal substances were readily available in a way that now seems utterly perverse. Arsenic was used widely in medicine, agriculture, industry and the home. It was employed to dip sheep, kill rats, anoint fly papers, and could be purchased in powdered form from grocers, no questions asked. In 1819 a bill was introduced that would have made the labelling of deadly poisons compulsory, but it was opposed by the Society of Chemists and Druggists as potentially damaging to their business. It never passed.
Then, as now, changing a status quo underpinned by commercial interests was extremely difficult (the sale of alcohol, for instance, was temporarily banned in the US only on the back of a gigantic religious awakening). There are echoes of the fight to restrict sales of cigarettes in the teeth of opposition from big tobacco. Though no one’s right to bear arsenic has been enshrined in any constitution, the parallels with gun control and the arguments of the National Rifle Association are unavoidable. Lord Carlisle thought there were limits to what the law might do, and that the scourge “could only be successfully combatted by teaching our people the true spirit of Christianity”. Arsenic doesn’t kill people, people kill people.
In fact, the first defences against poison-murder were not legislative, but scientific. The Marsh test, a highly sensitive means of registering the presence of arsenic in food, drink or human remains, was developed in 1836, while the sale of the poison was not restricted until 15 years later. The Arsenic Act meant that vendors had to record purchases, but it was not until 1868 that things tightened up significantly, with a witness required for each transaction and a number of other poisons, such as strychnine and cyanide, added to the restricted list. Even so, Christiana Edmunds, with basic subterfuge, was able to get her hands on enough deadly material to terrorise a town.
How very different things are now. Or so we like to think. It seems preposterous that a child could walk into a grocer’s shop to buy arsenic, and that efforts to prevent this were resisted for so long. But in many US states it’s legal for a child to possess a rifle. The refined sugar we pump into our foods might one day be thought of as beyond the pale. Before the smugness sets in, it’s worth asking: what’s our poison?
