I'm really sorry about this but I bring news of a very covetable book that you might want to add to the Ch*****as list...

Bitten By Witch Fever - Wallpaper and Arsenic in the Victorian Home by Lucinda Hawksley (published by Thames & Hudson)

 'As to the arsenic scare a greater folly it is hardly possible to imagine: the doctors were bitten as people were bitten by the witch fever.’ ― William Morris on toxic wallpapers, 1885. Bitten by Witch Fever presents facsimile samples of 275 of the most sumptuous wallpaper designs ever created by designers and printers of the age, including Christopher Dresser and Morris & Co. For the first time in their history, every one of the samples shown has been laboratory tested and found to contain arsenic. Interleaved with the wallpaper sections, evocative commentary guides you through the incredible story of the manufacture, uses and effects of arsenic, and presents the heated public debate surrounding the use of deadly pigments in the sublime wallpapers of a newly industrialized world.'

How odd then that I have, in my lifetime, lived just yards from two of the sources and natural providers for the wealth of William Morris.

In 1965 we moved from Mitcham in Surrey to a house in nearby Wallington on the banks of the River Wandle. By the time we arrived any traces of William Morris were long gone,  and stretches of the river were more of a polluted mess than the purveyor of clean water of the perfect chemical composition for William Morris's dyeworks upstream at Merton Abbey pictured here...

A  lot of life happens in between but in 1980 Bookhound and I move to Tavistock, a town whose wealth was once and briefly predicated on the existence of tin and copper mines locally and from which William Morris prospered, as Lucinda Hawksley elaborates in this book...

'The personal wealth of the family was derived from one of the world's largest producers of arsenic : Devon Great Consols Mine. Morris's father, who died when William was a child, left him shares in the mine (near Tavistock in Devon.) It was his father's lucky speculation in the mines during the 1840s that funded Morris's education as well as his early business ventures.'

In 1994 we moved out of town to splendid isolation in the Tamar Valley, and are now within walking distance of the Devon Great Consols mine, the source of all those minerals, and ultimately, when the lode was exhausted, the source of arsenic.

I feel a little as if I am stalking William Morris...or he is stalking me from beyond, because not only that but William's sister Alice Mary Morris married into the well-known Hornbrooke Gill family in 1864. The local banking family owned some of the land and properties around us here and, as Lucinda Hawksley confirms, it is well-known that William Morris, in constant denial about the dangers of arsenic in wallpaper dyes, came to visit his sister in these parts...

'A letter sent by Willam Morris to his wife Jane in 1881 while visiting his married sister Alice in South Devon proves that he did travel close enough to the mines to have inspected them in person...he reported that he and Alice had strolled together beside the River Tavy - only a few miles from Devon Great Consols mine...'

Incidentally Alice's husband Reginald Gill, much respected and a very prominent local figure, was to die as a result of a hunting accident in 1897, but his legacy is clearly visible for all to see in Tavistock...the Gill Wing at the cottage hospital still very much in evidence.

But I digress...

If we are talking about book as object to be stroked and loved then look no further...

Bitten by Witch Fever is a treasure trove of pages and pages of reproductions of many of the wallpapers of the day that contained arsenic, and all cleverly interspersed with smaller pages of text which recount the whole sorry tale. Who can know how many deaths there were from wallpaper exuding poisonous fumes in damp Victorian houses, indeed many of the deaths were apparently misdiagnosed as diphtheria. The stark facts of Lucinda Hawksley's text juxtaposed with the luxury of the decoration bring it all into sharp focus...

And then there were the cosmetics...

And the medicines...

I think you can tell that this has been an inspiring book for me, a fascinating story of poisonous beauty that has led me on an exciting trail of discovery and revelation. Ultimately it would be public pressure rather than any legal process that ended the use of arsenic in wallpaper; despite the very well-known dangers the British government was slow to act and in fact never has done. To this day apparently there is no legislation in this country that prevents the use of arsenic to colour wallpaper, it was the 'power of the pocketbook' that made its use obsolete.

The best books are those with legs. Read Bitten by Witch Fever alongside the more detailed The Arsenic Century by James C Whorton which I mentioned on here back in 2010, and I now see in connection with William Morris, and then add in Helen Rappaport's excellent book Beautiful for Ever : Madame Rachel of Bond Street - Cosmetician, Con-Artist and Blackmailer and maybe finish off with Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert and you'll have done arsenic inside out and top to tail.

But just imagine the working conditions for those who produced the arsenic. Many of them would have lived around us here and doubtless died and are buried in the village graveyard. At its peak in the 1870s Devon Great Consols Mine was producing 3000 tons of arsenic a year by smelting the ore in calciners (you can read more about the tortuous and lethal process here) and those calciners (stone kilns) are still there to see as part of the Tamar Valley Mining Trail through that woodland over yonder...

Boots at the ready and I'll take you for a walk over there later this week.