Published in 1854, the book North and South (in the original North and South), written by British novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Gaskell, is set in Milton, a fictional industrial town in the north of England. There, 19-year-old Margaret Hale witnesses the social earthquake caused by the industrial revolution. Elizabeth traces in the work originally published in the magazine Household words, edited by the writer Charles Dickens, a tough and tense portrait of the relationship between employers and employees, without missing an approach to issues such as strikes and unions. Gaskell’s work is also a moment to reflect on the miserable lives in cities suffocated by the toxic fumes of growing industries. A scenario that is at odds with the natural environment. Nostalgia for nature enchanted Victorian tastes, which saw the profusion of color in artificial flowers as a breath of fresh air. These flowers were used as a decoration and fashion element, a stimulus for the development of a symbolic communication — floriography — commonly known as the language of flowers. A Victorian craze fueled by the profusion of flower shapes and colors that spawned an entire industry around the manufacture of delicate artificial petals. The British Census of 1861 records the existence of over four thousand manufacturers of artificial flowers in the city of London, the majority of which operated in family units under degrading working conditions and unhealthy environments.
In December 1861, a press article titled Pretty Poison-Wreaths (something like “Beautiful Crowns of Poison”) reported the death of a 19-year-old girl named Matilda Scheurer, a florist in the English capital. November 1861, Matilda died of a debilitating illness. [Matilda] regurgitated green water. The whites of his eyes turned green and he told the doctor that all he saw was green.” Alison Matthews David, American historian, quotes in her 2015 book Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Clothing Past and Present, a 19th-century physician who reported Matilda’s manifestation of illness and pain. Pretty Poison-Wreaths’ lines underlined that it was “proven by medical testimony that she [Matilda] he has been ill four times in the past 18 months for the same cause.” For the young florist, the hangman who had committed the last act of her short life had a name: Scheele’s green, the pigment invented in 1755 by Swedish pharmacist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a prolific discoverer of the chemical world. We owe Carl Scheele the discovery of chemical elements such as chlorine, barium, manganese, tungsten, as well as various chemical compounds such as nitric acid and glycerol. With his green, Scheele obtained a lively and fresh tone, cheap to and which closely imitated the colors of nature. A green that was, however, deadly, the result of an extremely toxic chemical combination, a deadly “marriage” of arsenic and copper sulfate. Until the second half of the century In the 19th century, Scheele’s green used in the composition of wallpaper and wall paint, clothing, wax candles, toys, as well as as a coloring agent in confectionery recipes and drinks. Killer color shined in the ingredients of recipes such as the blanc manger, especially popular among the Scots. The nature of Scheele’s green components was so deadly that it was still used in the formulation of insecticides in the 1930s.
Source: DN
