Latest
News from Sandra and an intriguing blog about Killer Clothing: All
the Rage In the 19th Century Arsenic dresses, Mercury hats, and
flammable clothing!
Hello and Hope this finds you well.
Many
of you have been kind to contact me about my two surgeries within the
past few months. Suffice it to say, it was “ouchville,” but am now on my
way to recovery. In five days, I graduate to a less cumbersome splint.
Thanks for your kind words.
Had a few signing events with Anne Donovan of Branches Books and Gifts in Oakhurst, below in August.
Then
the Authors Reveal Their Secrets presentation at the Friends of the
Oakhurst Library event in July. Linda Lee Kane, Vicki Thomas, Sandra
Masters, Kris Lynn and Cora Ramos.
And
a TV interview by local Channel KSEE 24 with Kris Lynn and myself. It
was a hoot and a holler. You can click on the actual interview on my
website at: www.authorsandramasters.com on the home page.
I
am working on edits for Book Six, The Blue-Eyed Black-Hearted Duke, of
the Duke Series with the hope a contract will be offered. It is a
departure from my traditional Regency Romance since it is a Regency
Fantasy Supernatural. Woke up one night
after it was a halfway work-in-process and I had a vision of the
supernatural creatures in a stained glass window. Viola! Revisions made
it a reality. More about this in the future. My dearest hope is that it
will be available for print in 2017.
This is my inspirational meme by Kris Lynn - Kristallynn Designs.
For all of my books, I create visionary graphics to allow me to escape my own world into my characters’.
Sandra Masters, Historical author.
Now to some fascinating information.
In all of my five Regency Historical Romance books, I do explain the fashions of the day and what my heroines and heroes wore.
In
search of another topic, I came across a headline that indicated that
fashion had its price and sometimes it was DEATH! It was sometimes
referred to as Killer Clothing.
My
shock was doubled since I spent at least twenty-five years in the
fashion industry in New York City working for various textile
manufacturers and never had a clue! Woe is me.
Killer Clothing Was All the Rage In the 19th Century
Arsenic dresses, Mercury hats, and flammable clothing caused a lot of pain.
Did
you know that while sitting at home one afternoon in 1861, poet Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife, Fanny, caught fire. Her burns were so
severe that she died the next day. According to her obituary, the fire
had started when “a match or piece of lighted paper caught her dress.”
At the time, this wasn’t a peculiar way to die. In the days when
candles, oil lamps, and fireplaces lit and heated American and European
homes, women’s wide hoop skirts and flowing cotton and tulle dresses
were a fire hazard, unlike men’s tighter-fitting wool clothes.
It
wasn’t just dresses: Fashion at this time was riddled with dangers.
Socks made with aniline dyes inflamed men’s feet and gave garment
workers sores and even bladder cancer. Lead makeup damaged women’s wrist
nerves so that they couldn’t raise their hands. Celluloid combs, which
some women wore in their hair, exploded if they got too hot. In
Pittsburgh, a newspaper reported that a man with a celluloid comb lost
his life “While Caring for His Long Gray Beard.” In Brooklyn, a comb
factory exploded. In fact, some of the most fashionable clothing of the
day was made using chemicals that are today considered too toxic to
use—and it was the producers of this clothing, rather than the wearers,
who suffered most of all!
MERCURIAL MALADIES
Many people think that “mad as a hatter” refers to the mental and physical side
effects hat makers endured from using mercury in their craft. Though
scholars dispute whether this is actually the origin of the phrase, many
hatters did develop mercury poisoning. And even though the phrase has a
certain levity to it, and while the Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland was silly and fun, the actual maladies hat makers suffered
were no joke—mercury poisoning was debilitating and deadly.
In
the 18th and 19th century, a lot of men’s felt hats were made using
hare and rabbit fur. In order to make this fur stick together to form
felt, hatters brushed it with mercury. “It was extremely toxic,”
says Alison Matthews David, author of Fashion Victims: The Dangers of
Dress Past and Present. “Especially if you inhale it. It goes straight
to your brain.”
One
of the first symptoms was neuromotor problems, like trembling. In the
hat-making town of Danbury, Connecticut, this was known as the “Danbury
shakes.”
Then
there were the psychological problems. “You would become very shy, very
paranoid,” Matthews David says. When medical examiners visited hatters
to document their symptoms, hatters “thought they were being observed,
and they would throw down their tools and get angry and have outbursts.”
Many hatters also developed cardio-respiratory problems, lost their
teeth, and died at early ages.
Although
these effects were documented, many viewed them as the hazards that one
had to accept with the job. And besides, the mercury only affected the
hatters—not the men who wore the hats, who were protected by the hats’
lining.
“There
was always kind of a bit of a pushback from the hatters themselves,”
Matthews David says of these dangerous working conditions. “But really,
honestly, the only thing that made [mercury hat making] disappear was
the fact that men’s hats went out of fashion in the 1960s. That’s really
when it dies. It was never banned in Britain.”
ARSENIC AND OLD LACE
Arsenic
was everywhere in Victorian Britain. Although it was known to be used
as a murder weapon, the cheap, natural element was used in candles,
curtains, and wallpaper, writes James C. Whorton in The Arsenic Century:
How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned at Home, Work, and Play.
Because
it dyed fabric bright green, arsenic also ended up in dresses, gloves,
shoes, and artificial flower wreaths that women used to decorate their
hair and clothes.
VIEW IMAGES
For
example, in 1861, a 19-year-old artificial flower maker named Matilda
Scheurer—whose job involved dusting flowers with green, arsenic-laced
powder—died a violent and colorful death. She convulsed, vomited, and
foamed at the mouth. Her bile was green, and so were her fingernails and
the whites of her eye. An autopsy found arsenic in her stomach, liver,
and lungs.
SAFETY IN FASHION
Public
concern over arsenic helped phase it out of fashion—Scandinavia,
France, and Germany banned the pigment (Britain did not).
The
move away from arsenic was hastened by the invention of synthetic dyes,
which made it “easy to let arsenic go,” according to Elizabeth
Semmelhack, senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, Canada.
VIEW IMAGES
This
raises interesting questions about fashion today. While arsenic dresses
might seem like bizarre relics of a more brutal age, killer fashion is
still very much in vogue. In 2009, Turkey banned sandblasting—the practice of spraying denim with sand to give it a fashionable distressed look—because workers were developing silicosis from breathing in sand.
“It’s not a curable disease,” Matthews David says of silicosis. “If you have sand in your lungs it will kill you.”
Yet
when a dangerous production method is banned in one country—and when
the demand for the clothing that method produces remains high—then
production typically moves somewhere else (or continues despite the
ban).
In
the 1800s, men who wore mercury hats or women who wore arsenic-laced
clothing and accessories might have seen the people who produced these
items on the streets of London, or read about them in the local paper.
But in a globalized economy, many of us don’t see the deadly effects
that our fashion choices have on others.
Mauve
boots dyed with the new synthetic color containing arsenic, picric
acid, and other toxic chemicals, English (early 1860s) (Collection of
the Bata Shoe Museum, photograph by Ron Wood)
For
example, there’s the achingly narrow shoes worn by women to slip into a
“beauty ideal,” and for men and women alike there was mauve
footwear tinged with
the first synthetic dye. Created by William Henry Perkin in 1856, mauve
was revolutionary in influencing color tastes. It
was unfortunately incredibly toxic, made with arsenic, picric acid, and
other harmful chemicals. Around the same time tortoises and elephants
were being spared in making hair combs, but the
manufactured celluloid was explosive. Ballerinas draped in tulle were
pirouetting into gas lights on the stage at such a frequency it was
called a “holocaust.” Even the high heel, which had come back into vogue
in the late 1850s, deliberately threw women off-balance as part of a
very confined, yet alluring, form of femininity.
The
19th century shoe demonstrates the movement over the era from personal
relationships with independent artisans to industries like the
700 embroiderers who labored on boots in the factory of François Pinet.
Matthews David points out how with these elaborate shoes, “the same
object exists in both spaces,” moving from the unsanitary, debilitating
conditions of the unventilated factories to the foot of a strutting
member of the upper class. Likewise all those gleaming, shined boots
were not kept clean in the dirty 19th century by the rich wearers, but
by the numerous, poor shoeshine boys who worked the streets for scraps
of money.
Murphy, photograph
Arnold Matthews) Hands damaged by arsenic dyes, lithography from an
1859 medical journal (courtesy Wellcome Library)
Perhaps
the most evocative fatal fashion trend of the 19th century is the color
green. Before inventor Carl Wilhelm Scheele came along near the end of
the 18th century, there was no color fast green, only the option to do a
blue overlay with yellow or vice versa. By mixing arsenic and copper,
Scheele developed a pigment that would hold, whether in wallpaper,
paintings, or clothing. It also happened to look fantastic under natural
and new gas light, an important duality for the time. By the mid-19th
century, when, as Matthews David notes “nature was disappearing from the
environment,” this “Emerald Green” was incredibly popular
in artificial flowers. It was also highly toxic, even deadly, and it’s
no coincidence that Baudelaire titled his book of tormented poems Les
Fleurs du Mal — The Flowers of Evil — just as the death of a young
artificial florist was being investigated.
RESOURCES AND FURTHER INFORMATION:
Becky Little is a writer focusing on history. Published October 16, 2017
Sources: Wickipedia, Internet
In no way does this author claim originality for this information.
Originally posted on https://www.authorsandramasters.com/single-post/2017/10/20/Newsletter
Sophie, our Terrier-Chihuahua
is cold and cuddles up in a too-big hat, but to me,
she’s still adorable. She’s waiting for hubby, Ron, to start the fire.
