The Deadly Green Wallpaper That Poisoned Victorian Homes

Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a Swedish chemist, made this stunning bright green in 1775, which became known as “Scheele’s Green.” The problem was that it was made using a compound of copper and arsenic.

Fast forward to 1814, and a German manufacturer pushed Scheele’s recipe to a whole new level and created a brighter and longer-lasting green that we often call Emerald Green. It was made using arsenic and verdigris. Sure, make the toxic paint even more long-lasting!

The arsenic pigment was also used to make rich blues and bright yellows, which were perfect for Victorians who wanted bright interiors. But that also meant that any other walls that had colors other than green weren’t safe at all.

Wallpapers began taking over society by storm. In 1834, Britain was able to produce around 1.2 million rolls, and by 1874, that went up to a staggering 32 million rolls a year. And since arsenic pigments were cheap, vivid, and durable, an enormous chunk of all that wallpaper was carrying poison straight into people’s homes on an industrial scale.

Arsenic wasn’t just in wallpaper, though. Victorians actually put it in food coloring, cosmetics, children’s toys, dyed dresses, and even used it on meat to keep flies away. The stuff was basically (and unfortunately) woven into daily life.

I would’ve understood it if Victorians didn’t know that arsenic was poisonous, but they did. They used it to kill rats, and they also knew about its use as a murder weapon. It was even dubbed an “inheritance powder” because it was used to assassinate family members so their titles and estates could be claimed.

Many assumed that for them to get poisoned with arsenic, they actually had to eat it. So by that logic, they believed that they were only in danger if they actually licked the walls or chewed the paper. But unfortunately for them, arsenic could absolutely wreak havoc just by being in the room!

Left alone on the wall, arsenic wallpaper could shed tiny flakes of arsenic dust into the air, which people then breathed in. And in damp conditions, it could release a poisonous arsenical gas. So yes, you didn’t need to touch it at all.

When wallpaper got damp, certain molds growing on it could turn the arsenic into a toxic gas. A cold, humid Victorian house was basically the ideal factory for producing invisible poison. And considering how damp and drafty old British homes could be, you can just imagine the trouble with all that.

One of the earliest people to crack the mystery was a doctor himself, who papered his own study in green, then got sick. He’d suffer nausea and stomach pain, feel better after leaving the room for a few days, then get ill again the moment he returned.

One of the physicians who helped expose the danger was Thomas Orton, who cared for the Turner family whose four children all died from a mysterious illness. He traced the cause to the bright green wallpaper in the bedroom and confirmed that it was arsenic poisoning.

In that same 1862 case, the Turner children had been seen tearing at the wallpaper and licking the green pigment right off its surface, a detail that helped confirm arsenic as the cause.

Even animals weren’t immune to the issue. In Birmingham, a couple and their pet parrot all fell ill within a week, and yes, it was because of the wallpaper. Once it was removed, they all recovered, parrot included.

You’d think they’d stop at walls (and sometimes food), but people actually wore dresses and gloves that were dyed in this arsenic green. To no one’s surprise, it caused oozing sores and swollen hands.

As cities grew and nature vanished, arsenic-green artificial flowers became a hot fashion accessory worn in the hair. The women who made them paid a terrible price. In one factory of a hundred girls, 26 suffered chronic poisoning, one died after months of severe ulceration, and only four stayed healthy. The people manufacturing the “beauty” were being destroyed by it while the wealthy wore the results.

William Morris, the most celebrated wallpaper designer of the century, flat-out denied that arsenic wallpaper was dangerous. He insisted that since he had it in his own home and his friends hadn’t dropped dead at all, the whole scare was nonsense. He called the doctors foolish, comparing their concern to people gripped by “witch fever.”

Morris’s denial looks even worse once you learn where his money came from. His family held shares in Devon Great Consols, the largest arsenic-producing mine in the world at the time. So the man dismissing the arsenic panic was profiting from arsenic at the source. It’s hard not to raise an eyebrow at that guy.

Because of the scares, Queen Victoria reportedly had all the green wallpaper stripped out of Buckingham Palace after a visiting dignitary fell ill there in 1879.

The British government dragged its feet for years and refused to properly regulate the stuff. What actually ended the arsenic wallpaper era were the common folks. As newspapers spread the word, consumers simply stopped buying poisonous paper and demanded “arsenic-free” products.

The switch wasn’t as clean as it sounds, though. Plenty of manufacturers slapped “arsenic-free” labels on their products while their suppliers kept using arsenic anyway. One firm proudly advertised its wallpaper as poison-free, yet modern testing of a surviving sample proved it still contained plenty of arsenic.

This content was created with the help of AI.