Swindled

by Bee Wilson

  The rule of caveat emptor—let the buyer beware—also came into play. If consumers chose to buy falsified foods, that was their lookout—an argument we will return to in chapter 3. To Accum, familiar with the much more interventionist system of Westphalia, such arguments were unconstitutional and unjust. The “true interests of the country” dictated that adulterators, both large and small, be dealt with by the strong arm of the law. As for the supposed loss in tax revenue that would come from exposing them, Accum believed that “a tax dependent upon deception must be at best precarious.” His strongest reasons for opposing this argument, though, were moral. To paint sloe leaves with poison and pass them off as tea was wicked; and far from turning a blind eye, the law should crack down on such activity. His indignation roused Accum to one of his most dramatic statements: “It is really astonishing that the penal law is not more effectually enforced against practices so inimical to the public welfare. The man who robs a fellow subject of a few shillings on the high-way, is sentenced to death; while he who distributes a slow poison to a whole community, escapes unpunished.”80 This wasn’t quite right; the last British citizen to hang for highway robbery had been executed in 1783. Accum had made his point, though. Too many swindlers were getting away with it, and the law needed to intervene. Where government revenue was at issue, con men could be prosecuted for adulterating taxable items such as beer or tea. But there was no specific law against adulteration, and little consistency in the way that the existing law was applied. More government action was needed to extend penalties “to abuses of which it does not now take cognisance”; that enlarging the law in this way, Accum argued, would actually benefit ‘the revenue.”81

  Not everyone shared his opinion, though. Some thought “the revenue” was to blame, in the first place, for much adulteration. If imported goods weren’t taxed so highly by a greedy government, there would be no motive for making cheap imitations from native plants. The Times, whose general outlook was favourable to laissez-faire, responded to the fake tea scandals of 1818 in exactly the opposite way to Accum. What was needed was not more government interference but less. It shared Accum’s disgust at the tea counterfeiters, remarking that many took refuge in the “mild refreshment” of tea because they feared the “deleterious drugs” used in porter. What an injustice it was that “sober men and women are to be poisoned as a penalty for refusing to get drunk.” But unlike Accum, The Times was not altogether surprised that nine-tenths of the “tea dealers of the metropolis” sold the “adulterated article in a greater or less proportion.” An anonymous editorial written in March 1818 held that adulterated tea was

  inevitable—inevitable, so long as the genuine tea of China shall be taxed very nearly one hundred per cent on its original cost and sold to the people of England, who are the greatest consumers of it in the world, at a higher price than to any of those nations who never send a single merchant ship to sea. We are not so childish to adjure a financier by his regard for the health or enjoyments of his countrymen, to reduce a tax on a simple article of consumption; but we would appeal to the common sense and plain arithmetic of our law-givers, whether it be for their interest to maintain the tea-duties at such a rate as to supersede the demand for this popular article, and to extinguish the revenue desirable from it, by forcing into the market a spurious commodity, which is only advantageous to manufacture, because of the exorbitant imposts on tea. Mr Pitt knew better.82

  This last was a reference to the fact that when Pitt the Younger was prime minister (1783–1801), he had slashed tea duties from 119 percent to 25 percent in order to combat smuggling. It had been a very successful policy, vastly increasing the amount of tea passing through the Exchequer. These were different times, though, with the price of all food at a premium following the wars with France. The Corn Laws, introduced in 1815 to safeguard the livelihood of British farmers, kept the price of wheat, and thence bread, artificially high. Meanwhile, duties on luxuries such as tea, wine, spirits, and tobacco were all extremely high in 1820, which doubtless contributed to the market in counterfeit versions.

  Accum himself makes frequent reference to the effects of “the late French war” on food and drink, especially beer. During the Napoleonic Wars, many lines of trade were shut off, pushing up the price of all raw materials. London porter, so Accum noted, was “unquestionably” weaker at this time, except when it had been made “intoxicating” by the addition of “narcotic substances.”83 He describes the special jackets worn by brewers with many large pockets, each concealing a different adulterating substance—spices, colours, and drugs.84 During the wars, Accum observed, imports into Britain of a drug called Cocculus indicus shot up. This is a convulsive poison, whose active ingredient is picrotoxin, a powerful and bitter narcotic, now used to destroy lice or stupefy fish. In those days, it was added by fraudulent brewers to beer, to make its effects stronger and cover up the fact that not enough malt and hops had been used. Brande’s Manual of Chemistry, published in 1819, noted its dangers—a fact seemingly known to the brewers themselves, though it didn’t stop them from using it. In Every Man His Own Brewer (1790), Samuel Child admitted that Cocculus indicus was “poisonous leading to stupefaction, and unlawful; being of excessive strength to attack the head”; yet he still includes it in his recipe for porter.85

  The adulteration of beer was not only an attack on drunkards. Since so much water, especially in cities, was undrinkable, beer had the status of a basic family drink, consumed by children as well as adult men and women. This made tampering with it a grave matter, affecting the whole population. The problem was widespread. Accum cites countless prosecutions against brewers and publicans for adulterating beer in one way or another, or for mixing strong beer with weaker “table beer.” Between 1813 and 1819, more than thirty brewers were fined vast sums for “receiving and using illegal ingredients in their brewings.” Among them, John Cowell was fined £50 for using Spanish liquorice and mixing table beer with strong beer; John Gray was fined £300 for using ginger, hartshorn shavings, and molasses; Allatson and Abraham were fined £630 for using Cocculus indicus, multum, and “porter flavour.”86

  “Death’s Register” by Richard Dagley from Death’s Doings (1826), showing a skeleton plotting various poisonous swindles. Notice the sign on the wall, which reads “Accum’s List” and the barrel of Cocculus indicus, which was an adulterant of beer.

  What these prosecutions reveal, though, is that, at least as regards beer, the government intervened more to protect the consumer than Accum allowed. British parliamentary laws safeguarding beer at this time were comparable to the notorious Reinheitsgebot of Bavaria, promulgated in 1516. Acts of Parliament prohibited beer from containing any substance but malt, hops, and water (yeast was added to beer only later).87 Druggists and grocers could be prosecuted for selling adulterating items to brewers, even something as harmless as molasses (a dark treacle used to colour and sweeten beer). Even the use of burnt sugar to add colour and isinglass to clarify beer were prohibited by law.88 Never again would the standards be so stringent.

  Indeed, the standards for British beer now are nowhere near as strict as they were then. Practically all beer sold in modern British pubs would count as “adulterated” in Accum’s view, even if not adulterated with such noxious substances as Cocculus indicus. By law British beer is permitted to contain caramel to adjust its colour, potassium chloride to adjust its flavour, phosphoric acid to change its acidity, and numerous other additives and processing aids. Brewers may choose from no fewer than seventeen different preservatives, such as calcium sulphite or sodium benzoate.89 To Accum, most of these substances would have been needless deceptions; and the law agreed with him. The case of beer shows how inconsistent the British state of 1820 was in its laissez-faire attitudes toward food and drink. While it chose not to interfere in cases of food adulteration, even poisoning, it could be very strict in regard to beer, a remnant of older patterns of government regulation of what people ate and drank.

  Clearly Accum
was writing at a crossroads, as the new, impersonal modern trade in food superseded older attitudes. Urbanization, as one historian has said, “had deprived millions of people of experiences that had been commonplace for humankind before”—the taste of honey, for example; not long after Accum, a London street sweeper remarked that he had never tasted honey but had heard it was “like butter and sugar mixed.”90 Accum rightly recognized a new world in which the integrity of most basic foods was constantly under attack; this is the world we still live in today. But, unlike most of us now, Accum remembered enough of the old world to remember what unadulterated food should really be like. He knew the “genuine old . . . beer of the honest brewer” with its “rich, generous, full-bodied taste.”91 And he knew it was a disgrace that instead of this nourishing drink, so many people were making do with a product that was stale, coloured, or drugged.

  Accum’s Disgrace

  Given the uproar that surrounded Accum’s Treatise, you might expect that it would have led to some change in British law. It did not do so. The “Death in the pot” campaigners would have to wait another forty years before the first anti-adulteration legislation was passed, in 1860. There were various reasons for this.

  The prevailing mood of the British press and government in 1820 was still excessively laissez-faire: nonintervention remained the dominant philosophy of the day, and it took several decades for this to change. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century, after years of pressure from socialists, Chartists, and radicals, did the doctrine lose its dominance.92 Accum was thus something of an anomaly in his day: a man of trade who favoured state intervention.

  Another problem was the state of the science: Accum’s chemical tests, though advanced by the standards of 1820, were still somewhat limited and would be superseded, first by the more comprehensive chemical tests of French chemistry, and later by the microscopic food analysis of the 1850s. But there was also a third reason, which had to do with Accum himself. If 1820 was the year of his greatest triumph—a year when he was feted by the press and had a glowing profile written of him in European Magazine that hailed him as the “most popular consulting chemist” in Britain—it was also a year in which he lost everything and was to flee the country with his reputation ruined. As a result, Accum never got the chance to press home the legal questions that his Treatise had raised. For Accum, the scourge of swindlers, was caught out in a swindle of his own.

  On the 5 November 1820, Guy Fawkes Day, the assistant librarian at the Royal Institution, a Mr. Sturt, discovered that several books in the Reading Room had been mutilated—various leaves and plates had been torn out.93 Since these books were ones that Accum was in the habit of reading, the finger of suspicion pointed immediately at him. His connection with the Royal Institution had been important to Accum’s career. So highly did he regard the institution that he dedicated his first book on chemistry to its managers. After he gave up working there, he continued to be a subscribing member, which gave him rights to use the Reading Room, with its extensive library of books. For an intellectual magpie like Accum, it must have been an invaluable resource; though, judging by later events, it was one whose limits he failed to understand.

  After Accum left the Reading Room on 5 November, the assistant librarian went over to look at the books he had seen in Accum’s hand. Sure enough, some leaves had been torn out. To make sure that the crime really had taken place, the secretary of the institution ordered Mr. Sturt to have peepholes bored in a cupboard adjoining the Reading Room. From there, it was possible to spy on the activities of those using the library. On 20 December, Accum fell into the trap. From the safety of his cupboard, Sturt observed Accum tearing several pages out of a volume of Nicholson’s Journal, before leaving the institution in a “hurried and confused manner.” A search warrant was put out. After Accum’s Old Compton Street residence was ransacked, the Royal Institution librarian identified a further thirty torn pages on his premises. Accum’s defence was that he had torn them from his own books; but he was arrested and charged with robbery. This case was dismissed by a magistrate who was clearly on Accum’s side, remarking that once separated from the books, the leaves just amounted to “waste paper,” of no value. Needless to say, this did not satisfy the bigwigs of the Royal Institution. They brought a new prosecution against Accum of “feloniously stealing and taking away two hundred pieces of paper of the value of ten pence.”94

  Having been the toast of the town only a month earlier, Accum was now a social embarrassment and on his way to becoming a pariah. The newspapers made fun of him. A feeble verse called “Death in the Pot” circulated in the press:

  What is his crime? A trick at most,

  A thing not worth debating.

  ‘Tis only what the Morning Post

  Would call Accum-ulating.95

  After the scandal, he was dropped unceremoniously by his publishers, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Browne, despite his astonishingly prolific output and healthy sales. But other friends rallied round. He was accompanied in court by John Papworth, an architect, and Rudolph Ackermann, the publisher, who paid £100 each in “surety” to keep Accum out of jail.

  His friend Anthony Carlisle wrote to The Times begging Earl Spencer, president of the Royal Institution, to reconsider and stop this “persecution against a man of science.” Carlisle did not deny that Accum was guilty of “gross misconduct,” but he argued that Accum had learned the habit of plundering books in this way from the scientist William Nicholson, who would often tear up books “to save time and trouble.” Carlisle insisted that Accum and Nicholson looked on books as no more valuable than “crucibles” or even pots and pans. He pleaded, moreover, that because of his lack of a “refined education” (reading between the lines, this meant because he was un-English, and more particularly of Jewish blood), Accum did not see the full “moral turpitude” in his actions. Carlisle regretted that Accum appeared unable to make “a competent apology” for himself but begged His Lordship to reconsider, praising Accum as a “remarkably ingenious man,” a scientist of “native simplicity, lively intelligence and frankness.”96

  It was hopeless. The prosecution went ahead on 5 April 1821. The Times haughtily commented how generous the Royal Institution had been in allowing Accum to remain “at large on bail.”97 But Accum did not appear at the hearing, having left for his native Germany, unable to bear the shame and loss of popularity any longer. He would never return to England. Aged fifty-three, he was forced to rebuild his life, becoming a professor of technical chemistry and mineralogy at the Royal Industrial Institute in Berlin. He would die in Berlin in 1838 at age sixty-nine, having completed a final work in German not on adulteration but on the properties of building materials. He seems never to have got over the humiliation of being ostracized by English society. After 1820, his English works were published either anonymously or under the pseudonym “Mucca,” a reversal of Accum, whose sound underlined the fact that his name was now muck. Seldom has anyone moved from ubiquity to obloquy so fast. In 1822, in the course of a satire on the press, the poet John Hamilton Reynolds (1794–1852) asked: “Mr Accum—ay, what has become of Mr Accum?”98 He had become no more than a footnote.

  England was the poorer for Accum’s absence, not least because he never got the chance to continue his work on adulteration. One of the most controversial aspects of his Treatise had been the way he fearlessly named and shamed individuals for their part in food fraud, using minutes from parliamentary committees of investigation to expose to the glare of publicity “respectable” villains who might otherwise have covered up their activities. In his second edition, he promised to continue these exposés. The book-mutilating scandal put paid to that. Some have been tempted to see a conspiracy in Accum’s disgrace. Was he framed by powerful interests who did not want him pressing home his investigations? The historian of science C. A. Browne wrote of Accum’s “secret enemies,” arguing that “the work of the reformer in all ages has been rewarded with hatred and abuse.”99 In the secon
d edition to the Treatise, which appeared in April 1820, Accum himself hinted at secret battles. His practice of naming and shaming swindlers had given rise to threats against him, presumably from manufacturers. He wrote in reply:

  To those who have chosen anonymously to transmit to me their opinion concerning this book, together with their maledictions, I have little to say; but they may rest assured, that their menaces will in no way prevent me from endeavouring to put the unwary on their guard against the frauds of dishonest men, wherever they may originate; and those assailants in ambush are hereby informed, that in every succeeding edition of the work, I shall continue to hand down to posterity the infamy which justly attaches to the knaves and dishonest dealers who have been convicted at the bar of the Public Justice of rendering human food deleterious to health.100

  In other words, had Accum not been ruined, he would have devoted his energies to continuing the fight against adulteration. Was he therefore prevented from doing so by malign forces?

  Probably not. Even though he had powerful enemies, they were merchants and not scientists; the humble assistant librarian of the Royal Institution seems to have had no motive for lying about what he saw through the peephole. Anyway, the book-mutilating incident seems entirely in keeping with what we know of Accum’s character. Even his friends admitted that he was both impetuous and impatient and saw books simply as a means to the end of advancing his own cause. It takes little familiarity with Accum’s work to see that he engaged in repeated low-level literary plagiarism. He had a habit of lifting whole passages unacknowledged from other writers. In one instance he even lifted a whole section from one of the reviews of his Treatise, to use as his own in writing another book. Sometimes, he would quote a source, then continue the quotation without quotation marks, leading the reader to suppose they were reading Accum’s own prose. He did this with Count Rumford’s thoughts on coffee in his Culinary Chemistry. This seems perhaps less dishonest than clumsy, since Accum did quote from Rumford on the same page. Much of Accum’s writing was effectively anthologizing, and perhaps he sometimes forgot where the anthology stopped and his own thoughts began.