Swindled

by Bee Wilson

  A Victorian cartoon showing a little girl purchasing poisons from a grocer.

  A French chemist, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Chevallier (1793–1879), saw a direct relationship between the fact that Britain was “the country par excellence of commercial liberty” and the fact that British sweet-makers got away with colouring their candies with copper and verdigris.26 It would be hard to disagree with this. Except when it affected Treasury revenue—as in the case of sugar, tea, and coffee—the British state did not at this time see it as its business to interfere in the selling of food. Peter L. Simmonds, editor of the Journal of Commerce, noted that the Treasury sanctioned “admixtures and adulterations in a variety of instances, as in the case of chicory and coffee, cassia and cinnamon, wild and cultivated nutmegs,” but was “most virtuously indignant at adulterated tea, tobacco, snuff and other heavily taxed items.”27

  The British approach was not purely cynical, though. It was also based on a widely shared conviction that there really was no alternative. Supporters of laissez-faire economics (of whom Britain had more than its fair share) had convinced themselves that doing nothing was the best thing to do. The market was god, and many believed that, through some magical process of equilibrium, the market would provide. In the early nineteenth century, many of the old monopolies and tariffs were being done away with in the name of progress. In 1815, the Assize of Bread and Ale was finally abolished as archaic. Without the old guild structure in place, the old assize had become impossible to administer. But instead of replacing it with a more modern form of regulation, Parliament decided it would be best to leave well alone. What happened between a man and his baker was no business of the state; free trade was best. The committee that had been called to comment on the assize decided that “more benefit is likely to result from the effects of a free competition . . . than can be expected to result from any regulations or restrictions under which the bakers could possibly be placed.”28

  The effect of abolition, however, was to transform baking into “one of the most depressed, overcrowded and unremunerative trades of the day.”29 Under the terms of the assize, the price of bread had always been fixed, which guaranteed a certain security to the profession of baker. The relaxing of the law meant that thousands of new bakers set up shop, and all of them sought to undercut one another. Eliza Acton noted that in 1851, the number of bakers in Paris was limited to 601, which meant that they were all assured of selling plenty of bread and enjoying a certain dignity, making a fine product and being paid a decent amount for it, whereas Britain’s free trade had pushed the official number of London bakers to 2,286 (the unofficial figure may have been as high as 50,000).30 These bakers may have had commercial liberty, but they had no peace of mind. To make a loaf that they could sell at a price at which they could find buyers for it, they were forced to reduce the quality of ingredients to a minimum. Under these conditions, honesty was suicidal. A witness to the Committee on Journeymen Bakers commented that “They [the bakers] only exist now by first defrauding the public, and next getting eighteen hours work out of the men for the next twelve hours.”31

  A French chemist who had established himself in London, Alphonse Normandy, observed rather smugly how different things were across the channel. As a Frenchman, he had often been amazed at how shameless were the adulterations that took place in England, where manufacturers had so little to fear from the law. Once, he confronted a baker in Islington with a loaf of bread glistening with alum crystals, only to be insulted with “a very offensive expression about my eyes.” By contrast, it was very hard, he said, to adulterate bread in France:

  When bread is adulterated in France, which occasionally is the case, the baker is at once summoned before the police correctional; if it is the first offence, he is fined, or if the offence has been very gross he is shut up for a week or ten days, or something of that kind; and if the offence is repeated, he is prevented from establishing himself again as a master baker; he can work as a journeyman baker, but he can no longer establish himself as a master baker, or the sentence is placarded about town; in fact he is a ruined man.32

  Food frauds were not unknown on the Continent. In 1844, a whole Belgian family was poisoned after a baker mixed too much copper sulphate in his dough, an additive used to improve bad flour, which one chemist called “hateful fraud.”33 However, such crimes were dealt with far more strictly by the law and its agents in France and Belgium than they were in Britain, where a mere “pecuniary loss” or fine was all that the fraudsters had to fear.34

  Under Prussian municipal law, for example, it was explicitly stated that “no person shall knowingly sell or communicate to another for their use, articles of food and drink, which possess properties prejudicial to health, under a penalty of fine or bodily punishment . . . those who are found guilty of knowingly selling victuals which are damaged or spoiled or mixed with deleterious additives shall be rendered incapable for ever of carrying on the same branch of business,” and the fraudulent food would be seized and either destroyed or, if not inedible, “confiscated for the benefit of the poor.”35 This law was in the medieval tradition of laws against swindling. Modern commercial Britain, by contrast, seemed to think it could do without such laws.

  John Mitchell, a chemist, expressed amazement in 1848 that England “is about the only nation that has no laws, or no effective laws, for the protection of the public against the adulteration of food.”36 This anomaly was puzzling. By the nineteenth century, the guild system that had done so much to protect food quality was gone from France as well as England (it was finally abolished by the Jacobins). Paris, like London, was a modern industrial city, with consumers distanced from the producers of most of their food. So why was French food not falsified to the same extent? The difference was that the French state had continued the guild’s role of protecting the citizen-consumer from bad food. Napoleon’s Civil Code ruled that “no person could exercise the trade of a baker without the permission of the prefect of Paris; and no baker could quit his business without having given six months previous notice.”37 The same mentality continued under successive governments. In 1817, after Napoleon had been supplanted by the Bourbon monarchy, police were ordered to maintain an active surveillance of bakeries.

  Under the laissez-faire British government, there was a different conception of responsibility from that of Continental governments. In France, the responsibility for producing good food lay with the producer; the state would police their activities and, if they should fail, would punish them for neglecting the interests of its citizens. By contrast, the British government—except in extreme cases—placed most of the responsibility with the individual consumer. It would be unfair, or so the thinking went, and contrary to liberty, to interfere with the shopkeeper’s right to make money. In the 1840s, a patent was granted for a machine designed for making fake coffee beans out of chicory, using the same technology that went into manufacturing bullets.38 This machine was clearly designed for the purposes of swindling, and yet the government allowed it. A machine for forging money would never have been licensed, so why this? As one consumer complained, the British system of government was weighted against the consumer in favour of the adulterator: “Any attempt at fraud on the part of the customer is punished by law, and above all, is easily detected. The bad shilling is at once recognized and nailed to the counter; but the poisonous adulterations practised upon food remain undiscovered, until their effects are shown in the indisposition or perhaps serious illness of the consumer.”39

  Eliza Acton thought that many in Britain chose to “shut their eyes” to the true state of food and drink. “They do not wish to be disturbed in their belief that it is all that it ought to be.”40 In many cases, shutting their eyes to the problem was all that British consumers could do. If adulterated food was the only food on offer, it made psychological sense to pretend to yourself that it was all right, otherwise you would never have eaten anything. The British system of trade in food at this time depended on this enforced susp
ension of disbelief: the ability of consumers to lie to themselves about what they ate. For this reason, the necessary reform could not come from the consumers themselves, it had to come from government. Yet the British government was equally good at shutting its eyes to the consequences of swindling.

  Mid-nineteenth-century France was a very different place. Like several other European countries, France had a board of health—the Conseil de Salubrité—whose job it was to watch over anything that might harm public health, including adulterated food. In Paris, there were seven expert members on the Conseil “who have the surveillance of markets, factories, places of public amusement, bakeries, shambles, meat, medicines, etc.”41 Then, in 1851, France adopted its first generalized law against food adulteration, which put it on a par with financial fraud. French law took the side of the consumer, seeing adulteration as an attack on private property. Unlike the British establishment, which feared that too much food regulation would damage economic life, the French attitude was that “protecting the quality of edible goods encourages the growth of productivity and preserves the reputation of national products.” Under the new law the “moral character” of the offence of falsifying food was viewed as serious; it was deemed a grave offence (délit) rather than a minor economic infringement (contravention).42

  These national differences were not just abstract. The differing attitudes toward food law in Britain and France yielded substantial disparities in the degree to which the food sold in shops was falsified. Coloured confectionery was perhaps the clearest and most chilling example. In France, Switzerland, and Belgium, sellers of confectionery were held responsible if what they sold turned out to be poisonous.43 It was expressly forbidden in France to make use of any mineral substance for colouring sweets, lozenges, sweetmeats, pastries, or liqueurs. If sweets were coloured it must be with “safe,” mostly vegetable dyes, such as saffron for yellow sweets or cochineal for red ones. It was also forbidden to wrap sweetmeats in paper that had been glazed and coloured with mineral substances. All confectioners and grocers were obliged by law to have their name and address printed in the wrapping paper.44 If any sweet should be coloured with a poison, the vendor was personally responsible. “But in England,” one consumer protested, “the centre of civilization as we are so fond of calling it—poison is openly vended in the streets, shop-windows are filled with it.”45

  This sounds like scaremongering, but it was a statement of fact. In 1831, a Dr. O’Shaughnessy, working on behalf of the medical journal the Lancet, toured the streets of London collecting numerous samples of sweets, bonbons, and sugarplums and submitting them to chemical analysis. He found that parents who bought these treats for their darling children were dicing with death. Of the samples collected, the red ones were often coloured with lead or mercury; the green sweets, with copper-based dyes; and the yellow, with gamboge, a purgative resin-based dye from the Far East now used to colour Buddhist robes, or, more perilously, yellow chromate or chrome yellow of lead. How common were these poisonous dyes? If O’Shaughnessy’s evidence was typical, they were widespread. Out of ten red samples, two contained harmless cochineal (from crushed insects, which most people can tolerate, though a few people are allergic to it), two contained semiharmless “vegetable lakes of aluminium and lime” (azo dyes such as carmoisine, which are now thought to cause temper tantrums and hyperactivity in some children), and six contained either “red oxide of lead,” “red sulphuret of mercury” (vermilion or mercuric sulphide), or lead chromate, any one of which could give a child a nasty dose of heavy metal poisoning.46 Despite O’Shaughnessy’s work, the sale of poisoned sweets continued unabated over the next two decades.

  The British famously had a greater fondness for sugar than the French, and it manifested itself in the yearning of the British child for fantastically coloured sweets. The pick ‘n’ mix sweets of the modern British child—the pink shrimps, fried eggs, cola bottles, and so on— had equivalents in the 1840s. The Victorian confectioner sold ginger pearls and sugar dragees, yellow rock and multicoloured hundreds and thousands, clove sticks and peppermint pipes, coconut candy made from sticky brown sugar, strawberry sweets and apple sweets, sugar oranges and sugar lemons, and all had to come in a blinding array of colours if they were to sell. One contemporary noted that

  In the large and frequented thoroughfares, such as Tottenham Court Road, Houndsditch or High Street, Whitechapel, these establishments are made as showy as possible; they burn a vast amount of gas, and have their windows filled with sugar compounds, many of which have been moulded into fanciful and highly coloured forms. Sometimes the image represented is a mutton chop, or rasher of bacon; onions and potatoes are very popular; and eggs and oysters, dogs, shoulders of mutton, pears and mackerel are also much esteemed by the youthful customer.47

  A candy mutton chop is a pretty frightful idea, particularly if you consider the fact that the red grain of the meat was almost certainly painted on using lead-based colouring.

  Unsurprisingly, there were frequent reports in British newspapers of poisonings from sweets. In September 1847, three adults and eight children were taken to Marylebone Workhouse “having been seized with vomiting and retching after eating some coloured confectionery.”48 The following year, the Northampton Herald reported that several people had been poisoned at a public dinner on account of some green sugared cucumber ornaments used to decorate a blancmange. One man died as a result. The year after that, some children in Marlborough became alarmingly sick after eating “a green flower made in sweet paste in imitation of a fuchsia,” which had been used to decorate a “magnificent cake.”49 One French scientist commented with Gallic bemusement that every year in England a number of children died as a result of eating toxic sweets.50 Something had clearly gone wrong with a food culture that took such trouble to make such grotesquely inedible foods.

  It was not only the French who noticed, however. An anonymous English writer complained that such things were bound to happen for as long as the government maintained its blind attachment to the beneficent workings of the free market: “in England, the only protection for the public, under the present laissez-faire system of government, is that afforded by publications in which the means of detecting adulterations are clearly indicated.”51 Even publications did not necessarily provide protection though. Just because the news papers had exposed one batch of green copper sweetmeats as toxic, it was no guarantee against other kinds of toxic green sweets being made and sold by other confectioners. By 1850, there was plenty of publicity in Britain about adulterated food. Most of it, though, was too vague and too unscientific to do much good.

  Publicity vs. Science

  These days, the newspapers seem so full of contradictory food scares that it becomes difficult to see how anyone has ever managed to eat anything without their health suffering. One week it is “Eat more oily fish or miss out on valuable omega 3s!” and the next it is “Too much oily fish will give you mercury poisoning!” Before long you glaze over when reading these stories. You develop food-scare fatigue. Because newspapers deal in fear, and most of us are not toxicologists who can unravel the ins and outs of a story, it becomes hard to distinguish alarmism from truth. This problem is not new.

  In 1830, ten years after Accum’s Treatise, another book appeared denouncing the whole spectrum of food and drink in Britain as fraudulent. It was entitled Deadly Adulteration and Slow Poisoning; or Disease and Death in the Pot and the Bottle. Unlike Accum’s book, it was not signed, but written anonymously “by an enemy of fraud and villainy.” Unlike Accum, this anonymous author was clearly not a scientist. Instead of hard evidence, he indulges in scaremongering and wild accusations, lashing out vaguely against “charlatans and nostrum-mongers” and the “pernicious system of fraud” that physicians as well as food-sellers were guilty of.52 Like many modern-day conspiracy theorists, the author mixes up truth and fantasy until you can hardly be sure which is which. He writes—accurately—that many potato sellers tried to increase the weight of their
“murphies” by soaking them in water.53 He complains—truthfully—about the deadly cosmetics that so many ladies slapped on their faces. But then he writes— absurdly—that drinking too many spirits will make a person die of “spontaneous combustion” because the spirits have so transformed the human body that it must suffer a kind of “supernatural” punishment.54 The trouble with this kind of scaremongering was that its style made it hard for the reader to believe even what was true. The Lancet, ever sensible, characterized the author as a “well-meaning individual, but of that class of exaggerating alarmist” who adopt a “tone of halfmad honesty.”55

  Far from checking the extent of adulteration, such tracts could encourage it by making swindling seem normal; if swindling was everywhere, what was the point of being honest? With its scattergun approach, accusing all food producers in general rather than naming specific guilty parties as Accum had done, such publicity was of little value to the consumer. It was scant help, when buying groceries from your local shops, to know that grocers in generally tampered with food; what you needed to know was whether this particular grocer was one of the demons, or an honest exception. What’s more, by sensationalizing the problem, these tracts could leave the rational gentlemen of the British establishment feeling that it was best to let the matter alone. Even those Victorians who were staunchly antiadulteration might feel that while “the press has literally groaned with the efforts of sensational writers on this subject . . . it has often been grossly exaggerated.”56 Scaremongering only bolstered the position of the laissez-faire dogmatists that the best thing to do was to do nothing. And while this attitude dominated, adulteration became ever more prevalent.