Swindled

by Bee Wilson

  By 1848, John Mitchell could write about adulteration in Britain as a “growing evil” that had only got worse in the thirty years since Accum, with some “extraordinary and newer frauds” taking their place alongside the tried and tested ones. Mitchell was the author of a Treatise on the Falsification of Food and the Chemical Means Employed to Detect Them, which took up where Accum left off. Unlike the scaremongers, Mitchell backed up his claims with evidence, analysing many foods himself or else relying on other scientific authorities. It is therefore telling that he repeated most of Accum’s accusations—red lead in Double Gloucester cheese; alum in bread; plaster of Paris, pea, and bean flour in flour; no end of poison in confectionery—and added some more of his own: milk adulterated with water, flour, milk of almonds, gum, chalk, and turmeric; “so-called finest chocolate” adulterated with flour, potato starch, and—how revolting this must have been—clarified mutton suet.57 Accum had described a scenario where developments in chemistry contributed both to new techniques in swindling and to new means to fight it. This had only continued, in Mitchell’s view. “As chemistry advanced, it unfolded new secrets, and opening on the one hand more decided and unequivocal tests for the adulterations, it at the same time gave a larger scope for the adulterators.” The situation was so bad, he believed, that “nearly all the substances used . . . are adulterated, debased or badly manufactured.”58

  This was despite the fact that since the beginning of the nineteenth century, as well as refining of old techniques, chemists had developed numerous new techniques for analysing food and drink. Mitchell lists countless new gadgets and new methods: Schuster’s alkalimeter, a teardrop-shaped vessel for testing the pH value of beer and wine; Gay-Lussac’s alcoholometer, a more accurate tool for measuring the alcohol content of drinks than the old hydrometers for measuring specific gravity mentioned by Accum; the Pesier natrometer for measuring the purity of potassium salts; and the chlorometer and acetimeter as used by Chevalier. From the 1820s onwards, Gay-Lussac developed volumetric analysis, whereby the nature of liquids was gauged through the way their volume fluctuated when certain reagents were added. The 1830s saw the birth of organic chemistry— the chemistry of animal and vegetable substances, as opposed to minerals—as a distinct branch of the subject, enabling many foods to be analysed far more accurately, and broken down into their distinct components. Mitchell cites a French chemist called Jean-Baptiste Dumas, who analysed flour into albumen, fibrine, caseine, glutine, starch, and glucose.59 There were also new developments in colorimetry, where suspicious ingredients could be indentified by comparing their colour when dissolved in solutions with the colours of known chemicals. This was a useful test for finding out, for example, if saffron was pure, as saffron solution is a very distinctive yellow. Fluorimetry—testing the fluorescence of different solutions—was likewise useful for identifying the purity of mustard as against turmeric, since turmeric is strongly fluorescent, while mustard is not fluorescent at all.60

  However, hardly any of this chemical analysis of food was taking place in Britain. English analytical chemists were in short supply, whereas France—and later, Germany—abounded with them: Gay-Lussac, Dumas (1800–1884), Descroizilles, Vauquelin, Pelouze, Péligot.61 Thus, while the French had in place both the governmental structure and the body of scientific experts needed to deal with the problem of food swindling, Britain had neither. Moreover, the new chemistry, though brilliant at certain tasks, wasn’t perfect. If you wanted to test the alcohol content of brandy or to determine whether certain mineral additives had been included in food, you had a better chance of success now than ever before. If, however, you wanted to know if milk was pure, you were on shakier ground.

  Mitchell admitted the difficulty. Water, he said, was “the substance employed most generally” to adulterate milk. This was “very difficult to detect” because “the density of pure milk is variable.” So the usual chemical tests done to test the density of a substance could not establish with absolute certainty whether milk had been watered down, assuming the percentage of water used was fairly small. There were similar problems in detecting the near-universal mixture of expensive coffee with cheap chicory. If you had nothing but chicory on your hands, you could do a simple chemical test: nitrate of silver, says Mitchell, gives no precipitate with chicory, whereas it does with coffee. But this test would be useless to detect a mixture of chicory and coffee; the precipitate would still ensue, on account of the presence of coffee; the test would only come out completely negative if a shopkeeper had been brazen enough to sell pure chicory as pure coffee. This left great uncertainty. Indeed, in 1847, Sir Charles Wood, the laissez-faire chancellor of the Exchequer (mainly remembered now for keeping poor relief as low as possible), told the Commons that “three distinguished chemists” reported to him that “neither by chemistry nor in any other way can the admixture of coffee with chicory be detected.”62 The inference was that if it couldn’t be detected, then nothing could, or should, be done about it.

  Wood turned out to be wrong, in every possible way. This mixture—along with other food mixtures—could be detected with absolute certainty, and the method for doing so was about to be discovered. The problem was that food scientists had been looking in the wrong direction. Chemical analysis alone was not going to crack the problem. What was needed was a scientific instrument that had, bafflingly, been more or less neglected by food analysts until the 1850s: the microscope. The tide turned decisively against swindling in Britain only after food was put under the critical gaze of the microscope, and not by a chemist but by a doctor, the great and faintly absurd Dr. Arthur Hill Hassall, “the apostle of antiadulteration.”63

  Food under the Microscope: Arthur Hill Hassall

  “In those days,” recalled Arthur Hill Hassall, looking back over his long and busy life to his youth in the 1840s, “people often said to me, ‘Ah! The microscope is all very well as an amusement, but of what practical use is it in life?,’ these people little dreaming of the many and vastly important facts which in the future were to be brought to light by its instrumentality.” In the twenty-first century, microscopy is fundamental to almost all chemical research. But in the 1840s, the microscope was treated by chemists as little more than a “scientific toy”—entertaining, rather than useful. The compound microscope had been used by botanists and biologists since the seventeenth century and had plumbed such mysteries as the sex of bees, yet “Hassall was the first to realize the full and systematic application of microscopy to the detection of adulteration.”64 Without the microscope, Hassall wrote, the “multitudinous adulterations practised on nearly every article of consumption” could “never have been discovered and exposed.”65 Chemical analysis was useful as far as it went—for detecting copper in pickles, say, or lead in cayenne—but it was “powerless” to discover “organic admixtures” of foods. It was the microscope, said Hassall proudly, that was “the great and chief means of detection”; and Hassall himself was the great and chief wielder of it.

  Arthur Hill Hassall (1817–94), the scourge of Victorian swindlers. Hassall was about forty-five when this mezzotint was made. In the background is a statuette presented to him in 1865, depicting fraud (the toad) being speared by science.

  In some ways, Hassall was an unlikely social campaigner. The son of an army doctor, he was a stiff, neurotic figure, notwithstanding his luxuriant sideburns (which he accessorized, in later life, with an equally luxuriant moustache), possessing a long nose and a pinched mouth, a man whose emotions were decidedly closed off; he managed to write a 166-page autobiography without mentioning that he had been married—twice—while dwelling at length on his boyhood reactions to eating a blood pudding. But Hassall’s repressed nature was allied with a fierce moral indignation, which made him recoil instinctively from fraud and lies. In 1850, he was a thirty-three-year-old doctor who had already retired from his Notting Hill practice on grounds of ill health. He had found his practice “somewhat harassing”—as he seems to have found much of life—and t
hen, after walking home late from the theatre one night, he got wet through and developed pleurisy, from which he never fully recovered. As a result, he and his first wife left the harassing patients of Notting Hill and moved to a house in St. James’s, where by way of a hobby he fitted himself up with a modest laboratory for “chemical and microscopial research.” The history of British food might have been very different if Hassall had chosen stamp collecting instead.

  During this premature retirement, Hassall was in the habit of energetic “journeyings” through the streets of London. He couldn’t help noticing the “various articles of consumption” on display in shop windows and “the explanatory placards exhibited.” It was Hassall’s instinct that “there was much amiss in the appearance of some of the articles and statements made in respect of them”—in other words, he didn’t believe the hype. Meanwhile, he kept noticing in the newspapers “frequent complaints of the bad quality of the ground coffee sold and many doubts expressed as to its genuineness.” Being at a loose end, Hassall decided he would “look into the matter myself.”66 He realized that, before he could determine whether coffee in the shops was adulterated, he would have to know what both coffee and chicory looked like under the microscope in their pure forms. So he set to work.

  I commenced by examining microscopically sections of the whole coffee berry, unroasted and roasted, and then the roasted berry after being ground. In the same way I examined the raw and roasted chicory root. I had now some valuable data to proceed upon. I found that the roasting and partial charring and blackening by no means destroyed the beautiful minute structures and tissues entering into the composition of the coffee berry and chicory root.67

  Coffee adulterated with wheat and chicory viewed through Hassall’s microscope.

  Looking at Hassall’s illustrations, you can see exactly what he meant. Under the microscope, coffee and chicory are chalk and cheese. Pure ground coffee looks like shards of honeycomb, whereas pure ground chicory looks like slices of squidgy cucumber, on account of its milky “utricles” or cells.68 This was an immensely useful discovery, because Hassall could now tell, beyond a shadow of a doubt, whether any given sample of coffee had been adulterated. His microscope could detect when even a tiny amount of chicory had been added to a sample of coffee, because it wouldn’t take long before a single chicory utricle would show up.

  His next move was to go into London shops, buying samples of coffee and analysing them. His results showed that nearly all the coffee was “adulterated most extensively in a variety of ways,” and “some consisted of little else than chicory.” Other samples when put under the microscope exposed “considerable amounts” of roasted wheat, rye, beans, and burnt sugar, and “these spurious admixtures were sold under the most grandiloquent names and with statements absolutely false.”69 (He does not seem to have found any liver, but then, this was added only to ready-prepared coffee, not mixed into the ground stuff.) Hassall wrote his findings up, and on 2 August 1850 read a paper On the Adulteration of Coffee before the Botanical Society of London.70 The effect was immediate. The following week, The Times carried a leading article on Hassall’s discovery. Suddenly, his “retirement” from medical practice was becoming rather eventful.

  “Thus encouraged,” Hassall set to work on other foods.71 He chose brown sugar, which had a very different structure from coffee, being “crystalline” rather than “organized.” Popular opinion believed that grocers were often diluting their sugar with sand to make it go further. A nineteenth-century joke repeated in various forms had a grocer asking his assistant: “Have you watered the treacle and sanded the sugar? Then you may come in to prayers.”72 Hassall’s microscope discovered that this particular food scare was not true; he found no evidence of sand in any of the samples he examined, concluding that “the grocer was probably libelled” when he was accused of sanding his sugar. Not that Hassall could recommend eating brown sugar. It may not have contained sand, but it did abound “with living and dead acari, louse-like creatures, in all stages of growth and development,” which explained “the malady to which grocer’s assistants were specially liable, namely grocer’s itch.”73 Until brown sugar could be supplied in a purer form, Hassall advised eating white sugar instead.

  The sugar mite, which Hassall found in brown sugar. The mite was guilty of causing the nasty condition, grocer’s itch.

  The great advantage that Hassall had over previous antiswindling campaigners was the pitiless accuracy of his microscope. Even so, what was to guarantee that the brief food scandal he had created would not fade, as Accum’s had done? What made Hassall’s scientific work so lasting was the way it was yoked to a relentless and perfectly executed campaign of publicity, and for this the credit must go not to Hassall himself but to Thomas Wakley, the visionary editor of the Lancet.

  Naming and Shaming and the Health of a Nation

  By the time Hassall’s microscope was causing its stir, Thomas Wakley (1795–1862) had been looking for several decades for a way of reforming British food. A “lifelong radical,” he had set up the weekly medical paper, the Lancet, after his promising medical career was damaged by some macabre personal rumours. In August 1821, Wakley, then a young and recently married surgeon, was assaulted in his own home, and the house burned down. The insurance company accused him of arson, because the house had been heavily insured. Meanwhile, another rumour circulated that Wakley was the surgeon responsible for having beheaded the corpses of five political extremists who had been hanged earlier that year. So far as we can gather, there was no truth in either rumour. In 1821, Wakley successfully sued the insurance company over the arson claim, receiving full compensation. He had been shaken by the experience, however, as had his wife, and he sought a new direction.

  Thomas Wakley (1795–1862), founder and editor of the Lancet, which gave Hassall’s science the publicity it needed.

  The word “lancet” had more than one meaning, as Wakley was aware. Most obviously, it was a medical instrument, a kind of scalpel, but double-edged, which could be used to make incisions, just as the Lancet aimed to cut out both nonsense and disease. Less well known was its meaning as an architectural term: a lancet is a Gothic arched window, designed for letting in light. From the very beginning, the Lancet had an agenda of enlightenment as well as criticism; Wakley believed passionately in the power of the right kind of publicity to effect good and aimed his paper at the general public rather than a narrow medical audience. His vision of health was social, not just individual. The Lancet campaigned for hospitals to make their statistics public and for the medical corporations to become more open, professional, and democratic. It attacked the enemies of health wherever it saw them—quacks, inept doctors, the inadequate poor relief system, the callous system of corporal punishment in the armed forces. Wakley argued for public health in the widest sense—and this necessarily entailed a frontal assault on the evils of adulterated food.

  It had been Wakley in 1831 who had hired the young medical graduate W. B. O’Shaughnessy to go out onto the London streets to collect samples of coloured confectionery for analysis. Wakley had read one of the scaremongering anti-adulteration tracts we have already encountered, Deadly Adulteration and Slow Poisoning, a book that left Wakley in two minds. His instincts told him that much of what the book said was true, but he disliked its wild tone, unsupported statements, and inaccurate science, which, far from contributing to public health, could only lead to an “epidemic of terror.”74 In Wakley’s view, the only way to take on the swindlers was to hold up “individual malefactors” to “public animadversion.” “To attack vice in the abstract, without attacking persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is fighting with shadows.”75 This was exactly what he and O’Shaughnessy attempted with the Lancet’s article on poisoned sweets, which published the names and addresses of the guilty confectioners. So far as it went, it was a hit. O’Shaughnessy’s analyses confirmed that the scaremongers were right, and the Lancet urged the government that Something Ought to Be Done. As
usual, though, nothing was. O’Shaughnessy joined the East India Company and left for India. Wakley employed another scientist, T. H. Henry, as a food analyst, but he didn’t discover anything interesting enough to publish in the Lancet—whether for lack of talent or because he analysed the wrong things, we don’t know.

  When finally Hassall published his revolutionary findings about adulterated coffee, Wakley’s excitement was palpable. Here, at last, was the scientific tool—the microscope—to power Wakley’s publicity machine. He wrote to Hassall at once, with all the conviction of someone who had spent twenty years pondering the question: “You will never effect any lasting good until you are able to publish the names and addresses of the parties of whom the articles were purchased, giving the results of the examination in all cases whether good or bad. Do you think it would be possible to do this without an amount of risk which might be ruinous?”76 Despite his cautious nature, and despite fearing that he “risked all I possessed, namely, my scientific and professional reputation,” Hassall bravely replied: “Yes, I believe it might be done.”

  The pair wasted no time in setting up the rules by which they would operate. Hassall would—anonymously, at first—write a series of articles for the Lancet analysing food and drink samples purchased from shops all over London. These articles would appear frequently and would cover as many different kinds of food and drink as possible. Every article would include the names and addresses of the sellers of adulterated samples. Wakley would bear the expense and the legal risk, and Hassall would do all the spadework, accompanied by a helper, Henry Miller (who also made the beautiful drawings of Hassall’s microscopial analysis), so that one of them could make the purchase and the other could be, “if needed, a competent witness” to the sale. On leaving the shop, they would write the name, vendor, date, and cost of the product on the wrapping, plus each of their initials, to ensure that no mistake was made. It was tough work, especially for someone of a frail disposition. The Lancet reports appeared initially every week, and then fortnightly, through the years 1851–54. To obtain enough samples, Hassall and Miller had to make frequent “nocturnal excursions” into the seedier parts of London “in all weathers and in all seasons.” Often, through “waiting and hanging about,” they became “chilled to the bones, not arriving home till near midnight.”77