by Bee Wilson
It was worth it, though. For the first time, here were facts about adulteration that were statistical rather than anecdotal. Over these four years, Hassall analysed more than 2,500 samples of food embracing “all the principle articles of consumption, both solids and liquids” and found that purity was the exception, adulteration the rule.78 Earlier writers might say vaguely that cinnamon was “often” or “sometimes” adulterated (with cassia, wheat, mustard husks, and colouring), whereas Hassall could state with absolute certainty that out of nineteen samples of ground cinnamon, only six were genuine; that three consisted of nothing but cassia; that ten were mixed up with bulking agents such as sago, flour, or arrowroot; and that these faked cinnamons were not always cheaper than the real thing, meaning that the public was being consistently cheated in the purchase of cinnamon.79 Unlike the scaremongers, Hassall was not afraid to say when a food was not adulterated. All of the twelve samples of mace that he tested were genuine. Salt, too, was generally pure. On the other hand, he and Miller couldn’t find a single sample of unadulterated mustard in the whole of London, no matter what price they paid.
The effect of this relentless, hard-edged publication of the facts of food swindling, week after week, was to shake British public opinion out of its apathy over adulteration. After Wakley’s death, Hassall had the good grace to acknowledge that this was largely due to his colleague’s “moral courage” and his “bold and unprecedented step” of printing the names and addresses of tradesmen (though in his lifetime it rankled with Wakley that he received so little of the credit and Hassall so much).80 A contemporary observed that
A gun suddenly fired into a rookery could not cause greater commotion than did this publication of the names of dishonest tradesmen, nor does the daylight, when you lift a stone, startle ugly and loathsome things more quickly than the pencil of light streaming through a quarter-inch lens, surprised in their native ugliness the thousand and one illegal substances which enter more or less into every article of food which it will pay to adulterate.81
Although this work was long overdue, in some ways the time was right. There had been a shift in mood since Accum’s time. Hygiene and public health were now properly on the political agenda; the Victorians had become alarmed by their own unhealthiness and wished to do something about it. From 1836 to 1842, Britain had suffered unprecedented epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and influenza. In 1842, Edwin Chadwick (1800–1890) had published his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, exposing the filth and poor drainage suffered by the working classes and linking this to high rates of disease and mortality. The following year, there was a Royal Commission on the health of towns; and in 1848, the government finally caught up with the Continent and set up a General Board of Health, with Chadwick as its chief commissioner. The new mania for public health created unlikely political allies. Evangelical Christians now united with irreligious Benthamites over the attractiveness of sewers. Something else was changing too, as Chadwick observed. Laissez-faire was slowly turning from a term of approval to an insult. For some, it no longer meant freedom, but the selfish, uncaring attitude of “letting mischief work.”82 Trying to improve the nation’s health no longer seemed like unnecessary interference, but the only rational—or Christian—thing to do.
By 1850, to be “sanitary” was the height of desirability. This was reflected in the name that Wakley gave to his and Hassall’s joint project—the Analytical Sanitary Commission. Every report on adulterated food and drink published by Hassall appeared under this unwieldy title. Before the first report appeared, the Lancet made a grand announcement: “uncontaminated air and pure water are now universally regarded as necessary to the maintenance of healthy existence, and to obtain them we have appointed Boards of Health and Commissions of Sewers.”83 Tackling adulteration was the obvious next step. The Lancet proposed “to institute an extensive and somewhat vigorous series of investigations into the present condition of the various articles of diet supplied to the inhabitants of this great metropolis and its vicinity.”
One of the earlier and more dramatic reports in the Lancet was on water itself. Consumers had known for decades that most of what came out of the tap was foul. But they had no way of proving it. Despite the existence of several chemical tests, scientists were almost as powerless. In 1828, a Dr. William Lambe of the Royal College of Physicians wrote that most of the water drunk by ordinary people was deadly; but he could not specify exactly how or why. It was easy enough to tell when water was stagnant or putrid, but much water contamination was imperceptible to the human eye. It takes only an infinitesimal amount of the worst organic contaminants for water to be capable of causing death. Enter Hassall and his microscope. With his usual thoroughness, Hassall collected samples of water from all the main water companies of London: from Chelsea and Lambeth and Vauxhall and Hampstead and East London, and also from some outside London, such as Kent. Under the microscope, Hassall found levels of impurity never before suspected. In his youth, he had done some work on varieties of freshwater algae. The living organisms he found in Thames water were a good deal less charming.
The seepage of sewage into the water supply meant that “drinking” water was teeming with “excessive contamination with organic matter, animal and vegetable, dead and living.”84 The engravings accompanying the article illustrated the contamination in disgusting detail. In 1850, Hassall had published a book with full-colour illustrations of revolting organisms, A Microscopical Examination of the Water Supplied to the Inhabitants of London and the Suburban Districts Punch carried a cartoon exaggerating Hassall’s illustrations: “a drop of London water,” which was teeming with skulls, turtles, humanoid bugs, and tombstones. Actually, this was not so far off the original. Hassall discovered that West Middlesex water, for example, was infected with countless tiny crablike animals (entomostroceae), together with algae and fungi from sewage, despite the claim of the water company that their water was “bright and pure at all seasons.”85 As Hassall pointed out, water contamination mattered not just in its own right, but because of its use in other adulterations, “since in milk, beer and spirits the chief adulterant employed in London was Thames or some other impure water.”86 Even if you were canny enough to avoid drinking plain water, you might still be infected by drinking watered-down beer.
Needless to say, the water companies hated being named and shamed. In response to the Lancet’s allegations, the Southwark and Vauxhall Water Company protested that it had a full filtration system and that “the company receives no complaints.” To which the Lancet replied: “Complaints indeed! Where is the utility of addressing complaints to monopolist directors who, in reply, will probably intimate their readiness to cut off the supply altogether!” Besides, whether the company received complaints or not, the microscope proved that Southwark and Vauxhall water was “with one exception, the worst water in London”—swarming with disease-carrying organisms. In 1851, the government held an inquiry against the water companies, at which poor nervous Hassall was obliged to be a witness. The clever barristers for the water companies did their best to humiliate him, preying on his sensitive nature. One of them shouted under their breath, “That humbug, Dr Hassall,” a puerile trick to unnerve him. It worked. Forty years later, he still smarted at this slur. Another cast doubt on whether the bottles in which he had collected the water were clean. He assured the court they were. What, had he washed them himself? Hassall replied that he had. To which the barrister triumphantly said: “You are a bottle washer then!”87
A Punch cartoon mocking the deplorable state of London water, based on Hassall’s microscopic analysis of Thames River water.
The lawyers could tease Hassall all they liked. They could make him anxious—this was pathetically easy to do—but they couldn’t change the hard facts of his microscope. Hassall noted proudly that during the whole period of the naming and shaming campaign from 1851 to 1854, though “a few lawyers’ letters were received and in one or two cases actions
were commenced . . . only one went as far as the delivery of the declaration.”88 This, he said, a touch boastfully, was testimony to the “remarkable accuracy” of his reports. The more the swindlers wriggled, the more absurd he could make them look, and they knew it. One of the cleverest aspects of the Lancet’s campaign was the way it used the grand lies of commercial advertising against the very products they were advertising.
Advertising and Legislation
Wouldn’t it be refreshing if, for every advertisement, there was a counteradvertisement attached? “Contains calcium, good for children’s bones,” the packaging of a processed cheesy snack might say. But underneath, in big letters, it would read, “Also contains sizeable amounts of saturated fat, salt and colouring, which will do them no good at all. And by the way, there is calcium in all cheese, not just in this sorry imitation.” This will never happen. The closest anyone has ever got to this fantasy was probably Hassall, who punctured the falsehoods of food marketing with devastating understatement.
Hassall lamented the fact that there was no legal requirement for food packets to state their true ingredients. For the purposes of his rhetoric in his Lancet reports, however, this failure of the law was very useful. Hassall’s technique was simple. He would quote in full the fanciful claims of the manufacturers, before revealing the true contents of the packet. Again and again, Hassall would cite the assertion of the seller that their product was “genuine,” only to show that it was highly adulterated. “Genuine mustard,” “genuine cayenne,” and “genuine arrow-root” were anything but. “Finest WHITE PEPPER” said a package bought from Wm. Bowley of 110 Tottenham Court Road. Hassall noted that when he visited the shop, this shopman had particularly directed him to choose “the article as one of great superiority and undoubted purity,” whereas his own judgement was: “adulterated, consisting of finely-ground black pepper, and a very large quantity of wheat flour.”
Hassall was quite explicit about what he was doing. He recognized that he was living in the first great age of advertising and saw it as his job to set the record straight.
Tradesmen now resort to the press extensively. They are authors and puffers on an extensive scale; witness the numerous handbills, circulars and advertisements, used to announce the various articles of food and drink. It is but right, therefore, that the press should make an exposure of the adulterations perpetrated, and thus supply the antidote as well as the bane.89
Some of the most outrageous advertisements made a grand play of how pure the food was. At James Robinson’s coffee shop at 156 Bishopsgate Street, there was a placard of gigantic proportions.
GENUINE COFFEE.
No adulteration.
We conceive it is our duty to caution our friends and the public against the present unjust and iniquitous system pursued by grocers in adulterating their coffee with
Roasted beans,
Dog biscuit,
Chicory, and tan.
Our advice to purchasers of coffee is, to buy it in the berry, and grind it yourselves; if you cannot do this, purchase it of respectable men only: pay a fair and honourable price for it; you may then depend upon a GOOD and GENUINE article.
The implication was that James Robinson himself was “respectable.” In fact, Hassall revealed, his coffee was “Adulterated—with a very large quantity of chicory.”90
The more insubstantial the food, the more exaggerated were the blurbs. At the time of the Lancet reports, there was a craze for farinaceous foods, special curative foods for invalids, powders to be mixed up with warm water or milk into a magical gruel that promised to answer all the niggling stomach worries of the Victorians. Because these foods could sell for a high price, there were many of them on the market, and because there were many of them on the market, they all made absurdly inflated claims for their own efficacy, insisting that all other farinaceous foods were nothing but snake oil, and that they alone could be trusted.91 One of the most prominent brands, Warton’s Ervalenta, insisted that
This agreeable, nutritious, farinaceous food radically cures habitual constipation (costiveness), indigestion, piles, and all diseases originating in a disordered state of the bowels and digestive organs, which it speedily restores to their natural vigour and action, without the aid of medicine, or any other artificial means . . . The invaluable properties and extraordinary efficacy of this eminently curative dietetic have been acknowledged by the first physicians and analytical chemists of the day.92
Warton’s Ervalenta was pricey stuff. A 1lb canister sold for 2s. 9d. The recommended portion size was 2 ounces, yielding eight portions per canister at just over 4 pence each. Compare this with the cost of bread in 1850, which was about 1.8 pence per pound.93 In addition, you were advised to purchase a special syrup to take alongside the Ervalenta, called “Warton’s Melasse,” costing a further shilling a bottle. If the testimonials on the handbill were true, maybe it was worth the high price. Only Ervalenta, it insisted, could restore you to perfect health. It made a great point of warning the consumer to avoid its main rival, “that vile and spurious article called Revalenta,” which is not, like Ervalenta, “an agreeable and pleasant food, but a nauseous and viscous preparation, more adapted to pig-wash.” It also noted that “Persons having mistaken Lentil Flour for ‘Warton’s Ervalenta’, Warton & Co. inform the public that it is a quite different article.”
Not so different, as it turned out. Under Hassall’s microscope, Warton’s overpriced Ervalenta was nothing but ground French lentils, fragments of husk, and starch granules from a substance resembling Indian corn. The special “Melasse” syrup was bog-standard molasses; the only special things were the price and the pompous packaging.
Hassall was especially enraged by the way that advertisers assumed the language of anti-adulteration. The worst swindlers were those who spent the most time attacking swindling. Warton’s main rival, Du Barry & Co., who marketed a farinaceous food called Revalenta Arabica, issued a handbill attacking “FIFTY DIFFERENT GANGS OF SWINDLERS” who made a living from selling “trashy compounds of peas, beans, lentils, Indian [corn] and oatmeal.” Under the heading “CRUEL DECEPTIONS ON INVALIDS EXPOSED,” Du Barry stated, alarmingly, that the health of many invalids had been “fearfully impaired by spurious compounds of peas, beans, lentil, Indian and oat meal, palmed off upon them under closely similar names, such as Ervalenta, Arabica Food, Lentil Powder, Patent Flour of Lentils etc.”94 As for Du Barry’s own product, “this light, delicious breakfast farina,” it claimed to have even more health-giving properties than Warton’s Ervalenta. As well as banishing all stomach complaints, it also removed
palpitations to the heart, nervous headache, deafness, noises in the head and ears, pains in almost every part of the body, chronic inflammation and ulceration of the stomach, eruptions on the skin, scrofula, consumption, dropsy, rheumatism, gout, nauseas and vomiting during pregnancy, after eating, or at sea; low spirits, spleen, general debility, paralysis, cough, asthma, inquietude, sleeplessness, involuntary blushing, tremors, dislike to society, unfitness for study, delusion, loss of memory, vertigo, blood to the head, exhaustion, melancholy, groundless fear, indecision, wretchedness, thoughts of self-destruction etc.95
As you read down the list—a breakfast which can cure indecision!— you begin to wonder if the copywriter is sharing a joke with the consumer. A sick joke, if so. Another striking thing about the handbill was the way it took particular pains to distance Revalenta from any association with lentils. Lentils, the writer insisted, were difficult to digest and caused nervous complaints. They could make a person “very ill.” Therefore it could not be in any sense true that the Du Barry company was supplied with lentil flour from a certain Mr. Nevill, as this Mr. Nevill had recently said. Du Barry certainly did not pay Mr. Nevill “an annual sum” for fabricating the Revalenta Arabica. “So much for Mr Nevill’s insane fabrications!”96 Revalenta, Du Barry maintained, was not made from lentils—perish the thought!—but from “the root of an African plant, somewhat similar to honeysuckl
e.”
After all this hyperbolic nonsense, it is deeply satisfying to read Hassall’s analysis of Du Barry’s Revalenta, which he purchased from a shop on Oxford Street. Revalenta is nothing but a mixture of lentil and barley-meal. Hassall cannot resist concluding that, since Du Barry has condemned the nutritive properties of lentils, it has, by implication, condemned itself.97
In the battle between Hassall and the swindling advertisers, the first round undoubtedly went to Hassall. In 1855, a Parliamentary Committee was set up to look into the adulteration of food and drink, calling Hassall as its first witness. Since the first Lancet report in 1851, the cause of anti-adulteration had attracted new campaigners. John Postgate (1820–91) was a Birmingham surgeon who knew all too well the truth of Hassall’s reports, having spent his youth working as a grocer’s boy, where he had been schooled in swindling. As an adult, Postgate poured everything into fighting adulterated food, even taking money from his own family to print pamphlets on the subject. Postgate enlisted two radical Birmingham MPs, George Muntz (1794–1857) and William Scholefield (1809–67), to the cause. It was Scholefield who headed the Parliamentary Committee.