One way of doing it

In his essay ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, De Quincey derides poisoning as an inferior method of bringing about the death of others. It seemed to him both sneaky and unmanly. However, the age that succeeded him was a golden age of poisoners, many of whose crimes are remembered to this day. De Quincey was wrong, or at least in a minority: everyone, except of course the victim, loves a good poisoning.

Arsenic and antimony were the elements whose compounds were most frequently employed by Victorian murderers and murderesses, but the author also considers those of mercury, lead and thallium. Contrary to the title, he deals not only with murder but with occupational and environmental diseases caused by the ignorant or careless handling and disposal of such compounds. He even recounts the health scare caused by the suggestion that the release of a poisonous gas from babies’ mattresses that were treated with an antimony fire-retardant was responsible for cot deaths.

It doesn’t take much to arouse our fears of poison, precisely because we can so easily be poisoned without realising it. Indeed, the largest mass poisoning in the history of humanity has occurred in the last two decades in Bangladesh, where Unesco-promoted and funded wells have delivered highly arsenical water to tens of millions of people, untold numbers of whom are now suffering from chronic arsenic poisoning. None of them suspected anything until it was too late. Furthermore, it is always possible that chemicals currently deemed harmless might turn out to be poisonous. The possibilities for neurotic anxiety about toxic chemicals in the environment are clearly endless.

A compendium such as this book must deal with individual cases in a rather superficial and perfunctory manner.