Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination

Abstract

The 1856 trial of the Rugeley Poisoner (William Palmer), his conviction, refusal to confess and the subsequent medico-legal controversy that surrounded the case form the backdrop to this interdisciplinary study of the role played by criminal poisoning and poison detectives (toxicologists) in mid-Victorian society. The book is principally an investigation of ‘the application of medical and scientific expertise to matters of criminal law’ (p. 3), using a selection of well-known trials in addition to that of Palmer. But an underlying sub-theme concerns ‘the imagination’, which reappears throughout in various guises (historical, literary, legal and scientific) to offer a highly creative and challenging interpretation of an era in which poisoning crimes revealed modernity and the institutions of civilised life to be at once constructive and threatening. Ian Burney has divided his book into five chapters which, in a relatively slender volume, range quite widely over the subject at hand. The first three chapters develop an analysis of the different ‘cultures’ of poison, looking in turn at its links with civilisation, the efforts made to contain the social threat of secret poisoning and by scientists to establish themselves as expert interpreters of the poisoned body, and then move on to consider the relationship between legal and chemical standards of proof and evidence. Although there is much here that will be familiar to readers who have made a study of the history of medico-legal expertise (in which toxicology played a major role because of its ability to render tangible the intangible), Burney succeeds in opening up new ways of thinking about the issues raised, not least by highlighting the interconnectedness of public and scientific discourses on the subject.