Historical Note

Historical Note

Death by poison is, at its very nature, an intimate affair: an element of trust generally exists between victim and villain. Such closeness is liable to be abused, as demonstrated by the fact that throughout England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the largest population of accused poisoners consisted of mothers, wives and female servants, between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine. Motives ranged widely: grudges against employers, the removal of inconvenient spouses or lovers, death benefits or the inability to financially support a child.

It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that early toxicologists were able to reliably detect poison in human tissue. Thus, I set The Lost Apothecary in late-eighteenth-century London; even fifty years later, Nella’s disguised remedies might have been easily detected during an autopsy.

The number of individuals (across all social classes) who died by poison in Georgian London cannot possibly be established. Forensic toxicology did not yet exist, and whether accidental or homicidal, poisoning deaths tend to be little more than a footnote in eighteenth-century bills of mortality. Certainly, the lack of detection methods contributed to this. Given how easily these agents can be disguised and administered, I’d venture the number of poisoning deaths is significantly higher than reported in these records.

In data gathered from 1750 to 1914, the most commonly cited poisons in criminal cases were arsenic, opium and nux vomica. Deaths due to plant alkaloids like aconitine—found in the Aconitum plant, also known as wolfsbane—and organic poisons of animal origin, such as the aphrodisiac cantharidin from certain species of beetles, were not uncommon.

Some of these poisons, like household rat poison, were readily accessible. Others were not, and their origins—the shops at which such toxins might have been purchased—have not been well established.