The Secret Poisoner: A Century of Murder by Linda Stratmann (review)

Linda Stratmann is the author of numerous true crime books and two series of novels set in the Victorian period. Trained as a chemist's dispenser, and with a Bachelor of Science in psychology, she has the wide-ranging background common to professional writers. In The Secret Poisoner: A Century of Murder, she tackles the well-trodden subject of poison as a method of murder in the nineteenth century by focusing on the "duel of wits and resources" between poisoners and forensic science, which, she argues, occurred largely between 1800 and 1900 (xi). The book centers on Britain, but has a few chapters on France and one, set in the 1890s, on the United States. Though well-written, this book will be of little use to Victorian scholars. Because it is not an academic study, the author makes too many overstatements and includes too little analysis, and the material is extremely familiar to criminal justice historians. Given her background, Stratmann explains the chemistry well, but has some factual errors and puzzling lurches of time and place.

Stratmann's book traces poisoning trials from 1815 to 1900 in roughly chronological order. The early nineteenth century gets more attention than the late Victorian period, while the epilogue, puzzlingly, jumps ahead to the 1950s and 1960s. Her method is almost entirely descriptive: she narrates the stories of either one prominent poisoning trial or several of them, interspersing these with background material or remarks about the difficulties of toxicology for each particular poison. Many of the trials she covers are the usual suspects—Thomas Smethurst, William Palmer, Adelaide Bartlett, et cetera—though, happily, the reader is spared yet another take on Florence Maybrick. Forensic medicine did not follow a linear trajectory; in many ways the science of 1900 was not much more advanced than in 1800. Tests for arsenic became more refined over time, and limits on its sale were the earliest in Britain (1851), but vegetable and mineral poisons were harder to isolate. With the latter, the best scientists could manage was to do what they had always done: first, taste the substance, and, second, observe its effects on a distressing (to this reader) number of animal subjects. Arsenic and strychnine were the most common poisons, but over time antimony, aconite, morphine, and chloroform, among many others, were also tried. Scientists struggled to keep up, particularly as so many of these substances either occurred in nature or were the products of decomposition (ptomaines). Thus, a number of suspected poisoners throughout the century were acquitted, reprieved, or pardoned.

Stratmann is careful to remind readers that poisonings were always a small minority of murders in Britain; their prominence in the Victorian imagination was more indicative of fears of gender and class rebellions than real threats. She has a cautious approach to the moral panic over the Essex poisonings in the 1840s, one fully justified by the small number of bodies actually showing poison when autopsied. Stratmann's lack of historical training, however, leads to some errors, especially when she makes generalizations. For instance, she claims that the 1844 bastardy law "effectively repealed" the 1834 bastardy clause, and that "[f]athers were required to pay 2s 6d a week" under the new law (126, 299). This is an oversimplification. The 1844 law allowed women to sue men for affiliation, but they could not get help from the poor law to do so; as a result, few women could bring a suit, since they did not have the money for the summonses. They also had to have independent corroboration of the paternity, and at least twenty percent of these suits failed due to that clause. Furthermore, 2s 6d a week was the maximum set, not the automatic award required of all putative fathers. A similar overstatement occurs when Stratmann claims that the Married Women's Property Act of 1882 gave a married woman a separate legal identity from her husband. The act empowered married women to buy and sell...