5

Food adulteration

In any discussion of changes in the standard of diet in the nineteenth century, it is necessary to look at the quality as well as the quantity of food which English people consumed. So far we have spoken of the foods of the period as though they were constant and stable factors, as though the bread, the tea, or the beer of 1850 were essentially the same commodities as today. In fact, this was very far from the case. Adulteration of food prevailed in the first half of the nineteenth century to an unprecedented and unsupposed extent, and had far-reaching social, economic, and medical consequences which must not be overlooked in the debate about standards of life in early Victorian England.

In primitive and agrarian societies there was, no doubt, trickery, substitution of bad for good, petty dishonesty of many kinds but systematic adulteration would not have been possible. Food adulteration is essentially a phenomenon of urban life, and its historical origins cannot be traced back earlier than the city states of the classical world. As soon as there emerged a consuming public, distinct and separated from the producers of food, opportunities for organized commercial fraud arose: cheaper and nutritionally inferior substitutes might be used to replace the proper constituents of a food, essential ingredients might be removed, or foreign substances added to impart fictitious flavour, appearance, or strength.

The earliest mention of adulteration comes from Athens, where frequent complaints about the quality of wine eventually compelled the appointment of inspectors to watch over this essential of life; the name of one Canthare, who was particularly skilful in artificially maturing new wines, has come down to us. Similarly in Rome, according to Pliny, it was impossible to obtain the natural wines of Falerno, and certain wines from Gaul were notoriously sophisticated with aloes and other drugs. Roman bakers were accused of adding ‘white earth’ (possibly carbonate of magnesia) to their bread, which they obtained from a hill outside Naples.

There is little evidence of such practices in England before the Middle Ages. In an agricultural society, living directly on and off the land, each village — and each household within each village — was to a large extent self-sufficient, and every housewife was her own baker, butcher, and brewer. Only with the emergence of a distinct town-life in the centuries after the Norman Conquest, and a growing number of merchants, artisans, and shopkeepers who were necessarily dependent on others for the supply of their food, do we find the first examples of deliberate adulteration. Dr Frederick A. Filby has traced the history of food frauds in these early centuries from the viewpoint of a chemist primarily interested in adulteration as ‘one of the factors that lay behind analytical chemistry’, drawing his evidence from City Letter Books and guild ordinances.¹ He unearthed some picturesque instances of early sophistications — the piece of iron inserted into an underweight loaf of bread, sugar in ale used to disguise dilution, and ‘foreign’ wines manufactured from native English fruits — but on the whole, the bakers, brewers, and garblers emerge with remarkably clean records. Dr Filby concludes that ‘until the nineteenth century there was but little, and very slow, development in either adulteration or its detection’, and there seems no reason to quarrel with his verdict. Certainly there was no widespread organized trade in deception: the cases that occurred were isolated in extent and generally crude in their execution, and were almost always detected by vigilant local authorities.

Before the rapid growth and urbanization of the population in the nineteenth century, the conditions of widespread adulteration did not exist. Outside London and the few other great cities, food producer and food consumer were still not widely separated; they generally lived in the same small market-town or village, probably in the same street, and a fraudulent grocer or brewer would quickly lose his reputation and his custom. Moreover, central governments and local municipalities regarded themselves as having a duty to protect the public against false dealings, and to punish transgressors severely. It was for this reason that for more than five hundred years, from 1266 onwards, the price and quality of bread and ale were nationally controlled by the system of Assizes,² while local inspectors, often acting in conjunction with the guilds, kept watch over other foods. Offenders might find themselves pilloried, imprisoned, dragged on hurdles through the streets, and if still recalcitrant, finally banished from the town.

By the closing decades of the eighteenth century, however, the quality of many foods was rapidly deteriorating, and it is certain that during the next hundred years adulteration became an exceedingly widespread and highly remunerative commercial fraud. Public complaints against millers, bakers, and brewers had been raised during periods of scarcity and high prices in the 1750s³ and again in the 1790s,⁴ but little credence was given to reports which were apparently prejudiced and exaggerated. It was only in 1820, when Frederick Accum published his Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, that the subject was ventilated for the first time in a thoroughly dispassionate and scientific manner. Accum had acquired a high reputation as an analytical chemist, first in the Brande Pharmacy, then as an assistant to Davy at the Royal Institution, and later as Professor of Chemistry at the Surrey Institution, and his work as a consultant to manufacturers of many kinds placed him in a unique position to investigate the frauds of the day. As long ago as 1798 he had begun to contribute articles to the Journal of Natural Philosophy on the purity of drugs and medicines, in the course of which he had drawn attention to the great skill misdirected to adulteration; he then continued analytical work on food for the next twenty years, publishing, among other works, technical treatises on baking, brewing, wine-making, and ‘Culinary Chemistry’.⁵

Accum’s researches disclosed that almost all the foods and drinks of his day were more or less heavily adulterated, and he fearlessly exposed the methods used and the names of convicted persons. His Treatise dealt in detail with the frauds practised on some two dozen articles in common use, ranging from bread, beer, and tea to wines and spirits, condiments and confectionery. In baking their bread, he found that the London bakers invariably used alum as an adulterant for whitening the inferior grades of flour known as ‘seconds’: ‘without this salt it is impossible to make bread from the kind of flour usually employed by the London bakers as white as that which is commonly sold’. The finest white flour went to the confectioners and pastry-cooks, and the ‘baker’s flour is very often made of the worst kinds of damaged foreign wheat, and other cereal grains mixed with it. … Common garden beans and pease, are frequently ground up among the London bread flour.’⁶ By the addition of a small quantity of alum (about 4 oz to the sack of 240 lb was the usual amount in Accum’s day), the baker was able to pass off a cheap loaf as being made from the more expensive ‘firsts’ flour, and, of course, to charge for it at the higher price. He also occasionally added potatoes for cheapness, and subcarbonate of ammonia to produce a light loaf from spoiled or ‘sour’ flour.

The offence here was perhaps not too heinous, for the use of alum was a fraud on the pocket rather than a danger to health. The adulterations of ale and porter which Accum disclosed were far more serious. In the single year of 1819 there were nearly a hundred convictions of brewers and brewers’ druggists under the Excise laws for using cocculus indicus (a dangerous poison containing picrotoxin), multum, capsicum, copperas, quassia, mixed drugs, harts-horn shavings, orange powder, caraway seeds, ginger, and coriander: these were all employed as cheap substitutes for malt or hops, allowing beer to be diluted by giving it a false appearance of ‘strength’ and flavour. Accum found that the average alcoholic strength of many samples of London porter purchased at Barclay’s, Hanbury’s, and other leading firms, was 5.25 per cent, but when the same beers were bought at the public house they averaged only 4.5 per cent. The public taste at this time was for ‘hard, old beer’ which had been matured in the brewers’ vats for twelve or eighteen months. But long storage was an expensive business, and Accum revealed that some brewers and publicans resorted to sulphuric acid to ‘harden’ new beer: on the other hand, if storage had continued too long and the beer had turned sour, preparations of oyster shells were available to ‘recover’ it.⁷ Those who preferred to drink tea were hardly more fortunate. Large quantities were manufactured from native English hedgerows, the leaves of ash, sloe, and elder being curled and coloured on copper plates: an official report a few years earlier estimated that 4,000,000 lb of this rubbish were annually faked and sold, compared with only 6,000,000 lb of genuine tea imported by the East India Company. There were eleven convictions for this offence between March and July 1818. In one case, the Attorney-General v. Palmer, the defendant, a grocer, had carried on the regular manufacture of fictitious tea at premises in Goldstone Street. He employed agents to collect black-and white-thorn leaves from hedges round London, paying them at the rate of 2d a pound. Those destined for ‘black tea’ were boiled, baked on iron plates, and when dry, rubbed by hand to produce the necessary curl; the colour was given by adding logwood. ‘Green tea’ was made by pressing and drying the leaves on sheets of copper, and then colouring with Dutch pink and poisonous verdigris to impart the fine green bloom. The teas were then sold at 3s or 4s a pound for mixing with genuine tea. Palmer was convicted, and fined £840.⁸

It is not possible to do more than mention a few more of Accum’s revelations — the poisonous pickles which owed their green colour to copper, the ‘nutty’ flavour in wines produced by bitter almonds, the rind of Gloucester cheese coloured with vermilion and red lead, and the pepper adulterated with the sweepings of the warehouse floors — commodities known in the trade as ‘DP’ (pepper dust) or, more inferior still, ‘DPD’ (dust of pepper dust). ‘Does anything pure or unpoisoned come to our tables, except butchers’ meat?’ asked the Literary Gazette after reading Accum. ’We must answer, hardly anything.… Bread turns out to be a crutch to help us onwards to the grave, instead of the staff of life; in porter there is no support, in cordials no consolation, in almost everything poison, and in scarcely any medicine cure.’

There is no doubt that Accum’s Treatise, appearing at a time when a series of Excise convictions of brewers had already aroused public interest, created a deep and immediate impression which, for the first time, directed attention to the urgent need for reform. The book itself was a tremendous success, with its arresting title and emblem of skull and crossbones with the quotation, There is Death in the Pot‘ (2 Kings iv, 40): the first edition of a thousand copies sold out in less than a month, and a fourth edition had appeared within two years. It has been suggested that it was the most widely reviewed chemistry book ever written, and it seems that there was scarcely a newspaper or periodical published in 1820 which did not contain a lengthy notice — occasionally critical, though much more often enthusiastic. Yet the book had no immediate effect in reducing adulteration — indeed, it is possible that in exposing the techniques of fraud Accum instructed others in the very art he wished to suppress. In any case, within a few months of the book’s publication, Accum’s career in England came to a sudden end. In April 1821 he was indicted by the managers of the Royal Institution for mutilating books in their library (some thirty end-pages were found in his possession, which he had probably taken for making notes), and he chose to leave the country rather than face public trial and disgrace. Adulterations of Food had raised up many powerful enemies who were only too pleased to make capital out of the situation; the press and public opinion swung sharply against the man who had been for a time London’s most popular scientist, friends deserted and his publishers refused to handle any more of his work. Thereafter, contemporary writers studiously avoided mentioning his name, and even Accum himself, from the safety of a Berlin professorship, usually wrote under the pseudonym ‘Mucca’. Although all the facts in the case are by no means clear, there is a strong suspicion that there existed a deliberate conspiracy of vested interests determined to discredit and silence Accum, which succeeded in its object by driving him out of the country.

The circumstances of Accum’s disappearance unquestionably caused some people to doubt the truth of his findings, but although public interest and concern about adulteration waned after 1820, it never wholly disappeared. Economists, doctors, and others had at last been compelled to take notice of a great and growing evil, and reference to adulteration now came to be made in such respectable works as Dr Ure’s Dictionary of Chemistry,⁹ McCuIloch’s Dictionary of Commerce,¹⁰ and the medical writings of Paris¹¹ and Pereira.¹² For most people, however, the next milestone came in 1830, when there appeared an anonymous tract entitled Deadly Adulteration and Slow Poisoning Unmasked: or Disease and Death in the Pot and Bottle. ¹³ It was far less authoritative than its predecessor, and evidently not the product of independent research. It aimed, in an earlier tradition, at sensational disclosures — oil of vitriol and white arsenic in gin, nux vomica and opium in beer, pulverized gypsum, whiting, and burnt bones in bread, to name only a few — yet many of its claims were not exaggerated. Nux vomica, another narcotic like cocculus indicus, was discovered by Excise seizures, gypsum and whiting were found in subsequent analyses of bread, and there is proof that large quantities of ground Derbyshire stone were also used in place of flour. A witness before a House of Commons Committee in 1818 stated that when crushed and rolled into a fine powder, it was impossible to detect it in bread - ‘the magistrates there [Sheepshead in Leicestershire] had some baked on purpose, and it could not be discovered; there is, I believe, two or three hundredweight lying in Leicestershire. There is not a baker in that neighbourhood who was not detected in using it’.¹⁴ Deadly Adulteration was at least important in reviving interest in the subject, and in showing that new and dangerous frauds were still being devised.

Bad as this was, all the evidence of Parliamentary reports, trade guides, and scientific investigations indicates that adulteration increased in the following years to reach a peak in the middle of the nineteenth century. The next major contribution to knowledge was a work entitled A Treatise on the Falsifications of Food,¹⁵ written in 1848 by an analytical chemist who had been investigating adulteration for the past twelve years, and it set a new standard by its original analyses and detached expression. The book leaves no doubt that adulteration had greatly increased since Accum’s day, and had now reached terrifying proportions, Mitchell reported, for example, that he had never examined a single sample of baker’s bread that did not contain alum; the amount used was generally about a hundred grains to the 4–lb loaf, but he had occasionally found whole crystals of alum the size of a pea. Boiled potatoes were frequently used in bread, and sometimes carbonates of magnesium and ammonia. In samples of flour he had found chalk, potato-flour, pipe-clay, and powdered flints, and one small bun which he analysed contained three grains of alum and ten of chalk. A very common adulteration of beer was with sulphate of iron, or ‘heading’, which made it possible for publicans who diluted their porter to serve it with a frothing head — regarded by the customer as a sign of strength. Again, the manufacture of ‘British tea’ which Accum had described was still carried on, and had, indeed, grown in extent. There existed at least eight factories in London in the 1840s expressly for the purpose of drying used tea-leaves and reselling them to fraudulent dealers: according to George Phillips, the head of the Chemical Department of the Inland Revenue, the practice was as follows: ‘Persons were employed to buy up the exhausted leaves at hotels, coffee-houses and other places at 2 1/2d and 3d per pound. These were taken to the factories, mixed with a solution of gum, and re-dried. After this the dried leaves, if for black tea, were mixed with rose-pink and black lead to “face” them, as it is termed by the trade.’¹⁶ Henry Mayhew also describes how the purchase of spent leaves was a regular street-trade in the 1840s and 1850s, being collected from servants in the larger houses, and particularly from charwomen, who apparently regarded them as a legitimate perquisite.¹⁷ There can be no doubt about the truth of these reports for, apart from the Excise convictions, Mitchell’s analyses disclosed a wide variety of colouring matters including black lead, Prussian blue, indigo, Dutch pink, turmeric, and the poisonous copper carbonate and lead chromate.¹⁸

To quote only one more example of Mitchell’s revelations, he found that it was now practically impossible to buy pure coffee. It almost always had large proportions of chicory, roasted corn, the roots of various vegetables, and colouring matters such as red ochre. He had also found in coffee a substance which appeared to be baked horses‘ liver, from which it would seem that even the knacker’s yard had been pressed into the service of adulteration.

The testimony of chemists like Accum and Mitchell is fully endorsed by evidence from Parliamentary papers, from trade guides published for the instruction of bakers and brewers, and from numerous other reliable sources. Although there was no government inquiry into adulteration in this period, several Parliamentary committees touched on the subject incidentally. In 1815, for example, one witness before a Committee of the House of Commons which was investigating the assize of bread, himself a baker, stated that ‘the use of alum is indispensable’.¹⁹ Another said, ‘Potatoes are used very much, that I believe is generally known; these improve the bread wonderfully, better than alum or anything else, it makes it rise and saves yeast.’²⁰ The anonymous author of The Guide to Trade, published in 1841, recommends his readers to add a peck of potatoes — somewhat ambiguously referred to as ‘fruit’ — to a sack of ‘seconds’ flour, together with eight ounces of ‘stuff’ (a mixture of salt and alum).²¹ For the brewer and publican there was a whole library of ‘Guides’, ‘Friends’, and ‘Vade Mecums’ containing the latest information on adulteration, substitutes, and remedies. Probably the best known and most influential was Samuel Child’s Every Man his own Brewer, which appeared first in 1790, but went through twelve editions during the first half of the nineteenth century. This remarkable work purported to be written ‘for the general benefit of society, and particularly for the lower classes’, and to divulge methods of brewing ‘which have been long kept an impenetrable secret’. He prefaces his recipe for porter with the following comment:

However much they may surprise, however pernicious and disagreeable they may appear, I have always found them requisite in the brewing…

One Quarter of Malt	2 oz Spanish liquorice
8 lb hops	1 oz cocculus indicus
6 lb treacle	2 drachms Salt of Tartar
8 lb liquorice root	¼ oz heading
8 lb essentia bina	3 oz ginger
8 lb colour	1oz linseed
4 oz lime	2 drachms cinnamon.22
½ oz capsicum

Oddly enough, Child omits coriander seed — which other brewers included — as ‘pernicious, not to say poisonous in the highest degree’, while he recommends the deadly cocculus indicus as ‘indispensable’. The reason he gives for the use of all these substances is that ‘malt, to produce intoxication, must be used in such large quantities as would very much diminish, if not totally exclude, the brewer’s profits’.

In addition to the trade guides, which, despite the fact that they advocated the use of illegal substances, were sold quite openly, the would-be adulterator could seek the advice of the numerous druggists who specialized in the preparation of these nostrums. Many posed openly as ‘bread doctors’ or ‘brewers’ druggists’, while others carried on the trade more discreetly as an adjunct to their legitimate business: most seem to have been itinerant, although there were evidently brewers’ druggists with shops in London, twenty-seven of whom were prosecuted and convicted between 1812 and 1819. As late as 1850, Dr Normandy reported that he had seen ‘a cart bearing the inscription in staring paint of “Brewers’ Druggist” … standing in broad daylight, at midday, before a publican’s shop’,²³ although it appears that by this time it was becoming a dangerous business to operate openly in towns, and most did their trade in the country, advising small brewers and bakers that they must keep up with the London practice if they wished to make profits.

The growth of adulteration to such alarming proportions had no single cause. It cannot simply be ascribed to greed and the desire for unlawful profit — ‘the eager and insatiable thirst for gain’ which Accum believed characterized the traders of his time. There is no good reason to suppose that the Victorians, ambivalent as they may have been, were conspicuously more immoral than earlier generations; indeed, a new awareness of social evils of all kinds was one of their more redeeming features. The root causes of adulteration are to be found in the changes which took place in this period of rapid industrialization and urbanization, a period when an ever-increasing proportion of the population was becoming dependent on commercial services for the supply of its food and, as capitalism and specialization advanced, further and further removed from the ultimate food-producers. At the same time, the medieval control over food standards by national and local regulation came to be abandoned — partly because of administrative difficulties but, more fundamentally, because of a changed conception of the role of the state and a doctrinaire belief in the efficacy of free competition to ensure the best interests of the consumer. These changes, coinciding with unparalleled inflation and shortages during the French wars, combined to produce a situation in which it was, for the first time, easy, safe, and profitable to adulterate.

The organization of the food trades themselves went through far-reaching changes in these years. Until the eighteenth century many bakers had been their own millers, and most publicans their own brewers; by 1850 both were increasingly dealing with remote, highly capitalized, and mechanized producers, to whom they were frequently bound by ties of debt. In other trades such as grocery, the wholesaler or agent had become interposed between retailer and purchaser, and had often acquired a dominating position.²⁴ In these new, impersonal conditions, the old local relationships and sanctions, which had done much to maintain high quality, largely broke down.

The abandonment of the policy of food control was an even more important stimulus to adulteration. It is true that, by the later eighteenth century, the system was becoming increasingly difficult to administer, and to have enforced the ancient Assizes of Bread and Ale over the new towns and suburbs would have required an executive force which it was quite beyond the powers of decayed guilds and corrupt municipalities to command. But, more fundamentally, the policy was discontinued because of the changed climate of economic opinion. By 1815 enlightened legislators of all parties had come to accept without reservation the doctrine of free trade according to Adam Smith, and to believe that society as a whole would be most benefited when its economic affairs were regulated by the inexorable — and necessarily just — laws of supply and demand. The generation which abolished the East India Company’s monopoly, permitted workmen to combine and to emigrate, and began to tackle the tariff jungle, could clearly not countenance the perpetuation of archaic restrictions on the internal economy. It was precisely in this spirit that the Assize of Bread was repealed in 1815 after a perfunctory Committee had pronounced a classical exposition on the futility of economic regulation: ‘Your Committee are distinctly of opinion that more benefit is likely to result from the effects of a free competition … than can be expected to result from any regulations or restrictions under which [the bakers] could possibly be placed.’²⁵

From this time onwards there was no general attempt by government to intervene between producer, retailer, and consumer in order to regulate the price or quality of food. The Customs and Excise Department was, of course, concerned to see that duty was paid on beer, spirits, and on imported foods such as sugar, tea, and coffee, and to this end it attempted to enforce a number of eighteenth-century statutes which classified adulteration, like smuggling, as a fraud on the revenue. We have already seen how singularly unsuccessful they were. Despite an elaborate organization and a staff of nearly five thousand officers, the Excise was utterly incapable of suppressing adulteration even in the limited range of dutiable commodities over which it had authority. In any case, the Excise was interested only in those adulterations which touched the public purse: about the public health it was supremely indifferent.

It was in accord with the prevailing belief in free competition that some contemporaries regarded monopoly as one of the principal causes of adulteration. Undoubtedly, monopoly affected some trades adversely, but it does not seem to have been a factor of general importance. The example most frequently cited in the early part of the century was that of the eleven great brewers of London,²⁶ who, it is known, regularly met together to fix a common price and strength for porter, and adopted practically uniform methods of manufacture. But the fact is that only one conviction for adulteration was ever obtained against the great houses, and that not for a dangerous ingredient: Barclay’s, Meux’s, and the rest employed methods of economy which could possibly be criticized, but compared with the small brewers, they were justly renowned for the good quality of their beers. Monopoly exerted a far more prejudicial effect on the retail of beer than on its manufacture. The practice of ‘tying’ public houses to a particular brewer had begun in the eighteenth century, and by 1850 the majority were held in this way. There is good evidence that when brewers had these assured outlets for their beer they often dealt on unfavourable terms with their tenants, and so, in effect, forced them to adulterate in order to make a living. In country districts, where one brewer often enjoyed a perfect monopoly by virtue of owning the only inn, he could sometimes supply it with the most offensive liquor which he was unable to get rid of elsewhere.

The other food industry to be characterized by a degree of mono-polization was flour-milling. We know that local monopolies existed in the later eighteenth century, for some of the earliest attempts at co-operation were directed towards establishing corn mills in order to break the hold of the miller who supplied inferior and adulterated flour at high prices. Later, many millers followed the example of the brewers by taking over bakers‘ shops and placing journeymen in them as their agents: this was particularly common in the ’underselling‘ branch of the trade, where adulteration was greatest.²⁷ It seems that where a miller had a guaranteed outlet through a ’tied‘ baker, he was often tempted to deteriorate the quality of flour, and also to connive at adulteration by the baker so long as a large turnover was maintained.

By and large, however, competition was much more characteristic of the food trades in the nineteenth century than monopoly, and it is to the excessive degree of this competition that we must look for the principal cause of adulteration. In the case of the baker, the publican, and the grocer, it existed in such acute form that they were constantly driven to quasi-legitimate means of earning a livelihood, and it is no coincidence that it was in these trades that adulteration was at its height. The bakers are the most obvious case in point. Under the Assize system there could be no competition in price, only in quality. The trade was reckoned a good one, for the ‘allowance’ guaranteed security and reasonable profits without excessive labour. But the abolition of price-fixing in 1815 brought a revolution which transformed baking into one of the most depressed, overcrowded, and unremunerative trades of the day. By 1850, fifty thousand bakers were struggling to exist in conditions of intense competition: three-quarters of them were ‘undersellers’, selling below the regular price, and there had even appeared a class of ‘cutting bakers’ who undersold the undersellers.²⁸ In London the price of the quartern loaf now varied by as much as 3d. In such circumstances it was all but impossible for bakers to remain honest men. When bread was sold at or below the cost of flour, as frequently happened, the baker had to devise means of making it go further or replacing it by other materials, and once the process had started, competition acted as a vicious spiral, driving him to deteriorate quality to the limit consistent with producing a saleable loaf. As a witness before the Committee on Journeymen Bakers put it, They only exist now by first defrauding the public, and next getting eighteen hours work out of the men for twelve hours‘ wages.’²⁹

Excessive competition was similarly created by legislative action in the retail of beer. In reaction against the severity of earlier licensing policy, the Beerhouse Act of 1830 permitted anyone to sell beer on payment of a two-guinea Excise fee: the result was that ordinary houses, chandlers’ shops, and mere country shacks were rapidly turned into beer houses. In Liverpool alone fifty new beer-shops opened every day for several weeks, and over the whole country 45,000 were established within eight years. Goulborn, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had said in moving the bill, ‘This measure … would work well. It would conduce at once to the comfort of the people in affording them cheap and ready accommodation; to their health in procuring them a better and more wholesome beverage.’ His optimism was ill-founded. Intense competition for custom soon developed between the beer-shops, and between the beer-shops as a whole and the fully licensed inns and taverns which could also sell wines and spirits and were prepared to make little or no profit on the sale of beer in order to ruin the beer-shops.

The result was a fierce ‘price war’, and by the middle of the century thousands of beer-shops were selling porter at 3d a quart instead of the standard 4d by diluting with water and making up for lack of strength by adding cocculus indicus or other drugs. Although it was frequently stated by expert witnesses before Parliamentary committees that no publican could make an honest living by selling at 3d a pot, nothing was done for many years to reverse the disastrous policy of 1830: despite all evidence to the contrary, the blind belief of Victorian legislators in the efficacy of unrestricted competition remained unchanged and practically unchallenged.

Competition was probably seen in its ugliest aspect in the contract system for the supply of groceries. Public institutions — hospitals, prisons, workhouses, barracks, schools, and so on — were normally supplied by tender, the lowest often being accepted in the interests of economy. Boards of Guardians, responsible for the administration of workhouses, not uncommonly accepted contracts under market price, caring little about the quality of the foods supplied. There is good reason to suppose that such institutions suffered from adulteration to an enormous extent. When Dr Hassall analysed samples of arrowroot supplied to London workhouses, he found three-quarters of them adulterated with potato flour, tapioca starch, and sago powder.³⁰ The large number of deaths at Drouitt’s Institution for pauper children in 1850 was ascribed by Dr Wakley, the coroner, to the adulteration of the oatmeal with barleymeal; the latter was less nutritious and more aperient, and diarrhoea and vomiting had been prominent symptoms of the outbreak. This was one of the commonest of all adulterations, and did not end here despite the publicity given to the Drouitt’s case. In 1852, several London vestries advertised for oatmeal, and accepted a tender which was 3s a load below the next lowest: a competitor, who did not see how it could be done at the price, suggested an inquiry, when it was found that a large proportion of the ‘oatmeal’ consisted of inferior barleymeal.³¹ Many instances also came to light of adulterated butter, tea, coffee, pepper, and other articles supplied by contract to public institutions, and we must conclude that this kind of fraud was extremely common in the middle of the last century.

The high price of many foods and drinks, due in large measure to the heavy taxation which they were made to bear, was a minor though significant cause of adulteration. A connection can undoubtedly be traced between the extensive adulteration of tea, coffee, beer, sugar, spirits, wine, and pepper and the severe duties which were levied on them: in 1853, immediately before Gladstone’s free trade budget, tea was still charged at 1 s 1 Od a pound, pepper at 6d, coffee at 3d, brandy at 15s a gallon, rum at 8s 2d, and British spirits at 7s lOd, while sugar, butter, and cheese paid variable, though appreciable, amounts. Many of these were articles of heavy working-class consumption, and it is hardly surprising that public houses and grocers’ shops, struggling to exist in conditions of intense competition, sought to lower the cost to their customers by illicit means. The dilution of beer and spirits with water, which was the commonest of all frauds throughout the century, is the most obvious example of the use of an untaxed adulterant in order to lower cost.

We have now looked at some of the causes — economic, legislative, and fiscal — for the prevalence of adulteration in the middle of the century. The question remains — why did the public allow themselves to be cheated and poisoned in this way? The answer is, of course, that the majority did not know. Only a small minority of educated people had heard of the disclosures of Accum and the other chemists, and these tended to be the people who could afford to pay more for their food and obtain it pure at high-priced shops. It was well known that the heaviest adulteration was found in the ‘low neighbourhoods’ of cut-price shops. But for the poor, who had to prefer cheapness, there was no real choice, especially when, as was often the case, they were in debt to a local tradesman and had to take what he offered. Ignorance and poverty between them condemned the mass of the population to an adulterated diet. Nevertheless, it has also to be admitted that even when people became aware of the existence of adulteration, and were financially able to exercise a choice, some continued to prefer the impure to the genuine. Eating habits are highly conservative, and people had for so long been conditioned to impure bread, tea, pickles, and the rest that they did not always immediately like the flavour or appearance of unadulterated foods. Early pioneers of pure food sometimes encountered strong consumer resistance — co-operative societies, for example, experienced such difficulty in selling uncoloured teas that at least one went to the trouble of employing a lecturer to tell people what good tea should look like.³² For all these reasons, any great improvement in the quality of food had to wait until effective legislation against adulteration was introduced in the 1870s.

When we turn from the causes of adulteration to consider its effects, it is necessary to keep in mind several distinct aspects — commercial, fiscal, medical, and moral. Adulteration was a deliberate fraud for the sake of gain, and its most direct effect was financial loss to the consumer. Those who gained were sometimes the manufacturers, who because of their command of plant or machinery were often able to adulterate on a large scale and in comparative secrecy; millers, brewers, coffee and cocoa grinders, and the preparers of drugs fall into this category. More often, however, it was the retailer who benefited most from adulteration, and, indeed, depended on it for his existence. We have seen how large sections of the baking and beer-selling trades were maintained by these means, and the same is true of the retail of coffee, milk, and other things. The wholesale price of coffee in mid-century was 9d a pound, of chicory 3d; by mixing equal proportions an article costing 6d or 7d was retailed at anything from Is to Is 6d a pound. Milk was generally bought wholesale at 3d a quart and retailed at 4d, but the addition of only 10 per cent of water increased the profit by 40 per cent: such an adulteration was very difficult to detect, and was one of the most persistent until modern times. At a meeting of the Society of Public Analysts in 1893 a member recalled the case of a wholesale dealer who made £1,200 a year simply by adulterating pepper. Examples might be multiplied, but it is sufficiently evident that adulteration had come to be regarded as a normal and almost legitimate method of carrying on trade. The gain of the seller in all these cases was, of course, the loss of the buyer, a loss which affected the whole community in some degree, but which fell particularly heavily on the poorer classes, who were unable to afford the luxury of pure food. Although it would be impossible to express this loss arithmetically, there can be no doubt that adulteration was one of the factors which helped to make the poor poor in the middle of last century.

It follows that as well as involving loss to the individual, adulteration caused a serious reduction in the public revenue. Duties on articles of consumption accounted for at least half the total national revenue in the middle of last century, and many of the items so taxed — malt, spirits, tea, sugar, coffee, and so on — were among those most heavily adulterated. Again, it is impossible to calculate this loss exactly, because the precise extent of adulteration cannot be gauged, but P.L. Simmons, the contemporary authority on commercial products, put it at between two and three million pounds a year, and Dr Hassall thought that it must be as much as seven millions.³³ A loss of this size represented one-tenth of total revenue: it was more than the stamp duty and half the receipts from income tax.

To prevent these losses, the Excise Department maintained a staff of nearly five thousand officers scattered about the country, and sixty or seventy analytical chemists centred in London. The inefficiency — some said corruption — of this department was notorious, even at a time when the civil service as a whole was not conspicuous for probity. George Phillips, the Chief Chemical Officer of the Board, stated before a Parliamentary committee in 1855 that during the last twelve years his department had examined forty samples of hops (thirty-five of which were adulterated with cocculus indicus, grains of paradise, and tobacco), 105 of spirits, and 142 of tea. Of the samples of coffee analysed, only 13 per cent had been found adulterated, but a Treasury minute of 1851 had permitted the sale of mixtures of coffee and chicory, provided the product was labelled as a ‘Mixture’: consequently a compound of 5 per cent coffee with 95 per cent chicory could, provided it was labelled, pass as genuine.³⁴ In general, the attitude of the Excise Department towards the adulterator seems to have been most accommodating: it had not even objected when in 1851 Messrs Duckworth of Liverpool took out a patent for a machine which compressed chicory into the shape of coffee-beans, the whole object of which was to defraud.³⁵

Much more important than purely financial or fiscal considerations, however, were the effects of adulteration on health. Adulteration operated here in two main ways. First, as we have seen, many frauds consisted of replacing the proper constituents of a food with cheaper and possibly worthless substances — water in milk or beer, chicory in coffee, barleymeal in oatmeal, and so on. At first sight, these might be dismissed merely as frauds on the pocket, but in fact, by lowering the nutritional value of the foods concerned, several of them basic articles of diet, public health could be seriously affected. A spectacular instance of the effects of adulterated oatmeal was the mortality at Drouitt’s Institution, referred to on p. 97. More often, however, the effects of undernourishment were only to be seen indirectly in the prevalence of disease and the short expectation of life which characterized the earlier nineteenth century. In particular, children reared on a diet of adulterated bread and diluted milk were ill-equipped to resist the infectious diseases and gastric complaints which took such a heavy toll of infant life. Although alum in bread was not poisonous, there is good evidence that it inhibited digestion and so lowered the nutritional value of the food; together with impoverished milk it could well be one of the reasons for the physical degeneracy of the Victorian poor.

Second, numerous adulterations were quite directly and immediately harmful to health. In the 1850s Dr Hassall compiled a list of more than thirty injurious substances which he had discovered in foods and drinks: it included cocculus indicus in beer and rum, sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruits, and preserves, lead chromate in mustard and snuff, sulphate of iron in tea and beer, copper carbonate, lead carbonate, bisulphate of mercury and various other mineral colouring matters in sugar confectionery. Several of these were deadly poisons if taken in sufficient quantity, and numerous cases are on record of death caused by cocculus indicus in rum, paralysis due to lead in cayenne pepper and snuff, and the poisoning of children by mineral dyes in sugar confectionery. Scarcely a year passed when deaths were not reported from this last cause. In one instance, fifteen people died after eating lozenges bought in Bradford market — the sweet manufacturer had asked a chemist for plaster of Paris but had been given white arsenic by mistake — and on another occasion twenty guests at a public banquet in Nottingham were taken ill after eating green blancmange, which had been coloured by arsenite of copper. Only one died.³⁶ Much more often the quantity of poisons used was not sufficient to produce immediate symptoms, but many of them were cumulative, and would leave trace elements of lead, copper, mercury, and arsenic to build up in the system over the course of time. Here again, we may well have a cause of the chronic gastritis which was one of the commonest diseases of urban populations in the early nineteenth century.³⁷

Finally, in the widespread extent of adulteration there clearly lay moral implications for a nation which prided itself on its high standards of morality, public as well as private. The man who deliberately cheats and poisons his neighbour for the sake of gain would be regarded by most civilized nations in much the same way as the thief or the murderer, yet, little more than a century ago, an important section of the English middle class — the class which had taken upon itself the moral leadership of society, and the task of reforming the vices alike of the aristocracy and the lower orders — not only practised adulteration but accepted it as a normal agency of commerce. Business morality was never lower than at the time when Christian observance was at its most ostentatious, and in this, as in contemporary sexual attitudes, we have a striking illustration of the ambivalence of which the Victorian character was capable.

No member of the group betrayed the conspiracy of silence, no word of criticism or self-reproach ever issued from those who stood to gain by adulteration. On the contrary, when faced with irrefutable evidence of their offence, adulterating traders put forward a number of justifications designed to prove that they were, in fact, performing a public service — that adulterations were only practised in response to public taste, that they constituted ‘improvements’ and lowered the price of foods which would otherwise have been too expensive for the poor to buy. Needless to say, it was not mentioned that adulteration was always for the profit of the seller and at the expense of the buyer, and that, quite apart from the possible dangers to health, adulterated goods were dearest in the end. The strange double morality of the day ignored these, as it did other inconvenient facts, and for many years after the end of the present period shopkeepers continued to conduct their business on the maxim of the common law, ‘Caveat emptor“ (‘Let the buyer beware!’).

Notes

1 Filby, Frederick A. (1934) A History of Food Adulteration and Analysis.

2 Webb, Sidney and Webb, Beatrice (1904) ‘The assize of bread’, Economic Journal, 14.

3 My Friend, a Physician (1757), Poison Detected; Emanuel Collins (1758) Lying Detected; Henry Jackson (1758) An Essay on Bread … to which is added an appendix explaining the vile practices committed in adulterating wines, cider; etc.; Sampson Syllogism, a Baker (1757) A Modest Apology in Defence of the Bakers.

4 The Crying Frauds of London Markets, proving their Deadly Influence upon the Two Pillars of Life, Bread and Porter by the Author of the Cutting Butchers Appeal (1795).

5 Browne, C.A. (1925) ‘The life and chemical services of Fredrick Accum’, Journal of Chemical Education (New York) (October, November, and December).

6 Accum, Fredrick (1820) A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons, 132 et seq.

7 ibid., 173 et seq.

8 The Times, 18 May 1818.

9 Ure, Andrew (1835) A Dictionary of Chemistry and Mineralogy (4th edn).

10 McCulloch, J.R. (1834) A Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical and Historical of Commerce and Commercial Navigation.

11 Paris, J .A. (1826) A Treatise on Diet.

12 Pereira, J. (1843) A Treatise on Food and Diet.

13 Deadly Adulteration and Slow Poisoning Unmasked; or Disease and Death in the Pot and Bottle by an enemy to Fraud and Villany (nd, 1830–1).

14 Committee of the House of Commons on Petitions of the Country Bakers 1818: Minutes of Evidence, 20–1 (evidence of Francis Crisp).

15 Mitchell, John (1848) A Treatise on the Falsifications of Food, and the Chemical Means Employed to Detect Them.

16 Hassall, A.H. (1855) Food and Its Adulterations: Comprising the Reports of the Analytical Sanitary Commission of ‘The Lancet’,278.

17 Mayhew, Henry (1861) London Labour andthe London Poor II, 149–50.

18 Mitchell, op. cit., 167–8.

19 Report from the Committee of the House of Commons on the Laws relating to the Manufacture, Sale and Assize of Bread (1815): Minutes of Evidence, 79.

20 ibid., 69.

21 The Guide to Trade: The Baker (1841), 33 et seq.

22 Child, Samuel (Brewer) (1820) Every Man his own Brewer: a Practical Treatise explaining the Art and Mystery of Brewing Porter, Ale, Twopenny and Table Beer; etc.

23 Normandy, A. (1850) The Commercial Handbook of Chemical Analysis, 61.

24 Fay, C.R. (1923–5) ‘The miller and the baker: a note on commercial transition, 1770–1837’, Cambridge Historical Journal I, 89.

25 Report, op. cit., reprinted in The Pamphleteer VI (1815), 162.

26 Barclay, Perkins & Co., Truman, Hanbury & Co., Reid & Co., Whitbread & Co., Combe, Delafield & Co., Henry Meux & Co., Calvert & Co., Elliot & Co., Taylor & Co., and Cox and Camble & Co.,

27 Report addressed to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department Relative to the Grievances complained of by the Journeymen Bakers (1862).

28 Read, George (1848) The History of the Baking Trade.

29 Report, op. cit., 107.

30 Hassall, op. cit., 349.

31 Burn, J.D. (1855) The Language of the Walls, and a Voice from the Shop Windows, or the Mirror of Commercial Roguery by ‘One who Thinks Aloud’, 335.

32 Select Committee on Adulteration of Food, etc.: Third Report (1856), 270–3. Also J. Woodin (1852) The System of Adulteration and Fraud now Prevailing in Trade.

33 Hassall, Arthur Hill (1857) Adulterations Detected: or Plain Instructions for the Discovery of Frauds in Food and Medicine, 694.

34 Select Committee on Adulteration of Food, etc.: Second Report (1855), Q. 2142 et seq.

35 ibid., Qs. 2135–41.

36 Anon (1856) The Tricks of the Trade in the Adulteration of Food and Physic, 45.

37 Greg, W.R. (1831) An Inquiry into the State of the Manufacturing Population, and the Causes and Cures of the Evils therein existing, 7 et seq.