The Colour That Was Supposed to Be Killing Everyone, and William Morris's Very Inconvenient Fortune

In 1885 William Morris wrote to his friend Thomas Wardle that the doctors warning about arsenic in wallpaper had been "bitten as people were bitten by the witch fever". He thought the panic was nonsense and said so. He was also, at the time, drawing an income from a mine that was among the world's leading producers of arsenic. Modern toxicology suggests he was probably right about the wallpaper — which somehow makes the story worse rather than better.

Why Victorian green was such a good green

Before 1775 there was no reliable bright green. Painters mixed blue and yellow and watched it go muddy or fade. Then the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele produced a copper arsenite that was vivid, cheap and stable, and Scheele's green went into everything. In 1814 a more durable version arrived — Schweinfurt green, also sold as Paris green or emerald green — and the Victorian appetite became enormous.

Arsenical greens went into wallpaper, dress fabric, artificial flowers, children's toys, candles, book cloth and confectionery. They were the first greens that stayed green under gaslight. That is the whole reason for their popularity, and it is easy to forget how starved the eye was for colour before synthetic pigments.

The panic

From the 1850s doctors began reporting households falling ill in rooms with green wallpaper. The theory that stuck was that damp paper let mould convert the arsenic into a toxic gas. In 1874 a Michigan doctor named Robert Kedzie produced one of the strangest public health objects ever made: Shadows from the Walls of Death, a book of actual arsenical wallpaper samples, bound and sent to public libraries with a warning not to let children near it. Surviving copies are still handled with care.

The public reacted the way publics do. "Arsenic-free" became a selling point on wallpaper. Manufacturers who could advertise it, did.

Morris, who was right and compromised at the same time

Morris & Co. used arsenical pigments in its early wallpapers. Under commercial pressure — customers were asking — the company had eliminated arsenic from its wallpapers by 1883, and Morris's own designs were arsenic-free by 1885. He did it while thinking the reason was rubbish. In the same letter to Wardle he suggested the real culprit in these sick houses was the drains, and that physicians were blaming the decoration because the decoration was visible.

The uncomfortable half: Morris's family wealth came substantially from Devon Great Consols, a copper mine in the Tamar Valley that turned to arsenic as copper prices fell and became one of the largest arsenic producers anywhere. Morris held shares and sat on the board in his twenties before resigning. The design reformer who wanted to rescue English craft from industrial ugliness was funded, in part, by an industry that damaged the health of the people working in it.

And the verdict? Contemporary toxicology has largely dismantled the gas theory. Work by William Cullen and Ronald Bentley on trimethylarsine — the compound the Victorians feared — concludes it has very low toxicity and that the poisonous-wallpaper story is, in their phrase, closer to an urban legend. Morris's instinct about his own wallpaper was sound.

What the arsenic did do harm at was the point of extraction and in other products. The panic aimed at the drawing room while the actual damage was happening at the mine.

The tube Burne-Jones buried in the garden

The best story about a poisonous pigment does not involve arsenic at all, and it involves Morris's closest friend.

Mummy brown was a rich transparent brown made, as advertised, from ground mummified remains — human and animal — mixed with myrrh and pitch. It was popular with the Pre-Raphaelites. Edward Burne-Jones, Morris's lifelong friend and a partner in Morris & Co., learned the truth at a dinner party from Lawrence Alma-Tadema and flatly refused to believe it. His wife Georgiana recorded what happened when he was convinced:

he left us at once, hastened to the studio, and returning with the only tube he had, insisted on our giving it decent burial there and then. So a hole was bored in the green grass at our feet.

Burne-Jones's nephew was Rudyard Kipling, who was there, helped dig, and wrote that to the end of his life he could have driven a spade within a foot of the spot.

Why any of this matters to a wall in 2026

Modern archival pigment inks are the boring, excellent end of this history: colour that is stable, lightfast and made of nothing that needs burying in a garden. It took roughly two centuries of experimentation, some of it lethal to the people doing it, to get bright colour that behaves.

The William Morris botanical prints here reproduce his pattern work — the repeating leaf, the deep jewel greens he built a style on — on 250gsm matte paper with pigment inks. Same colours, none of the chemistry. If you want the technical version of what "archival" actually means, we wrote that up separately.

Morris is worth reading about beyond the patterns. He was a socialist, a printer, a poet and a genuinely difficult man who spent his life arguing that ordinary objects should be well made — while being funded by an arsenic mine and dismissing a public health scare he happened to be right about. People are rarely one thing.

Sources worth your time

The William Morris Society's own blog has a level-headed piece on the wallpaper claims, and the Journal of Victorian Culture has covered the scholarship. Lucinda Hawksley's Bitten by Witch Fever takes its title from Morris's letter and reproduces the arsenical papers from the National Archives. Wikipedia's entries on Scheele's green, Paris green and mummy brown are solid starting points with the primary citations attached.

Written by The VORAROSA atelier — VORAROSA is an independent poster atelier. We design and curate 196 original art prints and produce each one on demand on 250gsm museum-quality matte paper.