A Register Kept in a Very Good Hand
The Bureau’s sanitary desk has had a ledger on it since June. It arrived from an address in Islington with no covering letter beyond one line, and it is, on any fair assessment, a beautifully kept book. Our correspondent — she signs herself only as the Compiler of the Spotted Register — set down four thousand one hundred and six cases of what she calls the spotted condition, observed in the streets, omnibuses and shop doorways of London between the fourteenth of February and the ninth of November 1853. The columns are ruled in red and headed date, parish, sex, extent of the eruption, and outcome. The hand does not vary from the first page to the last. Where the arithmetic can be checked, it is correct.
The Bureau went first to the last column, as it always does. In four thousand one hundred and six entries, the outcome reads recovered. Four thousand one hundred and six times, without a single exception, and without an entry for anything else — no relapse, no complication, no burial. A condition that never once fails to resolve is not a condition. It is a season.
The second difficulty is that the Compiler’s year is already occupied. The third cholera pandemic was in Britain that autumn, and London’s own visitation of 1853 and 1854 took 10,739 people. Newcastle upon Tyne lost more than fifteen hundred to the third and worst of its cholera outbreaks; St Paul’s churchyard on Westgate Road buried 547 that year, 319 of them in September, and 55 on the twentieth of September alone. That is also a register kept in a good hand, in the same country, in the same months. The Bureau does not accuse the Compiler of inventing her year. It observes that somebody else was already using it.
The Year the Dots Were Real
Before the Bureau takes the file apart it should say what the file gets right, because it gets a good deal right. The pattern was genuinely in fashion in the early 1850s, and it was genuinely named after a dance. The polka came out of Bohemia around 1830, reached the ballrooms of Prague by 1835, Vienna by 1839, Paris in 1840 and London by 1844, and the Paris reception was hysterical enough to be called polkamania. The name itself was a political courtesy — Czech and Polish for a Polish woman, adopted out of sympathy for Poland after the rising of 1830 — which the Parisian dancing public will not have been thinking about.
The trade did what the trade always does. The word “polka-dot” is in English print by 1851, with “polka-spot” and “polka-dotted” two years earlier still, and the milliners were already selling the polka hat and the polka jacket beside them. So a Londoner writing “the year of the polka dot” in 1853 was not coining anything. She was using a phrase already available to her, about a cloth already on the counter. The Bureau concedes the whole of it.
It concedes the geography. The Register has the condition crossing the Channel and then the Atlantic, and the dance did exactly that — carried to America by European emigrants, and popular there from 1840 to 1890. She has described a real diffusion and mistaken only what was diffusing.
It concedes something else that she does not appear to know, and which tells in her favour. The association she believes she discovered is real, and it is four hundred years older than her ledger. In the Middle Ages spotted cloth was avoided precisely because irregularly spaced dots called to mind the rashes of leprosy, smallpox, plague and measles; the pattern carried a settled association with contagion and uncleanliness. Europe read dots as a picture of illness for centuries before anybody thought to wear them on purpose. What the Compiler has done is take that old reading and a real fashion and weld them into a disease.
The Boutique, and the Copper Cylinder
The Register traces the outbreak to a small and daring Parisian house, and to one designer who put spots on a line of dresses and was laughed at for a fortnight. The Bureau has no objection to Paris. Its objection is to the direction of travel, and the direction of travel is a matter of machinery rather than opinion.
An evenly spaced dot is an industrial object. Roller printing was patented by Thomas Bell in 1785, designed from the start for six colours at once, and the problem of holding six rollers in register was solved in the same year by Adam Parkinson of Manchester. A single-colour machine commonly ran off ten to twelve thousand yards in a ten-hour day. The whole art lies in the engraving of the copper, and the trade’s own warning about it is exact: every scratch on the surface of a roller prints a fine line on the cloth. A dot repeat that holds true across a bolt is not a flourish of taste. It is a cylinder that has been cut properly, turning all day in Lancashire.
The Bureau has done the sum the Register omits. One single-colour machine, worked six days in the week across the nine months the ledger stood open, lays down better than two million yards of printed cotton at the slower of those two rates. That is one machine, in one shed, in one county. Nobody anywhere in the chain requires a boutique.
The Register has the social order of the thing backwards too. It describes the pattern descending from the silk gowns of the aristocracy to the cotton aprons of the working class, as though spots were a favour handed down. Printed cotton was the cheap cloth, and it was cheap because the machine was fast. A pattern issued by the mile does not need an aristocracy to carry it downward; it arrives everywhere at once, on the cheapest bolt in the shop. The Compiler puts the cause down to escapism and to a blurring of the classes. The Bureau puts it down to copper, and would observe that copper is testable.
The Plates Are Three Years Late
Six coloured plates travel with the ledger, and they are the part of the file the Compiler is proudest of. They are also the part that can be dated, because clothing can be dated, and these can be dated twice over.
Every plate shows the dome. That silhouette is got with the steel-hooped cage crinoline, patented in Paris in April 1856 by R. C. Milliet and in Britain by his agent a few months later. In 1853 a woman got the shape the hard way, in layers of petticoats which had already, by 1847, begun to collapse under the weight of the skirts they were meant to hold out. The cage was a relief from that, and it did not exist when the Register was open. Then there is the colour. The dots on the fourth plate are mauve, and mauve is Perkin’s accident of 1856 — an eighteen-year-old chemist oxidising aniline with potassium dichromate in an attempt to make quinine, finding purple in the flask when he washed it out with spirit, and opening a dyeworks at Greenford the next year. The colour was not even called mauve until 1859, and was not a necessity until 1859 to 1861. The plates are dated 1853 and dressed for the end of the decade.
Invited to comment, the Compiler replied that the plates had been worked up later, from memory, by a niece with a good eye. The Bureau accepts this without reservation, and observes only that the niece’s memory runs three years ahead of the event, and in one particular six.
The Dates the Register Has to Get Past
Everything the Compiler describes, in the order the record actually puts it.
A music teacher in Bohemia watches a young woman step to a folk tune in a way he has not seen before, and writes it down.
Paris takes the polka and loses its head over it — polkamania in the papers. London follows by 1844.
“Polka-spot” and “polka-dotted” reach English print. The dance has become a pattern.
“Polka-dot” itself is in print. The shops are already selling the polka hat and the polka jacket under the same borrowed name.
The Compiler opens her register on 14 February and closes it on 9 November: 4,106 cases, 4,106 recoveries. In the same autumn Newcastle buries more than fifteen hundred of its people, 319 of them into one churchyard in September alone.
Cholera in Broad Street kills 616. The handle comes off the pump on 8 September, and the Board of Health blames the air anyway.
The steel cage crinoline is patented in Paris — the silhouette the Register’s plates have been wearing for three years already.
Perkin, aged eighteen, makes mauveine by accident. Only now are the mauve dots on plate four a thing that can exist.
The colour acquires the name mauve, and with it two full seasons of fashion.
Matilda Scheurer, nineteen, dies of the arsenical green she has been dusting onto artificial leaves. This is what a garment trade fatality looks like in the record.
What an Epidemic Looked Like in 1853
The Compiler prefers the second reading of her own file, and the Bureau owes it a hearing. In that reading the spots are a genuine eruption, mild, universal and self-limiting, and the fashion is camouflage — a whole population agreeing to dress as its own symptoms so that nobody need be ashamed of them. Asked whether any sufferer had been confined to bed, she answered that confinement would have defeated the purpose, the eruption being visible only out of doors.
Here the record is kinder to her than she can have expected. English medicine in 1853 could not have identified a new disease if one had been handed to it, because it was looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. Miasma theory held that epidemics rose off rotting matter as bad air; Edwin Chadwick’s working principle was that all smell is disease. William Farr, who had built the country’s whole apparatus for recording what people died of, believed the decisive factor was elevation, and had an inverse correlation between height of ground and mortality to show for it. John Snow had put the water argument in print in 1849 and been ignored for it. When the pump handle finally came off in Broad Street on 8 September 1854 — a full year after the Register closed — the Board of Health still attributed that outbreak to the air. A profession able to stand over 616 dead in one Soho parish and go on blaming the atmosphere would certainly have missed a nationwide rash of round marks. That is the strongest sentence in the correspondent’s case, and she did not write it.
What defeats her is the shape of her own book. A condition with four thousand one hundred and six cases and no deaths leaves no mark whatever on a system built to count the dead by cause. The Compiler has described, accurately, something the registers of 1853 were structurally unable to see — and then offered their silence as her proof. The silence is real. It is also exactly what one would expect from nothing at all.
The Cloth That Did Kill
This is the movement the Bureau would rather not write, because the Compiler is standing very close to something true and facing the wrong way. Victorian clothing did make people ill. It did so in 1853, and in every year on either side of it, and the mechanism was chemical rather than sartorial.
Scheele’s green is copper arsenite, made in 1775 and taken up by the nineteenth century with enormous enthusiasm. It went into wallpapers, dress fabrics, bookbindings, paints, wax candles, children’s toys, and the artificial leaves and wreaths that finished a headdress. Matilda Scheurer, an artificial-flower maker of nineteen, died of it in 1861; she had spent her working life fluffing the powder onto fabric foliage, and by the end her eyes and her fingernails had gone the colour of the pigment. Contemporary accounts describe children wasting in green rooms and women fainting in green gowns. The crinoline the Register’s plates admire so much was flammable as well as fashionable: Florence Nightingale put the toll for 1863 and 1864 at not less than 630 women burned to death in their own clothes.
The Register notes with satisfaction that the dots spread from cloth to wallpaper and thence to tableware. They did. So did the arsenic, by the same route and in the same years, and it killed the women who made the goods far more reliably than the women who bought them. The Compiler’s epidemic asks the Bureau to accept that the most dangerous thing about a Victorian dress in 1853 was its pattern. The pattern was the only part of it that was harmless.
What a Mania Leaves in the Archive
The Register’s closing pages abandon medicine for philosophy. The Compiler proposes that the spots were a release from the severity of the age, a private mutiny conducted in cotton, and that their sudden retreat in November proves the pressure behind them had been relieved. She calls it a mania, and asks the Bureau to look at the manias.
The Bureau has looked, and offers her the best of them in good faith, because it is the one case in the record where her two readings are the same event. In the Dutch tulip trade the flamed and feathered petals that made a bulb precious — a Semper Augustus at something like ten thousand guilders, against a skilled artisan’s three hundred a year — were the work of the tulip breaking virus, which splits one petal colour into two and quietly ruins the plant while it does it. The most expensive pattern in European history was a symptom. Nobody in Haarlem knew that, and it is not clear it would have altered a single contract if they had.
The rest of the tulip story is less obliging. Prices broke in February 1637, apparently beginning around the third of the month, and the ruin everybody can describe — servants beggared, a nation deranged, fortunes gone in an afternoon — comes largely from a book Charles Mackay published in 1841, twelve years before the Compiler opened her ledger. The archival work since has found the trade confined to a fairly small group of merchants and craftsmen, with fewer than half a dozen prominent dealers in any real difficulty. Manias are considerably easier to write than to find in a record office. In that respect the Spotted Register stands squarely in the tradition.
What the Bureau Is Able to Certify
The Bureau is able to certify that the polka was a real craze with real dates, that the polka dot was a real pattern under that name by 1851, that the machine which printed it was real and prodigiously fast, that Europe read dots as an image of disease for centuries before Victoria, and that Victorian dress killed a documented number of the women who made it. It is not able to certify that anyone in 1853 caught anything.
We wrote to Islington once more and asked for a single line in a physician’s hand: a name, a parish, a date, a diagnosis. The reply came by return of post. No physician was ever called, the Compiler writes, because no one was ever ill enough to warrant calling one, and she puts this forward as the most remarkable feature of the epidemic and the reason she began the Register in the first place. She adds, without appearing to notice, that the eruption cleared in every recorded case on removal of the garment.
The file remains open.
