“For Orton, it brought to mind an unsettling theory that had been doing the rounds in certain medical circles for years: that wallpaper could kill.” This theory held that, even though nobody was eating the paper (and people did know arsenic was deadly if eaten), it could cause people to get sick and die. The one thing he worried about: the Turners' bedroom had green wallpaper, she writes. He found nothing wrong with the water supply or the home’s cleanliness. In desperation, one of the things he started to do was make notes about their home and its contents. One prominent doctor named Thomas Orton nursed a family through a mysterious sickness that ultimately killed all four of their children.

“Before the craze for these colors had even reached Britain, the dangers associated with arsenical paints had been acknowledged in Europe, but these findings were largely ignored by British manufacturers,” she writes. Copper arsenite, of course, contains the element arsenic. After a Swedish chemist named Carl Sheele used copper arsenite to create a bright green, “Scheele’s Green” became the in color, particularly popular with the Pre-Raphaelite movement of artists and with home decorators catering to everyone from the emerging middle class upwards. The root of the problem was the color green, writes art historian and Victorianist Lucinda Hawksley for The Telegraph. But the vivid floral wallpapers were at the center of a consumer controversy about what made something safe to have in your home. Arsenic was everywhere in the Victorian period, from food coloring to baby carriages. In one sense, it wasn’t that unusual, writes Haniya Rae for The Atlantic. Those looks might strike you dead, but in the Victorian period, wallpaper could–and did–kill. Victorian wallpaper, much like many of this year’s runway styles, was brightly colored and often full of floral designs.

2017 desktop wallpaper victorian