Attack of the killer wallpaper

In Victorian Britain, vividly coloured wallpaper was the height of fashion – and the cause of countless deaths. Lucinda Hawksley reports

On Thursday, April 3 1862, Dr Thomas Orton was summoned to Limehouse, east London. The patient was a gravely ill threeyear-old named Ann Amelia Turner and her parents were desperate: over the previous six weeks, Richard Turner, a bricklayer, and his wife had lost all three of their other children to a mysterious illness, and they feared Ann Amelia would be next.

When the first of their children had fallen ill in the February, the local surgeon had diagnosed diphtheria, a contagious disease all too common in 19th-century London. Within a few days, a second child was dead, closely followed by a third: again, in both cases, diphtheria was blamed. When Ann Amelia started to display the same symptoms as her siblings, someone summoned Dr Orton, one of Victorian London’s most senior physicians.

According to his own notes, on arrival at the Turner house Orton had found Ann Amelia “suffering from extreme prostration”, racked with pain and unable to swallow – symptoms consistent with diphtheria. Yet, despite increasing panic among their neighbours, living cheek-by-jowl in a typical East End terrace, none of them had contracted the disease. Nor had the other Turner children responded to traditional diphteria treatments. This just didn’t make sense: Orton felt increasingly certain that the original diagnosis was wrong. Before he left Limehouse, he did what he could to make Ann Amelia comfortable, and began making notes about the family’s living conditions. These, he would later refer to in court.

He noted that the Turners’ home was cramped but clean and otherwise in “capital condition, well drained and ventilated”. He examined the neighbourhood’s sanitation and water supply but found nothing he considered injurious to health. The one feature of the house that