Perhaps the most curious method of poisoning ever used in fiction is that introduced by the late Mr. James Payn in his novel, "Halves." The poisoner uses finely chopped horse-hair as a medium for getting rid of her niece. In this way she brings on a disease which puzzles the doctor, until one day he comes across the would-be murderess pulling the horse-hair out of the drawing-room sofa, which causes him to suspect her at once. This ingenious lady introduced the chopped horse-hair into the pepper-pot used by her victim. The inimitable Count Fosco, whom Wilkie Collins introduces into "The Woman in White," was supposed to possess a remarkable knowledge of chemistry, although he says, "Only twice did I call science to my aid," in working out his plot to abduct Lady Glyde. His media were simple: "A medicated glass of water and a medicated bottle of smelling-salts relieved her of all further embarrassment and alarm." This genial villain waxes eloquent on the science of chemistry in his confession. "Chemistry!" he exclaims, "has always had irresistible attractions for me from the enormous, the illimitable power which the knowledge of it confers. Chemists—I assert it emphatically—might sway, if they pleased, the destinies of humanity. Mind, they say, rules the world. But what rules the mind? The body (follow me closely here) lies at the mercy of the most omnipotent of all potentates—the chemist. Give me—Fosco—chemistry; and when Shakespeare has conceived Hamlet, and sits down to execute the conception—with a few grains of powder dropped into his daily food, I will reduce his mind, by the action of his body, till his pen pours out the most abject drivel that has ever degraded paper. Under similar circumstances revive me the illustrious Newton. I guarantee that when he sees the apple fall he shall eat it, instead of discovering the principle of gravitation. Nero's dinner shall transform Nero into the mildest of men before he has done digesting it, and the morning draught of Alexander the Great shall make Alexander run for his life at the first sight of the enemy the same afternoon. On my sacred word of honour it is lucky for Society that modern chemists are, by incomprehensible good fortune, the most harmless of mankind. The mass are worthy fathers of families, who keep shops. The few are philosophers besotted with admiration for the sound of their own lecturing voices, visionaries who waste their lives on fantastic impossibilities, or quacks whose ambition soars no higher than our corns."
In "Armadale," the same novelist introduces us to a poisoner of the deepest dye in the person of Miss Gwilt. This fair damsel, whose auburn locks seemed to have possessed an irresistible attraction for the opposite sex, was addicted to taking laudanum to soothe her troubled nerves, and first tried to mix a dose with some lemonade she had prepared for her husband's namesake and friend, whom she wished out of the way. This attempt failing, and a second one, to scuttle a yacht in which he was sailing, proving futile also, he was finally lured to a sanatorium in London, where she had arranged for him to be placed to sleep in a room into which a poisonous gas (presumably carbonic acid) was to be passed. At the last moment she discovers her husband has taken the place of her victim, and in a revulsion of feeling she rescues him, and ends her own life instead in the poisoned chamber. According to the story, the medical investigation which followed this tragedy ended in discovering that she had died of apoplexy; a fact which had it occurred in real life would not have redounded to the credit of the medical men who conducted it.
The heroine of Mr. Benson's novel, "The Rubicon," poisons herself with prussic acid of unheard of strength, which she discovers among some photographic chemicals.
On the stage, "poisoning" has gone somewhat out of fashion with modern dramatists, although it was a common thing in years gone by for the villain of the play to swallow a cup of cold poison in the last act, and after several dying speeches to fall suddenly flat on his back and die to slow music. The death of Cleopatra, described by Shakespeare as resulting from the bite of a venomous snake, is like no clinical description of the final effects of death from the bite of any known snake. Beverley, in "The Gamester," takes a dose of strong poison in the fifth act, and afterwards makes several fairly long speeches before he apparently feels the effects, and finally succumbs. The description of the death of Juliet, which Shakespeare, in all probability, conceived from reading the effects that followed the drinking of morion or mandragora wine, is an accurate description of death from that drug. The use of this anodyne preparation to deaden pain dates from ancient times, and it is stated it was a common practice for women to administer it to those about to suffer the penalty of the law by being crucified. We have another instance of the fabulous effects ascribed to poisons by the early playwrights, in Massinger's play, "The Duke of Milan." Francisco dusts over a plant some poisonous powder and hands it to Eugenia. Ludovico approaches, and kisses the lady's hand but twice, and then dies from the effects of the poison.
Miss Helen Mathers, in one of her recent works, viz., "The Sin of Hagar," a story warranted to thrill the soul of "Sweet Seventeen," makes some extraordinary discoveries which will be new to chemists. For instance, she tells us of strychnine that actually discolours a glass of whisky and water. One of the characters, a frisky old dowager, professes to be an amateur chemist, and this lady, we are gravely informed by the novelist, "detects the presence of the strychnine in the glass of whisky and water at a glance."
But Miss Mathers has still another poison, whose properties will doubtless be a revelation to scientists, and it is with this marvellous body the "double-dyed villainess" of the story puts an end to her woes. For convenience she carries it about with her concealed in a ring, and when at last she decides on committing suicide, we are told "she simply placed the ring to her lips, a strange odour spread through the room, and she instantly lay dead."
Sufficient eccentricities of this kind in fiction might be enumerated to fill a volume, but we must forbear. It is perhaps hardly necessary to state that the lady novelist is the greatest sinner in this respect, and stranger poisons are evolved from her fertile brain than were ever known to man.