Dyed And Gone To Heaven Essay, Research Paper
Dyed and gone to heaven Mauve Simon Garfield Faber £6.99, p224 As pigments go, mauve has a rather seedy reputation. It is the colour of socks worn by effeminate cads, of suits favoured by jumped-up spivs, of flowery dresses loved by lumpy barmaids. Even disreputable, libidinous old Uncle Monty, in Withnail and I, dismisses Richard E. Grant’s character with: ‘He’s so mauve.’ Yet, as Garfield reveals in this intriguing, elegant little biography of the world’s first factory-made pigment, mauve was once the acme of high fashion. Created from coal-tar by-products by William Perkin in 1856, it was adopted by Queen Victoria for her couture and was the vogue colour for ladies’ dresses for a decade. Mauve made a fortune for Perkin who abandoned an academic career to develop his revolutionary dye-works system, the first time using chemicals, not plants or herbs, to colour wool and silk. In doing so, Perkin helped create the modern chemical industry. As Punch wrote: ‘You can make anything from salve to a star, If only you know how, from black coal tar.’ Within decades, Britain had lost control of its chemical manufacturing prowess – mainly to Germany – for reasons that sound depressingly familiar. While we had individual geniuses, we lacked patience and self-belief. ‘We do not organise, hate abstract ideas, and put difficulties rather than encouragement in the path of the discoverer,’ admitted War Secretary Richard Haldane in a 1906 speech to mark the jubilee of Perkin’s breakthrough. Tragically, most of the rest of UK science and technology suffered, a similar sad fate in the twentieth century. Even Perkin’s grave was ignored, and eventually lost until research, instigated by Garfield during the preparations for his book helped uncover the last resting place (in Roxeth Hill, north London) of the man who gave us mauve.