---
title: "Arsenic Green: Did Victorian Dresses Really Kill?"
description: "Arsenic green killed flower makers and sickened some wearers, but the idea that one waltz could poison a room is a Punch-era exaggeration."
type: Story
url: https://teazle.art/stories/arsenic-green-victorian-dress-poison
published: 2026-10-16
updated: 2026-10-16
author: "The Teazle editors"
image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/0c3274d643edd90289f97d4cd560cf284fc9a3e8-2000x1586.jpg?w=1600&fit=max&q=78&auto=format
image_license: PD
---

# Arsenic Green: Did Victorian Dresses Really Kill?

*A vivid copper-and-arsenic pigment colored Victorian wreaths, wallpaper and ball gowns. The clearest victims were the workers who made them; wearers got eye, throat and skin trouble, not mass poisoning. What the period sources show, and where to see color at Vienna's Wien Museum until March 2027.*

![A wood-engraved cartoon of two skeletons at a ball. A bowing skeleton in evening dress, with a long tailcoat and thin legs, invites a skeleton woman in a wide crinoline skirt trimmed with leaves and a wreath of leaves on her skull; small skulls and crossbones decorate the hem. The caption reads The Arsenic Waltz, The new Dance of Death (Dedicated to the Green Wreath and Dress-Mongers).](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/0c3274d643edd90289f97d4cd560cf284fc9a3e8-2000x1586.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*The Arsenic Waltz. The new Dance of Death, Punch, or the London Charivari, 8 February 1862, p. 54. Wood engraving. Wellcome Collection, 36772i. Wellcome Collection. PD*

Some Victorian green dresses and wreaths really did carry poison, and a few wearers fell ill. The people most clearly harmed, though, were the young workers who made artificial leaves and flowers. The famous warning, that one ball dress could kill the admirers of half a dozen ballrooms, was a journalist's flourish, and the record supports a smaller, more local kind of harm.

## What was arsenic green?

Arsenic green is a family of bright copper-and-arsenic pigments. [Scheele's green](https://teazle.art/glossary/scheeles-green.md) is copper arsenite. Schweinfurt green, which came later and is also called Paris green or emerald green, is a copper acetoarsenite. Both were used on wallpaper, paint, toys, cloth and the powder dusted onto artificial leaves, and period writers often blurred the two together.

The dates are less tidy than the usual retelling. Wikipedia and the Paris Review give 1775 for the invention of Scheele's green by the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele; Wikipedia adds that he published his method in 1778, which is the date the Victoria and Albert Museum uses for the discovery. The improved green is usually credited to the Schweinfurt makers Wilhelm Sattler and Friedrich Russ, who began commercial production in 1814. Its recipe was published by Justus von Liebig and André Braconnot, in 1822 or 1823 depending on the reference. The V&A calls the later green "more durable", and Wikipedia says it was meant to darken less around sulfides than Scheele's.

## Where did the green end up?

On far more than ball gowns. The Paris Review lists dresses, waistcoats, shoes, gloves and trousers among the things Scheele's green colored, along with wallpaper and artificial foliage. The V&A adds paints, wine-bottle stoppers, sweets and children's toys.

In dress it appeared in two forms: the color of the cloth, and the leaves on the flowers that women pinned to their hair and skirts. The cloth most often named in later complaints is green [tarlatan](https://teazle.art/glossary/tarlatan.md), a sheer cotton fabric in open plain weave, usually heavily sized for stiffness (Merriam-Webster), used for ball gowns and close in spirit to [tulle](https://teazle.art/glossary/tulle.md). An article on arsenic as a domestic poison in the Massachusetts State Board of Health's supplement to its report for 1883 said the arsenical pigment was "so loosely applied to the cloth" that a portion of it easily separated upon the slightest motion. A report of 1878 adds a twist: it found the green on some tarlatan was held more firmly by gum arabic and starch. How much came off depended on the cloth and the maker.

![A watercolor fashion illustration of two women and a small boy standing in a leafy garden. One woman wears a long gray gown trimmed with violet bows and a violet bonnet and carries a posy; the other wears a white gown with turquoise trim and a straw hat with flowers; the boy wears an orange jacket and a plaid skirt.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/957bfeb2bafbb82eb51a5f89e14b4c6cc40037af-2954x3673.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Hélöise Leloir, Illustration for a French fashion magazine, ca. 1862. Watercolor. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 53.664.31. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0*

The fashion for green was also a fashion for foliage. Wreaths, sprays and trimmings of artificial flowers were worn in the hair, on bonnets and on skirts in the 1850s and 1860s. A lithographic stone of 1853 by Paul Gavarni in the Metropolitan Museum's collection carries a caption the museum translates as "We're wearing lots of flowers this spring, especially on hats." The Met's hat of about 1868 is crowned with artificial blossoms and leaves. Nothing in the museum's records says how those leaves were colored, so they illustrate the trade rather than prove the poison.

![A lithographic stone, photographed with its reversed drawing facing up: a young woman in a dark shawl carries a pot of flowers on her head and a bunch of flowers in the crook of her arm, with a second figure and a hat of flowers sketched behind her. French lettering runs beneath the image.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/51355b1413f96341281caebf6c696b0f656e382c-3443x4000.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Paul Gavarni, "We're wearing lots of flowers this spring, especially on hats," plate IX from The English At Home, from Masks and Faces, 1853. Lithographic stone. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018.48. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0*

![A small hat on a white mannequin head, covered with a crown of pink and cream artificial blossoms and green leaves, with long dark ribbons trailing down on either side.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/6c777ebadc0096dfd2851c4fe9e7a8873401b546-533x657.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Hat, American, ca. 1868. Straw, silk, cotton. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, C.I.66.52. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0*

## Who actually died?

The documented victims were workers. The best-known case is Matilda Scheurer, a 19-year-old artificial-flower maker in London who, according to the historian Alison Matthews David and the Paris Review, died on 20 November 1861. The Northampton Mercury of 30 November 1861, reprinted on a modern blog, reported the inquest, which was held by a Mr. Brent. Her mother told the court she had been vomiting a greenish matter. A surgeon, James Thomas Paul, said he had treated her four times in 18 months for the same cause, and that at post-mortem the lungs showed arsenite of copper and the liver was "highly impregnated." A sister, the report said, had died under similar circumstances.

Her employer testified that he had 98 girls at work in his warehouse. He had suggested masks, which the girls refused because they were hot, so they wore muslin over their mouths. A juror said the use of arsenite of copper in such manufactures was prohibited in France. The jury found she died accidentally from the effects of arsenite of copper used in her employment.

*Punch* was unimpressed by the verdict. In "Pretty Poison-Wreaths," in its issue of 7 December 1861, it wrote that the jury had blamed "arsenite of copper used in her employment," and that "death is evidently about as accidental as it is when resulting from a railway collision occasioned by arrangements known to be faulty." Matthews David adds that the press described the death in grisly detail, including green vomit and her telling her doctor that everything she looked at was green; the inquest report quoted here mentions only a greenish vomit.

The wider evidence comes from physicians. A report of the Medical Officer to the Privy Council for 1862, quoted in Henry Carr's book *Our Domestic Poisons*, describes Dr. Guy examining about a hundred young women who made artificial leaves. Skin disease hardly any of them escaped, he found, and of twenty-five examined nearly all showed signs of chronic arsenical poisoning: thirst, nausea, vomiting, weakness, fever and headache. Matthews David's argument, as summarized in popular coverage, is that arsenic fashions, like the mercury of hatmaking, were most dangerous to the people who manufactured them.

## How did a dress become a headline?

Through a chain of events in early 1862. After Scheurer's death, the Ladies' Sanitary Association asked the chemist A. W. Hofmann to analyze artificial leaves from a ladies' headdress. He published his findings in *The Times* on 1 February 1862 under the title "The Dance of Death," reporting that green dresses, wreaths and artificial flowers colored with copper arsenite or acetoarsenite were toxic. A reprint in the *Chicago Medical Examiner* of September 1862 gives his analysis: about ten grains of white arsenic in a dozen leaves, and, since a ball wreath contained roughly fifty leaves, more than forty grains in a lady's hair, "sufficient to poison twenty persons" if taken in appropriate doses.

A week later, on 8 February 1862, *Punch* printed "The Arsenic Waltz" on page 54: a skeleton in evening dress bowing to a skeleton in a crinoline and leaf wreath, lettered "The new Dance of Death" and "dedicated to the green wreath and dress-mongers." The Wellcome Collection, which holds the print, describes it as a wood engraving and notes a tentative attribution to John Leech; the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical index lists it as anonymous. On 15 November 1862 (page 197) *Punch* ran an essay called "Poisoners and Polkas." If ladies persisted in wearing arsenic dresses, it argued, a ball would become as deadly as a cannon ball, and that a dress "may prove as deadly as the shirt of Nessus."

| Date | Event | Source |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1775 / 1778 | Scheele's green invented / method published | Wikipedia (locating references), V&A, Paris Review |
| 1814 | Schweinfurt green produced commercially | WebExhibits, Wikipedia, V&A |
| 1822 or 1823 | Liebig publishes a recipe | Wikipedia (1822), WebExhibits (1823) |
| 20 Nov 1861 | Matilda Scheurer dies in London | Paris Review, Matthews David; inquest in Northampton Mercury, 30 Nov |
| 7 Dec 1861 | Punch, "Pretty Poison-Wreaths" | Punch 41, p. 233 (archive.org scan) |
| 1 Feb 1862 | Hofmann, "The Dance of Death," The Times | Wellcome record; UAL caption |
| 8 Feb 1862 | Punch prints "The Arsenic Waltz" | Wellcome record; Punch 42 index, p. 54 |
| Sept 1862 | Hofmann's leaf analysis reprinted | Chicago Medical Examiner 3 (9): 537 |
| 15 Nov 1862 | Punch, "Poisoners and Polkas" | Punch 43, p. 197 (archive.org scan) |
| 1 May 1882 | German ordinance on poisonous colors, in force 1 Apr 1883 | Reichsgesetzblatt 1882, no. 11 |
| 1883 | Massachusetts board's report supplement: green tarlatan dresses now "very rare" | Fifth Annual Report, Supplement (archive.org) |

## Could one ball gown really poison a room?

No, and nothing in the surviving record says one did. The line is a satirist's exaggeration built on a real mechanism: a loose powder on a light, open fabric, shaken free by dancing. Matthews David quotes the *British Medical Journal* a week after Hofmann's letter: a green-clad woman "carries in her skirts poison enough to slay the whole of the admirers she may meet with in half a dozen ball-rooms." She also reports that Hofmann found green tarlatan carried as much as half its weight in arsenic, and that a Berlin doctor judged that no less than 60 grains powdered off from a dress of this kind in a single evening. The Massachusetts supplement gives Hofmann's estimate as twenty or thirty grains of pigment per hour from a dress worn in a ballroom. The legend then grows with the telling: a University of Virginia article repeats a report that one woman's gown could poison people in seven ballrooms.

An 1878 item in the *Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal*, relaying a British Medical Journal report on analyses by Professor A. P. Kerley, found large amounts of aceto-arsenite of copper in all six samples of green tarlatan tested, with more arsenic in the dearer cloths. That shows what the cloth could hold, not what a wearer absorbed.

What the physicians did record were smaller harms. The Massachusetts supplement describes a blue-striped dress that caused conjunctivitis, nasal catarrh and a sore throat, and, citing *The Lancet* of 22 May 1880, a dark-green dress trimmed with light-green leaves, bought from a well-known Parisian atelier, that caused a pustular rash on the neck and arms; the dress was found to contain "a large percentage of arsenic." Henry Carr's book prints a case from Dr. Arthur Gamgee, who traced an outbreak of conjunctivitis and tonsillitis among ballet girls at the Alhambra to their gossamer green tarlatan dresses, which were found "loaded with arsenic"; the costumes were changed and the girls recovered. Carr also reproduces a doctor's account of a pair of "bronze green" silk gloves that left a woman's hands swollen for weeks. Matthews David adds a lady who bought green gloves in 1871 and suffered repeated ulcers at the fingernails until arsenic salts were found. The Massachusetts supplement mentions one child, unnamed, who died after wearing stockings colored with an arsenical pigment.

The cautious reading, then, is that arsenic greens could shed, that wearers could suffer eye, throat and skin trouble, and that the dose in any single dress is not something the surviving sources let anyone calculate. Dismissing the danger because the famous number is a joke would be as careless as repeating it.

![A full-skirted evening dress on a mannequin: cream silk woven with small floral sprigs in a plaid of blue stripes, an off-the-shoulder V-shaped cape collar edged with blue ruching and gold fringe, and a very wide bell-shaped skirt.](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/jvxyxtrt/production/6c3a3d944c016d0c95b32f598960a4f1a88e91d5-2921x4000.jpg?w=1280&fit=max&q=78&auto=format)
*Evening dress, American, 1857–60. Silk. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009.300.953a, b. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0*

## Do surviving green dresses still contain arsenic?

Some do, some do not. Ingrid Mida of the Fashion Research Collection at Toronto Metropolitan University recognized the color of a silk dress of about the 1860s with braid and fringe, and she and Matthews David tested it in the university's physics lab on 5 September 2014. It did contain arsenic. It was later shown at the Bata Shoe Museum in the exhibition *Fashion Victims*.

Others tested clean. The University of Virginia's Historic Clothing Collection checked a pair of mid-nineteenth-century bodices that are "arsenic green" and found no arsenic in them. The Houston Museum of Natural Science tested a Victorian dress it dated tentatively to the 1870s and got a negative, but the curators said the sample, taken from inside a seam, had been soaked only a few minutes, and that a 24-hour soak might change the result.

The mismatch is itself informative. Color alone does not prove arsenic, and a pigment that sheds easily may have shed over a century and a half of handling, cleaning and storage. A negative result on one garment says little about the trade. A positive one shows that the pigment was used on cloth someone wore.

The Met's costume records do not settle the question either. The entry for the American evening dress of 1857 to 1860 shown here gives its date, culture and fabric, not its dye chemistry, and none of the objects pictured in this story has been shown to contain arsenic.

## How did arsenic green go out of fashion?

Through law abroad, pressure at home, and a change of taste. Matthews David writes that the French and German governments passed legislation against these pigments and that the British government took no action. Britain had regulated the sale of arsenic since its Arsenic Act of 1851, but, she writes, large-scale industrial use stayed unregulated. A juror at the Scheurer inquest said France already prohibited arsenite of copper in such manufacturing.

Germany's ordinance of 1 May 1882, published in the Reichsgesetzblatt and in force from 1 April 1883, is explicit. Its fourth paragraph forbids arsenic-based colors for wallpaper and also forbids copper colors made with arsenic, and fabrics containing them, in the making of clothing. A fashion-law commentator states that Britain never passed a statute prohibiting arsenical dyes in clothing and that the color faded through press coverage, medical writing and consumer pressure. That is one commentator's account, but it fits Matthews David's.

Shoppers were also given a way to check. The V&A's conservation blog, citing James Whorton's *The Arsenic Century*, describes a test published in *The Times*: ladies were advised to carry a phial of ammonia "instead of the usual scent bottle," because a drop on an arsenic green would turn blue, the sign of copper. By the 1883 report the Massachusetts board could call green tarlatan dresses "very rare." There is no single date on which arsenic green ended in dress; it left the ballroom as warnings accumulated, makers advertised freedom from arsenic, and fashion moved on.

## What do the sources not show?

Three things. They do not show how much arsenic any wearer absorbed from a single dress; the figures quoted above are estimates of what could shed, not measurements of what was taken in. They record no named wearer who died of a dress, only local illnesses and, in the Massachusetts supplement, an unnamed child and stockings. And Hofmann's letter in *The Times* is known here through the Wellcome Collection record, a university caption and a reprint of his analysis, not from the newspaper itself.

That is a good reason to keep two ideas apart: the documented, severe harm to workers, and the less severe, less quantified harm to wearers. The satirists of 1862 merged them because a ballroom made a better picture than a workshop.

## Where can you see it?

The Wien Museum in Vienna is showing *True Colors: Viennese Fashion across Four Centuries* (in German, *Farbenspiel*) from 1 October 2026 to 28 March 2027. The museum's listing describes about 350 garments from its fashion collection, tracing color from the tightly regulated eighteenth century to the present, and press coverage names the curator as Michaela Lindinger. Nothing in those listings says the show deals with arsenic, so go for the color, not for the poison.

For the look of 1860s dress, the Metropolitan Museum's open-access collection includes the watercolor fashion illustration by Hélöise Leloir (ca. 1862), the evening dress of 1857 to 1860 and the hat with artificial blossoms shown in this story. The Wellcome Collection holds the *Punch* print of 8 February 1862. For the history of how fashion made its victims, Alison Matthews David's *Fashion Victims* and James Whorton's *The Arsenic Century* are the two books to start with.

For other stories on how color and cloth shaped bodies and trades, read [Black, and Not Just Black: Victorian Mourning Dress](/techniques/victorian-mourning-dress-crape-and-stages), which includes the period's complaints about poisonous dyes in crape, and [Printed Cloth, Block to Screen](/techniques/printed-cloth-block-plate-roller-screen) on how color reached the fabric. The wide bell skirts in the evening dress shown here were held out by the [crinoline](https://teazle.art/glossary/crinoline.md), and the flowers and wreaths of the period were trimmings for the [milliner](https://teazle.art/glossary/milliner.md) and the [dressmaker](https://teazle.art/glossary/dressmaker.md) alike.


## Sources

1. [The arsenic waltz. The new dance of death (Punch, 8 Feb 1862, p. 54), wood engraving, ref. 36772i](https://wellcomecollection.org/works/awbr7whm). Wellcome Collection
2. [Illustration for a French fashion magazine, ca. 1862, Helöise Leloir (53.664.31)](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/386313). The Metropolitan Museum of Art
3. [We're wearing lots of flowers this spring, especially on hats, Paul Gavarni, 1853 (2018.48)](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/769241). The Metropolitan Museum of Art
4. [Evening dress, American, 1857-60 (2009.300.953a, b)](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/159541). The Metropolitan Museum of Art
5. [Hat, American, ca. 1868 (C.I.66.52)](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/84572). The Metropolitan Museum of Art
6. [Dangerous Fashionable Folly: Green Artificial Flowers, Chicago Medical Examiner 3(9): 537 (Sept 1862)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9983972/). PubMed Central / Europe PMC
7. [Arsenic in Wall-Papers and Dresses, Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal 17(6): 221-222 (Jan 1878)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9451252/). PubMed Central / Europe PMC
8. [Fifth Annual Report of the State Board of Health, Lunacy, and Charity of Massachusetts (1883), Supplement (published 1884), 'Arsenic as a Domestic Poison', pp. 217-222](https://archive.org/details/fifthannualrepor00mass_2). Internet Archive (State Library of Massachusetts copy)
9. [Our Domestic Poisons; or, the Poisonous Effects of Certain Dyes & Colours, 3rd ed. (1883), Henry Carr](https://archive.org/details/b21523253). Internet Archive (Wellcome Library copy)
10. [Verordnung, betreffend die Verwendung giftiger Farben, 1 May 1882 (Reichsgesetzblatt 1882, no. 11, pp. 55-56)](https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Verordnung,_betreffend_die_Verwendung_giftiger_Farben). Wikisource
11. [Death from artificial flowers (Northampton Mercury, 30 Nov 1861), reprinted](https://www.jack-the-ripper-tour.com/generalnews/poisoned-by-flowers/). Jack the Ripper Tour blog
12. [Pretty Poison-Wreaths, Punch, 7 Dec 1861 (vol. 41, p. 233)](https://archive.org/details/sim_punch_1861_41). Internet Archive (Punch 1861, vol. 41)
13. [Poisoners and Polkas, Punch, 15 Nov 1862 (vol. 43, p. 197)](https://archive.org/details/sim_punch_1862-11-15_43_1114). Internet Archive (Punch 1862-11-15)
14. [The Arsenic Waltz, Punch, 8 Feb 1862 (vol. 42, p. 54)](https://archive.org/details/sim_punch_1862_42). Internet Archive (Punch 1862, vol. 42)
15. [Illustrated captions (note on Hofmann's 'The Dance of Death', The Times, 1 Feb 1862; Punch, 8 Feb 1862, p. 54)](https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/26554/2/Revised%20captions.docx). University of the Arts London research repository
16. [The Arsenic Dress: How Poisonous Green Pigments Terrorized Victorian Fashion (excerpt from Alison Matthews David, Fashion Victims, 2015)](https://jezebel.com/the-arsenic-dress-how-poisonous-green-pigments-terrori-1738374597). Jezebel
17. [Scheele's Green: The Color of Fake Foliage and Death](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/02/scheeles-green-the-color-of-fake-foliage-and-death/). The Paris Review
18. [Scheele's Green](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheele%27s_Green). Wikipedia
19. [Paris green](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_green). Wikipedia
20. [History of Emerald green](https://webexhibits.org/pigments/indiv/history/emerald.html). WebExhibits
21. [This Week's Post: Free From Arsenic](https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/caring-for-our-collections/weeks-post-free-arsenic). Victoria and Albert Museum
22. [Arsenic Green Dress (Ingrid Mida, 24 Nov 2015)](https://www.torontomu.ca/content/dam/fashionresearchcollection/research-articles/Arsenic_Green_Dress.pdf). Toronto Metropolitan University, Fashion Research Collection
23. [Killer outfits: UVA collection spotlights deadly designs through history](https://news.virginia.edu/node/383036). UVA Today
24. [The Deadly Dress Test!](https://blog.hmns.org/2019/07/the-deadly-dress-test). Houston Museum of Natural Science, Beyond Bones blog
25. [Arsenic and Old Lace](https://fashionlawjournal.com/arsenic-and-old-lace/). Fashion Law Journal
26. [Farbenspiel / True Colors: Viennese Fashion across Four Centuries (exhibitions page and event listing)](https://www.wienmuseum.at/ausstellungen). Wien Museum
27. [True Colors. Viennese Fashion across Four Centuries](https://www.wien.info/en/now-on/events/viennese-fashion-across-four-centuries-1135044). Vienna Tourist Board (wien.info)
28. [True Colors at the Wien Museum](https://www.fashion.at/culture/2026/true-colors-wien-museum-fashion-exhibition21-2-2026.htm). Fashion.at
29. The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned at Home, Work, and Play (James C. Whorton)
30. [Arsenic Act 1851 (14 & 15 Vict. c. 13), 'An Act to regulate the Sale of Arsenic'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_Act_1851). Wikipedia
31. [Tarlatan](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tarlatan). Merriam-Webster
32. Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present (Alison Matthews David, Bloomsbury, 2015)

## Glossary

- [Scheele's green](https://teazle.art/glossary/scheeles-green.md): Scheele's green is a bright copper-arsenite pigment, credited to Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1775, used on cloth, wallpaper and artificial leaves.
- [Tarlatan](https://teazle.art/glossary/tarlatan.md): Tarlatan is a sheer, heavily sized cotton fabric in open weave, used for ball gowns and costume; green tarlatan became notorious for shedding arsenic.
- [Tulle](https://teazle.art/glossary/tulle.md): Tulle is a lightweight, very fine net fabric, used for veils, ballet skirts and layered evening dress.
- [Crinoline](https://teazle.art/glossary/crinoline.md): A crinoline is a stiffened petticoat or, from the 1850s, a cage of steel hoops, worn to hold out a woman’s skirt.
- [Milliner](https://teazle.art/glossary/milliner.md): A milliner is a maker of hats; millinery is the craft and trade of making them.
- [Dressmaker](https://teazle.art/glossary/dressmaker.md): A dressmaker is a person who makes clothes, especially women’s dresses, to measure.

Canonical: https://teazle.art/stories/arsenic-green-victorian-dress-poison