Simon Garfield is the author of eighteen acclaimed books of non-fiction including Timekeepers, A Notable Woman (as editor), To the Letter, On the Map and Just My Type. His study of AIDS in Britain, The End of Innocence, won the Somerset Maugham Award. simongarfield.com
Praise for Simon Garfield
‘A one-man Blue Peter team for intelligent adults, a great British explainer’ Observer
‘Witty, erudite and entertaining’
Esquire
‘Garfield has a talent for being sparked to life by esoteric enthusiasm and charming readers with his delight’
The Times
‘A sort of museum between hard covers . . .
as good as pop history gets’
Sunday Express
‘Simon Garfield has made his name as an author who can spin fascinating narratives out of subjects that seem, on the face of it, narrow to the point of being dull’
Financial Times
‘With a magpie’s appetite for glittering trivia, Garfield is as eager to amuse as to inform, and achieves both’
Telegraph
Also by Simon Garfield
Expensive Habits
The End of Innocence
The Wrestling
The Nation’s Favourite
The Last Journey of William Huskisson
Our Hidden Lives (ed.)
We Are at War (ed.)
Private Battles (ed.)
The Error World
Mini
Exposure
Just My Type
On the Map
To the Letter
My Dear Bessie (ed.)
A Notable Woman (ed.)
Timekeepers
This edition published in Great Britain and Canada in 2018
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Distributed in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Faber & Faber Ltd, London
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Simon Garfield, 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 278 2
eISBN 978 1 78689 279 9
Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh
Contents
List of Illustrations
PLATE 1
William Perkin in 1852 (Science Photo Library)
August Wilhelm von Hofmann (1818–92), engraving by C. Cook (Sheila Terry/Science Photo Library)
William Henry Perkin and his wife, Jemima Harriott, in 1860 (Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library)
PLATE 2
Print from recipe book of Roberts, Dale & Co., Cornbrook Chemical Works, 1862 (Museum of Science and Industry/ Science & Society Picture Library)
Perkin’s original bottle of mauveine dye (Science Museum/ Science & Society Picture Library)
PLATE 3
Silk dress, c. 1862, dyed with Perkin’s original mauve aniline dye (Science Museum/Science