The Bradford Poisonings - When Sweetness Turned to Death uncovers one of Victorian Britain's most shocking public health tragedies: the 1858 arsenic poisoning that turned an ordinary market evening into a scene of devastation.
On a cold October night in Bradford, families bought sweets from the stall of William "Humbug Billy" Hardaker, unaware that a terrible mistake had transformed a simple treat into something deadly. What followed was panic, grief, and an investigation that exposed the dangerous world of food adulteration, industrial chemicals, and weak regulation in nineteenth-century Britain.
As the death toll rose, Chief Constable James Withers, analytical chemist Felix Marsh Rimmington, and leading medical figures worked to uncover how poison had entered the town's sweets and who should bear responsibility.
Blending historical fact with carefully researched fiction, John Lawless brings Victorian Bradford back to life, from crowded markets and newspaper offices to laboratories, inquests, and courtrooms, exploring not only how people died, but how a tragedy helped change the way Britain thought about public safety.
Atmospheric, forensic, and deeply human, The Bradford Poisonings, When Sweetness Turned to Death is a story of ordinary lives caught in extraordinary circumstances, and of the search for truth in a world where profit, negligence, and trust could prove fatal.
From the author of Stolen Innocents and The Quiet Shepherd.
