Bitten by Witch Fever is a solid book. It promises to explore the history of arsenic and its use in wallpaper pigments, and it delivers. I only wish it was a little more in depth.

Wallpaper designs dominate, with the written sections confined to what are essentially smaller booklets sewn inside the larger book. I appreciate the effort not to let the text get in the way of the visual elements. Each design was not only credited and dated but also had its toxicity ranked (“possible,” “probable,” or “highly likely”), which was neat. I’ve seen other reviewers complaining about the typeface but honestly it doesn’t bother me that much.

As for the content of the text, it’s a fairly brief overview. Hawksley raised some really interesting points like the correlation between the rapid increase in poisonings in the 1830s and 1840s with the growth of the life insurance industry, and the interpretation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper as a tale about gradual arsenic poisoning. William Morris is a fascinating figure – Hawksley does note the contradiction between his socialist views and his capitalist business practices. Still, I found the book a little lacking, as it couldn’t quite commit to being a biography of Morris and his contemporaries, but it couldn’t commit to being a complete history of arsenic either.

I would give Bitten by Witch Fever three and a half stars, but since I bought it for the pictures and not the text I feel it’s harsh to fault it for the writing.