More Precious Than Gold

 

As a creature of the Seventies’, I have always had a thing for the colour purple. Even in the middle of the finest summer, I loved getting out of toxic sunlight and into the dark heart of a boutique, pulsating strobe lighting and rock music by turns, and finding that perfect purple handbag, preferably made of suede and alive with fringing. Or a jacket of aubergine wet-look plastic. Or a pair of purple wedgies to match either accessory – ah! What’s not to love? In the longer term, it came as a surprise to learn that purple dye, as we know it, came not from the imagination of a hyper-aware hippy, but from the laboratory of one William Henry Perkin. In the mid-nineteenth century, he was trying to synthesize the malaria drug, quinine, normally extractable from the bark of the exotic cinchona tree, in a glass flask. But the experiment failed and the only result was a black solid. Perkin tried to clean out his flask with alcohol, and it was the resulting solution that gave the world mauveine, or synthetic mauve. With it, a whole new Victorian cult of purple was born. The fashion for purple has waxed and waned ever since. It became very  popular in the 1970s, being regarded by the 'new agers' of the time because of its associations with higher consciousness. 

Throughout the ages, purple has always been a special colour, associated with magic, mystery and royalty. In antiquity, writers like Democritus (c. 460 - 370 BC) believed that the colour resulted from the harmony of the four elements the ancients believed the world was made from; earth, air, fire and water. By Roman times, the wearing of purple had become a royal prerogative, a colour reserved for the highest officers in the state in the form of a purple and gold robe. By the time of Diocletian (244 - 311 AD), it had come to be exclusively associated with the Emperor. For anyone else to wear it was tantamount to treason. Until the Middle Ages, purple had connotations of magic. In William Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon describes the flower as 'purple with love's wound'. One reason for the cult of purple may have been the expense involved in its manufacture.

Tyrian purple had been manufactured from the shells of sea-molluscs by the Phonecians, from about 1500 to 300 BC. For many centuries, the closest the common people got to the wearing of purple was from a blue dye, approximating to indigo, obtained from the woad plant. But unlike magnificent Tyrian purple, it faded easily. Modern optical physics was born in 1704 when Sir Isaac Newton published his book, Opticks. As early as 1665, Newton had 'bent' light rays from the sun by passing them through a glass prism, and producing the spectrum of colours that we call the rainbow; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. At one end of the spectrum  violet light waves approximate to 400 nanometres in length. At the other end, red light waves approximate to 760 nanometres, with the remaining colours in between. Violet waves are shorter and high-frequency, while red waves are longer and low-frequency. What we call ultra-violet is a wave higher in frequency than the violet we can see, and therefore not visible to our eyes. It is this high-frequency quality at the violet end of the spectrum that gives us the abundance of 'blues' in nature - and turquoise, ultramarine, mauve, mulberry - in contrast to relatively few reds and yellows.

Until William Henry Perkin's time, other purple dyes had been available but these were unstable and unsuited to mass manufacture. Following Perkin's discovery, the Victorians went purple crazy. In Bleak House by Charles Dickens, Mr Guppy wears a pair of mauve kid gloves as he proposes to Esther Summerson. Today, I am in possession of purple sheets, towels, blouses, t-shirts, skirts, undies and yes, a purple handbag. Wherever and whatever, long may purple last.