Maeve and Maude are sitting mellowly in Malvern drinking gin and tonic and eating marshmallows on Melba toast. They are, perhaps, not in the pink of their lives, but they are at least in the mauve. Or the mauve is in them.
It’s not that the marshmallows are mauve – though that may depend on how you look at them. No, it’s that the gin in their G&Ts is Empress 1908 gin, which, though naturally indigo in colour, when mixed with tonic water – shifting the pH – turns a fetching shade of mauve. Which is perfectly fitting.
I’ll explain. Tonic water, as you may know, contains quinine, which is useful in treating malaria. Quinine comes from a South American plant, cinchona. During the 1800s, when the British Empire was putting a lot of people in tropical places such as India, there was considerable demand for it, and people were looking for ways to make a lot more of it for a lot less money. The chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann, who was in London in the 1850s, thought he might be able to synthesize it from coal tar. This turns out not to be possible, but in 1856, one of his students, the 18-year-old William Henry Perkin, while trying to do so in his home laboratory, found he had created – among other things – a dark residue that, when he tried to clean it off using alcohol, left his cleaning rag permanently stained a rather lovely shade of purple.
Young Perkin immediately went into the dye business.
You see, up to that point, all dyes needed to be made from natural sources, and in particular, the purple dyes needed to be made from shellfish or from bird poo – and the shellfish kind was rare and extremely expensive, while the bird-poo kind was, frankly, crappy. The luxury and cost of the shellfish purple, which was classically gotten from traders from Tyre, had led to its association with royalty. So Perkin at first called his product – the world’s first artificial dye (and also the first aniline dye) – Tyrian purple. But by the time he was bringing it to market in 1859, he had renamed it with a French word: mauve. This mauve dye caught on quickly, as purple was suddenly affordable – and also because Queen Victoria wore a mauve gown to the Royal Exhibition in 1862. Its fad faded once it was found that the dye also faded, but mauve never went away; indeed, it had a great resurgence in the 1890s.
And where did this French word mauve come from? From a pretty little purple flower of the family Malvaceæ. This flower, named malva in Latin, had, by the usual weathering and fading of words over time, become mauve in French. And a particular one with white-and-purple flowers, Althæa officinalis, went from Latin bis malva to French guimauve. Does that word guimauve look familiar? If you’re Canadian, it probably does, because you’ll see it on the French side of packages of a particular foodstuff: marshmallows.
Mallow, like mauve, is descended from Latin malva; it’s the English name for the plant. For the Althæa officinalis, we added marsh because of where they grow. As it happens, marsh-mallows have been eaten and used medicinally for millennia, at least since Ancient Egypt. Among the things made with them was a confection produced by boiling the roots and mixing the result with honey. Over time, the confection added egg whites and replaced the honey with sugar, and eventually – in the 1800s – the marshmallow root was replaced with gelatin… but the confection kept the name. Like many words, it stuck around even after the original connection had moved on.
But things such as dyes and flowers are as often named for what they look like as for what they come from, like the coal tar derivative was named for the flower. Words, too, can look similar without being actually related: neither Maude, nor Maeve, nor Malvern, nor Melba (nor Melbourne, which is the origin of the stage name Melba – Nellie Melba was born in Melbourne, Australia), nor even mellow is related to mauve/mallow/malva.
And when, in 1869, William Henry Perkin named his third son (who would go on to become a noted chemist in his own right) Frederick Mollwo Perkin, he did not name him Mollwo after the flower that named the colour that made both of them rich. No, he just named the boy after his second wife, the boy’s mother, who was born Alexandrina Mollwo – her family name is from Germany; it was adapted in the 1600s from the French name Molveau, which is a variant of Maulveau, a toponym meaning ‘bad valley’. (No word on whether the valley had any guimauves growing in it.)
So, to recap: Perkin tried to make quinine from coal tar; the result had no quinine but had a dye. The dye was named after a plant it wasn’t made from. That plant has also given its name to a confectionary item, which is also no longer made from it. And the confectionary item is not the same colour as the dye. (Well, I guess you could find mauve marshmallows somewhere, or make them if you want.) And Maeve and Maude have purple in them, not from the marshmallows, not from the quinine, but from the gin, which is also not made with mallow (speaking of how things are named, its colour comes from the butterfly peaflower, Clitoria ternatea), and which is only mauve when mixed with the tonic – so once again quinine has led to mauve, in its way.
Sesquiotica 