I’m not sure I can trust this site to be historically accurate, given http://lateralscience.blogspot.com/2013/02/victorian-product...

The OP article is a historical account from 1897. What you linked to is clearly marked as fiction:

"Victorian Production of One Ounce of Nitrogen Trichloride" is the first chapter of The Ernest Glitch Chronicles. A Novel by Roger Curry

Yeah, there's a few things there that are a bit of a worry, not to mention that element 17 seems overly represented in the wrong places (instead of element 7)!! Bit a nonsense really. Incidentally, in my other post I refer to an organic chemistry book given to me by my father decades ago when I was a teenager. It also had descriptions of the production of fulminates and it described the different sensitivities of the more common Hg and Ag forms. (When one's a budding chemist of about 14, one's chemistry books get well thumbed around such descriptions.) ;-)

The same book covered picric acid in considerable detail. It made a specific point of mentioning that sometime during WWI TNT replaced picric acid in shells for various reasons including safety. Being a reasonably strong phenolic acid, picric acid readily formed metallic picrate salts with shell casings and that these salts are much more unstable than the straight acid.

It seems that even nowadays with the still-regular roundup of WWI munitions on the 'Western Front' (in Belgium, etc.) old corroded picric acid shells are a major ongoing problem (dozens of them still turn up (usually plowed up) every year). If I recall correctly said acid was also largely implicated in the enormous Halifax disaster of 1917.

One final point: when I was a school picric acid was one of the standard reagents in our school chemistry lab. Seems it was no big deal back then, nor was the 'fertilizer' which we used to remove tree stumps.