Fume and perfume: Some eighteenth-century uses of smell

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 43, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 444-463

  Brant, Clare ^a  

^a KING'S COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 57849115081     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/421927     Document Type: Review

References (69)

1. Roy Porter, "Foreword," in Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (New York, 1986), p. v
2. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, p. 4
3. Lene Oøstermark-Johansen, "Entry Point," in The Nose Book: Representations of the Nose in Literature and the Arts, ed. Victoria de Rijke, Lene Oøstermark-Johansen, and Helen Thomas (Middlesex, 2000), p. 3
4. Mark Jenner, "Civilization and Deodorization? Smell in Early Modern English Culture," Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas, ed. Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (Oxford, 2001), p. 144
5. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, Calif., 1965), p. 228
6. Annick le Guérer argues that after seventeenth-century intellectual hostility, smell was rehabilitated by eighteenth-century philosophers. Scent: The Mysterious and Essential Powers of Smell, trans. Richard Miller (London, 1993), chap. 5. She discusses Montaigne's interest in smell in chap. 3, passim
7. First published as Les Pouvoirs de L'Odeur (Paris, 1988)
8. Mark Jenner argues for a history of smells within a historical study of hygiene that is culturally wide-ranging. "Early Modern Perceptions of 'Cleanliness' and 'Dirt' as Reflected in the Environmental Regulation of London, c. 1530-c. 1700" (D. Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 1991)
9. Richard Palmer, "In Bad Odour: Smell and Its Significance in Medicine from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century," in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. S. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1993), p. 68
10. Thus Jonathan Reinarz, "Uncommon Smells in Victorian England," (paper presented at the Sense and Scent conference, Birkbeck College, London, March 2001)
11. Hans Rindisbacher, The Smell of Books: A Cultural Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992), pp. 9-10. Rindisbacher notes too that objects of smell have diverse physical and chemical properties, thus inviting classification - although one could argue every sense works on diversity
12. Palmer, "In Bad Odour," p. 66
13. On water and stagnant smells, see Mark Jenner, "From Water Conduit to Commercial Network? Water in London, 1500-1725," in Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (Manchester, 2000), pp. 250-72
14. Le Guérer, Scent, p. 215
15. Sir John Floyer, Pharmako-Basanos; Or, The Touch-stone of Medicine, &c. (London, 1687), p. 56
16. William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1998), p. 2
17. Jenner, "Early Modern Perceptions of 'Cleanliness' and 'Dirt,'" p. 159
18. George Savile, Lord Marquess of Halifax, The Lady's New-Year's-Gift; Or Advice to a Daughter (London, 1700; repr. Stamford, Conn. 1934), p. 71
19. Thomas Tryon, Tryon's Letters, Upon Several Occasions (London, 1700), p. 119
20. See David Bindman, Hogarth (Norwich, 1981), p. 123, for image and discussion
21. Cato, Serious and Cleanly Meditations upon a House of Office, dedicated to the Goldfinders of Great Britain (London, 1732), p. 5
22. For further discussion of the body and politics in relation to John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, see my forthcoming book on eighteenth-century letters; on Cato, see Julie Ellison, Cato 's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago, 1999)
23. Thus in Horace Walpole, The Lessons for the Day (London, 1742)
24. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato's Letters, 4 vols. (London, 1724), 1:123 [mispaginated for 223]
25. Mary Jones, "Elegy, on a favourite DOG, suppos'd to be poison'd," Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (Oxford, 1750), p. 59
26. Tobias Smollett The History and Adventures of an Atom, ed. R. Adams Day (Athens, Ga., and London, 1989), p. 126
27. Compare Mary Leapor, Poems upon Several Occasions (London, 1748)
28. Thus Don Fartinando, Benefit of Farting, title page
29. Jim Dawson, Who Cut the Cheese? A Cultural History of the Fart (Berkeley, 1999), p. 17
30. Jeffrey Broadbottom, Serious and Cleanly Meditations, upon a House-of-Office, reprinted in Don Fartinando The Benefit of Farting, p. 27
31. Broadbottom, Serious and Cleanly Meditations, p. 28. The same collection discusses how people who sit on tombstones absorb unwholesome vapors that make them melancholy and whether the smell of excrement puts people off having sex in bog-houses
32. "Strephon and Chloe" (1734), discussed by Dawson, Who Cut the Cheese, pp. 70-73
33. Originally part of a letter to Richard Pierce in 1783. Franklin's proposals, under the title The Letter to the Royal Academy, are reprinted in full in Dawson, Who Cut the Cheese, pp. 76-79
34. See Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1985)
35. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1998)
36. Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998)
37. Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660-1800 (London, 2001)
38. Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, chap. 4, discusses fops in depth
39. Mary Jones, "Epistle from Fern Hill," Miscellanies, pp. 135-36
40. reprinted in Women Poets of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford, 1982), pp. 163-64
41. The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope 4th Earl of Chesterfield, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, 6 vols., (n.p., King's Printers edition, 1932), 5:2054. A barbet is a medium-sized, woolly, and bearded water dog, from whom (ironically) the poodle is descended. A modern breed description stresses the barbet is a social animal, attached to its masters but able to profit from their weaknesses, hence a firm education is desirable. Perfect for Chesterfield, then
42. Compare Pope's interest in canine soiling and nipping in relation to courtly fawning in Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1985), p. 677. Loyola was savage in other ways: he regularly bit Chesterfield's visitors
43. Omai, or A Trip round the World (London, 1785), p. 8
44. Tryon, Letters, p. 6. He goes on to discuss the smell of foul metals, like quicksilver or lead
45. Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D, ed. R. W. Chapman (London, Oxford, and New York, 1970), p. 50
46. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford and New York, 1985), p. 86
47. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 252
48. Tobias Smollett, The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769), ed. Robert Adams Day (Athens, Ga., 1989), p. 231, n. 300
49. Donald T. Siebert, Jr., "The Role of the Senses in Humphry Clinker," Studies in the Novel, 6, no. 1 (1974): 17-26, quote on 25
50. Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy (Oxford, 1981), pp. 243-44
51. Terence Bowers, "Reconstituting the National Body in Smollett's Travels through France and Italy," Eighteenth-Century Life 21 (February 1997): 1-25
52. Journals of Captain Cook, ed. Philip Edwards (Harmondsworth, 1999), p. 101
53. The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, ed. Tim Flannery (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 83
54. The pleasantness of smells like wood smoke, coffee, and baking seems to me to turn partly on the way they waft, as if surprise was part of their pleasure. On the importance of circulation, see Ava Lee Arndt, "Pennies, Pounds and Peregrinations" (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1999) (my thanks to Alison Stenton for this reference)
55. Journals of Captain Cook, p. 101. As an analogue for the bad smell left by colonialism, compare the stink of dead hippo that haunts Marlowe in Conrad's Heart of Darkness
56. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Short Residence in Sweden [sic] (Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 87. Elsewhere she is sensitive to pleasant smells, like the "wild perfume" of the forest
57. "Albert," and "Tour of the Isle of Man," in Universal Magazine (London) 92 (January 1785): 85
58. Modern Manners: in a Series of Familiar Epistles (London, 1781), p. 102
59. The Man in the Moon [William Thompson], Mammuth; or Human Nature Displayed on a Grand Scale: in a Tour with the linkers, into Inland Parts of Africa, 2 vols. ( London, 1789), 1:215, ff
60. Freud has little to say about smell but proposes that the nose loses out to the genitals: man lost his sense of smell when he walked upright; it made his nose further from the ground; female genitals then became visible, so that sight displaced smell as the primary sexual sense. For a critique of this theory, and a reading of Freud's nose in relation to Jewish sensitivities, see David Howes, "Freud's Nose: The Repression of Nasality and the Origin of Psychoanalytic Theory," in Rijke et al., eds., The Nose Book, pp. 265-81
61. Charles Lock, "Ignoring the Nose: Making Faces," in ibid., pp. 169-181, argues "We prefer not to notice the nose, and even when we are invited to do so, we prefer to overlook it, by turning up or looking down our own" (p. 179)
62. Hugo de Rijke, "The Point of Long Noses: Tristram Shandy and Cyrano de Bergerac," in Rijke et al., eds., The Nose Book, pp. 55-75
63. [William Thompson], Mammuth, 1:284
64. Tim Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge 2000), pp. 220-21
65. Morton, Poetics of Spice, p. 227
66. Joseph Ritson, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as a Moral Duty (1802), reprinted in Tim Morton, ed., Radical Food: The Culture and Politics of Eating and Drinking, 1790-1820, 3 vols. (London, 2000), 1:171-273
67. Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature (1803), Canto II, lines 405-10, Scolar Press Facsimile (London and Yorkshire, 1973), p. 75
68. Thus Vicesimus Knox, Essays Moral and Literary, 6th ed., 2 vols. (London, 1785), argued that the odor of flowers and other pleasures of nature could not be appreciated by those who are uneasy of conscience. Compare Wordsworth later: "One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man, / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can." "The Tables Turned," in Lyrical Ballads (London, 1798)
69. Boswell, 30 July 1763, Life of Johnson, p. 326