Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense

"This is a great book. It’s the first book by the author and it’s a tour de force . What Tullett tries to do, essentially, is recreate people’s physical experiences of something that is apparently immaterial, sense and smell. And it really succeeds. On that theme of historically exploring things which we often take for granted, the first thing this book does is recreate the landscape of sense in 18th century Britain. It talks of changing ideas about air. It discusses sanitation and mucky smells on the street, drugs, tobacco and perfume. But what’s most important for me about this book is that it shows how, contrary to what we might expect, the story of smell is not one of ‘deodorization’. “The smile is second nature to some of us. We just assume that it is some kind of almost involuntary reaction to a real emotion … This books blows that out of the water” In 18th-century Britain, with these new refined towns and culture of politeness , we might expect smells to be stamped on and removed. But actually, Tullett shows that people are using the sense of smell in new ways, and so odour becomes even more important. One of the ways in which it becomes more important is that it is used to help people distinguish between one another. Scent is part of this new world of increasingly demarcated social distinctions, particularly of rank. In this story, the body is both the key to detecting social distinctions through the nose, but also, the way the body smells is key to expressing social distinctions. Different ranks have different scents, and different ranks have different capacities to smell, if that makes sense. Yes. That’s very interesting. Taste is an aesthetic category in this period. Of course, it works for houses and architecture and works of art, but it also works for smell and food and drink. With the rise of luxury trades, consumer culture, cosmetics and perfume in this period, there are ever more possibilities for divisions and distinctions of taste. Tullett’s book is a really successful social and cultural history of how those distinctions were exploited and used to express other sorts of distinctions between people. It’s very much about identities and the body. Gender is expressed through different sorts of odours, but I think Tullett is more interested in rank. Different orders do have different sorts of odours associated with them, but the author makes the important point that it’s not just the middling and elite orders that smell better—because actually those ranks also delight in different kinds of body odours. So, it’s not that certain ranks and certain odours go together to the exclusion of other possibilities, but there’s an increasing articulacy or expressiveness about the kinds of smells that are being deployed. And they’re being deployed in a new social world where there are new kinds of public spaces, where people of different ranks are mixing for the first time. It can be quite hard to distinguish between those different kinds of peoples. Smell is one tool that people are using to not only express difference, but also detect difference. That chapter about metaphoric odours is about the way that the language of smell, the ability to smell, olfactory skill and knowledge—that language and those discourses—are deployed in political debate. The language of ‘stink’, for example, was used in criticisms of politicians, particularly visual satires in the government of Robert Walpole. While I’m not sure that’s new, Tullett is showing us yet another way in which the language of smell is important."