Welcome to the second installment of the In A Sense series. These blogposts are linked with the In A Sense tactile exhibit currently on display in the Dalnavert Museum Visitor’s Center. For additional resources, follow the links at the bottom of this post. To see the full exhibit, drop by the museum or book a tour through our website.
There is nothing quite like the smell of baking bread. The tang of yeast warming into a toasty crust can transport one to a grandmother’s kitchen or a favourite café. The same can be said for a variety of smells. The olfactory has been called a gateway to ‘real’ history: both for personal history like the smell of a childhood home and wider history like the smell of a city street in the 1800s. This is why recipes, perfumes, and descriptions of smells from the past can feel so unique: they are sensorily immersive in a way that other forms of history cannot equal… despite being notoriously hard to recreate.
An obvious place to start thinking about smells is with old perfumes. Concoctions using flowers, spices, and oils have been used for people and spaces for centuries with popular brands like Baccarat and Grossmith commercializing iconic smells for many European Victorians. Queen Victoria had her own perfume called ‘Fleurs de Bulgarie,’ a mix of Bulgarian rose, musk, ambergris, and bergamot sold by the brand Creed: a combination which is still sold by the company today. Perfume was originally sold by chemists and pharmacists who created scents from various items in their inventories. Because perfume recipes were not copywritten, perfume companies had to use celebrity clout like Queen Victoria’s patronage to stand out from similar pharmacy products. However, after 1904, the perfume industry changed with a push from perfumer Francois Coty who had an eye for design as well as smell. He believed that perfume bottles mattered just as much as the perfume scent and teamed up with Art Nouveau jeweller René Lalique to make designer bottles for luxury clients and plainer bottles for less affluent customers. Coty was quoted as saying: “Give a woman the best product to be made, market it in the perfect flask, beautiful in its simplicity yet impeccable in its taste, ask a reasonable price for it – and you will witness the birth of a business the size of which the world has never seen.” Known as the founding father of the modern perfume industry and the first to offer in-shop samples, his prediction was not far off.
Bear with inner perfume vial, currently on display in the In a Sense Exhibit
Coty’s differentiation between luxury perfume and economy perfume echoed an established discussion in literature which linked smell to class. Author Janice Carlisle wrote about this phenomenon in her book Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction where she reviewed the olfactory in a selection of 1860s novels. Through these books, Carlisle argues that Victorians had common ideas around smells wherein one could “distinguish one individual from another by marking one of them with a smell,” a practice known as osmology. Who gives off odours and in what ways distinguished characters from one another especially in realms of class, gender, and vocation. Carlisle says that “class is not a thing, but a relation, even more an event” that is discussed through the descriptions of scents. For instance, saying that someone smelled of dirt and woodsmoke would have weighty connotations. A modern reader might take that description to mean that the person lived in a cabin while a Victorian reader would add a layer of morality, perhaps insinuating that the person in question was poor and lazy because they had to make fires on dirt floors. The choices that character made in the book could then be read with this information in mind. Just as the “hospital” smell or “grandma’s house” smell are known among modern readers, Victorians had their own language and understandings concerning the description of smells.
Actually describing scents in writing, however, can be tricky. Historical scientist Diane Ackerman says that “smell is the mute sense, the one without words.” The smell of hot coffee may be described as “earthy” but that does not actually give a specific smell to the drink. In the English language, smells do not come with the kind of vocabulary that sights or sounds do, yet “a whiff and we know” how we feel about a scent. This is, in part, why Carlisle, Ackerman, and other writers link smells to memory and class. When described or recreated well, scents can be “the formula for time travel.” In this way, “olfactory on the written page carry with them a distinctive aroma of referentiality . . . [where it is the] act of smelling itself that connects the present and the past.”
“Tulipe” from The Flowers Personified, 1847
Articles and Books:
Ackerman, Diana, 1990. A Natural History of the Senses. Random House.
Arias, R. 2009. Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past
Carlisle, Janice, 2004. Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction. Oxford University Press.
Cohen, William A. 2009. Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses. London: University of Minnesota Press.
Colella, Silvana. 2010. ‘Olfactory Ghosts: Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White”, in Arias and Pulham (2010a): 85-110.
Gallagher, Catherine. The Body Economic, https://archive.org/details/bodyeconomiclife0000gall/page/n13/mode/2up?view=theater&q=sight
The Language of the Senses https://archive.org/details/languageofsenses0000mcsw_g4w4
Madsen, Lea Heidberg, Dining with the Darwin’s: Senses and the Trace in (Neo-)Victorian Home http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/past_issues/6-1%202013/NVS%206-1-6%20L-Heiberg%20Madsen.pd
The Victorians: Perfume Society https://perfumesociety.org/history/the-victorians-from-violet-posies-to-va-va voom/#:~:text=Most%20fragrances%20in%20early%20to,%2C%20lavender%2C%20roses%2C%20honeysuckle%E2%80%A6
For more go to: https://www.friendsofdalnavert.ca/smell