The historiography of smell could be said to begin in 1982 with the publication of Alain Corbin's great work, Le Miasme et le Jonquil, translated into English four years later as The Foul and the Fragrant. This put smell on the historical map, according to Roy Porter,Footnote ¹ and redressed what Corbin saw as the overprivileging of the senses of sight and hearing in history, especially with reference to the eighteenth century. Corbin argued that “A careful reading of contemporary texts reveals a collective hypersensitivity to odors of all sorts.”Footnote ² While tracking these odors, and analyzing their local significance, Corbin proposed a larger pattern in the history of smell. Suppression of foul smells and promotion of fragrance was an important part of bourgeois hegemony; social control took place through the control of smells. This process was both public and private: it spanned public works of sanitation and personal practices of deodorizing, and connected them through social conventions of ventilation, cleansing, bathing, perfuming spaces and bodies. What Corbin described as “the great dream of disinfection” pursued by the nineteenth century evolved into a deodorized environment—our own—in which the very absence of smell indicated the resolution of conflict between the foul and the fragrant.Footnote ³ This is a compelling thesis and it has become a kind of orthodoxy. Thus Constance Classen sees the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as a time of “olfactory revolution” when sanitization resulted in a denial of the nose and the sense of smell. “After centuries in which smell had been associated with everything from sexual attraction, holiness, the breath of life, to disease and death, the nineteenth century set out to fight germs and deodorise the world.”Footnote ⁴

Recently, however, olfactory developments at the turn of the millennium have made scholars sensitive to the complexities of smell, and there is a growing field of “smell studies” exploring the nuances of olfaction. As Mark Jenner has argued, “every deodorising is another olfactory encoding.”Footnote ⁵ What exactly were the meanings of smells in the early modern period? Given that in the 1570s Montaigne said that the best condition of bodies was to be free of smell, do we overestimate the difference between then and now?Footnote ⁶ Is the modern period so monolithically hostile to the nose as Classen suggests? When, how and why did an early modern savor of smell become an Enlightenment discomfort? Or have eighteenth-century interests in smell been ignored in favour of the period's enthusiasm for sights and taste?Footnote ⁷ I want to look at a selection of texts dealing with what I will call eighteenth-century uses of smell, to explore how the foul and the fragrant coexist in some complex ways. My stress on use proposes that smells have cultural meanings and functions, and that these are often contextual, local, and elusive. “Use” provides a methodology of evaluation that leads to sources not always detectable through an olfactory binary of “good” and “bad.” I also want to extend awareness of the use of smells beyond their use in the history of medicine. Although smells play an important role in the history of the body, broadened into the history of hygiene,Footnote ⁸ we need to explore a history of smells for their own sake.

First, some principles. Not everyone has agreed on the number and nature of the senses, but supposing one accepts the orthodoxy of five, what is the nature of smell and where does it come in the hierarchy? Smell, like sight and hearing, can perceive objects at a distance, which makes it a higher faculty; it is also stronger in animals than in humans, which lowers it. Smell can be a basic function, an instinct connected to self-preservation (the ability to smell rotten food); it can also be a refined one, present in spiritual perceptions. Heaven is often described by early modern writers in terms of a synaesthesia of sweet smells and tastes.Footnote ⁹ So smell is nominally in the middle of the order of the senses, but volatile. Next: what kinds of smells are there? Plato thought there were only two kinds, good and bad, an idea reinforced by Corbin's categories of foul and fragrant, made the more powerful, I think, by their echoing of Lévi-Strauss's binary of the raw and the cooked. You know where you are with binaries. But other historians argue instead for “a complex semiotics” of smell.Footnote ¹⁰ The “odour of sanctity,” for instance, may be sweet to Christians and repellent to everyone else. Smelling a rat may be pleasing if you are a detective. Classification dominates the study of smell because it can be hard to describe smells.Footnote ¹¹ Having agreed on the instability of smell as a physical sense, and the uncertainty of representations of smell, critics are then divided over its history. Some—Corbin, Rindisbacher, Classen—see a turning point in the late eighteenth century, after which deodorants come to rule the world. Against this view—not so much old guard as Right Guard—are historians who question what this means for periods before and after. Were there not medieval developments in sanitation comparable to those of increasingly fastidious Victorians? Public health measures governing street cleaning, sewage disposal, the free flowing of water courses, the zoning of industries and hygiene in meat, fish, and fruit markets:Footnote ¹² these must have led to an olfactory evolution, if not a revolution, and they too originated from medical discourse invoking stink as the sign and medium of disease. This is not to say that smells are transhistorical, but to argue that sensitivity to smell is not the monopoly of moderns. Annick le Guérer argues “today's sensitivity is basically negative. Today's ideal is the realisation of bodies and spaces which, if not totally without odor, are at least odor-neutralised by perfumes that mask their natural smells.”Footnote ¹³ Is not awareness of nonsmell a deconstruction that cannot erase the process of smelling, however it alters its objects? Leaving aside the reconnection of bodies and spaces by aromatherapy, in which the power to perfume depends on being understood as natural, the late twentieth century seems as odorphiliac as odorphobic. Hence the thriving of a populist history which reductively sees the past as smelly, or turns the past into an overdetermined succession of fragrances. Thus English Heritage sells soap and cosmetics under the label “Scents of History,” and the company Past Times markets reproductions of domestic objects that convert the associations between smell and memory into a genteel history of odors—the Tudor Rose, the Victorian violet. The binaries of foul and fragrant are hard to escape; they smother historical specificity. Why should an age be generalized into an aromatic plant?Footnote ¹⁴ Conceding that associations between smell and memory are powerful, why should one assume that discourses of fragrance are historically stable? One late seventeenth-century pharmocopion describes the smell of primroses as like marmalade;Footnote ¹⁵ would you? The author was referring specifically to the leaves; the flowers to him smelled strong and heady, like bears-ears or love-apples. His comparisons show how historically diversified the nexus of fragrant can be.

I want to explore some political smells, then some smells in travel writing, and finish with a fantasy narrative about smell. To start with politics. Metaphors of the body politic in early eighteenth-century discourse focused in particular on the arse: there were endless jokes about broad-bottomed parliaments and parliamentary motions.Footnote ¹⁶ This anality was also olfactory: satire was full of farts, partly as a gleeful representation of infantile disorder, and partly as a trope of windy insignificance that contrasted with the self-importance of political orators. Farts supplied a comic form of smell whose transience emblematized a wished-for superficiality of political nuisance. More lasting and less amusing was the stink of corruption, associated particularly with the government of Sir Robert Walpole but which hung about in people's political noses for long after.Footnote ¹⁷ Literally, corruption referred to bribery; figuratively, to a rotting body politic whose effluvia was detectable through the sense of smell. The “stink of corruption” was a popular trope that used smell to invoke disgust as a reflex. Though disgust is etymologically linked more to taste than to smell, it retains some links to smell: before the word “disgust” came into use in the seventeenth century, “taste figured less prominently than foul odors and loathsome sights.”Footnote ¹⁸ As William Ian Miller argues, “The idiom of disgust consistently invokes the sensory experience of what it feels like to be put in danger by the disgusting, of what it feels like to be too close to it, to have to smell it, see it, or touch it.”Footnote ¹⁹ The stink of corruption does this straightforwardly. Eighteenth-century writings on politics were obsessed with corruption for several reasons. Corruption was another term for the distribution of power around an oligarchy: as old patterns of patronage adjusted to growing bureaucracy, the discourse of stink provided a metaphor for something uncontrolled and invasive, like the process of being misgoverned.

Some political smells were subtler than the smell of corruption. Mark Jenner argues we should look to the history of emotions, especially revulsion and disgust, to explain the affect-laden power of smell.Footnote ²⁰ I agree, with the caveat that relevant emotions are not all as clear cut as revulsion or disgust—for example, unease, an emotion attached to being in danger from a pleasant smell. Lord Halifax warned his daughter against men who say fine things for their own sakes: “as strong perfumes are rarely used but where they are necessary to smother an unwelcome scent; so Excessive good Words leave room to believe they are strewed to cover something, which is to gain admittance under a Disguise.”Footnote ²¹ Politeness was associated with refinement; impoliteness and vulgarity were associated with the return of the body, through belching or farting, for instance, which are still thought of as rude. Yet people showed wariness of refined smells. Just as the courtier's ready bow and smile might be a shade too obsequious, too flattering, too insincere, so perfume could be a disguise of the natural man. Excessive perfume was not civilizing but overcivilizing. Courtly aromas carried the smell of money, too: civet, with musk the basis of many perfumes, was valued because “it was the dearest of Stinks; and if Hog's Dung was as scarce, it's probable it might be as much in esteem.”Footnote ²²

Smell has an evanescence that makes comprehensive recovery difficult. Precisely because so much smell is elusive, it evades representation in words or pictures: in this sense it conveys something in the air, something understood and experienced yet intangible and invisible even when pervasive. It is less common than one might expect to find bystander figures registering smell, even in political prints featuring anal imagery. One print that does is Hogarth's 1751 burlesque of his own history painting Paul before Felix, in a print with the same title done in the manner of Rembrandt, according to the artist.Footnote ²³ The associations with a Dutch tradition of low comedy—understood to include associations with fug and bodily crudeness—survive the relocation of the action into an outdoor setting. On the right hand side of the print is a landscape with a lake, on which boats are sailing, and a tree whose leaves seem to be in motion. These two tropes suggest wind, and some of the figures assembled opposite Paul indicate disgust: one holds his nose, another lays a finger under his nostrils. No visual sign indicates who has farted: it may be the clerk who sits blissfully smiling in front of the two offended characters, or it might be Paul, behind whom lies the wind-riven landscape. That smell is not unidirectional is emphasized through Hogarth's addition of a grotesque dog wearing a collar inscribed Felix, its nose aligned with Paul's rear.

Hogarth's inclusion of a dog is important, and provides a peg for exploring scent-trails. The role of dogs was multifaceted; they evoked smell implicitly, though their uses were not exclusively olfactory. Part of their use in relation to a history of smell was to link liberty and corruption. Under Sir Robert Walpole there were peculiar associations between liberty and anality. Excretion became a trope for purging the body politic; its attendant smells, however noxious, were naturally so, and thus represented a healthier state than the stink of corruption. So the “British Cato” celebrated a privy: “Here we may sh——te, fart, stink, do what we please, / This Place was made for LIBERTY and Ease.”Footnote ²⁴ These lines play with understandings of the body politic as if to say the only freedom one could hope for was intestinal, no more. Texts, waste and politics came together in countless jokes about passing motions in parliament, especially the Golden Rump Parliament; the “necessary” house provided justification for making a stink about the stink of corruption. Wafting smells united texts, waste and politics as writers reworked discourses of the body from classical republicanism to suit early eighteenth-century conditions.Footnote ²⁵ So another “Cato” ruminated on the pleasures of lavatorial graffiti: “For he’s eased in his Body, and pleased in his Mind, / Who leaves both a T——d and some Verses behind.” The ephemerality of satirical writings was found also in the casually strewn waste of dogs in streets; excrement, both human and canine, acted as an emblem of irreverence towards those in power. Dogs had other associations which enhanced their associations with political smells. They were a traditional symbol of loyalty, ambiguously or voluntarily chained, as in Pope's elegant couplet inscribed on the collar of a dog belonging to the Prince of Wales: “I am his Highness’ dog at Kew, / Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you?” Dogs also represented an instinctive drive for the soft life, and the uncertain rewards of whatever scraps political creatures could scramble for.Footnote ²⁶ Hounds on the hunt, like politicians, obeyed orders and acted as a pack. They were also unmetaphorically associated with Tory rural preoccupations, as in the well-known examples of Addison's foxhunting Tory in The Freeholder and Fielding's hallooing Squire Western in Tom Jones. Dogs also represented unfettered appetites and a lack of bodily restraint which was offensive, but passingly so, like the detraction of hirelings. “A Church is not the less sacred, because Curs frequently lift up their leg against it, and affront the Wall: It is the Nature of Dogs.”Footnote ²⁷ Samuel Johnson's favorite insult, “dog,” which he used especially for Whigs, draws on an association between liberty and license in which malodor is subtly to hand. Moreover, just as dogs recognize each other through scent-markings—what one might call pee-mail—in the dog-eat-dog world of hack writing, authors acknowledged a common community through canine imagery. As animals, dogs symbolized the abject, but their skill in smelling made them emblems of the power to sniff out truths, especially the truth of a natural body disguised by fashion or courtly affectation. So one poet celebrated her dog's discerning nose: “When smart toupèe exhal’d the soft perfume, / He smelt a Beau, and sullen left the room.”Footnote ²⁸ Dead dogs helped choke London's street gutters, or kennels; figuratively, dogs added olfactory functions to what Smollett called “the sewers of scurrility.”Footnote ²⁹

The synonymity of political liberty and bodily liberty seems strongest in the 1720s and 1730s, and most favored by independent Whigs, like John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.Footnote ³⁰ The discursive link is strongest in reverse—that is, in how people writing about bodily liberty made analogies with political liberty. Here smell represents a freedom that should be understood in relation to powerful discourses of constraint and venting, most commonly represented in poetry's sighs. Venting “grief” politely through odorless sighs, poets rhymed themselves into “relief.”Footnote ³¹ A more Rabelaisian version of such relief was explored in a popular literature devoted to the joys of farting, in which political tropes were uppermost. A pamphlet published in 1722, in its thirteenth edition three years later, featured one Mr. Breech, who sat in the House of Commons for the borough of Rump-fort; though his history lay “under the dark veil of an Aenigma, yet we quickly smelt out his Hole Meaning.” The pamphlet aimed “to obtain Liberty for him to vent his Scentiments freely, and that he may be heard without Offence”; it comically laid out “the many Advantages that will attend an Act of Toleration, or free Liberty that Way.”Footnote ³² The liberty of unrestrained farting extended to a female readership that was politicized lightly in order to underline parody of constitutional tropes: a reply to Don Fartinando's production, by the Countess of Fizzle Rumpff, proclaimed itself an Address, signed by fifty-two ladies of quality “not one of them either WHIG or TORY.”Footnote ³³ The irrepressible punning of fart literature also embraced analogies with religious liberty, looking back to the Rump Parliament and an old notion that repressed farts rose to the brain and created prophecies.Footnote ³⁴

Here the history of smell interleaves with the history of sound: in the early to mid-eighteenth century, farts were frequently compared to gunpowder—think explosive report and acrid whiff.Footnote ³⁵ But it also departs from it: as a modern fartologist writes, “Fart! The very word can … create a phantom odour.”Footnote ³⁶ Conversely, odors stimulate words. So one eighteenth-century collector of lavatorial graffiti mused, “I suppose that the Poetical Matter, which lies in these dark Caverns, throws up certain Fumes, which finding an easy Passage through the Body of him who sits brooding over them, ascend into the Brain, and there create an Inclination to Versifying.”Footnote ³⁷ In this curious cycle of words, waste and wit, fumes are understood to stimulate poetry: as one couplet scrawled on a wall put it, “If Smell of T——d makes Wit to flow, / L——d! What would Eating of it do?”Footnote ³⁸ The peculiar literary propensity of farts was underlined by the overlap between puff, meaning a light, dry fart, and puff, meaning inflated promotion of new publications.

Fume and perfume are relativized in the common observation that every man delights in the smell of his own fart while being repelled by the odor of anyone else’s. In this respect fume challenges distinctions between public and private space. Swift explored one instance of fume rewriting space in relation to lovers who learn to enjoy each others’ farts;Footnote ³⁹ the couple's relationship demonstrates comprehension through odor. Smell's refusal to recognize social boundaries through separable spaces also lent itself to communitarianism. Thus Benjamin Franklin fantasized about an agreeable drug that would perfume people's farts and add to the pleasures of company: “The generous Soul, who now endeavours to find out whether the Friends he entertains like best Claret or Burgundy, Champagne or Madeira, would then enquire whether they chose Musk or Lilly, Rose or Bergamot, and provide accordingly. And surely such a Liberty of Expressing one's Scenti-ments, and pleasing one another, is of infinitely more Importance to human Happiness than that Liberty of the Press, or of abusing one another, which the English are so ready to fight & die for.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Offensive smell rather than uncontrolled sound is what makes farting in public transgressive, according to Franklin. Parodying a language of progress, he combines an older discourse of political smell with a newer discourse of sentimentalism: the pun scenti-ment here plays on sentiment as the language of feeling, with its investment in sociability and benevolence.

Ostensibly antisocial, farts have power to create community, rather than simply disturb it. The social uses of managing smells can be seen in two texts in which politeness is foregrounded. Studies of eighteenth-century politeness have paid attention to its central dicta of managing the body and refining discourse.Footnote ⁴¹ Politeness was unisex though in practice its meanings were often gendered.Footnote ⁴² Efforts to control bodily functions marked the polite gentleman; these were relaxed when social conflict allowed irrepressible hostilities to express themselves in outbursts. This discourse was partly open to women, as one can see in a poem written in 1750 by the otherwise very polite Mary Jones, a poet and letter-writer. She often stayed with friends: these visits eased her finances but brought their own strains. There is a Chinese proverb that says a houseguest who stays longer than three days is like a stinking fish. On one visit, Jones felt she ought to go home; her well-bred friend Charlot, daughter of a general, was being too polite in detaining her:

The malodorous fart indicates not rudeness but a sensitivity to the dangers of overpoliteness. Repression is unhealthy, like a fart held in. The General's management of his smells makes politeness compatible with naturalness, and hence sincere. The reason Charlot won’t let Mary out like a fart is for fear of what “squeamish nymphs at court” will say; women find it harder to be natural.Footnote ⁴⁴ Metaphors of the body politic are reapplied to the body—the fart as rebel—and interestingly gendered.

By letting air out of the body, a fart makes the body's inside detectable, giving depth. Just as polite airs might be sniffed at suspiciously, some unpleasant smells were disassociated from the fumes of abjection. One such left a trace in Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son. These letters are best known for their dictatorial insistence on the minutiae of politeness—what Chesterfield called “the graces.” This meant being well groomed, genteelly dressed, having perfect manners, being a good conversationalist and cultivating an easy grace in one's bearing, address and public behavior. Chesterfield set spies on his son to report on his progress and criticized him for his infractions and failures (which were many). He has been thought of as the model of a cold, heartless parent, but in exoneration, if not excuse, one should say that Chesterfield was trying to groom his illegitimate son for a career in attendance at European courts, where polite manners were necessary to advance one's prospects. His correspondence was itself a lesson in elegance—so it is surprising to find Lord Chesterfield, epitome of eighteenth-century politeness, in a medium known for its consideration, discussing his dog farting. Chesterfield tried to buy some hounds—pure bred, of course; failing to secure any, he acquired a barbet called Loyola, who succeeded a previous dog called Sultan. On 19 October 1753 he wrote a letter to his son berating him for not showing enough douceur of countenance. This lecture is followed by a discussion of Jewish and Turkish history, which Chesterfield had been reading, and he segues from oriental despots to dogs by way of Sultan. He reports Loyola's installation, then: “I must not omit, too, that when he breaks wind, he smells exactly like Sultan.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Smell conveys the return of the repressed. Like Sultans, absolute monarchs may fart with impunity where their courtiers cannot. Trying to teach his son to make his naturally cheerless expression into a charming one, the father was more tolerant of a farting dog than his ungainly son as an antithesis to the courtly body. Chesterfield the courtier was compelled to use politeness like a scent to mask flattery, but this civilized man nonetheless liked to live with something savage, within smelling distance, as if to remind himself that politeness was artificial, like a perfume.Footnote ⁴⁶

Chesterfield's letters to his son were published posthumously in 1774, the same year that Captain Cook's protégé Omai came from the South Seas to visit London. Contemporaries made much of the coincidence in various ways including smell. This was one of the recurrent motifs of a pantomime performed at Covent Garden, in which Harlequin accompanied Omai to London. Omai has a talisman of feathers that gives off a magic odor, a delicate, pleasing perfume, which sets the characters “sneezing, yawning, dancing, whistling, laughing, crying and all by a smell.”Footnote ⁴⁷ There are perhaps traces of Shakespeare in this: in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, magic is associated with the invisible operation of smell. But eighteenth-century refinement gives fragrance a particular meaning here. A seductive perfume overrides bodily control; the invisibility of smell acts like magic to disrupt decorums. The attraction of civilization to the primitive was expressed through smell; the “noble savage” had olfactory allure.

The conscious and unconscious arousals of smell create emotions of anxiety, hostility, even paranoia, which differ in important ways from revulsion, not least because they do not necessarily lead back to the body and its abjections. Annick le Guérer notes that the olfactory sense is a prime means for distinguishing between the known and the unknown: “It can inspire either recognition or rejection.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Emotions included a violent fear that is cerebral. Thus writing about unendurable (and unnameable) smells, one writer evoked the threat of cultural otherness: “Italy and Spain can give many fatal Demonstrations of this Truth, who are so exquisite in the mixing, preparing and compounding of Scents, that they have dominion over the very Air to what Extent or Limit they please; Nay, they will force the Air to Conspire with their Black Designs, and retain their Intention till their Mischiefs are Completed.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Politicized tropes of plot and conquest merge with the poisonous fumes of Mediterranean darkness. Some of the most explicit writing about smell is to be found in travel writing, where smell often acts as an index of cultural difference and a measure of contempt. It was a commonplace of English writing about Scotland that Scotland was smellier. Thus Samuel Johnson complained of the Western Islanders, “They pollute the tea-table by plates piled with large slices of cheshire cheese, which mingles its less grateful odours with the fragrance of the tea.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Like many travelers, Johnson's nose was offended by the lack of covered sewers in Edinburgh, which made walking the streets “pretty perilous, and a good deal odiferous.” Boswell was embarrassed: “A zealous Scotsman would have wished Mr. Johnson to be without one of his five senses on this occasion. As we marched slowly along, he grumbled in my ear, ‘I smell you in the dark!’”Footnote ⁵¹ Boswell later pointed out with some pleasure that English complaints about Edinburgh in the eighteenth century had been made about London in the seventeenth.Footnote ⁵² Fear, given a source in stink, could be kept at bay by a countering power of smell—literally, in aromatics, thought to be able to ward off illness. They were still being sold at the end of the eighteenth century. The protective power of smell versus stink was also more figurative. So when Smollett's character Tabitha Bramble crosses into Scotland, afraid of the barbarous Scots, she clutches her smelling salts.Footnote ⁵³ Like the nosegay or pomander earlier, and like aromatherapy later, smelling salts became a site of agency that protects against powerlessness. Ironically, the ammonia base of those smelling salts on which polite bodies depended was obtained by distilling urine.

One stereotype represented the Scots as smelling unpleasantly sulphurous in their persons, a calumny that associated them with the itch, for which sulphur was used as a cure.Footnote ⁵⁴ It seems strange to find Smollett reinscribing such clichés in his curious remix of political chronicle and travel fantasy, The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769). This satire, covering the Seven Years’ War and its aftermath, lightly disguises Britain as Japan in an orientalist secret history. Smell becomes a metaphor for misperceiving; people are led by the nose or chase phantasmic odors.

Smell also provides a superficially familiar political register of disgust. Jan-ki-dtzin, famous for making stinking balls of filth, pelts Yak-strot; this is John Wilkes abusing Lord Bute.Footnote ⁵⁵ Politicians’ promises are equated to farts, and the people are treated equally satirically: “The majesty of the mob snuffed up the excrementitious salts of Taycho's invectives, until their jugulars ached, while they rejected with signs of loathing the flowers of Mura-clami's elocution; just as a citizen of Edinburgh stops his nose when he passes by the shop of a perfumer.”Footnote ⁵⁶ This is not quite a simple cliché of Caledonians accustomed to stench to the point where they prefer it to pleasant odors. In Smollett's satirically inverted world, where Britain becomes oriental and the mob prefer invective, olfactory stereotypes are also relativized: disgust is local and possibly misplaced, like political acumen, which is reserved for the author. Just as ammonia is really urine, so metaphor turns into metamorphosis. The mutabilities of smell preference become an emblem of defamiliarization.

Smollett is probably the eighteenth-century writer most strongly associated with smell; he was caricatured by Sterne as the learned Smelfungus. As Donald Siebert has observed, Smollett takes the senses seriously, especially smelling and tasting, “usually regarded as low, comic, and coarse.”Footnote ⁵⁷ People who do not trust their senses depart from common sense, like a famous doctor who embarks on “a learned investigation of stink”: “he had reason to believe that the stercoraceous flavour, condemned by prejudice as a stink, was, in fact, most agreeable to the organs of smelling; for, that every person who pretended to nauseate the smell of another's excretions, snuffed up his own with particular complacency; for the truth of which he appealed to all the ladies and gentlemen there present. … He himself, (the doctor) when he happened to be low-spirited, or fatigued with business, found immediate relief and uncommon satisfaction from hanging over the contents of a close-stool, while his servant stirred it about under his nose.” Siebert argues that Smollett thinks “Though our senses can cause us discomfort, there is a kind of delight in the sure knowledge that the discomfort brings with it.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Smell is part of his obsession with dirt, explicitly or lurking just out of sight, as it were, but the displacement into a nominally “lower” sense than sight involves something darker than comedy. So in his Travels through France and Italy, he finds Rome a compound of cobwebs, urine, ordure and putrefying carcasses. Ancient vomits meet modern slops: “The corridors, arcades and even stair-cases of their most elegant palaces, are depositoriness of nastiness, and indeed in summer smell as strong as spirit of hartshorn.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Terence Bowers has argued that Smollett's obsession with dirt is an attempt to withstand its violation of categories, as a metonym for a larger anxiety about the aristocratic body betraying its proper function in the nation.Footnote ⁶⁰ I think smell has additional, independent meanings. Hartshorn is ammoniac—it counters a lack of consciousness. Strong smells protect against the worse threat of unconsciousness, here, the unconscious influence of cultural otherness. A self disorganized by a strong smell is nonetheless understood to be vigorously returning to itself.

The chief who killed Captain Cook had a bottle of smelling salts that was evidently a prized possession;Footnote ⁶¹ when an English ship came by twenty years later, the sailors refilled the bottle as a good-will gesture.Footnote ⁶² We do not know what this scent meant to the chief, but just as many bad smells are the consequence of stagnation, there are associations between good smells and circulationFootnote ⁶³—including the circulation of trade. One of the few explicit references to smell in Captain Cook's travels is to an incident in which he was obliged to accept stinking fish from some islanders, to give them an incentive to trade.Footnote ⁶⁴ So smells of decay can indicate economic vitality. The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, traveling in Sweden in 1791 report at length on the people and society of Scandinavia. She also went out for walks to enthuse over the scenery. Mountains, river, ocean, meadows lay in sight: “As we drew near, the loveliest banks of wild flowers variegated the prospect, and promised to exhale odours to add to the sweetness of the air, the purity of which you could almost see, alas! not smell, for the putrefying herrings, which they use as manure, after the oil has been extracted, spread over the earth, claimed by cultivation, destroyed every other.”Footnote ⁶⁵ She was driven back indoors. Romantic thoughts become impossible in a smelly environment. As another traveler put it: “Think how great was my dissatisfaction when, after having travelled through a country filled with some of the most delightful objects in nature, and with a mind elevated to the highest degree of romance by those objects, I was crammed into a nasty little parlour, darkened with clouds of tobacco. … My romantic ideas vanished immediately.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Close, confined smells, long understood to be bad, reinforced a newer idea of indoors as soul-cramping. Yet though Wollstonecraft is revulsed, she is not exactly disgusted. Dried herring was a staple of that trade that was to be the chief means of making Norway a more civilized country; more fume than perfume, it is nonetheless a stage on the road to luxury. Again, bad smells can be good and good smells suspect.

One of the commodities of that luxury supposed by some to be ruining eighteenth-century Britain was perfume. It was also reviled because it crossed gender lines, like this stereotype, described by a fashionable young lady:

Perfumes were used to blend gender essences and question sexual identity.

I want to end by looking briefly at an imaginary voyage narrative published in 1789. It imitates aspects of Gulliver's Travels, but with much of the action taking place through the nose; one might call it an olfiction. The protagonist ends up in a society in Africa that is organized around the pleasures of smell. The members of this society have customs that surprise the narrator: they are ashamed of eating and drinking, and retire to attend to these appetites. On the other hand, they are quite unabashed about pissing in public.Footnote ⁶⁸ This society is ruled by a class called the hierophants, whose pleasures are exclusively olfactory: their subjects burn incense to them, which they collect and store in something called a narodrastic, a leather bag with a funneled aperture through which smells are released. The narrator is given a sniff: aromatic, spicy, reviving, the inhalation acts like a pleasant drug. Philosophical conversations follow: serene, clear, restful. The hierophants’ world is suffused with fragrant delights: they live in nests perfumed by roses; when they socialize, they pass round odiferous flowers instead of a bottle of wine. The senses are reversed, and made compatible with reason. Their relationship to the body is also rewired. The narrator says to a hierophant: “I understand,' said I, `that the great organ of pleasure, and consequently of temptation to vice in this country, is the NOSE.' `To be sure,' he replied, `little youngling, and pray what is the great organ of pleasure in your country?' I enumerated here all those instruments, without exception, with which the Roman youth, according to Sallust, laboured to dissipate their patrimony. `Pugh,' said the hierophant, in allusion to one of them, `we hold that, in this country, as inferior even to the pleasure of sneezing.'”Footnote ⁶⁹ In this sort of satire, comic inversion invites the reader to make a connection between noses and penises.Footnote ⁷⁰ But it has been suggested that the point of nose jokes is interpretative confusion rather than innuendo—the point is not to substitute one meaning for another, innuendo, but to play with layers of meaning.Footnote ⁷¹ Smell plays a part in shame and its crisis of semantics: “The delicacy or indelicacy of our imaginations in these small matters, occasions not a few revolutions in language.”Footnote ⁷² Erudition supplies euphemisms, which stabilize class boundaries until the labouring class adopts them, and then some other term must be invented. The power of smell to entrench social distinction is also explored in this novel in relation to capitalism. Indeed, smell becomes a metaphor for capitalism. Some of the hierophants

Getting away from binaries of smell as foul or fragrant, fragrance becomes a metaphor for pleasure, for labor, and for their troubled fusion in luxury.

Perfume changes a sense of space, argues Tim Morton: “A smell is there, but it is hard to locate it. It can denote both atmosphere and something emerging from an atmosphere, and thus deconstruct the difference between figure and ground. This is clearly seen in the use of spice in poetry. The status of perfume as background or foreground, as atmosphere or detail, is radically undecidable.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Morton argues that the poetics of spice create a utopian space in which boundaries between subject and object evaporate, as they are not predicated on a dialectic of consumer and consumed; this form of perfume erases labor.Footnote ⁷⁵ His model can be adapted to explain a transhistorical fascination with fume in the form of farting: consumption is literally present in terms of the body's ingestion of flatulence-inducing foods—the proverbial diet of beans—but the product escapes commodification. Labor returns only in the effort required to repress a fart; hence it points not to luxury's dialectic between consumption and excess, but to comfort's dialectic of pleasure and sufficiency. You can’t fart more than you want to, unless you make a living out of it.Footnote ⁷⁶

I would argue that all smells change space, not just pleasant ones, and space can change the perception of smell too. Expectations about smell work around concepts of closed and open as much as fume and perfume. Morton believes that the culture of sensibility in the eighteenth century provided aesthetic modes in which less tightly bounded experiences of space could be mediated,Footnote ⁷⁷ and he makes a strong case for how the discourses of spice do so. Yet however sensibility altered a relationship between the body and the world, olfactory precedent helped stabilize newer scent registers. Provegetarian writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century stress the fragrance of plants opposed to the stench of animal food, but at least one cited Pythagoras as a precedent for olfactory revulsion to meat.Footnote ⁷⁸ Romantic poets’ penchant for medievalism, orientalism and other distancing frames can be read as at least in part a way to impart smell to fantasy, looking to a rich olfactory world in which indulgence in luxurious odors can seem historically or geographically naturalized, without being confined in time or place. The perfume of wild flowers appears to mark them as beyond the reach of culture, yet this projection of elusiveness is itself ideological. Scent in flowers exists to attract insects—hence palest flowers often smell sweetest, because they are not relying on color to attract insects for pollination. Humans ignore this function and instead impose an economy that is aesthetic, not reproductive. Thus Erasmus Darwin described Flora greeting the triumphal car of Love and Psyche, decked with hyacinths, jasmine, violets and lilies:

Flowers are of course used for sexual symbolism; my point is that their scent is used for an eroticism that makes humans, not insects, the object of desire. Perfume acts as a sign of desire, but also a metaphor for it.

To conclude: foul smells can be good, fragrant smells can be bad, and all smells can be metaphors. Having argued that the cultural meanings of smell are important to history, I want to unfix this conclusion by raising the question of how social preferences coexist with individual ones. Just as now the smell of cloves reminds some people of Christmas and others of dentists, not all olfactory meanings are stable. Eighteenth-century moralists argued that pastoral smells inspired virtue,Footnote ⁸⁰ but there was obviously some resistance to privileging the fragrances of nature—for instance, one of Boswell's friends said he much preferred the smell of a flambeau at the playhouse to the smell of a summer evening.Footnote ⁸¹ Attitudes to smell were not consistently binary: they found expression in oxymorons, like “the sweet stinks of London.”Footnote ⁸² The most popular perfume in the late eighteenth century was a concoction called Olympian Dew; people remarked on it being fashionable (though I haven’t yet found a description of how it smelled). The name of this perfume is suggestive: a mythological place, Mount Olympus, meets a natural process, dew. Mountains rise, dew falls—and in between these heights and depths are smells: confined, circulating, foul, fragrant, metaphorical. In Rousseau's words, the sense of smell is the sense of the imagination.