Abstract
One of the myriad challenges of literary historicism is how we might understand the sensory experience of the past. Mapping the terrain of the Victorian period is all too often a matter of intellectual history rather than of everyday encounters with tastes, smells and sensations. The increasing interest in affect and sense studies over the past ten years has gone some way to redressing the neglect of olfactory experience. Catherine Maxwell’s new book marks not so much an advance as a quantum leap in our understanding of Victorian scentscapes. It is one of those rare books that is both a ground-breaking work of cultural history and a rigorous study of literary style. The meticulous care in research, the encyclopaedic knowledge of Victorian literary culture and the precision of her prose make Maxwell’s book a rare beast in Victorian Studies. It is also rare, in these days of research auditing and rushed publication, in its length and depth. Most monographs clock in at about 230 pages, but at over 350 pages, this is a book that has been given by author and press the time and space for careful consideration. It is also beautifully produced with a generous number of coloured plates and black and white figures.
Maxwell’s argument is fairly straightforward: that perfume was an important influence on, and symbol for, writers – particularly poets – who wanted to explore the evanescent nature of beauty. The book, she announces, is ‘a reconceptualization of the imagination that reinstates its hidden links with the historically neglected sense of smell’ (p. 1). A brilliant argument is very rarely complicated: as soon as it is made, its truth becomes self-evident and you find yourself shocked that no one has noticed this phenomenon before. Maxwell, pleasingly, avoids the intellectual gymnastics of affect theory, which one may expect in a study of sensation. The importance of this book lies in the sheer scale of evidence and the careful readings that leave one thoroughly convinced of the importance of scent in Victorian literary culture.
The book begins, after the introduction, with a long chapter on Victorian perfume culture in which Maxwell plots the rise of the British perfume industry and its relationship to its much more famous French counterpart. Here we find in-depth information on perfume production processes, its marketing and its consumption. There is a dazzling display of detail here, from the rather disturbing production of animalics to the inclusion of period advertisements, which offers readers a vivid sense of the perfumed world of the Victorians. The majority of perfumed products were designed for, and bought by, women. While a very modest application of scent might be acceptable for men, there was a definite suspicion about any man who applied perfume liberally. Particularly in the early period, the perfumed man is frequently a comic figure, but his perfume may hint that he is untrustworthy, an upstart, cad, or a bounder, or possibly something even more sinister than that. (p. 46)
The cultural history that opens the volume usefully orients the reader, but the vast majority of the book is given over to the ways in which perfume wafted through Victorian literary culture. The first couple of case studies are John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley who, Maxwell demonstrates, were vital touchstones for those late-Victorian writers who would become obsessed with perfume as an impetus to, and symbol of, the imagination. As she explains in the introduction, it is hardly surprising that the aestheticism and decadence of the fin de siècle was ‘the perfect partner for perfumery, since they both share the desire to improve on nature’ (p. 3). There is a chapter on Walter Pater and Algernon Charles Swinburne who set the model of the literary olfactif that was inherited by the poets, novelists and critics of the 1880s and 1890s. It is to these figures – Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, John Addington Symonds, Arthur Symons, Mark André Raffalovich and Theodore Wratislaw – that Maxwell devotes a large part of her study. It is particularly pleasing to see Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the aunt and niece who wrote under the identity ‘Michael Field’, get a chapter of their own. They were both remarkably sensitive to scent and, as Maxwell demonstrates, used gifts of perfume as a means of expressing their love for one another, and in Bradley’s poetry, in particular, it becomes the symbol of both love and the imagination.
The final chapter of the book takes us from the late-Victorian period to the writers of the Edwardian period and of high modernism. Virginia Woolf had a troubled relationship with both Victorian literature (and particularly writers of the 1890s) and people who wore scent (notably Katherine Mansfield). As Maxwell argues, it is in the rather surprising form of her autobiographic narrative of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, Flush (1933), that Woolf was able to finally achieve ‘a rapprochement with the scented world of Victorian literature’ (p. 290). Yet Woolf’s animosity was only one early twentieth-century response. As Kristin Mahoney has shown in Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (2015), the 1890s and their obsessions persisted in the twentieth century as a touchstone for a motley group of writers and artists. Maxwell places the work of Compton Mackenzie, particularly his early novels Carnival (1912) and Sinister Street (1913–14), into this narrative, demonstrating how his obsession with smell was framed by his indebtedness to the writers of decadence and aestheticism.
This summary of Maxwell’s brilliant study has only been able to draw broad brushstrokes and in doing so cannot truly do justice to the importance of her work, for it is in the impeccably thorough research, the sensitive close readings and the breadth of knowledge – whether that be of literary history or perfume production – that its quality lies. The only criticism one can make of the book is that it doesn’t come with its own appendix of bottled scents, but that would make it a far more expensive proposition, for at £30, or $40, it is amazingly good value considering the extortionate prices currently charged for many academic volumes. It is a volume that every Victorianist should own, for once you do the Victorian period will never smell the same again.