Perfume & Sent

THIS STUDY stakes out a new territory in surveying the world of perfume and scent in nineteenth-century British literature, organising itself principally around aestheticism and Decadence. Its novelty is somewhat remarkable, since the subject matter is clearly promising; these movements are, after all, characterised by their hypertrophied sensory emphasis and their bent towards synaesthesia. Nevertheless, Maxwell's book is the first that I know of to address this particular topos, standing alongside Janice Carlisle's study of smell in the prose of the 1860s and the work of Richard Stamelman and Cheryl Krueger on French literature and showing that British authors of the period were every bit as interested in scent as their Parisian counterparts.

Maxwell looks specifically at the uses made in both prose and poetry of perfumes and other smells, both natural and artificial, which are sought out for pleasure. She largely eschews framing her commentary in nineteenth-century scientific or philosophical theories of smell, instead appealing primarily to literary contexts and an impressive range of sources concerning the perfume trade in the period. The argument for perfume's importance in the subject matter is cumulative, and Maxwell bases her study mostly around detailed biographical accounts of her chosen authors' relationships with scent. Recurrent themes drift in and out of the chapters, such that the reader is left with a strong impression of the very allusiveness of scent itself. At once immediate and ineffably suggestive, Maxwell shows how scents were apt to accrue a wide range of metaphorical resonances, evoking memory and eroticism as well as standing for the aesthetic experience of literature itself. She balances her readings with a surprising materiality, not only focusing on the workings of the perfume trade but dwelling in detail on the chemistry of the particular scents and relating this to their often complex phenomenal qualities.

Chapter one gives a brief history of perfume in Britain in the nineteenth century, recording how British manufacturers emerged from the shadow of their French counterparts. It then turns to how perfume use was gendered, setting up this study of mostly male authors by focusing on the ambivalences around perfumed men. Etiquette guides forbade the use of scent for men and mid-century novels are censorious of the figure of the perfumed dandy. Yet perfume use was more widespread than this suggests, and men as eminent as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli wore it. Ambivalent, too, is T S Eliot's retrospective condemnation of aestheticism's "perfume of femininity," something which coexists with the echoes of Percy Shelley's olfactory metaphors that Maxwell finds in Eliot's poetry. The second chapter explores Shelley's recurring influence further. It traces the lineage of associations accruing to a particular scent, that of the violet. In "Music, When Soft Voices Die" and "The Sensitive-Plant," Shelley transforms the violet into a figure for music, and hence poetry itself. Maxwell goes on to show how this resonance was taken up by Tennyson and the poets who went by Michael Field.

The third chapter inaugurates another principal theme of the study, those aesthetes for whom part of their artistic identity was expressed through discernment in the realm of smell, figures Maxwell calls "flaireurs" or "olfactifs." Algernon Charles Swinburne was inspired by Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal in his early poetry, but ultimately did not adopt wholesale Baudelaire's "hothouse" tastes. Swinburne develops instead a vocabulary of critical praise reflective of his own preference for "breeze-blown landscapes and sea-coasts." For Walter Pater, smell became an even more important critical trope, enabling him to articulate the "atmosphere" of an age, as in The Renaissance, or in "Style" the "scented essence" of a work or the "soul perfume" of a particular author. The next chapter concerns John Addington Symonds and Lafcadio Hearn, presenting them as "cosmopolitain flaireurs" whose interest in smell tended toward its use in expressing particular locales and the human bodies therein. For Symonds it is Walt Whitman rather than Baudelaire who is the governing influence...