Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture, by Catherine Maxwell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture by Catherine Maxwell Hans J. Rindisbacher (bio) Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture, by Catherine Maxwell; pp. xvii + 361. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, £30.00, $40.95. Scholarly research and output on scent and olfactory perception across many cultural dimensions have been astounding in recent years, not least in literary culture, from high to pop literature and on to Internet blogging, where fragrance has penetrated deeply. [End Page 517] Add to this Catherine Maxwell's study Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture, which brilliantly opens up the vast territory of its title. Maxwell's method combines in-depth literary-historical knowledge and meticulous philological research with sophisticated textual interpretations, meshing into a dense web of Geertzian cultural thick description. Unfolding like a perfume in time, from the "Top Notes" in chapter 1 to "Victorian Drydown and Sillage" in chapter 8, the study sets up the Victorian age by prefacing it with select Romantic writers (Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats) and reaches into the modernism of the early twentieth century with Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie. What is more, Maxwell is equally at home in the material world of scent as she is in its literary, symbolical, and imaginary spheres. The establishing chapters 1 and 2 provide background and context for important developments in perfumery and changes in olfactory sensitivity. These chapters comparatively invoke the better explored and longer studied French literary-cultural context (Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Paul Verlaine) and sketch key trends that perfume houses such as Eugène Rimmel and Septimus Piesse both create and promote. Maxwell provides facts and context for Victorian fragrance preferences and their literary associations (violets and the idea of naturalness, love for lily of the valley, obsession with decadence and artificiality, preoccupation with the "strange flowers and heavy odours of the hothouse"), and she outlines cultural attitudes and social values expressed in fragrance, from mourning and remembrance to erotic provocation and perfumed writing (60). In the service of contextualizing the scented world of nineteenth-century England in these first two chapters and thus providing the cultural base notes for the whole book, Maxwell draws on an astonishing wealth of facts, running the gamut from ancient perfumery to twenty-first-century scent critics and artists, olfactory chemists, and fragrance bloggers, from the elixirs of Arabia and the Biblical "Song of Songs" to Chandler Burr, Jean-Claude Ellena, Sissel Tolaas, and others. The "heart note" chapters are each focused on individual Victorian writers, juxtaposed in pairs, with cross-referencing as needed, illuminating each other through their work and personal attitudes to scent. Chapter 3 thus unites Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater; chapter 4 links John Addington Symonds and Lafcadio Hearn; chapter 6 is about Michael Field (the joint nom de plume of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper); and in chapter 7 we find the decadents Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. With far over one thousand footnotes that link to and integrate a broad array of literary and cultural sources, Maxwell's is a deeply erudite book, the carefully crafted olfactory complement to her earlier Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature (2009). It contains a number of black-and-white illustrations and a set of beautiful color plates, and concludes with a well-articulated index and an up-to-date, interdisciplinary bibliography. The Victorian period is a complex age in all regards, and one of the dominant social traits is a high value placed on propriety, which is often class-based, and which manifests in reticence about corporeal, sensual, and sexual matters, and in strict gender roles. Such strictures are handled a bit more loosely among the literary and artistic set, the people at the center of Maxwell's inquiry, as many of them are highly aware of and deeply enjoying the experience of scents. Maxwell teases out these complexities [End Page 518] as reflected in literary culture, and her exploration of the "unfamiliar scented world of Victorian literature" in fact turns up rich source materials in primary literature, biographical writing, essays, and commentary and criticism (1). She uncovers a broad...