London particular

Great blog I just stumbled on, by a retired teacher in Tasmania, whose passion is Victorian history. Another example of the many ways blogs can be used. You got your angst-ridden journals, your commonplace books, your Op-Ed sections, your photo-albums, and something like this, which is simply a space for short essays of indeterminate length on subjects of interest.

The first post I read was a nicely evocative one on fog in Victorian London, which reminded me of the opening of Bleak House. Someone really ought to write a history of human smells through the ages. We don't ever hear much about it, smell being the most fugitive of senses, but I venture that if any of us went back in time, to any era at all before about the 1950s, the first and most enduring impression we'd get is the way things smelled differently. And not in a good way.

Here's what Claire Tomalin writes, of a previous era, in her biography of Samuel Pepys:

Londoners spat black. Wall hangings, pictures and clothes turned yellow and brown like leaves in autumn, and winter undervests, sewn on for the season against the cold, were the colour of mud by the time spring arrived. Hair was expected to look after itself; John Evelyn made a special note in his diary in August 1653 that he was going to experiment with an 'annual hair wash'. But every house, every family enjoyed its own smell, to which father, mother, children, apprentices, maids and pets all contributed, a rich brew of hair, bodies, sweat and other emissions, bedclothes, cooking, whatever food was lying about, whatever dirty linen had been piled up for the monthly wash, whatever chamber pots were waiting to be emptied into yard or street. Home meant the familiar reek everyone breathed. The smell of the house might strike a new maid as alien, but she would quickly become part of the atmosphere herself. *

You do wonder what exactly she means there by "enjoyed".

I'm just old enough to remember fog as it used to be, in Glasgow, before the Clean Air Act cleaned the, erm, air. It's a long time ago, and I was very young, but I'm clear that the fog then was of quite a different quality than anything going by that name nowadays.

On the matter of smells, on the other hand, I have the most vivid memory of the smell of what I was told were the tanks of a distillery in the north of the city which filled the air with the most gut-wrenching stink once a week, and which I associate with visits to my mother's sister who lived in that area. On one occasion the smell was so bad I was physically ill -- and I'm not a fragile flower, I assure you. My childhood memories are otherwise infused with the heady aroma of a farm (we lived on the very edge of the city): a boyhood of cowshit and rotting turnips. Not tea-cakes and tisane, granted, but it all comes rushing back still.

* hyperlink added