Scent is both an essential and seemingly impossible-to-recover aspect of material culture. Scent is one of our strongest ties to memory, yet to remember a smell without external stimuli is almost impossible for most people. Moreover, human beings (specifically Western humans) ability to smell has been diminished through a process of increased emphasis on odor-removal, hygienic practices that emphasize de-odorization (rather than the covering of one odor by another). While other intangibles of the human experience have been placed into the context of the eighteenth-century novel, scent has so...

Incorporating wide-scale research and focused case studies from among the most striking or prevalent uses of olfactory language in eighteenth-century British prose fiction, Friedman examines how the recovery of forgotten or overlooked sensory information might reshape our understanding of these texts.