Metaphoric Odours

Abstract

The association of smelling with intimate, instinctual, knowledge and the ascription of moral value meant that political and religious polemic made great use of attacks on bad odour or celebrations of the liberty to stink. Case studies of the Sacheverell affair and resistance to Walpolean corruption offer two examples of this. The smell of corruption could be found out by liberty-loving noses. But the liberty of citizens to make what smells they please and not have the government stick their noses in their business became a useful trope during the 1790s. Incense, on the other hand, became a handy metaphor for flattery, manners, and forms of gendered identity. Despite attacks on censing, sweet smells were still celebrated in the Protestant sensorium—as natural theological texts showed. Both political and religious invocations of scent testified to an increasing recognition of the subjectivity of smelling and worries about sensory privacy and publicity.