When I learned about sensory history, odors and olfaction captured my attention because they are so difficult to find. Diane Ackerman calls smell the “mute sense,” and I took that as a challenge.10 At the same time, I was discovering a preference for books that, like Nancy Tomes’s The Gospel of Germs and Susan Strasser’s Waste and Want, explained knowledge and habits that had once been commonplace but subsequently changed with material conditions and new knowledge.11 Thus, I was led into smell less by Alain Corbin than by the works of Joel Tarr and Martin Melosi, pioneering scholars in urban environmental history whose work on garbage, sewers, horses, and other messy elements of city life opened avenues for thinking about the environmental and health effects of urban growth.12 As I began exploring nineteenth-century cities, I sought moments when odors were so important that people were compelled to put them into words. I did not know what I was searching for, and my early finds are entirely due to the ability to search the full text of newspaper databases. I am deeply grateful for the labor that librarians and archivists have put into the digitization projects that aided my research and taught me where else to find odors in history.
Most of the descriptions of and complaints about odors I encountered were reactions to changing environmental conditions. Often these were funny, framed with humor in short newspaper editorials and in longer pieces. My favorite find was satirist Frank B. Wilkie’s “Court-House Ghost,” a short story in which the title character, “the incarnation of stench,” offered a fragrant tour of Wilkie’s 1870s Chicago and its many stinks.13 Beneath the humor, the story offers a strong olfactory introduction to many distinct spaces in Chicago, their defining odors, and Wilkie’s olfactory interpretations. For Wilkie, the strong smells of Chicago were closely aligned with the city’s industries and overcrowded spaces; he knew a bone boiler when he smelled one. While Wilkie found humor in his surroundings, many others feared unhealthy consequences from the foul odors they inhaled, writing to Chicago’s newspaper editors about “pestilential stenches” or, as editors and politicians, imploring the city’s government to act and alleviate the smelly conditions that were associated with ill health and disease outbreaks in a miasmatic worldview. By closely reading these accounts, I was able to assemble many olfactory geographies like those that artist Kate McLean has been creating for contemporary cities.14 These olfactory geographies revealed aspects of city life that were often difficult and unmanageable, and they gave me a sharper appreciation for how the environment played an active and even intrusive role in everyday lives.