A trip through The Canon reveals an awful lot about what The Two saw, heard, tasted, and felt, but smell doesn't come into play as much. Think about your own life - all the different smells one comes in contact with. We live in a world where most of these things are controlled pretty well, but during the time of Our Heroes it would've been very different. Things weren't quite as regulated, and some things had to just take over the olfactory sensors in the nose of anyone living in London.
A tour through The Canon finds us dealing with smells and scents and such, and I made a list of most of the things I found. Here are some key words and what they were used with:
Smell - tobacco, poison on a dead man's lips, creosote, different chemicals, hot metal, earth, burning oil, alcohol, coffee, moors, flowers, burned flesh, gunpowder, body odor, paint, damp places, and a rat. (Okay, an actual rat wasn't smelled, but I wanted to be thorough.)
Scent - a garden, summer air, tobacco, scent-bottle (cologne), thymescented downs. Mainly used in describing being on a scent.
Odor - malodorous chemical experiments
Odour - pine trees, tobacco, chemicals, lime-cream, plant decay, deadly plants, paint
Aroma - aromatic tobacco
Bouquet - wine
Stinking hold of a rat-gutted, beetle-ridden, mouldy old coffin of a China coaster.
A whiff of the sea. A whiff of his strong, fresh, bracing, east-coast air with him as he entered.
Fragrance - exotic plants
One of the things mentioned a lot in the cases is carriages - carriages that were pulled by horses or donkeys. According to Henry Mayhew (who wrote several books about the London poor), a horse produced as much as 42 pounds of manure a day. Multiply that by the tens of thousands of equines in London at the time of Holmes and Watson, and you can imagine how much horse exhaust littered the streets and ditches. The smell would have been overwhelming. Manure isn't mentioned (or even hinted at) in The Canon, so the problems it presented aren't tackled. But, anyone who lived in or near the city would have been very familiar with the stench.
We also find no mention of dung or urine. I realize these things weren't exactly "nice" to talk about, but they were so prevalent at the time that it seems like they would make it in somehow. A presentation that I'm working on talks about the different types of road surfaces at the time, and one of them is the wood-paved version. These were used to help deaden noise, but they also soaked up a lot of horse pee over the years. That smell, mixed with the other, had to be something to behold.
Another thing to take into account is the growing population. More people means more smells...if you know what I mean. Since you know where I'm going with this, I'll go no farther, but it's just another thing to add to the smell mixture. (For the record, poop is mentioned twice, but both times in reference to ships.)
So, what does this have to do with chronology? Quite a bit, actually. London was expanding at an incredible rate, and the amount of construction alone would change the face of the city for decades to come in a palpable way. (We didn't get the term London fog out of thin air.) (See what I did there?) Buildings, new streets, parks, cemeteries, tunnels, sewers, railroads...there was so much going on. Each of these things has a timestamp, and so does each of the cases. It's my desire to find out where they might intersect and see if it can help in dating a story correctly.
This is what I am always chasing. I want to know everything about London at the time of Holmes being in practise. Luckily the info will never run out. There's so much to learn, and new data comes to light pretty regularly. Happily, there are thousands of books and publications from that time to mine nuggets from. This is where my brain goes when the Holmes's fires are burning. I am studying train schedules, building layouts, lamp post designs, cabmen licenses, newspaper rates, women's rights, asylum lunch menus, marriage laws, construction locations, clothing styles, pavement types, telephone locations, typewriter fonts...you name it.
I want to know what Holmes and/or Watson would've encountered (with any of their senses) the second they stepped outside. What would they have see when they looked right or left? What kind of smells would hit their noses? What kind of sidewalk would've been under their feet? What kind of machinery did they hear? Would the air have been so thick with something they could actually taste it? I want to know it all. And I do not intend to stop. Right now in my Favorites menu I have over 60 different websites and blogs that I check into occasionally to look for things to research and hopefully cover on here or Facebook.
To wrap this up I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. I have a separate file for pictures of Baker Street, and so far I'm up to a few dozen. I've also collected numerous sources for construction on the Fabled Street that cover road expansion, curb alignment, renumbering, etc. It is my hope to know everything about just that one small place in the London universe, and it will take decades to accomplish. Again, that's just ONE spot from the time of Holmes and Watson. (Though an important one. *wink*).
The search goes on, and it all has to be done around a regular life. So, if you'll excuse me I've got research to do. Lots of it!
I'll see you next month, and as always...thanks for reading.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"Manure isn't mentioned (or even hinted at) in The Canon..." Au contraire, mon frere: "It was a bright, crisp February morning, and the snow of the day before still lay deep upon the ground, shimmering brightly in the wintry sun. Down the centre of Baker Street it had been ploughed into *a brown crumbly band* by the traffic, but at either side and on the heaped-up edges of the footpaths it still lay as white as when it fell." [BERY] I think the source of the street "brown" is fairly obvious.
ReplyDeleteI think it would refer more to mud, but it would be a combo of the two, no doubt.
DeleteWhile paved roads can get dirt on them, I think your "42 pounds of manure a day" per horse factoid would indicate that Victortian London street mud was not primarily a mixture of earth and water. "But according to Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth, mud was actually a euphemism. "It was essentially composed of horse dung," he tells Fresh Air's Sam Briger. "There were tens of thousands of working horses in London [with] inevitable consequences for the streets. And the Victorians never really found an effective way of removing that, unfortunately."
ReplyDeleteIn fact, by the 1890s, there were approximately 300,000 horses and 1,000 tons of dung a day in London. What the Victorians did, Lee says, was employ boys ages 12 to 14 to dodge between the traffic and try to scoop up the excrement as soon as it hit the streets."
I get what you're saying, and you make a good argument, but Doyle's writing was good enough not to have to refer to excrement by its color. He would've found a better way to describe it. If he used brown, he was referring to mud and dirt (in my opinion).
Delete