THE SMELL OF CLASS: BRITISH NOVELS OF THE 1860s

Abstract

EVENBEFORE ESTHER LYON enters the narrative of Felix Holt, she is introduced to the eponymous hero, whom she will eventually marry, through two smells — one present, the other absent; one highly conventional, the other distinctly unusual. As the narrator explains, Mr. Lyon’s sitting room contains “certain things” that are “incongruous” with its “general air” of “privation,” among them the “delicate scent of dried rose-leaves” and a wax candle. Lyon, embarrassed by what he takes to be Felix Holt’s unspoken criticism of such indulgence, explains to his visitor, “You are doubtless amazed to see me with a wax-light . . . but this undue luxury is paid for with the earnings of my daughter, who is so delicately framed that the smell of tallow is loathsome to her” (Eliot 53–54; ch. 5).¹ Esther’s association with the scent of roses is quite unremarkable: it simply and quickly registers her as a wholly acceptable marriage partner. Lyon’s reference to the smell of tallow candles is, however, according to the practices of Victorian fiction, quite unconventional, first because it explicitly evokes a smell that is not there, the strong odor of candles made from animal fat; secondly, because it identifies a good smell or the relative lack of one, that of wax candles, with a negative moral judgment: Esther’s practice of spending her earnings on such candles is, to Lyon at least,