YGS Lecture: Smell in Georgian Britain
Sat 17 Oct
|York Medical Society
Join us on Saturday 17 October as Dr William Tullett, University of York, gives our first lecture of the series on smell in Georgian Britain.
Time & Location
17 Oct 2026, 14:30 – 16:00
York Medical Society, 23 Stonegate, York YO1 8AW, UK
About the Event
Join us on Saturday 17 October, as Dr William Tullett (University of York) gives our first lecture of the series on smell in Georgian Britain.
The history of smell in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain is a janus-faced one. On the one hand this era saw the growth of a polite and commercial perfume industry and a new interest in the relationship between civilisation and sensitivity. However, this era's scatalogical humour gave off a bawdy funk and expanding industries filled many towns with sulphurous fumes. This talk takes a journey through the smell history of Georgian England and asks to what extent we can still detect the lingering legacies of Georgian smells in the twenty-first century.
About the speaker: Dr Will Tullett is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York. His books include Smell in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2019), Smell and the Past (Bloomsbury, 2023), and…
