The panel proposes to explore and invite conversation on the episodes of nineteenth-century phenomenology of light, air and odour as aspects of the environment (and envelopment) that are once perceived as atmospheric, optical and affective. In bringing to attention the practices associated with the realities and ideals of the European notions of the intimate, the morbid and the spectacular – as our presentations examine through case studies of the scientific, medical and engineering designs of select indoor environments – we show striking entanglements of the phenomena that may described as sensed and unsensed. We show how their relative status depended on who and how experienced or manufactured their presumed (un)realities. Drawing on the studies on the social and cultural formation of the senses, the panel will raise the question about the spatial and volumetric ramification of ‘environmental’ sensibility before the invention of the environment. We finally wish to reflect on how these historical accounts inform the imaginary of ‘syncretic interiors’ as spaces in which the work of senses is always already conditioned by the expectations about their social meaning.

Sofie Lachapelle (University of Guelph, Canada)

The growth of visual spectacle through lighting technologies and its impact on public health, safety regulations, and construction codes at the Paris Opéra from the 1820s to the 1880s

This paper will explore the growth of visual spectacle through lighting technologies and its impact on public health, safety regulations, and construction codes at the Paris Opéra from the 1820s to the 1880s. In 1831, Dr. Louis Desiré Véron accepted the prestigious position of director of the Paris Opéra with a dream of turning it into the Versailles of the new bourgeoisie. Understanding that more lavish decors, costumes, and special effects would attract a larger and much-needed paying audience at the time, Véron’s tenure was marked by increased seating capacity and a focus on visual spectacle. In particular, stage lighting grew into one of the most important departments at the Opéra during this time period. The introduction of gas lighting in the early 1820s had already begun to transform the operatic experience, both on and off stage. Gas light allowed for dimming and brightening effects. It affected colors, scenery, costumes, and makeup choices and contributed to the multi-sensory operatic spectacle that audience were coming to expect but also came at greater risks of fires. While large and tragic fires were prominently reported on by the press and reports of gas smells and fears possible leaks fill the archives, even small and contained fires, which were much more frequent, drove insurance costs and could jeopardised entire theatrical seasons. As such, reducing and managing the risk of fires became a key driver for public health ordinances, new construction safety codes and ventilation systems, on-site water requirements, increased firefighter presence, the creation of a medical service at the Opéra, and an important part of the history of the institution before electricity.
Keywords: History of opera, gas lighting, fire safety, public health, ventilation, nineteenth-century France

Manon Raffard (Université de Bourgogne, France)

The challenges raised by malodorous air in the Cités ouvrières—nineteenth-century France’s answer to the housing crisis brought on by the explosion of industrialization and urbanisation during the first half on the century.

The presentation will explore challenges raised by malodorous air in the Cités ouvrières— nineteenth-century France’s answer to the housing crisis brought on by the explosion of industrialization and urbanisation during the first half on the century. As François Laporte demonstrated in Disease and Civilization (1986), the 1832 cholera pandemic revealed how the degraded living conditions of the Parisian lower classes were a threat to their health and, by extension, that of the entire city’s population. In this regard, Alain Corbin and Ben Barnes both note that, in the ideological and epistemological context of the Second Empire and the Third Republic, scientific and cultural concerns regarding smell as an indicator of indoor air quality were particularly high, given the enduring belief in miasma concurrently with Pasteurian microbiology. Considering these elements, the presentation’s main objective is to contextualize olfactory representations and beliefs of late nineteenth-century Parisians regarding the lodgings of the poor, their state of insalubrity, the atmospheric threat they pose, and the appropriate measures to be taken to resolve the sanitary and social crises they seem to trigger. Indeed, considering that the “labouring classes” are still very much perceived—as Louis Chevalier put it—as “dangerous classes”, social, medical and housing policies of the time frame the atmospheric improvement of the Cités ouvrières as a collective civilizing mission, specifically targeting the poor to reduce criminality and sociopolitical unrest. I will purposefully use a mixed-sources approach, cross-analysing fictional texts, hygiene treatises, political pamphlets, press articles and policy publications to highlight the pervasive omnipresence of these beliefs—and their direct consequences on the working classes—in late nineteenth-century France.

Keywords: Social housing, history of representations, smell studies, class violence, ventilation, nineteenth-century France

Vladimir Janković (Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, UK)
The vicissitudes of air-sense in the intimate interiors of the early nineteenth-century domestic space, part an aerial history of indoors and part a study of a ‘pedagogy of disgust’ used as a proof-of-concept of ventilating technologies.

This paper explores the vicissitudes of air-sense in the intimate interiors of the early nineteenth-century domestic space, part an aerial history of indoors and part a study of a ‘pedagogy of disgust’ used as a proof-of-concept of ventilating technologies. I focus on how ventilation entrepreneur Anthony Meyler defined and marketed the medico-environmental repugnance to human rebreathing while drawing on the sensual realm of discomfort, a condition that had been widely known to the middle class publics through the virally popular James Beresford’s, Miseries of Human Life (1807). Meyler defined comfort as the absence of inconveniences (discomfort), arguing that the public was lacking elementary education in sensing dust, odours, drought, mildew, tobacco, candlelight and the aerial products of human perspiration and breathing. In his Observations on Ventilation and on the Dependence of Health on the Purity of the Air which we Respire (1822), Meyler showed how the simple routine of leaving the bedroom after waking up and returning to it would immediately demonstrate the malodorous aerial contents of sleep and showed that a most trusted of domestic spaces could spawn mephitic airs. Meyler targeted the pedagogy of disgust to the middle classes, but the routine implicated public sanitation in the recognition that ‘the air which is breathed within the dwellings of the poor is often most insufferably offensive to strangers.’ Meyler’s bedroom morning test and the strangers’ susceptibility to odours presumably ignored by the poor reflected on the cognitive provenance of air-sense as activated by behavioural, spatial and social gradients impregnated by the presumed medical risks.
Keywords: Ventilation, hygiene, breathing, private spaces, health education, nineteenth-century Britain