Looking Back, Groping Forward: Rethinking Sensory History

Abstract

Commentators in mid eighteenth-century London might have been surprised to learn that they lived in an age of Enlightenment, in which vision had consolidated its reign over the other senses; for they often wrote about precisely the contrary, about the dangers as well as the delights of an intractably material world that penetrated the body through the skin, tongue, nose and ears as well as through the eyes. Nowhere was this clearer, perhaps, than at Vauxhall Gardens, an intoxicating space, according to Henry Fielding, where people went to be 'gratified in almost every Sense at once' (Fielding 1742, 420).