AFTER MORE THAN A DECADE scrutinizing the importance of sight in the nineteenth century, Victorian scholars are training their own sights on other senses. Books like Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer (MIT 1990), James Krasner's Entangled Eye (Oxford 1992), and Kate Flint's The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge 2000)–studies that revolutionized our understanding of why and how sight mattered in Victorian culture–have recently been complemented by books like the two under review here. Janice Carlisle's Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction and John M. Picker's Victorian Soundscapes have much in common. While focusing on a sense other than sight, each shifts gracefully between Victorian culture and literature, and each demonstrates concern with class and gender. Both books can certainly awaken a reader to a new recognition of what it meant to be alive during an era of rapid change and rampant class-consciousness. We sniff out others along with the characters in Carlisle's chosen novels and retreat to our own quiet studies with sighs of relief as we read about Picker's Victorian scholars' and illustrators' attempts to create soundproof studies in order to exclude the cries and clatter of London streets. As we do so, it is all but impossible to come away without a refreshed perception of what it meant to be a middle-class Victorian male, besieged by the smell of an alluring woman or the annoying sound of a persistent organ grinder.