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Zachary Samalin, The Masses are Revolting:Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics ofDisgust（Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021）

Jenny Holt（元・明治大学）
One Wednesday a few years ago, I spent the morning having a wisdom
tooth extracted in Leeds. Having time to spare that afternoon, I decided tovisit the Thackeray Medical Museum at St James’s Hospital. Besides housing
a gruesome array of brutal surgical and dental equipment, the display
included a reconstruction of a Victorian slum — complete with all the healthhazards of the day — presented in painstaking and nauseating detail, down tothe odour of the latrine. Looking at these grim exhibits with a mouth full ofblood, while still reeling from the anaesthetic was, I can honestly say, athoroughly fascinating experience. It was like seeing a corner of VictorianEngland in 3D – the whole dizzying, sickly, dirty mess of it. The experience
was enlightening because it taught me one thing; that, despite being repelled
by revolting things, we are also compulsively fascinated by them. To confirm
this fact, you simply need to type any random disgusting topic into theYouTube search box. I discovered that one video, entitled ‘Botfly Maggot
Removal’, had attracted twenty million viewers.1
It is for this reason that, when given a choice of books to select to review
for this journal, I chose Zachary Samalin’s The Masses are Revolting, whichtakes us on a guided tour of the multitudinous sources of disgust to be foundin the Victorian world through the writings of those compelled to coexist
with them. The first chapter deals with the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858. Thatsummer, the combination of heat and increased sewage output into theThames (thanks to the vogue for flushing toilets) made the river’s odour so『ヴィクトリア朝文化研究』第 20 号（ 2022 年）

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nauseous that Parliament became unbearable to work in. The situation wassevere enough to force MPs to urgently address the question of sewage
treatment, hitherto a source of endless unproductive official wrangling. The
result was Joseph Bazalgette’s new sewage system, which pumped effluent to
the mouth of the Thames. Samalin, presenting an impressive array of sources,
traces political and journalistic responses to The Stink, discussing arguments
on issues such as whether sewage should be discharged into the river or usedas fertilizer, and investigating some eye-opening commentaries on the issue.
He also cites contemporary observations which will resonate with anyone
living in present-day Britain, where parliamentarians are often viewed as a
disconnected elite insulated by wealth against the travails of the masses. TheTimes, for example, rejoiced in the fact that Parliamentarians were finally
suffering from the effects of pollution in a way that normal Londoners hadbeen for decades, proclaiming: ‘It is right that our legislators should be madeto feel in health and comfort the consequences of their own disregard for thepublic welfare’. The British Medical Journal, meanwhile, hoped that a case of‘mild diarrhoea’ might visit the Lord Chancellor and stir him into action.2
Among his sources, Samalin also draws attention to important but littleknown documents such as John Snow’s ‘Drainage and water supply inconnexion with the public health’ (1858),3 which demonstrated that disease
was spread through the consumption of sewage-contaminated river or ditch
water rather than through airborne ‘miasma’. Snow’s article itself is worth
seeking out, because it presents some compellingly modern arguments forbasing sewage disposal on composting toilets rather than flush toilets, whichwaste fresh water and produce large volumes of effluent. Samalin focuses on
one passage from Snow’s final paragraph. Here, Snow mocks adherents of themiasma theory of disease by making a sardonic statement about the midcentury obsession with deodorizing the Thames. He remarks that the river’sodour is an aesthetic concern rather than a threat to public health, because
the stench itself actually deters people from drinking the contaminated water.
Samalin argues that Snow’s remark ‘can point us toward the historically184

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concrete ways that aesthetic theory offered a discursive framework within
which affective and sensory experience could be given a legitimate status
within the world of public action and debate’.4 However, I did wonder
whether Snow, Edwin Chadwick or the other participants in sanitary debates
would actually have been familiar with or inf luenced by the German
aesthetic theories that Samalin uses to interpret their arguments. I would have
liked to see more discussion of the sanitary debate grounded in material
culture; for example, through an exploration of the interior design culture,
hygiene beliefs and commercial pressures which favoured f lush toilets.
Indeed, a debate on Victorian beliefs about disgust, dirt and the home mightprovide a valuable insight into a public health problem which persists to thisday. Environmental groups are still concerned about the threat to publichealth from effluent discharge and have coined the term ‘Thames Tummy’ todescribe the gastrointestinal complaints suffered by water users due to highconcentrations of E Coli and Cryptosporidium.5 Our own ‘local’ waterway, Lake
Windermere, contains so much effluent from septic tanks that its eco system
is under threat.6 The influence of Victorian ideas of disgust and propriety on
plumbing and sewage systems, together with commercial interests, have left
us with a problematic legacy, and a critique of these ideas would provide a
useful insight into a still-relevant dilemma.
Chapter Two deals with episodes of disgust in Dickens’s Little Dorrit andBrontë’s Jane Eyre, as well as with the aesthetic disgust expressed by critics
such as William Morris and John Ruskin towards realist fiction. This trend
in literature, they felt, had hardened the modern public to the ‘infinite
nastiness’7 of industrial society and given it a ‘prurient appetite for the rotten
and the grotesque’.8 Throughout his analysis of these and other works,
Samalin shows how disgust was a paradoxical emotion for the Victorians. On
the one hand, it was an ‘unwanted feeling’ based on primitive, animalistic
urges which the rational citizen was obliged to conquer. On the other hand,
disgust played the role of uniting specific groups in their social abjection ofsupposedly inferior groups. It was also an ‘agent of social change’9 which

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could be mobilized in the pursuit of social improvements such as sanitaryreform. I would add that there is another dimension to disgust, which I havegestured towards already – that it is sometimes, paradoxically, entertaining
and perversely compelling, particularly in the work of Dickens. As Annette
Federico observes, neither aesthetic nor anthropological readings of disgust
explain the use of the disgust in Dickens’s work, where it is often a source ofgreat enjoyment to the writer and evidently, if audience figures account foranything, to readers also. ‘Although disgusting’, remarks Federico, the ‘fluidor perishable bodies’ of Dickens’s vilest characters ‘are not objects ofexistential terror, and they are often terrifically funny’.10 She argues that
Dickens’s work provides a kind of relief-valve for a society which over-valued‘self-containment and purity, Christian duty, and the virtue of stoicalendurance’, undermining its obsessive quest for order and for ‘classification
11…hard lines and clear taxonomies’. Investigating the tension between disgust
as an ‘unwanted feeling’ and as a sought-after sensation which offers

psychological relief in a society fixated on physical perfection would, again,
be a valuable avenue for future work, and might give an insight into ourcontemporary appetite for consuming media which provokes social disgust.
Samalin’s discussion of Jane Eyre focuses on the episode where St. JohnRivers f inds Jane a teaching post at a rural school. When Jane f irst
encounters her students, she f inds t hat some (t hough not all) are‘unmannered, rough, intractable, as well as ignorant’, and feels a sense ofdegradation at having fallen so far socially from her life at Thornfield Manor.
Ashamed at this feeling, Jane vows to improve her students so that she canfeel ‘gratif ication’ rather than ‘disgust’ in her work.12 Citing Martha
Nussbaum, Samalin explains that Jane’s irrational disgust has more to dowith status anxiety than an actual sanitary risk posed by the students. He also
argues that her desire to overcome it is evidence of a white middle-class‘civilizing mission’,13 and part of a general trend towards reforming theworking classes and colonized peoples out of their ‘disgusting’ primitive
habits. However, Jane’s disgust is arguably directed at herself as much as at

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Jenny Holther students. Immediately after the passage Samalin cites, Jane imagines thelife she could be living as Rochester’s mistress, ‘in a fool’s paradise atMarseilles — fevered with delusive bliss one hour — suffocating with thebitterest tears of remorse and shame the next’. Despite its luxury, the role of
mistress seems, if anything, to be more disgusting than the role ofschoolteacher, which suggests another paradoxical idea about disgust — that it
can coexist with powerful physical attraction. Jane’s language here echoes
Rochester’s remark that his relationships with previous mistresses weretainted by the ‘rooted disgust’ he felt for Bertha Mason, a fate which Janeimplicitly fears for herself. Indeed, Rochester uses the word ‘disgust’ morethan anyone else in the novel, mostly while discussing Bertha and hismistresses. St. John Rivers, devastatingly attracted to Rosamond Oliver, alsosees disgust and sexual attraction as intertwined. When he envisages giving up
his missionary plans and living at her father’s house, he imagines ‘human
love rising like a freshly opened fountain in my mind and overflowing withsweet inundation all the field I have so…assiduously sown with the seeds ofgood intentions’. Those plans, he remarks, would have been ‘deluged with anectarous flood’, causing the ‘the young germs’ of his good intentions’ to be‘swamped [by a] delicious poison cankering them’.14 Paradoxically, for Jane,the self-denial of missionary life also provokes disgust, especially when she
contemplates marrying St. John, going to India and having loveless marital
relations with him, which would be ‘monstrous’.15 As a Victorian woman, she
is faced with the decision between disgusting adulterous luxury withRochester or disgusting marital righteousness with St John. Ultimately,
Brontë fudges the issue by killing Bertha and maiming Rochester so that Janecan have a sanitized, non-disgusting relationship with a legitimate husband
who is no longer physically prepossessing enough to be dangerous. A further
examination of Brontë’s representation of disgust in terms of gender,
marriage, morality and sexuality would be fascinating.
Samalin’s third and most engaging chapter is about Charles Darwin’s workon the evolution of disgust which was, evidently, prompted by his own

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struggles with gastric illnesses. Samalin traces Dar win’s attempts tounderstand the complex and irrational relationship between the brain and thedigestive system. For example, Darwin was surprised by the disgust he felt
when he saw food being ‘touched by a naked savage, though his hands did
not appear dirty’,16 and reflected on how his brain had manufactured disgustwhen the food posed no danger to him. Samalin also demonstrates how theVictorians were intrigued by the way in which the stomach seemed to have ‘amind of its own’,17 not only performing its normal functions without any
conscious effort from the individual, but also, when disordered, impacting
on the emotions. He describes how this counterintuitive brain/stomach
dynamic undermined Darwin’s idea of the body and mind as a rational
machine. For example, he explains how Darwin envisaged language —supposedly a vehicle of reason — as emerging from more visceral acts ofcommunication such as vomiting and the emanations of physical disgust
which our ancestors may have used to demonstrate that food was unfit to eat.
He also explores an array of Victorian anatomical investigations into thedigestive system, which included some horrifyingly cruel animal experiments.
The book then proceeds to discuss the role of disgust in the evolution ofsocial theory, beginning with Engels’s descriptions of repulsive urban
conditions in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), and tracing
the ways in which descriptions of the disgusting city were used to convey theidea of social alienation. Samalin describes how these ideas emerged into theconcepts of anomie and urban estrangement employed by writers such as
Durkheim and Simmel, and ultimately into Sartre’s ‘existentialist nausea’.18 I
wondered whether a further discussion on Victorian ideas of money as ‘filthy
lucre’ (again an object of disgust and well as desire) might have helped togive a sense here of how ambivalent Victorian attitudes to capitalism were.
This could have included some discussion of the ways in which writers
associated exploitative moneymaking with contagion; for example, Charles
Kingsley in Alton Locke (1850), where contaminated clothes spread disease
from the sweatshop into the outside world.

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Chapter Five takes the idea of disgust out of the physical realm and into
the moral realm by considering the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, which
promoted the idea that moral corruption could spread through society in thesame fashion as disease. In this discussion, Samalin considers the moral
outrage provoked by Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. He focuses on Sue’s purchase ofa pair of Greek statues which provokes a confrontation with her landlady
over their alleged obscenity, and ultimately the destruction of the statues andthe eviction of Sue as the landlady attempts to purge the house of theirmoral ‘pollution’. I did wish, however, that he had looked further into
Margaret Oliphant’s claim, which he cites on p.235, that Jude’s relationshipto Arabella was the most ‘coarsely indecent’ thing ever to be put into English
print. In Jude’s marriage — as well as Sue’s relationship to Phillotson — Hardy
explores the role of physical disgust as a motivation for divorce. It would
have been interesting to see how the Obscene Publications Act actuallyfunctioned to silence those who were trapped in relationships which
physically disgusted them, and how, paradoxically, the authorities shut down
discussions on divorce by arguing that these debates in themselves would
somehow disgust or corrupt the public. But perhaps this is a discussion foranother day. The final chapter functions as a conclusion and briefly discusses
the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
Samalin’s work has many admirable qualities, not least the extensive bodyof primary texts which it presents, the introduction of lesser-known debatesby prominent individuals such as Darwin, and in the humour he provides,
particularly during the chapter on the Great Stink. I personally feel, though,that this book, like many more recent academic works, sometimes tends tofocus more on theoretical discussion than on primary texts. I think thetheoretical debates would have benef ited from being condensed andsimplified. I also felt that the discussion sometimes veered too far fromVictorian thought when twentieth-century thinkers (such as Foucault) wereincluded, and that this was sometimes disorienting. Above all, I would also
say that as academic writers it is incumbent on us all (including me) to makeZachary Samalin, The Masses are Revolting

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ease of reading much more of a priority when we edit our texts. Academicb o o k s s h o u l d b e a c c e s s i b l e to a w i d e ra n ge o f p e o p l e , i n c l u d i n g
undergraduates, non-specialists, and readers whose first language is not
English, both for the sake of the audience and for the sake of achieving as
wide a readership as possible. Sentences need to be kept short — three or fourlines at maximum — jargon should be kept to a minimum, and definitions
should be used for terms which are not in general use. Arguably, scholars ofVictorian literature already have enough obscure vocabulary to grapple within primary texts without having to run to the dictionary to search for words
such as ‘picayune’ (used by one critic whom Samalin cites).19 Notwithstanding,I think that The Masses are Revolting provides plenty of ideas which could beexplored further in many different directions, some of which I have notedabove. Indeed, it might be said that the book provides a lot of food fort hought ; even t hough much of t hat food is t horoughly, and quite
appropriately, utterly nauseating.

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注Guy Sterne. ‘Botfly Maggot Removal’. YouTube. 22 November 2017. Available
at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Iyjnk5ZOfE. Accessed 29 July 2022.
Samalin, Zachary. The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political
Aesthetics of Disgust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. p. 52.
Snow, John. Med. Times and Gazette, n. s. vol. 16, Feb. 13, 1858 (Part 1), pp.
161-162, Feb. 20, 1858, pp. 188-191 (Part 2), cited in Samalin pp. 58-9.
Samalin, p. 60.
Vidal, John. ‘Thames tummy: David Walliams has got off lightly so far’. TheGuardian. 9 Sep 2011. Available at : https://www.t heguardian.com/environment/blog/2011/sep/09/david-walliams-thames-pollution. Accessed 29July 2022. Wilson, Sarah. ‘England’s polluted rivers are breeding drug-resistantdiseases’. The Big Issue. 13 Jan 2022.
Available at: https://www.bigissue.com/news/environment/polluted-riversbreeding-drug-resistant-diseases/. Accessed 29 July 2022.
Horton, Helena. ‘Lake District sewage could leave Windermere “ecologicallydead ”’. The Guardian. 8 Oct 2021. Available at:

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/08/sewage-could-leavewindermere-lake-ecologically-dead. Accessed 29 July 2022.
Samalin p. 102.
Ibid. p. 15.
Ibid. p. 12.
Federico, Annette R. ‘Dickens and Disgust.’ Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 29,
2000, p. 154.
Ibid. p. 155.
Samalin, pp. 89-90.
Ibid, p. 92.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Richard Nemesvari. Peterborough, Ontario:
Broadview Press, 2021. Available at https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/
Jane_Eyre_Second_Edition/OCdJEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1 Accessed 3
August 2022. pp. 433, 387, 446.
Ibid. p. 477.
Samalin, p. 127.
Ibid. p. 138.
Ibid. p. 184.
Ibid. p. 248.