Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (review)

One of the things that really appalled the British family experiencing 1900 House, during its hokey attempt at recreating life at the tail end of the Victorian era, was a sense that it could never keep the house—or itself—sufficiently clean. With a sense of rising disgust that made for admittedly fascinating viewing, the family grasped peevishly that it couldn't use deoderants; improvised shampoos were a disaster; soap was unsuitable for cleaning clothes; and a rudimentary vacuum cleaner—touted at the time as cutting-edge technology—didn't remove dirt but pumped it generously everywhere. One of the best scenes, accordingly, was watching Joyce Bowler and her daughters "cheat" as they tripped down to the local drugstore in their late-Victorian regalia, to the bemusement of modern- day onlookers, and then exulted as they washed their hair with their favorite shampoo.

Mrs. Bowler complained repeatedly, even to the point of tears, that her greasy hair and increasingly smelly body were making her profoundly depressed. Are these, then, signs of disgust's historical contingency? It's a question worth serious investigation, especially in light of the Victorians' sanitation policies, purity campaigns, and preoccupation with different kinds of "filth," literal and otherwise. To this question, several contributors to this absorbing, canny, but slightly uneven collection argue strongly in the affirmative; others are more hesitant about proclaiming either way. Granted, the mother's affect in my example derives greatly from the gap between Victorian possibilities and her expectations—one that contemporary culture and advertising have widened considerably. But did the Victorians not complain about—and experience visceral disgust over—many of the same things?

A quandary for the contributors and, indeed, all Victorian scholars, is that the aversion and repugnance filling Victorian accounts of filth don't yield reliable comparisons between their affective intensity and ours. Indeed, if reactions to dirt vary from person to person, and even from day to day, are we right to presume even some degree of unanimity over senses and perceptions among eras or generations? In his intriguing account of "the Great Stinks of London and Paris" during, respectively, 1858 and 1880, David S. Barnes thinks not. "Was it the same odor in both cases?" he wonders (103). "Is it even possible that the sensory and emotional valences of foul odors varied within a single city and within the span of a century or so?" (113). At their most technical, the answers in both cases turn out to be "yes": 1858 London attributed its revolting stench largely to growing amounts of sewage dumped in the Thames, whereas Paris twenty-two years later rejected the Seine as its main culprit, but couldn't agree conclusively whether the "unprecedented olfactory assault on the population" stemmed from one or more water treatment plants in the city's northeast suburbs (112). If that were so, doubters queried, then why was the stretch of city lying between these plants and the ninth and eighteenth arrondissements so blissfully unaffected by the smell torturing everyone else?

Overall, it's relatively easy to identify a host of issues and desires accepted and even embraced nowadays that many Victorians, entirely disgusted, deemed imprisonable offenses. The point where morality (or a comparable yardstick) revolts against filth therefore marks a contingent value and judgment, for the revolt varies greatly in intensity and aim over time. But a debate over the contingency or universality of value is almost too easy to settle. Barnes is pursuing a more elemental question about visceral reactions: did Londoners and Parisians have radically different responses to the smell of their excrement? Though he hopes we'll view such responses as similarly inflected, the answer, in truth, must be "no."

About the noxious odors that settled over London in 1858, one wretched man reported: "On leaving the Adelphi Pier I was seized with vomiting" (qtd. 111). And far from being blithe and insouciant about their odors, Parisians were outraged by their city's "fetid exhalations...