Addressing the Victorian obsession with the sordid materiality of modern life, this book studies dirt in nineteenth-century English literature and the Victorian cultural imagination. Dirt litters Victorian writing - industrial novels, literature about the city, slum fiction, bluebooks, and the reports of sanitary reformers. It seems to be "matter out of place," challenging traditional concepts of art and disregarding the concern with hygiene, deodorization, and purification at the center of the "civilizing process." Drawing upon Material Cultural Studies for an analysis of the complex...