Dust and Sewers, Filth and Waste: “Disgusting” Retro-Speculation in Neo-Victorian Narratives

This chapter investigates neo-Victorian material culture and more specifically the way in which neo-Victorian writing engages with Victorian discourses on dirt, discarded, “abject” material or, “displaced” matter. The complementary Victorian obsession with hygiene, pollution, contagion and adulteration will also feed into this analysis. As interest in Victorian dirt and waste has become one of the foci of recent historiographic and interdisciplinary research while material culture is now a prime concern in neo-Victorian research a few forays into (bodily as well as non-bodily) neo-Victorian dirt have followed suit. The chapter summarises and further investigates how neo-Victorian narratives re-view Victorian practices of disposal, exclusion, cleaning, and recycling, as well as the transformation of these practices into ideologies of eradication of dirt. The chapter will focus in particular on well-established discourses focused on the River Thames (cholera and sewage in Matthew Kneale, Sweet Thames; Clare Clarke, The Great Stink), on bodily disgust in texts such as Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White and The Apple or Claire Boylan’s Emma Brown and, finally, on neo-Victorian re-visualisations of dirt in adaptations of Faber, Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, or Penny Dreadful.