The Masses Are Revolting

The Masses Are Revolting reconstructs a pivotal era in the history of affect and emotion, delving into an archive of nineteenth-century disgust to show how this negative emotional response came to play an outsized, volatile part in the emergence of modern British society. Attending to the emotion's socially productive role, Zachary Samalin highlights concrete scenes of Victorian disgust, from sewer tunnels and courtrooms to operating tables and alleyways. Samalin focuses on a diverse set of nineteenth-century writers and thinkers—including Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Charlotte Brontë—whose works reflect on the shifting, unstable meaning of disgust across the period.

Samalin elaborates this cultural history of Victorian disgust in specific domains of British society, ranging from the construction of London's sewer system, the birth of modern obscenity law, and the development of the conventions of literary realism to the emergence of urban sociology, the rise of new scientific theories of instinct, and the techniques of colonial administration developed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. By bringing to light disgust's role as a public passion, The Masses Are Revolting reveals significant new connections among these apparently disconnected forms of social control, knowledge production, and infrastructural development.

Zachary Samalin is Assistant Professor of English at New York University. His research and writing focuses on the literature and culture of the nineteenth century, affect theory and the history of emotions, and the history of literary and critical theory.

This rich genealogy of theory, and the preference for historicist method, leave open a number of avenues of conceptual exploration that should invigorate readers. [Tthe book so voraciously reads primary nineteenth-century journalism, social science, and evolutionary science, and so skillfully threads these with twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychology, law, and social theory, while nonetheless defining its core object as "political aesthetics."

The assiduity with which Samalin has charted 1857 to 1860 is complemented by the laser-like precision with which he has uncovered a valuable array of arguments and ideas that would be largely illegible without the cogent and precise accounting of disgust this book ably puts forth.

Sarah Winter, University of Connecticut, author of The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens:

In this highly original and incisive book, Zachary Samalin traces the pivotal role of disgust in the affective history of modern rationalization. The compelling analysis and illuminating case studies position this book as an influential contribution to understanding the transformations in Victorian thought in the realms of aesthetics, the social sciences, and politics.

William A. Cohen, University of Maryland, author of Embodied:

This ambitious book demystifies the idea that disgust is a primordial or instinctive emotion. By instead understanding disgust as culturally conditioned, Zachary Samalin shows how it engenders normative judgments, tastes, and values. In a rewarding if sometimes stomach-churning excursion through forms of Victorian disgust, The Masses Are Revolting considers how civilization is founded on that which it cannot tolerate.

Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania, author of Unseasonable Youth:

Disgust and the disgusting run across the landscape of Victorian thought and feeling. Zachary Samalin tracks them with unfailing inventiveness in this brilliant book. His history of nineteenth-century revulsions and counter-revulsions puts an entirely new cast on the formation of urban life, the rise of the human sciences, and the meaning of realist fiction. And there's a fatal twist in every chapter: Samalin shows the Victorian mind recoiling at its own disgust, troubled by its own instincts as much as it was by the masses and the messes it consigned to the social margins.

Lauren Berlant, University of Chicago, author of Cruel Optimism:

The Masses are Revolting leaves you with an unshakable sense of the visceral presence of stinky modernity—but not in a sensationalist way. This impressive book establishes disgust as a register of historical sociality central to ordinary modern existence in infrastructural, political, and philosophical terms. The writing is fantastic, strongly narrative, often playful, and always driven to explicate the affective and aesthetic pressures on Victorian social order and disorder—and beyond.