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William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, eds. Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. xxxvii + 317 pp. Ill. $68.95 (cloth, 0-8166-4299-0); $22.95 (paperbound, 0-8166-4300-8).
This wide-ranging and insistently theorized collection of essays discussing notions of and attitudes toward filth, dirt, and pollution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reminds this reader of David Lodge's 1965 comic novel The British Museum Is Falling Down. Lodge's protagonist, Camel, who is researching a doctorate on sanitation in Victorian literature, reads absolutely everything written in the period in order to establish what books did mention his subject and (just as importantly) what ones were silent about it-a research method that ensured that he never completed his thesis. Camel may have been a man ahead of his time, but the diversity of authors and texts discussed...