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.
