The Logic of Trash in Victorian Literature

Abstract

This dissertation studies novels, government public health reports, and journalism to draw conclusions about the logic that informs how the Victorians thought about trash. This logic, which I term the logic of trash, asserts that trash tells a story, and trash stories always feature a moment of rejection followed by decay. The Victorians were optimistic about trash and viewed it as something that could be repurposed and improved, and, under the right circumstances, made lucrative. However, trash was also a spectacle of decay, so they also believed that looking closely at it could give them important insight into their ultimate fate. The Victorian desires to both identify with trash and to discard it were at odds with each other, but the logic of trash shows that the conflicting desires to push trash away and to humanize it can be reconciled when trash is used as a metaphor for the rejects of society. Stories that use this metaphor follow the progress of rejected people as if they were trash (proceeding through the stages of discarding, recycling, and decay), and they cause writers to reflect upon their own death as they reflect upon the stories of these individuals, or even to wish for the death of groups they perceived as troublesome as a means of discarding both them and the image of human mortality they represent.