Abstract
Mary Douglas wrote that she derived the phrase ‘dirt is matter out of place’ from Lord Chesterfield, but the authorship of something close to this phrase was more likely Lord Palmerston's, and it arose in the context of policy concerns over urban sewage and rural fertilizer. The phrase was picked up immediately, made more abstract, and applied in a variety of contexts that drew together moral judgements with considerations of hygiene. Hence the phrase had a complex authorship and usage that had already prepared it for the uses to which Douglas would put it, and its history shows how the aphoristic formulation of a widely held notion can provoke thought by, in twenty‐first century terms, going viral.
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