1930 was a critical year for Waugh, for Britain, and for the world. The world was reeling from a deepening worldwide depression, which put millions of people out of work and called into question the foundations of capitalism. During this time, Britain’s colonial empire was being challenged, most famously in India, where Mahatma Gandhi led his famous Salt Satyagraha, a protestation of salt taxes, which became a tipping point in the ongoing fight for Indian independence from the British. New inventions such as the plane, motorcar, and telephone had become normalized objects by 1930, altering the nature of everyday life. Waugh himself was married and divorced within a year, events that corresponded with the writing of Vile Bodies. Waugh’s adoption of aesthetic modernist techniques was a way of wrestling with these dynamic changes.

American and Continental European modernists tended to extoll the modern era in writing and painting, welcoming, for instance, the sleek form of the motorcar and the hustle of modern social life. The English, by contrast, were cooler about modernity. In the late 18th century, as the first factories began upping the pace of life, Romantic poets sought solace in the receding natural world, or within the wilds of their own personalities.