In J.D. Salinger’s 1950 short story For Esmé With Love And Squalor the narrator recalls his time as a US sergeant stationed in Devon during the Second World War, and a short but memorable encounter with an unusually poised and direct English orphan called Esmé. Upon learning that he is a writer, she politely asks if he would write a story exclusively for her, adding by way of a helpful pointer, ‘I prefer stories about squalor.’ He leans forward, asking ‘About what?’ and she replies firmly ‘Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.’

It is no surprise, perhaps, that Esmé is an English child, because squalor has in the past been a particular speciality of British culture. Something about this soggy island, with its fogs and mists, rising damp and crumbling plaster, has frequently fused with an instinct for irony and self-deprecation to produce an inspired amplification of failure and mild disgust.

On its own, standing starkers in its most basic definition, squalor is unutterably bleak. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, it signifies the condition of being extremely dirty and unpleasant, often because of a lack of money. This undiluted, stomach-churning vision of squalor is the variety most often glimpsed in newspaper stories, or by those whose specific job it is to investigate lives that have, one way or another, gone badly and sadly awry: the unimaginable detritus of a house full of disintegrating adults and neglected children, the teetering ordure of a hoarder’s flat, or – unearthed from the photographic archive – the blank-eyed, accusing gaze of a ragged toddler in a crowded Victorian tenement. The reader or visitor registers the scene with a little jolt of horror and – professional duties permitting – often cannot wait to get away.

Squalor as transmuted through art, however, becomes something different. In the right doses, it adds the musk of reality to artifice, rather like the spadeful of manure that enriches the soil, or the note of civet in a perfume. Civet, a substance derived from the anal glands of civet cats, is unbearably strong and faecal smelling on its own, but perfumers discovered long ago that adding a small amount to other notes gave the perfume an animalic, irresistibly earthy allure: the judicious touch of filth only added to the appeal.

In the same way the depiction of squalor, when sufficiently diluted and distanced through the medium of prose, paint or song, carries an undeniably authentic charge of what it means to be mortal and mired in the flawed, material world. In the dingy interior, the messy bedroom, the dirty dishes, the slumped drunk, the invalid’s sickbed or the sprawled, ungainly nude, we get a peep at a form of truth: humanity when it is either no longer capable of controlling how it is seen by outside eyes, or in the moments before it finally hauls itself upright and constructs an acceptable presentation for its audience.

Further back in history, there was no way of escaping or ignoring squalor and disease, particularly in the teeming city. A predatory London lay in wait for country innocents, bent on their corruption. In Hogarth’s merciless, tragic 1732 set of engravings A Harlot’s Progress, a young beauty called Moll Hackabout arrives in the capital with the promise of respectable work. Before long, she has been gulled into prostitution, which – barring a brief period of prosperity as a rich man’s mistress – leads her inexorably to a syphilitic grave aged 23. That same year, the poet Jonathan Swift published his poem The Lady’s Dressing Room, which detailed the preparations of ‘haughty Celia’ for her appearance in public as finely-dressed ‘goddess’ by taking the reader through a truly nauseating list of Celia’s intimate tricks and bodily effusions, including her towels ‘Begummed, bespattered and beslimed/ With dirt, and sweat and earwax grimed.’

Whichever way round the journey came, from beauty to ruin, or semi-ruin, to the primped appearance of beauty, the message was the same: the glitter was inextricably bound up with the rot. But the artists and writers who went poking around in squalor did so not only because of the creative opportunities it generated, but also from a desire to rip the veil off the moral hypocrisies of the world and reveal it as it really was. In A Harlot’s Progress, the figures with money and authority do not emerge well: the moment Moll arrives in London, a wealthy rake is standing ready to exploit her; in the final scene, sitting around Moll’s coffin, the addled parson sits spilling his brandy while his hand fumbles up the skirts of another young woman.

For the painter Walter Sickert, the artist born in the next century most powerfully drawn to squalor – the unsettling Victorian kind, then Edwardian – the moral impetus largely fell away. It was replaced by an aesthetic and voyeuristic fascination, which was hidden and, at times, horrific. Partly inspired by the literary realism of French authors such as Balzac and Zola, Sickert painted half-lit nudes on iron beds, the ‘contre-jour’ light that he loved filtering through grimy windows to gloomy, greenish interiors. Citing the likes of Hogarth as an inspiration, he believed that a painting should ‘tell a story’, and he preferred to take the shabby truths of working-class life as his subject, a world away from the radiantly elegant society portraits produced by his London contemporary, John Singer Sargent.

He valued, for their authenticity, scenes drawn directly from life, without any idealised imposition of the artist’s own ideas of beauty upon them. At a lecture, musing publicly on the greatest English artist of the 19th century, Sickert asserted that it would be hard to find anyone to touch Charles Keene, an artist and illustrator who worked for the Illustrated London News and later Punch magazine.

The duality in the figure of the prostitute – free to roam across all social classes, alluring and potentially diseased, navigating both public and dangerously private spaces – fascinated Sickert, just as it had gripped Hogarth, but his perspective was narrower and disturbingly intimate. In 1907, Sickert had been painting nudes of a model in Mornington Crescent when the news broke of the nearby murder in Camden of a young prostitute, Emily Dimmock, by an unknown assailant. Her throat had been slit: the chief suspect, Robert Wood, an illustrator from a respectable family, was later acquitted by jury trial of the crime.

The artist’s response to the murder, which dominated the London press for months, was to link a series of four oil paintings to the killing, each of which depicted a man standing over or sitting next to a naked woman on a bed. Sickert’s alternative title for one of these paintings was ‘What Will We Do For The Rent?’ alluding to the economic desperation that often underpinned such sexual transactions. The third of these, the 1909 L’Affaire de Camden Town, is the most explicit and chilling: a dark-clothed man stands purposefully, arms crossed, looking down at an inert female body splayed awkwardly upon an iron bed.

In the airless, claustrophobic atmosphere of the small bedroom, in the moments of silence after whatever dark act suggested by Sickert’s title has presumably happened, the bed resembles something more akin to a butcher’s slab. If the artist’s own imagination was fired by such macabre scenes, so was that of the public; he shared with them a taste for what was not only squalid but sensational. A couple of years earlier, in fact, he had produced a very odd, darkly-lit painting entitled Jack The Ripper’s Bedroom, based on his own bedroom in Mornington Crescent, which the landlady had apparently informed him was once occupied by the Ripper himself. Such explicit preoccupations helped to nourish rumours that the debonair, womanising Sickert was in fact Jack the Ripper – a theory most vigorously investigated and espoused in recent years by the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell – but which hasnever been taken seriously by scholars.

Away from the lurid extremes of Sickert’s personal legend, however, the effect of his aesthetic on British culture was a powerful and enduring one. Its evocation of poky rented rooms, tawdry interiors, boredom and blowsy bodies – a world where excitements were delivered by the lights of the music-hall theatre and the boozer – seeped into the works of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and their contemporaries in the ‘London School’. It was echoed in the 1940s novels of Patrick Hamilton, and their depictions of seamy lodgings and precarious lives dependent on uncertain, short-term sources of income: a fresh punter, a modest windfall from a dead relative, the chance to cadge a drink or a dinner off a passing, prosperous friend. At the heart of it is a sense of perpetual impermanence, far from the certainties of middle-class respectability with its deep roots in property and family.

The scrabble for survival drives random encounters with strangers, often steeped in alcohol and unpredictable in their outcomes. The heroines of 1930s Jean Rhys novels such as Good Morning, Midnight and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie drift around Paris or London seeking a male protector, staying in dispiriting lodgings, squandering dwindling money on temporary fixes to their appearance, and painfully alert to the thousand small indignities that can be visited on a lonely woman whose looks are only travelling in one direction.

You are either drawn to this kind of thing – what Salinger’s Esmé would have called squalor – or you aren’t. Certainly, by 1960 the young David Hockney found Sickert’s influence on the Royal College of Art so overwhelming – ‘Sickert was god’ he recalled of his time there – that he found himself longing to push it away, and went to Los Angeles to paint bright colours, blue skies and swimming pools. But as a child growing up in Belfast in the 1980s, any suggestion of it hooked me. I started, by chance, with a volume of the French stuff: falling into Zola, and the narrow, dank Paris street where his anti-heroine, the red-blooded Thérèse Raquin, plotted against her frail husband Camille; then his Nana and the apartment where the courtesan Nana Coupeau, once the reckless queen of the demi-monde, lay with her face eaten away by smallpox.

After that I moved on to more documentary English fare: George Orwell in The Road To Wigan Pier – still a sharp rebuke to anyone tempted to idealise England’s past – describing the tripe-shop and lodging-house in which he rented a bed in a room with four others which ‘stank like a ferret’s cage’. The familiar note of ruined glories was present in the shape of a heavy glass chandelier which hung above them, a relic of its dwelling-house days ‘on which the dust was so thick it was like fur’. Their landlord, Mr Brooker, was ‘astonishingly dirty’: the key detail, jammed in my memory, is that ‘if he gave you a slice of bread and butter there was always a black thumb-print on it’.

After that, it bloomed everywhere. Squalor, like so many things, is on a spectrum, and at its mildest end it seemed to signify a bohemian release from the great struggle for control over the permanently encroaching forces of chaos and dirt – or at least a determination to stop them only when they threatened the person itself. Broadly liberated from the daily tyranny of cleaning and cooking, its artistic adherents freed up time for the perfection of the art or of the self. The raconteur Quentin Crisp, immaculate as ever in his hairstyle and dress, came on our television from his messy, stuffy bedsit to speak with thrilling insouciance about dust. ‘I have a message of hope for the housewives of England’, he said grandly, ‘After four years it doesn’t get any worse.’ His life had been greatly improved, he said, when he discovered a kind of powdered food substitute you can buy at the chemist.

Where the American dream involved great paroxysms of striving and self-reinvention, the postwar British aesthetic accepted that things were on the slide, and generated art from the descent. In John Cooper Clarke’s 1982 poem ‘The day my pad went mad’, the verbal energy erupts from the domestic horror: ‘The kitchen has been ransacked/Ski trails in the hall/A chicken has been dhansaked/And thrown against the wall.’ In the 1979 Squeeze song ‘Up the Junction’ the singer mourns a relationship that unfurled in bedsit-land – ‘We stayed in by the telly/Although the room was smelly’ – and resulted in a child, but was undone by his own dysfunction: ‘The devil came and took me/From bar to street to bookie.’

In 1998, the Margate-born artist Tracey Emin’s display of her own grimy, pungent bed repelled me when I saw it at the time, but I now appreciate it as an act of artistic courage. It held enough transgressive power to create a sensation: with its flotsam of past drama, empty vodka bottles, stained sheets, twisted tights and expired tea lights, it spoke more eloquently than most artworks of a personality in deep crisis.

Could it do so today? With the advent of the internet, the distinctive role of squalor in culture has changed. On Instagram, authors and artists have effectively become their own photographers, stylists and publicists. Like most people, they tend to filter their own existence through the lens of glamour and conventional success. Few poets are now clamouring to explore the eyelash glue and the smeared fake-tan towel-mitts of the The Influencer’s Dressing Room. The metaphorical garret has received a makeover, and the eye of the writer or artist has often turned determinedly inward to personal questions of identity and sexuality. The act of writing itself has been commodified, with hashtags such as #amwriting, and the proliferation of writing retreats in picturesque settings. There are new online rituals: the anticipatory cracking-open of a fresh notebook, the chronicling of the dispatch of immaculate manuscripts, or the ‘unboxing’ of the first pristine published copies. Squalor may indeed have migrated to fenced-off corners, such as the bizarre internet territories of OnlyFans or the dark silo of the true crime genre, but it is not parading in the mainstream.

The minimalist lessons of Marie Kondo have soaked into the arts world. While emotional chaos is welcome, physical mess is not. There is little nostalgie de la boue, unless the boue is of a specifically sexual nature. The author Sally Rooney is, of course Irish, not British, but her novels have spoken with unusual force to a generation of younger readers in Ireland, the UK and beyond: it is telling that in her first novel, Conversations With Friends, the chief representative of domestic chaos is not Frances, the narrator and aspiring writer, but her alcoholic father. He lives, horrifyingly, in a house that smells of chip oil and vinegar, with a depressed brown carpet and unwashed dishes. He’s everything that Frances wants to get away from – but before she leaves, she does the washing up. Striking amounts of longing, however, are directed at the costly chic of the Dublin house that her lover Nick shares with his wife Melissa. Today’s young authors are not poeticising their own rackety rented rooms, but growing misty-eyed over charmingly moneyed, owner-occupied interiors – and on a personal level, who can blame them?

Yet the world of Hogarth and Swift, Sickert and Orwell has not vanished. It is very much with us: girls tricked into prostitution, appalling flats rented at extortionate rents, and transient, precariously funded lives are all features of today’s Britain, too. One role of the arts used to be to explore this reality in a way that made it bearable for the better-off to look at. That may have walked a fine line between sympathy and voyeurism, but at least it ensured that such lives and circumstances were seen and considered at all.

But does the broader public still want to lend its gaze? In 2019 the author Cash Carraway, a single mother who had worked in a Soho peep show, published a brilliant memoir called Sink Estate, in which she chronicled the terrors and indignities, smells and sounds of poverty with fizzing black humour. The book was turned into a television series, Rain Dogs, starring Daisy May Cooper, which was critically acclaimed – but cancelled by its broadcasters, the BBC and HBO after one season, because of lacklustre viewing figures.

When it comes to depictions of Britishness, there will always be those who are more drawn to the caustic painterly squalor of Withnail and I, say, over the chocolate-box confection of The Holiday. But as the world shifts online, and as politics – particularly in the US – unashamedly celebrates wealth, great swathes of human reality are being left behind. For now, the note of civet is evaporating from our cultural life. Those who can afford to are veneering much more than their teeth.