This book is the product of an obsession dating back, perhaps, to the 1950s when the author heard the skiffle hit ‘My Old Man's A Dustman’, while on holiday as a child. Maidment has since collected and sifted through piles of images and literary representations of dustmen and has tried to make sense of what dustmen meant to nineteenth-century middle-brow readers. This is not an easy task. For one thing, the dustman was a ubiquitous, iconic figure who has left a mountain of evidence behind; as Maidment puts it, dustmen are literally ‘over-represented’ in the period covered by this book. Most important, the dustman is also a complex and ambiguous figure, hence his fascination for contemporaries. Unravelling the meanings of this stereotype helps illuminate changing genteel and middle-class anxieties about many key concerns including urbanism, proletarian culture, money and, most obviously, dirt and filth.

The introductory chapter surveys some of the most important secondary literature and lays out the major issues. ‘To study dustmen’, we are told, ‘is almost exclusively to study London’ and, more specifically, its street life. Following the influential work of Stallybrass and White, Maidment argues that the exuberant, grotesque figure of the dustman both fascinated and repulsed bourgeois observers. They were drawn to this liminal character, as they were to other low domains, because he represented their repressed other; dustmen for them were notoriously hard-drinking, lustful and hedonistic. They made their living from waste and therefore served as reminders of the essentially contaminated nature of Victorian capitalism. Subsequent chapters flesh out these ideas. We are shown how dustmen were represented as part of the ‘urban picturesque’ by artists such as W.H. Pyne, a tradition that aestheticized dustmen and concealed their labour. A much more threatening dustman appeared in theatrical adaptations of Pierce Egan's Life in London on the Regency stage. Here ‘Dusty Bob’ met his match in the form of a black, gin-soaked, prostitute called ‘Black Sal’. Their transgressive dancing in particular attracted audiences across classes and assured their important place in popular culture in the early Victorian period and well beyond. The dustman's body and dress – particularly his trademark fantail hat – made him a highly visible spectator of the metropolitan scene and a favourite subject for caricaturists. He was pictured drinking, smoking, shopping, fighting or simply looking at penny theatres, circuses, fairs or on the street. Literate dustmen were frequently ridiculed as illustrating the absurdity of the project of educational improvement among the lower working classes. According to Maidment, these generally comic representations of a transgressive, picturesque street culture increasingly gave ground to documentary reportage in the 1830s and 1840s. Artists and writers such as C.J. Grant and later Henry Mayhew constructed a more naturalistic image of the dustman that drained him of subversive content. Dustmen lived on in nostalgic narratives after mid-century, most obviously in the shape of the ‘Golden Dustman’, Nicodemus Boffin, in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, but they no longer exerted the same fascination on middle-brow readers in the later Victorian period.

Maidment's book is replete with astute and careful readings of many illustrations and texts drawn from an impressive range of sources. The pleasures of research and collection are apparent in page after page. It does not, however, add up to a history of the dustman, as the author candidly admits; it is about representations and meanings rather than ‘realities’, and this is a shame as the book would have certainly benefited from closer engagement with real as well as imagined dustmen. The changing nature of their occupation is hurriedly drawn; largely independent proletarians at the start of the period, they increasingly became public employees by the end. This transformation is loosely connected to their increasingly sanitized representation at various points in the text, though it is not developed in any sustained way. Other, more basic facts would also have been useful, including the numbers of people employed as dustmen in London and elsewhere. In short, in its stress on representation the book shares many of the methodological weaknesses of so-called ‘cultural’ history. There are other problems and omissions. Much more could have been said about the connection between dustmen and conspicuous consumption; Boffin's pretended fall in Our Mutual Friend begins after all when he and his wife start ‘going in neck and crop for Fashion’. One wonders also whether other evangelicals besides Grant sought to clean up the dustman's image. Vic Gatrell has recently over-emphasized their effectiveness in City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2006) but more detailed consideration of the specific means by which the grotesque and sexualized dustman was replaced by a sober, industrious worker would have been useful. Finally, Mayhew's assertions about the non-political nature of dustmen ought to be questioned, a point that brings us back to the repressed voices of the subjects. As Maidment is such an insightful reader, it is rather surprising that he fails to notice that the figure who states that he ‘vants a Cobbett’ is actually described as a ‘Political Dustman’ by the artist, Crowquill, in his 1826 print. This powerful, muscular worker is about to take off his apron ready for a fight and, unlike the other figures, stares accusingly out of frame at the middle-brow consumer or viewer. This very enjoyable and informative book tells us many valuable things about how this symbolically charged group of workers were portrayed in the nineteenth century. As an attempt to make sense of the cultural clutter surrounding dustmen in the period, however, it is only partly successful.