My Great-Grandfather's a Dustman...

The Golden Dustman, Nicodemus Boffin, in Our Mutual Friend reminds me that my grandmother's father had a Thames barge, and took rubbish from the Thames area round the Isle of Grain, into the Medway, to be dumped on the fields of Kent.

A Thames barge moored on the Medway in Rochester

A Barge in full sail.

Temple House, a 13th Century Knights Templer hostel
that in late Victorian times was used as accommodation for
Captains of Thames barges, including my grandmothers family.

But Victorian rubbish was something else.  Initially people were paid to remove rubbish.  Then it was realised that 'where there's muck...' and companies bought contracts to collect from London Boroughs.  The dust was the coal ash swept from 1000's of grates.  The sand left from burnt coal was used to make bricks.  In Leicester a whole estate was made from this sand.  The houses were called the Boot houses, after Henry Boot, the builder.  After fifty years all the bricks spontaneously decomposed at the same time and a whole estate had to be rebuilt.

Victorian rubbish contained no plastics.  Ashes, organic matter (including bones) and rags where the treasure.  (The dustman competed with the 'Rag and Bone' man.)  Anything burnable would have be put on the fire, so no paper or wood would be collected.  Because it's such an effort to remove rubbish, the dust piles featured in 'Our Mutual Friend' would have been a common sight.  As were dung heaps.