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Updated: April 30, 2025
The streets were empty and very quiet only the slow rattle of the dust-cart and the measured step of policemen changing beats. Long blue vistas and a cemetery silence as of a world under the great hand of the gentle brother of Death, and then the clang of Big Ben striking six. A letter was waiting for John in the breathless hall. It was from the Bishop of London: "Come and see me at St.
Anybody who has happened to have been run away with in a dust-cart through Fenchurch Street, or some other London pavement, the gas pipes being up at the time, might form some idea of our sensations as we pounded along, at full gallop, over some thirty miles of uneven, UNCOOKED road; but to anybody who has not had this advantage, description would be impossible.
From the private houses in Swathinglea alone which I had deemed, perhaps not unjustly, altogether illiterate we gathered a whole dust-cart full of cheap ill-printed editions of the minor English classics for the most part very dull stuff indeed and still clean and about a truckload of thumbed and dog-eared penny fiction, watery base stuff, the dropsy of our nation's mind. . . . And it seemed to me that when we gathered those books and papers together, we gathered together something more than print and paper, we gathered warped and crippled ideas and contagious base suggestions, the formulae of dull tolerances and stupid impatiences, the mean defensive ingenuities of sluggish habits of thinking and timid and indolent evasions.
An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a chef d'auvre of mechanism, compared with them and the horses! a savage might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration table. Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin.
But there was an interesting church presently, and on a dust-cart close by Henry read "Vestry of St. Pancras." "Can that be the St. Pancras' Church," he said to himself, "where Mary Wollstonecraft lies buried, and Browning was married?"
"Then you'd better drive down to the Riviera with your dust-cart, my good man." "What, where?" "Yes, to the Riviera!" The old man rubbed his hands. He was enjoying himself immensely. "It's only about fourteen hundred miles from here over there towards the south. The best place to find him is Monte Carlo between five and seven. And his wife and daughters I suppose you want to see them too?
Fifty years ago, Carlyle, in whom the truth was always alive, but in whom it was then unperverted by suffering, by celebrity, and by despair, wrote in his study of Diderot: "Were it not reasonable to prophesy that this exceeding great multitude of novel-writers and such like must, in a new generation, gradually do one of two things: either retire into the nurseries, and work for children, minors, and semi-fatuous persons of both sexes, or else, what were far better, sweep their novel-fabric into the dust-cart, and betake themselves with such faculty as they have to understand and record what is true, of which surely there is, and will forever be, a whole infinitude unknown to us of infinite importance to us?
Tall factory chimneys do not disfigure its silhouette or blacken its walls. Handsome equipages enliven the streets. But the municipality, like certain saints of old, seem to have taken vows of perpetual uncleanliness. Alike the scavenger's broom and the dust-cart appear to be unknown.
"Well, what do you make of the dust-cart? Rather fascinating, isn't it? Notwithstanding its uncleanly name, it's really rather sweet." To which she answered, speaking from out the wide background of her own emotion and purpose: "Yes, yes it's sad in a way, Richard, penetratingly, splendidly sad. But one wouldn't have it otherwise; for it is splendid, and it is sweet, abundantly sweet."
And our little procession of three carriages with white-favour-adorned horses and drivers, went through all the huge, noisy, indifferent traffic like a lost china image in the coal-chute of an ironclad. Nobody made way for us, nobody cared for us; the driver of an omnibus jeered; for a long time we crawled behind an unamiable dust-cart.
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