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elderly man to act as their own sweeper, both to ensure that their clerks arrived looking respectable as well as to provide the same service for their customers.
    Apart from these individuals, there were also civic attempts to keep the roads clean. A Parliamentary Select Committee in the 1840s recorded that three cartloads of ‘dirt’, almost all of it animal manure, were swept up daily between Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Circus alone – 20,000 tons of dung annually in less than half a mile. In addition to this, every day more refuse was cleared, most of which had fallen from the open carts constantly trundling by: coal dust, ash, sand, grit, vegetable matter, all ground to dust by the horses’ hooves and the carts’ iron wheels. In wet weather, it was shovelled to the sides of the roads before being loaded on to carts by scavengers employed by the parishes, with the busiest, most traffic-laden streets cleared first, before the shops opened, when traffic made the task more difficult. Dustmen also appeared on every street, ringing a bell to warn householders to close their windows as they drew near. Traditionally they wore fantail hats, which resembled American baseball caps worn backwards, with a greatly enlarged leather or cloth bill, the back flap protecting theirnecks and shoulders. Wearing short white jackets and, early in the century, brown breeches or, later, like Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend , red or brown cotton trousers, they carried huge wicker baskets and a ladder that allowed them to climb up the side of their carts and deposit their loads. 28 (See Plate 1, where fantail, red trousers and bell are all shown.)
    There were attempts throughout the period to mechanize the street-cleaning process. In 1837, a footman named William Tayler, who lived in Marylebone, wrote in his diary: ‘saw a new machine for scrapeing the roads and streets. It’s a very long kind of how [sic]...One man draws it from one side of the street to the other, taking a whole sweep of mud with him at once...There are two wheels, so, by pressing on the handles, he can wheel the thing back everytime he goes across the street for a hoefull.’ By 1850, the streets were ‘swept every morning before sunrise, by a machine with a revolving broom which whisks the dirt into a kind of scuttle or trough’.
    With so many unpaved roads, and as many poorly paved ones, dust was as much a problem in dry weather as mud was in wet. When David Copperfield walked from the Borough, in south London, all the way to Dover, he arrived ‘From head to foot...powdered almost...white with chalk and dust’. Because all the roads surrounding London were as dusty in hot weather, when heading for the Derby, ‘Every gentleman had put on a green veil’ while the women ‘covered themselves up with net’: ‘The brims and crowns of hats were smothered with dust, as if nutmegs had been grated over them’; and without the veils the dust combined with the men’s hair-grease, turning it ‘to a kind of paint’. Street dust also spoilt the clothes of pedestrians, and could even insinuate itself indoors, damaging shopkeepers’ stock and furniture in private households.
    Water not only kept down the dust in dry weather but also helped prolong the life of macadam surfaces, so by the end of the 1820s most parishes maintained one or more water carts, filled from pumps at street corners. The pumps were over six feet high, with great spouts that swung out over the wooden water troughs on the carts. 29 By the 1850s, the rumbling of ‘tank-like watering-carts’ marked the arrival of spring as they rolled out across the city. When the driver pressed a lever with his foot, it opened a valve in the water trough, and the water squirted out of a perforated pipe at the back of his cart as he slowly drove along, ‘playing their hundred threads of water upon a dusty roadway’.

    Streets were watered daily to keep down the dust. Here a water cart is being filled at a street pump in