Brian Maidment's Dusty Bob: A Cultural History of Dustmen, 1780–1870 is a history of the representational development of dustmen. Nineteenth-century dustmen usually worked on their own, with a license from the parish, and collected dust and other types of household waste from people's houses. Dust and waste were both facts of everyday urban life in the nineteenth century and carriers of highly symbolic meaning, and they were connected not only to disease and contamination but to money, corruption, secrecy, violence, and lust. Maidment is interested in why dustmen became such a constant presence in visual and textual sources during the nineteenth century, and the simplest answer is that dustmen, associated most centrally with street life in London, could be used by observers and cultural producers to explore excitement and anxiety about urban space. One of Maidment's central arguments is that the Victorian interest in dirt and social investigation must be placed in a longer context. Yet, there were also dramatic changes in understandings of London across the period he covers. If Regency London was a diverse and energetic place in which all classes participated in the rambunctious theater of the streets, Victorian London had become a frightening place of sin and deprivation.

Maidment distinguishes among three representational modes: the picturesque, the documentary or naturalistic, and caricature. In the early nineteenth century, costume books and educational alphabet books portrayed dustmen as romantic laborers or urban character types who were removed from their social context. Yet such early representations were soon overtaken by a more specific portrayal that established the character of “Dusty Bob.” Pierce Egan's novel Life in London, published in 1820–21, is about urban spectatorship and transgression, as two West End gentlemen travel to the East End for pleasure. There, in a tavern, they come across a variety of low-life characters, including Dusty Bob and a prostitute named African Sal. These two socially marginal figures serve as appropriate partners for one another and show both the possibilities of entertainment present in proletarian London and the fears about the contamination of sex, race, and class. The story was dramatized by W. T. Moncrieff in 1821, in a play in which the most famous scene involved Bob and Sal engaged in a highly sexual and vigorous dance that could offend yet tempt genteel observers. Maidment argues that the spectacular success of this theatrical production spawned the entry of Dusty Bob into other forms of popular culture, including images and popular songs.

Maidment follows this discussion with two chapters on visual culture between 1820 and 1850, one focusing on the public dustman and one focusing on the private or domestic dustman. The discussion revolves largely around comic caricature, but the comedy was constantly revealing of fears about urban growth, contamination, and violence. Stereotypes surrounding dustmen were complex and sometimes contradictory. Dustmen were portrayed as drunken and aggressive yet often redeemable and sympathetic, socially and economically ambitious yet at the same time idle and lazy. Dustmen were both representatives of the urban proletariat and spectators directing the viewer's gaze, thus becoming “socially transgressive urban adventurers” (103) themselves. One important stereotype suggested that due to their self-defined working hours, dustmen could always temporarily leave their duties to enjoy street life, whether shows, sports, violence, or politics, and they were more often depicted at leisure than at work. When they were working, it was often as a public nuisance, spraying dust on passersby or contributing to the noisiness of the metropolis. They were also consumers, partaking of new luxuries available to urban people with money. In all, caricaturists poked fun at dustmen for attempting to be respectable, educated, and amorous, and dustmen were symbolic of a variety of potential class and gender transgressions in the urban scene.

Between 1820 and 1850, Maidment suggests, dustmen were primarily portrayed through such comic caricature. Yet they found a new life in the very different context of Victorian social investigation and reform. The Victorians were interested in dustmen not only because of their interest in urban conditions and the categorization of work but because of their tendency to celebrate efficiency and the reuse of waste and their recognition of the necessity of trades that promoted public cleanliness. Using new methods including statistics and interviews, investigators like Henry Mayhew classified types of dust and waste as well as the kinds of workers who dealt with it, now often in the dust yard instead of in the streets. Yet despite the scientific impulse of people like Mayhew, dust heaps also maintained symbolic value as potentially dreamlike, with untold treasure both monetary and moral. One of the nineteenth century's most famous dustmen is Mr. Boffin in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. The narrative surrounding Boffin, which Maidment posits drew on well-established representations of dustmen, is one of dirt and redemption, whereby sudden wealth and advancement creates unexpected moral perils that are then overcome. The shift from early to mid-Victorian was a shift from comedy to serious moral commentary, yet dustmen did not necessarily emerge the worse for this: later dustmen often came across less as grotesque urban characters than as socially useful. Eventually, legislation limited the economic self-sufficiency of dustmen, who were incorporated into municipal employment and made responsible for civic cleanliness rather than the cleaning of individual households.

Dustmen, Maidment suggests, had particular cultural potency for a number of reasons. They became representative yet at the same time outside of the urban proletariat because of their combination of work and leisure, their ability to become relatively wealthy as “penny capitalists” who were not subject to work hours or factory discipline, and their association with dirt and mess that was nonetheless valuable. Their economic self-determination often troubled Victorians, and they thus could be portrayed as a dangerous yet comic social inversion. Maidment has done an excellent job bringing an obscure topic to life, and his study is an important contribution to our understandings of popular culture in London. At times, however, the connection to broader ideas about urban change could have been more fully developed. While Maidment provides basic information about the historical changes affecting dustmen, the reader is left wanting more detail about dustmen's position within the social and working life of London. Yet overall, Maidment's book is a meaningful contribution to the history of what nineteenth-century Londoners thought about their city. Dustmen, while only one among many urban trades, came to be symbolic of concerns about broad social and cultural change and are thus usefully integrated into any study of nineteenth-century urban growth.