Dust (garbage, especially ash and cinder) is what old Mr. Harmon built his fortune on, and it symbolizes the irony of upward social mobility. Old Mr. Harmon didn’t make his fortune in a glamorous business. Instead, he did a job no one else wanted to do—and he did so extremely successfully. This means that after his death, wealthy characters have no choice but to respect his massive wealth. Old Mr. Harmon originally intended to pass his fortune on to his son, John, but after John’s supposed death, the fortune ends up going to Noddy Boffin. Boffin, like old Mr. Harmon, lives an unglamorous life until money changes everything. Dust captures the difference between old money and new money, showing how in modern, industrial London offered upward social mobility for people willing to do work that the old money aristocrats looked down on. And so, dust challenges the idea that the things high society deems worthless are actually worthless, tying into the novel’s insistence that people from lower classes can be just as worthy—or worthier—than people from the upper classes.
Dust Quotes in Our Mutual Friend
He went down to his room, and buried John Harmon many additional fathoms deep. He took his hat, and walked out, and, as he went to Holloway or anywhere else—not at all minding where—heaped mounds upon mounds of earth over John Harmon’s grave. His walking did not bring him home until the dawn of day. And so busy had he been all night, piling and piling weights upon weights of earth above John Harmon’s grave, that by that time John Harmon lay buried under a whole Alpine range; and still the Sexton Rokesmith accumulated mountains over him, lightening his labour with the dirge, “Cover him, crush him, keep him down!”
It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. [...] From any point of the high ridge of land northward, it might have been discerned that the loftiest buildings made an occasional struggle to get their heads above the foggy sea, and especially that the great dome of Saint Paul’s seemed to die hard; but this was not perceivable in the streets at their feet, where the whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with muffled sound of wheels, and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.
“Do you like what Wegg’s been a-reading?”
Mr Venus answered that he found it extremely interesting.
“Then come again,” said Mr Boffin, “and hear some more. Come when you like; come the day after to-morrow, half an hour sooner. There’s plenty more; there’s no end to it.”
Mr Venus expressed his acknowledgments and accepted the invitation.
“It’s wonderful what’s been hid, at one time and another,” said Mr Boffin, ruminating; “truly wonderful.”