What is Dust?

Dust is one of the most ordinary substances imaginable. It gathers on windowsills, lingers in forgotten corners, and settles on the spines of neglected books. Most of us treat it as a nuisance to be swept away. Yet in literature and culture, dust is rarely so trivial. It has been used to symbolise everything from dirt and disease to nostalgia, memory, and even beauty.

I first became interested in dust while researching nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. What struck me was how often writers, artists, and even scientists turned to this most ordinary substance to express much larger cultural concerns. Dust is not just material but metaphor: it carries with it associations of filth, mortality, memory, and endurance. It is a particle that unsettles boundaries — between body and street, between past and present, between the domestic and the industrial.

In my work, I focus on how Victorian writers such as Arthur Morrison and Jack London used dust to describe poverty, contagion, and social collapse, while modernist authors like Willa Cather reimagined dust as a substance of memory and belonging. By moving between these moments, I aim to show how dust functions as a cultural barometer, revealing how societies at different times understood cleanliness, decay, nostalgia, and identity.

This post is the first in a short series on the cultural life of dust. Later entries will turn to the Victorians and their anxieties about filth, and then to modernist writers and artists who reimagined dust in surprising new ways. Here, I want to introduce dust as an idea that has always been more than matter: it is a substance that connects science, society, and art across centuries.

Dust and Science

In the nineteenth century, dust became an object of scientific curiosity as well as domestic frustration. Scientists like John Tyndall, in his lecture On Dust and Disease (1870), demonstrated how particles suspended in the air could spread contagion. Dust, once thought of as harmless fluff, became evidence of invisible dangers: germs, miasmas, and urban decay.

This scientific attention gave dust new weight in the cultural imagination. It was no longer a minor irritant but a reminder that modern life was saturated with invisible threats. To breathe meant to take in particles that might damage the lungs, spread disease, or hasten decline. Dust was unavoidable - and therefore unsettling.

Dust and the City

Dust also embodied the transformations of industrial cities. In London, coal smoke mingled with fog to produce the infamous “pea-soupers”. Street dirt blurred the lines between human bodies, buildings, and roads. For writers like Arthur Morrison in A Child of the Jago (1896), or Jack London in The People of the Abyss (1903), dust and filth became shorthand for poverty and the loss of individuality. Characters were described as if covered by, or even becoming part of, the dirt of the streets.

In these texts, dust was not simply matter - it was social commentary. To be covered in grime was to be marked by one’s environment, one’s class, and one’s lack of access to health or stability. Dust stood for more than pollution: it stood for inequality.

Dust as Metaphor

Dust has also carried weight as a metaphor across centuries. In the Bible, it represents mortality: “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”. It conveys impermanence, decay, and the fragility of human life. Literature has repeatedly drawn on this symbolism, using dust to express the passing of time, the erosion of memory, and the inevitability of death.

But dust is not only a symbol of endings. Because it lingers, resettles, and refuses to vanish, it can also signify persistence. To be “gathering dust” is not only to be neglected, but also to endure. Dust, paradoxically, speaks of both transience and endurance - the small particles that testify to the long passage of time.

From Filth to Aesthetic

By the early twentieth century, attitudes toward dust began to shift. Modernist writers and artists found in dust not only decay but also beauty. Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia (1918) treats the dust of the Nebraskan prairies as part of the landscape of memory, binding characters to place and to one another. For Cather, dust does not contaminate but comforts: it evokes nostalgia for childhood and the hardships of immigrant life.

Artists, too, experimented with dust. The photographer Man Ray famously left a work-in-progress untouched so that dust could accumulate on its surface, later photographing the result as a strange, lunar-like landscape. What Victorians had feared as contamination, some modernists embraced as texture, metaphor, or material for art.

Why Dust Matters

Dust may seem insignificant, but it is a cultural barometer. It tells us how societies have thought about health, purity, memory, and belonging. In Victorian London, it represented the dangers of overcrowding, poverty, and disease. In the American Midwest of the early twentieth century, it could instead symbolise rootedness, nostalgia, and resilience.

Dust is everywhere and nowhere, ordinary and extraordinary. It clings not only to objects but to ideas. By following dust across periods, we see how it shifts from filth to aesthetics, from fear to comfort, from mortality to endurance.