History

A character of this name appears in Richard H. Horne’s short story “Dust; or Ugliness Redeemed”, which was published in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words in 1850. In this story, Dotting is an eighty-three-year-old wooden-leg user, who specialises in searching through dust heaps (large piles of refuse common in Victorian London) for treasures. She helps to rescue and revive a gentleman, who has fallen into a canal. The gentleman eventually purchases Dotting and her associates a cottage out of gratitude. For more on this story and its significance, see chapter 4 of Ryan Sweet’s free 2022 book Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.

Backstory

A searcher and sorter of London’s dust heaps, Peg lost her leg many years ago, but nobody knows how.
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