Also missing from the painter’s palette was a strong black. Permanent black paint, distilled from tar and pitch, wasn’t popularly available until the late nineteenth century. So all the glossy black front doors, railings, gates, lampposts, gutters, downpipes, and other fittings that are such an elemental feature of London’s streets today are actually quite recent. If we were to be thrust back in time to Dickens’s London, one of the most startling differences to greet us would be the absence of black-painted surfaces. In the time of Dickens, almost all ironwork was green, light blue, or dull
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