In Victorian Britain rags were recycled into paper. Many of the urban poor made their living from collecting rags which were processed in paper mills before eventually being transformed into paper for books and newspapers. The personnel involved in recycling – beggars, orphaned children, rag-and-bone collectors and dealers in waste – featured in the fiction of the period, particularly in the work of Charles Dickens. He was fascinated by the ability of cloth to be transformed into different things, reflecting on how clothing of the very poor was converted into the paper on which his novels were printed. The child in rags appears repeatedly in his novels, whether Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, or Florence Dombey, and Dickens showed that ragged children could be ‘recycled’ into educated citizens, just as the filthy rags they wore could be recycled into books. Deborah Wynne explorest Dickens’s fascination with the link between rags, children and paper and hear some of the strange stories associated with Victorian textile recycling.