> (what is a "horse blinker"? "Michaelmas"?), etc. Why choose this type of subject matter to draw conclusions from?

Well for one thing it was topical for it's time, horses have these little black pad things that sit on their bridle (not 'face harness') to keep them from reacting to things in their field of vision that would be to the carriage driver's left and right (horses have a bigger field of vision than non-grazing non-prey animals like people who want them to go in a straight line without being scared). I had to look up Michaelmas (but am glad I did, it's a Christian religious tradition that likely isn't popular today in the US but probably was a bigger deal in Victorian England where they didn't have a quasi-replacement in Thanksgiving).

So there's all that history, a bit of sentiment on the present. And I didn't even touch on why the passage is good, it conveys a scene, mud splattered and smokey, so pretty much exactly what it intends. I'm not even a particular fan of Dickens or Jane Austen and don't go out of my way to read them. But I understand their value, it seems increasingly people do not and that shows their own gaping hole in worldly understanding.

Edit: Autocorrect