Tosher
A tosher is someone who scavenges in the sewers, especially in London during the Victorian era. The word tosher was also used to describe the thieves who stripped valuable copper from the hulls of ships moored along the Thames.[1] The former activity began around the time of the construction of the London sewerage system, designed by Joseph Bazalgette.
The toshers decided to cut out the middle man and it was a common sight in 19th-century Wapping for whole families to lift a manhole cover and go down into the sewers.
As most toshers would reek of the sewers, they were not popular with the neighbours. One unexpected side effect of the sewer work was that toshers - or, at least, those toshers who survived - built up a strong tolerance to typhus and the other diseases that swept the ghettos.[citation needed]
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[edit] Other meanings
"Tosher" was also recorded from a slightly earlier period as undergraduates' slang for "an unattached or non-collegiate student at a university having residential colleges."[2]
A similar sounding term from the same period, "tosheroon" has been applied to a tosher in error, but denotes a piece of pre-decimal British currency: the crown.[3]
[edit] See also
- Mudlark, someone who scavenges in river mud
[edit] References
- ^ 1851, H. Mayhew, London Labour, vol. II, p 150/2 : 'The sewer-hunters were formerly, and indeed are still, called by the name of ‘Toshers’, the articles which they pick up in the course of their wanderings along shore being known among themselves by the general term ‘tosh’, a word more particularly applied by them to anything made of copper.'
- ^ Recorded from 1839. The Oxford Universal Dictionary Illustrated, Little, William; Fowler, H.W; Coulson, J; Rev. and Ed. Onions, C.T. OUP., 1965
- ^ 1859, J. C. Hotten Dictionary of Slang, p. 112 : 'Tusheroon, a crown piece, five shillings.'
[edit] External links
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Look up tosher in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
- Toshers and mudlarks in fiction : "The Worms of Euston Square", a historical and literary mystery set in Victorian London
- Toshers in fiction : "Joe Rat", a novel by Mark Barratt
- Toshers and mudlarks in "The Horrid Jobs Quiz"
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