Morbid Fact Du Jour For February 2, 2010
Today’s Ragged Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
It is August 1854, and London is a city of scavengers. Just the names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoological catalogue: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen. These were the London underclasses, at least 100,000 strong. So immense were their numbers that had the scavengers broken off and formed their own city, it would have been the fifth-largest in all of England. But the diversity and precision of their routines were more remarkable than their sheer numbers. Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water’s edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull themselves out when they stumbled into a quagmire. The pole and the eerie glow of the lantern through the robes gave them the look of ragged wizards, scouring the foul river’s edge for magic coins. Beside them fluttered the mud-larks, often children, dressed in tatters and content to scavenge all the waste that the toshers rejected as below their standards: lumps of coal, old wood, scraps of rope.
Above the river, in the streets of the city, the pure-finders eked out a living by collecting dog shit (colloquially called “pure”) while the bone-pickers foraged for carcasses of any stripe. Below ground, in the cramped but growing network of tunnels beneath London’s streets, the sewer-hunters slogged through the flowing waste of the metropolis. Every few months, an unusually dense pocket of methane gas would be ignited by one of their kerosene lamps and the hapless soul would be incinerated twenty feet below ground, in a river of raw sewage.
Culled from: The Ghost Map
It’s no wonder there was so much disease in London back then. Yuck.
I’m almost afraid to ask: what did they do with the “pure” they gathered? Could it be dried and used for fuel, like buffalo chips? Or what?
If the “night-soil men” gathered what I think they gathered, I might have elected to be a pure-finder instead.
HOLY CRAP…. oooh to live back then…..
M.
Yes, that book was worth it just to learn about the “weird” professions and society.
I have just thought of a great idea for a reality show: Dog the Pure Hunter.
Excuse me, I need to call A&E and pitch it to them.
This was an awesome book. I think my favorite group is the toshers, they sound awesome.
Don’t forget about the vivid descriptions of cholera. I can’t look at rice the same ever again.
@Aimee
They used dog-poop in part of the mixture to tan leather.
Bleeekkhhhh! Or as my dear departed Pop-Pop always said to indicate extreme disgust, “Gust, liver!”
Okay, I know I can work the purpose of “pure” into my Pure-hunter show.
BTW: I know what you mean about the rice. I read Sheri Holman’s “The Dress Lodger” which is about a prostitute’s work with a boyd-snatcher during a cholera epidemica. Also a very good book.