#toshers

[esteemed-excellency]

💫 :D

Some urchins elected Hiram's roof as their base, to snatch as many hats as possible from his guests. They don't trust him enough, as they don't trust any adult, and they would never accept an invitation, because the house is always so full of adults, but they sneak in sometimes when the place is not crawling with people. Coincidentally, they always seem to find a warm meal waiting for them. The house staff is always nice to them, and if they're lucky they'll find a spectacled captain or an old zailor willing to spin a yarn. The Precocious Tosher seems to like Hiram's company and the others agree he's fun to be around. Still, it's better not to get too involved with him, and better to avoid the place if there's no one inside. The mirrors hiss too much. They do appreciate the attic though, it's a bit creepy and full of interesting items, the best place to hang out and tell scary stories.

Hiram finds the hats thefts hilarious and he knows about the attic visits. He always keeps the most hazardous items in his rooms to avoid unpleasant accidents with his guests. He offered to adopt a particularly tempestuous girl once, but she couldn't accept the offer, and he doesn't mind her friends running around on his roof.

[specialdykebusiness]

[quotesfrommyreading]

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 a hundred thousand 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 number. 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.

The scavengers, in other words, lived in a world of excrement and death. Dickens began his last great novel, Our Mutual Friend, with a father-daughter team of toshers stumbling across a corpse floating in the Thames, whose coins they solemnly pocket. “What world does a dead man belong to?” the father asks rhetorically, when chided by a fellow tosher for stealing from a corpse. “'Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world.” Dickens' unspoken point is that the two worlds, the dead and the living, have begun to coexist in these marginal spaces. The bustling commerce of the great city has conjured up its opposite, a ghost class that somehow mimics the status markers and value calculations of the material world.  Consider the haunting precision of the bone-pickers' daily routine, as captured in Henry Mayhew's pioneering 1844 work, London Labour and the London Poor:

It usually takes the bone-picker from seven to nine hours to go over his rounds, during which time he travels from 20 to 30 miles with a quarter to a half hundredweight on his back. In the summer he usually reaches home about eleven of the day, and in the winter about one or two. On his return home he proceeds to sort the contents of his bag. He separates the rags from the bones, and these again from the old metal (if he be luckly enough to have found any). He divides the rags into various lots, according as they are white or coloured; and if he have picked up any pieces of canvas or sacking, he makes these also into a separate parcel. When he has finished the sorting he takes his several lots to the ragshop or the marine-store dealers, and realizes upon them whatever they may be worth. For the white rags he gets from 2d. to 3d. per pound, according as they are clean or soiled. The white rags are very difficult to be found; they are mostly very dirty, and are therefore sold with the coloured ones at the rate of about 5 lbs. for 2d.

The homeless continue to haunt today's postindustrial cities, but they rarely display the professional clarity of the bone-picker's impromptu trade, for two primary reasons. First, minimum wages and government assistance are now substantial enough that it no longer makes economic sense to eke out a living as a scavenger. (Where wages remain depressed, scavenging remains a vital occupation; witness the perpendadores of Mexico City). The bone collector's trade has also declined because most modern cities possess elaborate systems for managing the waste generated by their inhabitants. (In fact, the closest American equivalent to the Victorian scavengers – the aluminium-can collectors you sometimes see hovering outside supermarkets – rely on precisely those waste-management systems for their paycheck.) But London in 1854 was a Victorian metropolis trying to make do with an Elizabethan public infrastructure. The city was vast even by today's standards, with two and a half million people crammed inside a thirty-mile circumference. But most of the techniques for managing that kind of population density that we now take for granted – recycling centers, public-health departments, safe sewage removal – hadn't been invented yet.

And so the city itself improvised a response – an unplanned, organic response, to be sure, but at the same time a response that was precisely contoured to the community's waste-removal needs. As the garbage and excrement grew, an underground market for refuse developed, with hooks into established trades. Specialists emerged, each dutifully carting goods to the appropriate site in the official market: the bone collectors selling their goods to the bone-boilers, the pure-finders selling their dog shit to tanners, who used the “pure” to rid their leather goods of the lime they had soaked in for weeks to remove animal hair. (A process widely considered to be, as one tanner put it, “the most disagreeable in the whole range of manufacture.”)

We're naturally inclined to consider these scavengers tragic figures, and to fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste. In many ways, this is the correct response. (It was, to be sure, the response of the great crusaders of the age, among them Dickens and Mayhew.) But such social outrage should be accompanied by a measure of wonder and respect: without any central planner coordinating their actions, without any education at all, this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people. The great contribution usually ascribed to Mayhew's London Labour is simply his willingness to see and record the details of these impoverished lives. But just as valuable was the insight that came out of that bookkeeping, once he had run the numbers: far from being unproductive vagabonds, Mayhew discovered, these people were actually performing an essential function for their community. “The removal of the refuse of a large town,” he wrote, “is, perhaps, one of the most important of social operations.” And the scavengers of Victorian London weren't just getting rid of that refuse – they were recycling it.

  —  The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (Steven Johnson)

[gigantic-spider]

Best of "Hark! A Ghastly Serpentine"

As my ZiMo campaign for The Hauntings of Hyde Park enters the latter half of its life, I want to show off some of the writing I've done for it! Here are my favorite parts of the first Threat "Hark! A Ghastly Serpentine"

First, the title: inspired by US millenial yearbook messages from the late 00s/early 10s, yes it IS a valid acronym of HAGS. Was it ever anything else? Well it was a Ghoulish Serpentine briefly, but that sounded too undead-y to me

I had a lot of fun thinking of this eel-faced merchant on the streets of London. Does he know he looks like an eel? Has he chosen this profession because of that or despite it?

One of the Side Characters, and certainly the most British of the bunch. Cholmondeley is a real surname in the UK, and I deeply hope that anyone with it has a lot of money to help cope with that fact.

I love my toshers. Definitely stretching the bounds of historical accuracy to include them as they were more of an early to mid 1800s feature, but there really were gangs of people who fished valuables out of the sewers! And who doesn't want someone with a nosepatch to talk to?

Two of my favorite Clues. It tickles me to think of telling my players "You see a bunch of ducks circling the docks like vultures." I also love inflicting terrible things on players, and I really love those terrible things pulling double duty as Clues

Finally, I'm really proud of this Reward. Conditions can be really fun and unique in The Between, so I really like this devil's bargain you get. Supernatural powers in return for your 'health' will drive some really interesting decisions from the players

If any of this looked interesting to you, please back my campaign to get it edited and in print!

[frizz-bee-2]

I was gonna draw Richie tosher for his birthday when all my family started arguing LMAO 😨

Anyways, love you richie fucking tosher

[dianereviewsbooks]

Hound GN

Hound GN is a classically illustrated graphic novel about war and what it does to its combatants. Private Barrow is a tosher, who hunts for sellable goods within the London sewers. He is the newest recruit in The Hounds, a special unit in the British army during World War I. The unit is sent into a zone plagued with both mustard gas and German troops. But the worst enemies come from within… 4…

[moonthrone-monster]

Crogmen

Crogmen are found in the taboo Sewers of Moonthrone. Those who are spotted by them in their territory disappear in their sleep if they manage to make it out alive. This doesn't stop toshers from going down there to search for relics from before dreamer night.

[maskingtape]

THE NIGHT-SOIL MEN - The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic

The scavengers, in other words, lived in a world of excrement and death. Dickens began his last great novel, Our Mutual Friend, with a father-daughter team of toshers stumbling across a corpse floating in the Thames, whose coins they solemnly pocket. “What world does a dead man belong to?” the father asks rhetorically, when chided by a fellow tosher for stealing from a corpse. “’Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world.” Dickens’ unspoken point is that the two worlds, the dead and the living, have begun to coexist in these marginal spaces.

[irenesexe]

inktober day twenty. TRUMPETS ON THE CAVE—– inktober prompt list here.

[skymim]

Headcanon of the day: Almost every city in Skyrim has a few scavengers, people who earn money gathering whatever litter is most profitable in their region. Most supplement their income by begging.

Riften refers to these people as “toshers” and the tosh they collect is mainly glass. Empty bottles can often be cleaned and reused by alchemists or innkeepers, damaged glass can be melted down to make new bottles to support the Black-Briar Meadery.

Markarth has scrappers who collect any trash made of metal and sell it by weight to be melted into low-quality iron goods.

Whiterun and Windhelm both have rag-pickers who find anything that can be used to fuel a fire (mainly discarded fabric and broken furniture.) These are poorer than scavengers in other cities because burnables can’t be sold, rag-pickers just hunt down bits of trash to keep themselves alive in their cold cities.

Solitude has mudlarks, people who walk the shoreline for valuables that wash up and get buried. (Toshing and scrapping take priority in the colder months.)

[esteemed-excellency]

I compiled a list of all the Exceptional Stories I played, to be updated with every new one I play or buy. The bolded ones fit with Hiram's storyline, and the stars are for my favourites:

A Stretch in the Sky

Discernment

Dernier Cri

The Exile's Chalice

Stolen Stanzas

The Queen of the Elephants

The Path of Blood and Smoke

The Deadly Dapperlings

Where You and I Must Go

Slobgollion

The Sinking Synod

Trial and Error

HOJOTOHO!

Lamentation Lock - Left with the Listless Pugilist, the Ascetic Housebreaker and the Hollow-Eyed Turncoat

Cut with Moonlight - Meridian House continues to operate

The Art of Murder - [played both endings, killing the snuffer was the most in character option but I liked her character]

Written in the Glim - The Entomological Astrologer continues her activities

The Magician's Dream - The Haunted Magician keeps working for the Glass

The Gift ⭐️ Sided with the Princess

A Trade in Souls - Spirifier ending

The Waltz that Moved the World ⭐️ Danced the Waltzing Duke to his death and took his secret

Totentanz ⭐️ Danced the true Totentanz and preserved its instruments

Adornment - Escaped Mr Stones' mines thanks to the Superstitious Smuggler's sacrifice. goddammit mr stones

Mistress of the Skies - The Collective moved to Parabola

A Devil's Due - Helped Verity recover the Lyrical Soul

SALON SCANDAL! - The Foreign Office declined to comment (and the Monster had wings)

The Hollow Triptych - Freed the Conjunction of Absence

A Bright Future - Brokered a compromise between Mr Fires and the Futurist

Cricket, Anyone? ⭐️ Gave the Broken Word to Hell, the Game must go on

Codename: Sugarplum ⭐️ Mr Stones kept the bomb, and the Bazaarine Correspondent went West. Hiram has the dog the dog

The Mudlark's Lament ⭐️ Befriended the Precocious Tosher and helped the Drownie

Flame, Lead, Clay, Glass - Both the Engineer and the Correspondent survived and will probably get together again in the future, the Correction was dealt with

For All the Saints Who From Their Labour Rest ⭐️ The Intrepid Deacon became an agent of the Brass Embassy

The Stolen Song - The final verses of the Enigmatic Drownie's song convinced the Accused Contralto not to join her in the zee

The Bloody Wallpaper ⭐️ Payed the debt to the Fingerkings, shouted at the Manager

The Children of the Glow - Chose to not reveal the truth about the Luminous Miss Sparks and her glowing paint

The Stone Guest ⭐️ Filmed with stage magic and The Grand Hunt

The Stripes of Wrath - Left the tiger to die in peace

Say it With Flowers ⭐️ Met with the Brooding Captain and the Lady in Lilac to mess with the Princess' plan, the messengers are safe.

The Green King - The Green King died, though Lady Jane bound herself to him

A Newt by Any Other Name ⭐️ Sacrificed The Lure, left The Newt in the vault, and kept the diamond newt

The Persona Engine - Destroyed the Machine

The Twelve-Fifteen from Moloch Street - Uncovered The Lily's secret and entered Hell

The Century Exhibition - entrusted the Wind of Ages to Hell, and kept its location from the Empress' regiment

The Season of Skies - the Gracious Widow will continue the Polymath's work, hoping for London to see the stars again

The Icarian Cup ⭐️ Saved the Zeefarer and won the race, the Zeefarer and the Explorer parted in friendship

The Tale of Old Fritz ⭐️ The Doomed Diver returned home safe

The Tempest - The Tempestuous Urchin learned to let go of her anger, and she remains with Silvvy

Reunion - The Prince remained in London, forsaking the royal family

Caveat Emptor ⭐️ Preserved the original parasitic sigil and its copy on the deed

The Marriage of Feducci ⭐️ The marriage fell through

The Fair Unknown ⭐️ Won the tournament with the Red-Handed Queen's favour and claimed the boon

A Crown of Thorns - Accepted and destroyed the Belligerant Prince's honey batch, helped with the Thorned Manservant's campaign

The Last Dog Society - The Sunken Admiral had his revenge killing the Sequencer and the Shamble-Man

[ssshwearereading]

In Bed with the Earl by Christi Caldwell

In Bed with the Earl by Christi Caldwell

To solve a mystery that’s become the talk of the ton, no clues run too deep for willful reporter Verity Lovelace. Not even in the sewers of London. That’s precisely where she finds happily self-sufficient scavenger Malcom North, lost heir to the Earl of Maxwell. Now that Verity’s made him front-page news, what will he make of her?

Kidnapped as a child, with no memories of his well-heeled past,…

[brassandblue]

'Confess!' What is your idea of the worst occupations a person could have? Have you ever had to work any of them?? (arthur)

"One of the worst? Being a tosher, a nightman cleaning the cesspits of Victorian London. I did not have the misfortune of ever working that job in that era, but about four centuries earlier I'd earn money by doing odd-jobs, including raking the streets of filth and yes, clearing cesspits. Manning the bilge pumps on a ship was slightly more palatable, so you can see why I opted to be a sailor instead."

[semper-legens]

134. Dodger, by Terry Pratchett

Owned: Yes   Page count: 391 My summary: Everyone knows Dodger. He’s a tosher, scavenging in the sewers of London to earn a living, and coming home at night to his friend Solomon and the dog, Onan. But when he sees a young woman being beaten by a group of men, he has to intervene. Turns out she was running from some very important people.  Now all eyes are on Dodger - and some of them aren’t friendly. My rating: 4/5     My commentary:

I gotta admit, I bought this book entirely on a whim. Literally, I just saw a quote from it on tumblr, thought that was interesting, looked up a summary, and then bought the book. Turns out, that was a good decision! I really enjoyed it, it’s different to a lot of the Pratchett books I’ve previously read (by which I mean exclusively Discworld) but not at all in a bad way. Although, I suppose it’s probably helpful that Victorian London’s not too different to Ankh-Morpork, from a certain point of view.

Dodger is great. He’s obviously based on the Artful Dodger, but is in-universe the inspiration for that character - early on, he meets Charles Dickens, then a reporter, and Dickens takes a great interest in his life. Dodger’s a really good example of a street-smart character; he’s not educated but he’s intelligent, and is ultimately a moral and decent person who doesn’t want to hurt others, and is angry at injustice on a practical level. This balances with Solomon, his friend and the anti-Fagin, who is a lot more high-minded and philosophical, though that doesn’t mean he’s without practical advice for Dodger as he moves through the upper echelons of society in order to figure out how to help Simplicity.

Speaking of, there is one issue I have with this book as a whole, and her name’s Simplicity. I don’t know what it is about Pratchett’s love-interest characters that annoy me at worst and bore me at best. Simplicity isn’t really given a lot of character. She’s a distressed damsel who Dodger needs to help, and that’s really all there is to her. There’s hints at her being more complex than that - the narration makes a lot of the idea that she’s not as simple as her name would imply - but I don’t think the reader’s ever really given any proof of that, nor really any reason that Dodger cares so much, besides the fact that she’s an attractive young lady and he has a crush. I’ve noticed this in Pratchett’s work in general, honestly - while he writes amazing older women, like Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, and a few of his younger women are also great, like Susan Sto Helit or Angua, if a female character is in a novel to fulfil the role of love interest, she is often underwritten and I am completely uninterested in her.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a historical fiction novel without some cameos from real historical people. Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Robert Peel...I do appreciate, however, that Pratchett sprinkled in some lesser-known personages in significant roles, particularly Angela Burdett-Coutts. It makes it all the stranger that Sweeney Todd also shows up in a significant role, though he’s not the sensationalised murderer and cannibal that we know about. Actually, Sweeney Todd plays an important thematic role in the novel - Dodger gently disarms him to stop Todd killing him, seeing that Todd’s only doing as he is because of some severe trauma from the war. This gets spun into Dodger being the Hero Who Took Down Murderer Sweeney Todd, despite Dodger protesting that he wasn’t a bad man, just a sad man. Todd ends up in Bedlam, and Dodger pays him a visit to make sure he isn’t being mistreated - but Todd goes down in history as a monster nonetheless. It’s an interesting through-line about stories, and how the narratives that survive about such people will be the only thing remembered by history, even if they aren’t true.

Next up, I take a wander through some kidlit.

[sanguinarysanguinity]

brick, shirt, iron

Shirley stepped down from the cab, noting the manhole for the King's Scholars' Pond Sewer under her feet. She had thought from the club's name that it might be a gathering place for dragons, and its location was suggestive that she might be correct: the ancient River Tyburn flowed in the sewer beneath her feet. She had noticed repeatedly during her apprenticeship with Mr. Sheffield -- and again, during her partnership with Jane -- that London's dragons seemed to have a special affinity for the city's subterranean rivers. Jane loved the Tyburn in particular: during her residence at Baker Street, she had commented more than once on the geniality of their rooms' position above the river's invisible flow, and the Summerses had made their marital home upriver in Hampstead, close to the Tyburn's source on the Heath.

Shirley hoped that Jane had not been foolish enough to go literally underground, among London's rivers, in seek of refuge. The sewers were exhaustively prowled by toshers; Jane could never hope to keep herself hidden from them, and the metallic argument would persuade any of them to talk. Worse, any self-respecting dragon would of course search for her among London's underground rivers. Should Robbie Summers' murderer come across her in one of those closed, brick-lined vaults, Jane would be trapped like the proverbial rat in a tunnel.

--

Hornblower sat on his porch and glared at Bush as he worked. "Belay that," he ordered once.

"Best to get it all under cover, sir," Bush said, his sweat drenching his shirt. "Lest the sun destroy the coopering."

Bush grunted quietly to himself as he rebuilt the pile to his satisfaction -- an oof as he shifted a cask, a quiet hup as his wooden leg slid, frictionless, through the soft sand. Hornblower fumed to watch him. He should have gone inside and left Bush to his folly, but his hut was dark and cramped, and after months of loneliness, Hornblower thirsted strangely for the sight of another human.

Bush came to the porch to draw a dipperful of water from the bucket near Hornblower's feet; the water overspilled as he drank, wetting his face and chest. He gave Hornblower a cock-eyed smile. "None here but us, sir," he said, and pulled his shirt over his head. He used it to mop the sweat from the back of his neck, then weighted it down with the bucket. There was something almost boyish in his pleasure at the prospect of going undressed, but there was nothing boyish about his broad chest, its curled hair shot with silver, nor the strong muscles that shifted under his skin.

"You'll give yourself sunstroke," Hornblower said, and pointedly turned his gaze to the sea.

"Not likely, sir," Bush said, and bent to his work again.

--

When Holmes’ train arrived, I could not bear to shake his hand in farewell, as might befit two close friends, and so I did not. Nor was he moved to give me any public farewell, and I watched him board as a stranger might. The train was empty enough at that hour that he could secure a window seat on the platform side of the train; I approached the window, and he lowered it for me.

"Send for me if you need me," I told him, a hand on the glass.

He put his hand over mine, his eyes speaking volumes about how much he regretted leaving me on these terms. "I will, John," he said, squeezing my fingers, even as I knew he would never send for me. It was not much comfort, there in the cold, damp morning, and yet I took what comfort from it I could.

"John--" he said, when I went to withdraw, and I turned back to him. "Promise me you won't let my subscription to the British Bee Journal lapse."

"Your…?" I stared at him in confusion. Surely his last words to me weren't going to be about a magazine subscription. The whistle blew once, then again.

"The British Bee Journal," he said, insistent, his hand hard on mine. "Promise me you won't let it lapse," he said again, and he was so vehement that I nodded, bewildered.

"Yes, yes," I said, and then when his lips pursed to form promise me, I nodded again. "I promise."

He nodded once, his eyes dangerously bright. 

"Sherlock--" I said, but his name on my tongue was suddenly more than I could stand, and I drew back, lest emotion overtake me.

His train began to move, rolling slowly out of the station. He did not look at me, only stared straight ahead, his visage like iron. 

I watched until his train was out of sight.

[caitlynlynch]

Kidnapped as a child and left to himself on the mean streets of London, Malcom North grew up to be king of those streets - or at least, the sewers that run beneath them. Leader of the ‘toshers’, the sewer scavengers, he’s utterly unprepared when a detective tracks him down and tells him he’s the lost heir to an earldom.

Reporter Verity is fighting for her place in a man's world - one which barely allows for her existence and certainly won’t permit her to thrive. Finding and writing the true story of the lost earl might be her one chance to keep her job and a roof over her head - and that of her younger sister, who she’s desperate to protect. As the illegitimate children of a deceased peer, there’s certainly nobody else to look out for them.

Malcom and Verity butt heads from the very beginning, from their meeting in the sewers she’s ventured into in search of him with no idea of the dangers that await. He doesn’t want to care, but he can’t just leave her in the scrape she’s landed herself in, and with everything he learns about her, it gets harder and harder to walk away, whereas she literally can’t, not without risking everything she cares about.

I have to admit I burst out laughing when Verity found herself deep in a pickle as everyone assumed she and Malcom were married. She kept finding herself backed up against a wall with only one way to turn, though, and to his credit Malcom recognised that, looking at the situation logically. But then, unlike a lot of historical romance heroes, he knows what it’s like to be desperately looking for a way out of an untenable situation.

The pair of them made a really good couple with a deeply satisfying romance arc between them as slowly they revealed their secrets to each other. There are some wonderful themes of found family here and I definitely hope Malcom’s friend Giles gets his own book in the series (maybe with Verity’s sister?) This was a seriously enjoyable read and I’m delighted to give it five stars.

In Bed With The Earl is available now.

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this title via NetGalley.