'Cleanliness for Human Weal to Godliness is Next'

I remembered a word I learned from Henry Mayhew’s four-volume London Labour and the London Poor (a work that begs to be read with pencil in hand): tosher. An American ear hears few echoes (except Peter Tosh), though in England uses of tosher and its root, tosh, seem to have proliferated. Here’s Mayhew:  

“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.”

In short, toshers are subterranean cousins to the better-known mudlarks. The OED definition is straightforward: “one who searches for valuable refuse in drains and sewers.” My brother is another cousin, once removed, as he scavenges Cleveland's alleys and Dumpsters for art supplies. Mayhew’s account of mid-nineteenth-century London street life is less a sociological tract than a tribute to human cunning and resourcefulness.

I thought of toshers while browsing The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (1930), edited by D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee. It’s not a collection to linger over because making fun of tin-eared, bathetically sanctimonious drivel is too easy. Guilt creeps in because it ought to be more difficult to feel so convincing a sense of superiority. The poem that sparked my memory was an excerpt from “London” (1848) by Samuel Carter:

“Magnificent, too, is the system of drains,

Exceeding the far-spoken wonders of old:

So lengthen’d and vast in its branches and chains,

That labyrinths pass like a tale that is told:

The sewers gigantic, like multiplied veins,

Beneath the whole city their windings unfold,

Disgorging the source of plagues, scourges, and pains,

Which visit those cities to cleanliness cold.

Well did the ancient proverb lay down this important text,

That cleanliness for human weal to godliness is next.”

I love the way bad poets twist syntax to conform to meter and rhyme, thus crafting lines resembling the lower intestine and its contents. In the introduction to Carter’s poem, Lewis and Lee write: “[T]he poet’s tribute to the metropolitan sewage system is at once just, finely expressed, and almost modern in its choice of theme.” In fact, the theme is rather old. In the previous, pre-sewer century, Jonathan Swift in “A Description of a City Shower” (1710) was more explicit and intentionally amusing about sewage:

“Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow,

And bear their trophies with them as they go:

Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell

What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell.

They, as each torrent drives with rapid force,

From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course,

And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge,

Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge.

Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,

Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,

Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.”