Scrapbook—Recycling in 19th-Century London

By Tom Mele

Ashes, rags, bones, scrap metal, used tea leaves, cigar butts, and dog excrement are just a few of the items collected by recyclers in 19th-century London. 

Some of the most successful recyclers of the 1800s were the dustmen. In that era, houses were heated by burning coal in an open hearth, and almost all household waste was burned in the fireplace. The dustbin man collected the ash, piling it in a high-sided wagon and later dumping it at a dust mound. There, the material was sorted into dirt, or fine ash, and larger breeze, or clinker. This work, performed mostly by women sifters, enabled the recovery of unburnt coal, metal, oyster shells, bones, and other more valuable items. Large dust mounds were often auctioned by the city. For a time, dustmen even paid to collect ash from people’s houses. Sifted ash was in great demand by the brickmakers who supplied the burgeoning city. In the novel Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens describes a typical dustman, Mr. Nicodemus Boffin, as a wealthy eccentric.

Many of the dustmen also contracted to clean the streets. The street sweepings were rich in manure, and this street mud was sold to farmers for fertilizer. In the city, boys in red jackets swept up after the horses, while street orderlies swept the crossings for tips.

Most other recyclables were collected by freelance totters, vagrant scavengers who were further classified by their area of expertise: 

Purers were boys who collected dog droppings for use as an astringent in the Bermondsey tanning yards. Their female equivalents were called bunters. Hogwash carters visited households to collect edible kitchen waste, while nightmen cleaned out cesspits for use as fertilizer. The kitchen maid could make a little pocket money by collecting bones, grease, and tea dregs, which were dried and resold. Likewise, hardups gathered cigars and tobacco waste to repack for less-affluent smokers. 

Scavengers sold their wares to either rag-and-bottle (R&B) shops or marine-store shops. The R&B shops purchased grease, drippings, leather, rags, paper, clothes, bones, bottles, and scrap metals. The proprietors, known as dollys, set up colorful and easily identified storefronts. Other R&B men scoured the streets in horse-drawn carts, servicing the butchers, kitchens, and sewing shops. Marine-store shops were similar establishments, but they tended to buy reusable rather than recyclable commodities. Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop may have fallen into this latter category. The proprietors of these shops relied on the poor scavengers and servants of rich households for their supplies. 

Ragmen bought soiled or outmoded clothes from wealthy households and resold them to the poor. This was a major business, and London had two major Old Clothes Exchanges that served as wholesale markets. A hundred or so used-clothing stores were situated on and around Petticoat Lane. Less-stylish or badly worn clothes were often exported to Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and even as far as Australia where the customers were less fashion-conscious. Old shoes were translated into wearable condition, though not always as matching pairs. Unrepairable shoes and scrap leather found a ready market in the makers of Prussian Blue dye.

The mudlarks were a mixed lot of the very old and very young who combed the banks of the Thames River. At low tide, these banks were mud flats that revealed nails, scrap iron, bits of rope, coal, wood, and other detritus from the river’s commercial shipping industry. Often characterized as “wild-haired individuals with large hats and rolled up trousers,” the mudlarks were a poor lot who worked in all types of weather. Contemporary accounts accuse the mudlarks of being thieves who pried lead or copper sheathing off anchored vessels to sell as scrap. 

Older and more adventuresome mudlarks graduated to toshers. These fearless scavengers entered the city’s sewer tunnels where they emptied into the river. Slogging under wealthy neighborhoods, toshers strained the sewage looking for bones, coins, jewelry, or most anything of value. In their dangerous profession, toshers risked rat bites, sewer gas, crumbling masonry, and being trapped by rising tides.

Out on the open water, dredgermen dragged the river bottom in search of lost cargo, anchors, or whatever they could pull up. Often employed by the police to look for bodies, it was remarked that no dredgerman had ever recovered a corpse with money in its pockets. 

Few of these colorful professions lasted into the 20th century. The ash sifters faded as natural gas replaced coal for home heating. A citywide sewer system displaced the night soil collector. The motor car and underground eventually reduced the need for horse-manure sweepers. Also, changes in manufacturing and farming eliminated markets for many of these commodities.

These lost professions are remembered largely thanks to Henry Mayhew’s 1861 work London Labour and the London Poor, an encyclopedic work on the subject based on his five years of interviews of London’s poor. Mayhew, Dickens, and other writers increased public awareness of the dreadful state of the Victorian underclass. The resulting social reforms and a general rise in living standards helped alleviate the scavengers’ grinding poverty.

Fortunately, there are a few linguistic remnants of these lost professions in words like hogwash, hardup, dustbin, and tosh (British slang for nonsense). Today, only the mudlarks remain. On any given weekend, you can see amateur scavengers still combing the banks of the Thames. No longer a task for the poor, today’s mudlarks are armed with sophisticated metal detectors, Wellington boots, garden shovels, and a £20 license issued by the Port of London Authority. Their quarry is no longer scrap metal and coal but items of historical interest, many of which grace the collections of London’s history museum. •

—Tom Mele, Connecticut Metal Industries Inc. (Monroe, Conn.)