Comments on: Sewer hunters of Victorian London

By: Robert Carter

Robert Carter — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 00:39:00 +0000

My favorite non-Dickens novel

By: Incipient Madness

Incipient Madness — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 13:24:00 +0000

What I meant is that rat bites themselves are not very likely to get infected unless you are also in a very filthy environment.

By: jackie31337

jackie31337 — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 12:30:00 +0000

When you consider that walking around in a sewer means you are wading through human (and other) waste, it’s easy to see how rat bites could be a source of fatal infections, especially in a time before antibiotics.

By: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

fuzzyfuzzyfungus — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 11:15:00 +0000

You would doubt a guy who is styled ”Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty”?

By: dr.hypercube

dr.hypercube — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 10:03:00 +0000

Toshers get a prominent mention in @Harkaway ‘s excellent _Angelmaker_.

By: SedanChair

SedanChair — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 05:45:00 +0000

Soon we’ll be hunting doodoo like these guys.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2231011.stm

“Hunt” is perhaps a misnomer, as the doodoo doesn’t run away or conceal itself. But the hunt for doodoo, unlike the hunt for rats, is a philosophical struggle with the self.

By: Bad Juju

Bad Juju — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 05:36:00 +0000

Is this part of Romney’s jobs plan?

By: Incipient Madness

Incipient Madness — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 02:55:00 +0000

As someone who has worked with rodents and been bitten by many rodents, I should remind everyone that rat bites seldom get infected because they tear out enough flesh that the wound bleeds itself clean. I think the infections were because the wound was getting random sewer goo rubbed in it.

By: DreamboatSkanky

DreamboatSkanky — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 01:52:00 +0000

I’d like to recommend Clare Clark’s novel “The Great Stink”, set in these sewers with a great cast of characters and olfactory detail and yes, rats.

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stink-Clare-Clark/dp/B004JZWL54/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341539236&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Great+Stink

By: Rotwang

Rotwang — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 01:35:00 +0000

Recommend everyone read “The Ghost Map” by Steven Johnson. It’s about cholera in London, but it goes into the dirtier jobs of the period. I think the teams emptying the ‘waste cisterns’ had to have had one of the messier jobs…

By: Lyle Hopwood

Lyle Hopwood — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 00:05:00 +0000

Well, that must explain the term “a load of old tosh”.

Here’s an article on the Sewer Pigs of Hampstead. I was fascinated with it when I first saw it: http://www.thevirtualdimemuseum.com/2009/03/wild-sewer-pigs-of-hampstead.html

By: blueelm

blueelm — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 22:51:00 +0000

“To live in any large city during the 19th century, at a time when the state provided little in the way of a safety net, was to witness poverty and want on a scale unimaginable in most Western countries today.”

We’re working on it!

By: Boundegar

Boundegar — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 22:39:00 +0000

Charles Palliser’s 1990 novel The Quincunx has a long and fascinating section with the hero living and working with the men who scrounged “the Shore” to survive. It’s a grim, dickensian novel with incredible attention to detail.

By: Stefan Jones

Stefan Jones — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 22:18:00 +0000

Sooooo Victorian Londoners would adopt cute baby pigs and then dump them down the loo?

By: Syd

Syd — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 22:14:00 +0000

My favorite Victorian era job was “Pure Finding”. Basically you went around collecting dog shit to sell to leather tanneries. This job stuck around until 1935 but at 8 shillings a bucket it might make a comeback.