Mudlarks and Purefinders

Mudlarks of Victorian London (The Headington Magazine, 1871)
A mudlark is someone who scavenges in river mud for items of value, a term used especially to describe those who scavenged this way in London during the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Mudlarks would search in the muddy shores of the River Thames during low tide, scavenging for anything that could be resold and sometimes, when occasion offered, pilfering from river traffic. By at least the late 18th century people dwelling near the river could scrape a subsistence living this way. Mudlarks were usually either youngsters aged between eight and fifteen, or the robust elderly; and though most mudlarks were male,girls and women were also scavengers.

Becoming a mudlark was usually a choice dictated by poverty and lack of skills. Work conditions were filthy and uncomfortable, as excrement and waste would wash onto the shores from the raw sewage and sometimes the corpses of humans, cats and dogs also. Mudlarks would often get cuts from broken glass left on the shore. The income generated was seldom more than meagre; but mudlarks had a degree of independence, since the hours they worked were entirely at their own discretion and they also kept everything they made as a result of their own labour.

Mayhew in his book, London Labour and the London Poor; Extra Volume 1851 provides a detailed description of this category, and in a later edition of the same work includes the "Narrative of a Mudlark", an interview with a thirteen-year-old boy.

Although in 1904 a person could still claim "mudlark" as his occupation it seems to have been no longer viewed as an acceptable or lawful pursuit. By 1936 the word is used merely to describe swimsuited London schoolchildren earning pocket money during the summer holidays by begging passers-by to throw coins into the Thames mud, which they then chased, to the amusement of the onlookers.

More recently, metal-detectorists searching the foreshore for historic artefacts have described themselves as "mudlarks".

Purefinder

London in the 1840s was more like a 21st-century Third world megalopolis than a 20th-century city. A significant portion of the population had no fixed place of work, and indeed many had no fixed abode. In classic fashion, the city teemed with outsiders, migrants from other parts of Britain and even Europe.

Items of commerce – food, drink, textiles, household goods – were distributed, not by trucks but by an army of carts and wagons. While goods were sold from storefronts, there were also thousands upon thousands of street-traders, generally lumped together as costermongers. Alongside these relatively familiar forms of trade in consumer goods and services, Mayhew's work describes lesser-known trades driven by now-obsolete markets and by sheer poverty, such as gathering of snails for food, and the extreme forms of recycling practised by 'pure finders' (who collected dog dung for tanneries) and 'sewer-hunters' (who searched the sewers for scrap metal and other valuables).

The articles comprising London Labour and the London Poor were initially collected into three volumes in 1851; the 1861 edition included a fourth volume, co-written with Bracebridge Hemyng, John Binny and Andrew Halliday, on the lives of prostitutes, thieves and beggars. This Extra Volume took a more general and statistical approach to its subject than Volumes 1 to 3.

He wrote in volume one: "I shall consider the whole of the metropolitan poor under three separate phases, according as they will work, they can't work, and they won't work".

He interviewed everyone—beggars, street-entertainers (such as Punch and Judy men), market traders, prostitutes, labourers, sweatshop workers, even down to the "mudlarks" who searched the stinking mud on the banks of the River Thames for wood, metal, rope and coal from passing ships, and the "pure-finders" who gathered dog faeces to sell to tanners. He described their clothes, how and where they lived, their entertainments and customs, and made detailed estimates of the numbers and incomes of those practicing each trade. The books make fascinating reading, showing how marginal and precarious many people's lives were, in what, at that time, must have been the richest city in the world.

Mayhew's perception as an observer is unsurpassed in early descriptions of London's street scenes. His richly detailed descriptions are able to give an impression of what the street markets of his day were like. Here is a typical description by Mayhew:

'The pavement and the road are crowded with purchasers and street-sellers. The housewife in her thick shawl, with the market-basket on her arm, walks slowly on, stopping now to look at the stall of caps, and now to cheapen a bunch of greens. Little boys, holding three or four onions in their hand, creep between the people, wriggling their way through every interstice, and asking for custom in whining tones, as if seeking charity. Then the tumult of the thousand different cries of the eager dealers, all shouting at the top of their voices, at one and the same time, is almost bewildering. “So-old again,” roars one. “Chestnuts all‘ot, a penny a score,” bawls another. “An ‘aypenny a skin, blacking,” squeaks a boy. “Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy-- bu-u-uy!” cries the butcher. “Half-quire of paper for a penny,” bellows the street stationer. “An ‘aypenny a lot ing-uns.” “Twopence a pound grapes.” “Three a penny Yarmouth bloaters.” “Who‘ll buy a bonnet for fourpence?” “Pick ‘em out cheap here! three pair for a halfpenny, bootlaces.” “Now‘s your time! beautiful whelks, a penny a lot.” “Here‘s ha‘p‘orths,” shouts the perambulating confectioner. “Come and look at ‘em! here‘s toasters!” bellows one with a Yarmouth bloater stuck on a toasting-fork. “Penny a lot, fine russets,” calls the apple woman: and so the Babel goes on.' Mayhew.
(Wikipedia)

pure finder

(obsolete) Someone who collected dog faeces for sale to tanneries (which used it as a siccative for bookbinding leather). Undertaken by old women in Britain in the 18th century. (Reference: Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 1987, paperback 1996 ISBN 1-86046-150-6 chapter 1 page 21.)
1851: The pure-finders meet with a ready market for all the dogs’-dung they are able to collect, at the numerous tanyards in Bermondsey — Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, volume 2, page 142