Tosher

A tosher is someone who scavenges in the sewers, especially in London during the Victorian era. The word tosher was also used to describe the thieves who stripped valuable copper from the hulls of ships moored along the Thames. The toshers decided to cut out the middle man and it was a common sight in 19th Century Wapping for whole families to whip off a manhole cover and go down into the sewers, where they would find rich pickings. As most toshers would reek of the sewers, they were not popular with the neighbours. One unexpected side effect of the sewer work was that toshers - or, at least, those toshers who survived - built up a strong tolerance to typhus and the other diseases that swept the ghettos. link