Tom Turdman
Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
June 2026
Before the Victorian initiatives of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the sewers of London merited little more than the sort of entry on the natural history of Iceland that Samuel Johnson recalled (“No snakes of any kind are to be met with throughout the whole island”). In previous centuries, the capital had to make do with primitive means of eliminating human waste along with the effluent from slaughter-houses and factories. Swift’s poem A Description of a City Shower gives a grimly comic picture of this tide of refuse swilling through the city: “Filth of all hues and odours seem to tell / What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell.” His lines are centred on the district close to the Fleet Ditch, commonly seen as the Cloaca Maxima of London. Within the City narrowly defined, a separate body named the Commissioners of Sewers, created after the Great Fire, were able to make regulations on drainage and police them with moderate success, but their writ did not extend to the growing areas outside the bounds of the medieval capital.
Key figures in the disposal industry were the men known as Tom Turdmen. Their job was to cart off “night soil,” as the excreta from cesspits, necessary houses, and middens were evasively described. The most famous representative came late in their history, in the form of the “Golden Dustman,” Nicodemus Boffin, in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865). Boffin is a kind of entrepreneur of urban dirt, a category that would undoubtedly include substances other than dust. The expression Tom Turdman is first listed in the OED records as late as 1694, in a translation of Rabelais, although it certainly occurred rather earlier. A pamphlet from 1664 refers to “Mr Tom Turds pond, which is to be called the Excremental Theatre.” Another derivative applied to the dump was Tom Turdman’s Hole, “a place where the nightmen lay their soil.” “Night-men” and “Goldfinders” are glossed by reference to the term in canting dictionaries. A characteristic usage from around 1700 runs, “All the difference he knew between a Bawd and a Procurer, was only such as was between a common Tom-Turd-Man, and a Person of Qualities House-Maid, who Emptied Close-Stools.” By 1744, a dictionary was able to reveal contemporary currency in defining “Gold-Finder” with the words, “A genteel name for him whose business it is to empty privies, vulgarly called a Tom-turd-man.” At the end of the century, there was room for the expression in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1786).
From Old Bailey records, we can deduce that one site lay in Whitechapel Fields on the far eastern side of the city. It was situated on Back Lane, in the vicinity of Hangman’s Acre, west of Sun Tavern Fields. We might notice that this reflects the habit in early modern cities of consigning their more noxious activities to the east side of town, in which direction the prevailing winds would blow.
From about 1700, the name crops up in literature with increasing regularity, most often in satirical writing by chroniclers of London life such as Ned Ward, who uses it several times. In a typical onslaught against what he called “Curlicism,” Daniel Defoe wrote in 1718 :
I think the Booksellers may be compar’d, in one Sense, to T--men, they may be very honest Men, tho’ they make a great Stink, and everybody cries Foh! at them, yet everybody deals with them. There is only one Thing to be wish’d, viz., that all Booksellers who sell stinking Books, such as Blasphemous, Bawdy, Lying, Treasonable Books, should like the T--men be obliged to open Shop only by Night, and then I doubt there would be very few Booksellers to deal with by Daylight.
Swift and his friends Pope and Arbuthnot are understandably suspected of coprophilia, and they show no reluctance to use the expression (sometimes in an abbreviated form, with a dash). For example, Swift inserts a contemptuous mention in his poem On Dreams (c. 1724) to “Tom-T---Man of true Statesman mold, / Collects the City Filth in search of Gold.” He also refers to gold-finders in The Fable of Midas (1712). John Gay invented a foundational myth for Cloacina in Trivia (2nd edition, 1720), but without touching directly on Tom Turdmen: however, she does fall in love with “a mortal Scavenger,” that is, a street cleaner. A brief allusion comes in the Scriblerians’ Peri Bathous (1728). Occasional anecdotes about those engaged in this work are found in jest books.
Virtually nothing is known, however, about real-life gold-finders. No eighteenth-century Henry Mayhew thought it worth his while to enquire into their life and labour. For all that, London could not have maintained any semblance of decency without the contribution they made.
See Franziska Neumann, “The Realm of Cloacina? Excrement in London’s Eighteenth-Century Waste Regime,” German Historical Institute London Bulletin, 43 (2021), 30–56, for a useful review of pertinent issues.