Victorian Serendipity

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I do like researching a subject and accidently stumbling across something else. A little bit of serendipity. Reading up on Victorian London docks, I found a short reference to a 'Tosher'. I thought a 'tosh' was a mate, some slang that I heard in the early 90s which then faded away. Turns out tosh was the treasure gathered by the tosher, someone who hunted in London's sewers for valuables. Finding coins and jewellery washed down from the streets above, it was recorded that earning $50 a day (in today's money) was the norm, so a lot of little treasures were being lost daily. Tosher was also the name for the thieves who stole the copper sheeting that covered the wooden hulls of ships moored on the Thames. Tosher also has other, more, prosaic meanings, such as a university student not part of a college and an unskilled painter and decorator, but I prefer the Victorian era definitions.