Crossword clues for mudlark
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context slang English) A pig; pork. 2 One who scavenges in river or harbor mud for items of value, especially in London during the Industrial Revolution. Also applies to a person scavenging in sewers. A person who begs near a river. (rare) A sewer cleaner. (rare) 3 A child that spends most of its time in the streets, especially in slum areas. A child who plays in the mud. Any dirty or unkempt person. 4 (cx slang English) A soldier of the Royal Engineers. 5 Any of various birds that are found in muddy places or build their nests with mud. Especially (taxlink Anthus petrosus species noshow=1) and ''Alauda arvensis''. 6 (cx AU English) The ''Grallina cyanoleuca'' that builds its nest with mud into a bowl-like shape. 7 A racehorse that performs well on muddy or wet tracks.
Wikipedia
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 the muddy shores of the River Thames at low tide for anything that could be sold; and sometimes, when occasion arose, 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 also the corpses of humans, cats and dogs. 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 (subject to tides) 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".
Mudlark is American guitarist Leo Kottke's fourth album, his first on a major label ( Capitol) and his first to feature other musicians. It reached #168 on the Billboard Pop Albums charts.
A mudlark is a person who scavenges in river mud for items of value, especially in London during the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Mudlark may also refer to:
- Girl with Ruffled Hair (The Mudlark), a portrait painted by Van Gogh
- The Mudlark, a 1950 film made in Britain
- The Mudlarks, an English pop vocal group active in the late 1950s and early 1960s
- Mudlark (album), Leo Kottke's fourth album
- Mudlark (company), an English gameification company
- Mudlark, an alternative name in Australia for the Magpie-lark (Grallina cyanoleuca)
- Mudlark, a model of Penton off-road motorcycle
Mudlark is a Sheffield-based production company that develop Chromaroma using players’ Oyster cards and Barclays Cycle Hire accounts. Points are awarded depending on the stations and journeys users complete on the London Underground and London Buses, as well as using ‘ Boris bikes’. It is described by its creators, Mudlark, as “location-based top trumps”, and encourages competition through leaderboards.
The game was launched to the public on 30 November 2010, when snow closed Gatwick Airport and caused severe delays on London’s tube network.
Usage examples of "mudlark".
Eucrasia was doing prelim on a string of optioned wetsets when she burned on the Mudlark wafer and popped her base.
Thus destroying not only the safe-copy of her own persona, but also the only copy in existence of the Mudlark program.
When the flames died down, a new Rebel Mudlark rose from them like a phoenix.
Above it floated the same false ideal of Rebel Mudlark she had seen in downtown New High Kamden.
I understand it, most of the dirty work was done during the corporate restructuring, when your mother dumped her stock in order to create the Mudlark Trust.
Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark dramas current throughout both Inner and Outer Systems.
Jack had been in his right mind, and if he had known he would one day become involved in a Plan such as this one, he never would have divulged, to his fellow oarsmen, the information that he had grown up a mudlark in East London, and that accordingly he had much experience swimming in estuaries, among anchored ships, in the dark, with a knife in his teeth.
For all of the strange places Jack had been, there was in him enough of the East London mudlark that he could not believe such a thing was actually done in this world.
East London mudlark who had succeeded in stealing an anchor only after sacrificing Dick Shaftoe to the Thames, and then passed out drinking so that he was apprehended the next day.
I was a mudlark with the voice of a mendicant, the soul of a thief, and the heart of a waterfront whore.
The mudlark had been of help to him in the Maude Idris case, and Monk had seen him a dozen times since then, albeit briefly.
There must be hundreds of thousands of rebel mudlarks loose in the System by now.
But as evening fell the captain issued blunderbusses to certain crewmen and told them to be on the lookout for mudlarks, and then Jack knew he had come full circle at last.
Young mudlarks searching the river quag for scrap had been known to step into some discoloured patch of mud and start speaking long-dead languages, or find locusts in their hair, or fade slowly to translucency and disappear.
There were many of these vessels in the heart of New Crobuzon, and the mudlarks dared each other to swim out to them, or to clamber along the old ropes that tethered them pointlessly.