London Victorian Poverty. Four penny coffins were common during the late Victorian era. Men would be offered a tarpaulin as a blanket, if sleeping like this wasn’t hard enough. If you only had two pennies, you would sit on a bench where a rope would keep you from falling when and if you fell asleep. It was known as a two-penny hangover, the word hangover become associated with alcohol in the past century. It first appeared in the English vocabulary in the 19th century as an expression for describing unfinished business from meetings, but it was not until 1904 that the word began to crop up in reference to alcohol, Based on research, the claim that the word “hangover” refers to the practice of sleeping over a rope is FALSE. In reality, the alcohol-related meaning of the term is an offshoot of its earlier meaning to refer to unfinished business or the aftereffects of other events.