1. Composting: Secondhand Matter and Human Waste

Of the two articles noted at the outset, only “Nature” is included in London Labour. Attesting to Christopher Hamlin's point that “urban sanitary problems were ecological problems in the most fundamental sense,”Footnote ¹⁵ “Nature” details one strand of the ecological underpinnings of Victorian thought via the unlikely route of sewage management. What Hamlin refers to as the “recycling imperative” in mid-Victorian approaches to sanitary science is especially relevant to the focus on secondhand items in volume 2 of Mayhew's London Labour.Footnote ¹⁶ It is here that “Nature” is reprinted in a section entitled “On the London Dustmen, Nightmen, Sweeps, and Scavengers.” I will return to the composition of London Labour in the following section to illustrate the resonance between Mayhew's form and an open ecology; here I want to consider this selection's broader context in the volume and its contribution to mid-Victorian ecological thought in relation to its challenge to the closed circuit that urban recycling promotes.

Whereas Mayhew focuses on what is “bought and sold first-hand” by the London poor in volume 1, in volume 2 he turns to the even more “novel, curious, and interesting” practices of “second-hand sellers” (2, 6). He begins with a survey of the secondhand items he will address—from tin kettles, old linen, and cigar ends to, somewhat less obviously, the trade in live animals—and closes this introduction with “the many uses to which that which is regarded, and indeed termed, ‘offal,’ or ‘refuse,’ or ‘waste,’ is put in a populous city” (2, 7). Far from presenting an obstacle to the smooth operations of cyclical patterns that he will remind us of later in the volume, cities offer all sorts of creative and enterprising responses to secondhand matter. In a “populous city,” a horse carcass is not left to decompose, for example, but is turned into tripe, skin, glue, and dye, a process that Mayhew anatomizes, drawing on Charles Babbage's report in Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1835), for five densely packed columns. This is a promising turn for the problems posed by populous cities: it describes a cycle whereby the valueless, here “offal,” gains value (2, 9); waste becomes “usable form.” Even printed matter—old books, newspapers, ledgers, love letters—take on second lives as packaging, until the very meaning of the word “waste” is reversed such that “waste” defines books and papers that are no longer read but rather used. And yet as soon as use is the operative mode, open and unpredictable connections emerge that cannot be contained by either recycling as a closed circuit or the categories generated by Mayhew to describe its functioning (2, 11).

If paper ends its life as useful “waste”—itself an unbounded term in Mayhew's lexicon—it begins as rags.Footnote ¹⁷ The trade in secondhand clothing, among the “most ancient of callings” (2, 26), takes on a grim cast when Mayhew considers “the several uses” to which the reader's “left-off clothes may be put” in the shoddy factory (2, 30). First they are torn and “grinded” with a coarse willow that produces “dry clouds of choking pungent dirt and floating fibres” (2, 30). Once reduced to something like a pulp, “fresh wool is added” to create a “reworked” “mingled material” from which new items can be produced. Mayhew is unsparing in his indictment of the health effects of this “lowest and foulest” of factory work (2, 30), stressing the “choky volumes,” the “devil's dust” that is “exactly like smoke,” and the “mildewy fungus” that create a respiratory disease called “shoddy fever” (2, 30–32). The “rags which the beggar could no longer hang about him,” he concludes, are in this way made into the “library table-cover of a prime-minister” (2, 30–31). Just as the “shoddy” is constituted by many recycled secondhand garments, so too is it constituted by the searing labor conditions of industrial modernity, conditions that here tie rags to books, the beggar to the prime minister, as they also exceed the recycling circuit—witness the pollution, airborne particulates, and labor conditions Mayhew expounds—they describe.Footnote ¹⁸ In another example of emergent secondhand economics, dogs’ dung—ironically called “pure”—is collected and used to cure leather that binds the books that will, in turn, become the “waste” noted above. But just as “pure” is an unlikely term for dog dung—redefined to correspond to its use—so too is “recycling” a term inadequate to the many fissures in the open recycling circuit recorded in Mayhew.

While dogs’ dung enables the pure-finders to support themselves, however minimally, human excrement is not so easily converted into something useful. Rather, it poses a problem in “populous cities” precisely because of the absence of a viable sanitary system to address rising populations. As Mayhew was well aware from his earlier “Cholera” article, the need for better sanitary measures was especially urgent among the poor, many of whom had moved to London seeking work, only to find their health more imperiled and their living conditions more precarious. That Mayhew chooses to reprint his article on natural cycles in volume 2, the volume dedicated to secondhand matter, and that he chooses to do so in the context of population control, is telling. Here, ecology is neither apolitical nor ahistorical; instead, it is used by Mayhew to urge reform and support recycling measures that will require concerted urban management extending well beyond the labor practices of isolated individuals. We have already seen how “Nature” was originally published one week after Mayhew's article outlining the political and national neglect of cholera, poverty, and sanitation in Bermondsey. In its reprinting, the implicit politics of natural cycles is only enhanced. On the face of it, “Nature” reads like a standard ecological account celebrating the interconnection of all things. But following the compromised interconnections London Labour has thus far cataloged, coupled with the political questions of sanitation and population, a different reading emerges.

The dustmen, sweeps, and scavengers comprise the last of three categories “Of Street-Finders and Collectors” who are themselves the last category of six that encompass the volume's focus on secondhand matter. This grouping—the cleaners of the city—occupies the greatest space in the volume, just under four-fifths of it; they are warmly praised for “silently and efficiently” ensuring the city's cleanliness as if under “the care of a tidy housewife” (2, 159). This alliance of the city and the house or oikos anticipates Mayhew's turn to the ecological patterns of decomposition and to his sharpening analysis of urban social distress. That is, if the dustmen, sweeps, and scavengers expertly attend to urban filth, the problem of sewage witnessed in the “Cholera” essay and extended here is beyond their capacity to address. Here, a comparison not to the built oikos, but to the natural world's composting and purification practices, is instructive:

This process defines a “wondrous economy” that translates what may be “pollution” for some into “nourishment” for others.Footnote ²⁰ The carbonic acid that humans exhale, for example, is what plants take in as nutriments. “Plants,” he writes, “are not only Nature's scavengers but Nature's purifiers” (2, 160); Mayhew transposes the terminology he has adopted at the outset of this section and applies it to the plants whose purification properties have been inadequately understood. In this vision of “mutual dependence,” plants are seen as protorecyclers transforming what is useless to us, indeed poisonous, into a usable form. The wondrous economy of the system follows from the fact that everyone and everything gains something: “What our lungs throw off, their [plants’] lungs absorb—what our bodies reject, their roots imbibe” (2, 160). Mayhew perceives in this account, indebted to Baron Liebig and new research in organic chemistry, a lesson on recycling that the city would do well to follow: to maintain “the balance of waste and supply” and the “principle of universal compensation” (2, 160), the infrastructure of the city should be designed to ensure that plants receive the human waste that optimizes growth.

Humans have always found excrement offensive, and they have removed it, one way or another, Mayhew observes, from the localities in which they live. But “the idea of using it never entered [their] minds” (2, 160). Inroads in science have helped Mayhew to comprehend that excrement is, in fact, “Nature's capital,” that it is “wealth set aside for future production.”Footnote ²¹ At this point, Mayhew interrupts his “Nature” reprint to offer a critique of Malthus's theory of surplus population and its failure to consider the ecological relations he delineates here (2, 161). That is, he cuts into his recycling essay to add more extended commentary on the topic. Excrement should be removed from the city, processed as fertilizer, and used to enhance agricultural output: “This doctrine of universal Compensation extending throughout the material world, and more especially through the animal and vegetable kingdom, is, perhaps, one of the grandest and most consoling that science has yet revealed to us, making each mutually dependent on the other, and so contributing each to the other's support.”Footnote ²² Here the material, animal, and vegetable worlds again work together in mutually supportive relations. But the fissure Mayhew introduces into his text in combination with his invocation of Malthus and political economy also binds his urban ecology to the open and unfinished city and its need for political and sanitary reform.

Indeed, the “doctrine of universal Compensation” may extend through the natural world, but in the city its smooth functioning is thwarted. The solution at the heart of Mayhew's volume—finding solace and comfort in the natural cycle as an answer to the problems besetting a populous and polluted urban environment—is to redirect urban sewage to rural agricultural lands in an interconnected sewer system. While this solution is compelling—Mayhew imagines the sewage seamlessly converted into loaves of bread to feed the poor (2, 162)—its vision of a closed circle of “productive continuity,” as Tina Young Choi puts it, fails to be realized. As Choi illustrates, “no system could be perfectly self-sufficient and self-perpetuating in the ways they [Mayhew and Chadwick] envisioned.”Footnote ²³ Choi points to Mayhew's illustration elsewhere in the volume of the shortcomings of the cyclical model he promotes as well as to the wider problem of land availability,Footnote ²⁴ but the perforations and interruptions in Mayhew's own print recycling of his article coupled with his framing of this reprint in the context of the intractable city also challenge a hermetically sealed recycling model.

If the city, for example, is like a body in which its refuse—the population's excrement—is “a precious ore, running in rich veins beneath the surface of our streets,”Footnote ²⁵ it is not a bounded body. In his introduction to this section, Mayhew notes that it is difficult to demarcate where “the capital begins and ends” (2, 159). He later returns to this point: the city's “precise boundaries and extent cannot be defined” (2, 163), and, citing J. R. McCulloch, it is “difficult to ascertain the extent of the metropolis at any particular period” (2, 163). This porousness of city boundaries is especially clear in Mayhew's numerous, and often idiosyncratic, tables.Footnote ²⁶ The section on “London Dustmen,” for example, includes six tables. The first two seek to catalog the streets, people, and houses in London to compass the sanitation and cleaning required. But in the text, Mayhew notes that the “total here given can hardly be considered as the dimensions of the metropolis.” And even if one could draw a line accurately demarcating its boundaries, its size is “so vast as almost to overpower the mind with its magnitude” (2, 159). Further tables subdivide the city by district and attempt to define the city by historical period, but in every case the numbers are unreliable; as Mayhew puts it, all the official bodies seem “to delight in creating a distinct metropolis for themselves,” thus producing a statistical “confusion worse confounded” (2, 166). Indeed, the volume opens with a table of statistics and then immediately qualifies it: “it is here cited, as indeed all the statistics in this work are, as an approximation to the truth rather than a definite and accurate result” (2, 2). The turn to nature at the heart of Mayhew's volumes on London's “bricken wilderness” (2, 159), then, renders the boundaries between the country and the city, animal bodies and vegetable worlds, the organic and the inorganic, and, indeed, life and death, unstable, porous, and dynamic. In short, a vision for closed-circuit recycling cannot be sustained either in relation to the constraints of midcentury urban development, as Choi notes above, or in relation to the fact that the city itself is not a bounded whole but a dynamic, mobile, and open network of relations.

As Mayhew recorded the city's rapid and unbounded expansion, moreover, so too did his project expand exponentially. The costermonger study in volume 1, for example, initially projected to include only two street biographies to represent the class as a whole, soon “inflates like a balloon,” as Anne Humpherys puts it,Footnote ²⁷ to include dozens of such biographies in ever-wider circles of inquiry. Instead of closing down and concluding any of his studies, he simply opened new tracks for analysis. Just as there were no boundaries neatly demarcating city from country, so too the communities within the city itself were porous, overlapping, and unsettled. Consider the porous spatial boundaries on which he focuses: the unloading of coal on the docks, the relay of watercress from suburban market to city street, and the rats in the sewers cutting irregularly through the city. In each of these cases, the boundaries—between river and dock, country and city, sewer and dry ground—are defined by activity and movement. Always fascinated by the usable forms derived from secondhand items, Mayhew traces connections between plants and people, excrement and food, rats and livelihoods in collaborative constellations and fertile alliances that never settle or take a final form despite the many charts, tables, statistics, and headings that seek to rein them in. Further, Mayhew's own practice of print recycling opens his earlier article to more extended commentary, interrupts its narrative, and situates it in a series of comments on the ways in which the city resists containment and closure. To see Mayhew as an urban ecologist, then, is to see him as tracing lines of connection such that all the selections of the volume are animated in each instance, but, like this ecological selection in which “Nature” is reproduced from the Morning Chronicle with new political commentary and interruptions, there are also perforations or punctures in the cyclical returns.

2. Composing: Usable Form and Open Ecology

If Mayhew dedicates many hundreds of pages to the recycling of secondhand matter—from horses, paper, and dogs’ dung to human excrement—into usable forms, to what extent can we consider his volumes themselves as usable forms?Footnote ³⁰ And if, in his passages on recycling, he privileges movement, connection, collaboration, and relation, to what extent, again, does his form support these discussions? In short, if volume 2 is keen to trace the work of street finders and collectors, to what extent is Mayhew's own practice of collection—“my vocation is to collect facts,”Footnote ³¹ he writes—linked to the material he records?Footnote ³² Mayhew offers an account of people, places, animals, plants, and things that does not follow a familiar or easily traceable pattern. He has been much criticized for his haphazard display of material, his lack of systematic conclusions, and his lack of theory. But I want to pause at this question of method to consider not what these volumes could have offered—a theory of labor or poverty—but what they do offer; not what they might have done, in other words, but what they do. I want to suggest that the idiosyncratic mode of Mayhew's collecting of facts and composing of print volumes captures a process that is about relating and interrelating, about composing, decomposing, and recomposing. They do not pin the city down; they set it in motion.

This dynamic process is intimately bound up with the composition—the putting together—of these volumes, a composition that reflects the focus on collecting and resonates with the political imperative underpinning Latour's “compositionist manifesto.” Donna Haraway, building on Latour, suggests that “compositionist practices” can build “new collectives” indebted to collaboration.Footnote ³³ Indeed, to refer to Mayhew as the author of London Labour is a misnomer insofar as these volumes are not in any traditional sense single-authored texts. In his introduction, Mayhew notes that he is indebted to two colleagues, Henry Wood and Richard Knight, and that Wood, moreover, deserves “to be considered as one of its authors” (1, xvi); further, when he was working for the Morning Chronicle, Mayhew had an entire team at his disposal, and presumably this practice continued with London Labour. The entries themselves, as I have noted, include a range of authors from the anonymous Morning Chronicle articles, to long passages, if not entire selections, from named authors, to, of course, the selections in the words of the street-folk themselves. But London Labour is also collaborative in the way that all writing, this article included, is. Even when material is not explicitly cited, it is written in an ongoing dialogue with others, a dialogue that Mayhew's collaborative method highlights and that was enhanced by many of the new forms to which it gave rise.

Haphazard, undisciplined, and collage-informed compositions may be a flaw when one is seeking to articulate a tidy theory, but they are an advantage when one is seeking to describe a volatile, “open and unfinished” city—its labor changes, its environmental changes, its practices, people, plants, things, and animals—to give readers some idea of how the different pieces operate together. Karel Williams, more than others, approaches Mayhew's work on its own terms, alert to the ways in which his efforts to classify create not “classifications but lists” that render his project “interminable” and alert, too, to his “openly chaotic” structures in which material sometimes stops “mid-sentence.”Footnote ³⁴ Williams argues that Mayhew's “methodological precepts”—what he calls his “inductive and taxonomic” approach—“far from organizing the work … become an active disorganizing principle.”Footnote ³⁵ For him, the “the non-unitary and uncontrolled quality of the discourse of London Labour defines [its] modernity.”Footnote ³⁶

A compositionist in Latour's sense, like a composter or recycler, is adept at taking what has been neglected, overlooked, or dismissed and transforming it into a “usable form” in an open circuit. While Mayhew's interviews with street-folk have rightly enjoyed wide critical appreciation, the other textual material on which he draws has been less often discussed. And yet this material—the commentaries, summaries of the interviews, tables and statistics, copies of letters and songs and sundry other street productions, governmental reports, lengthy footnotes, illustrations and other found material of all kinds from poems, sample letters, and street literature to selections from Charles Dickens—is integral to Mayhew's project. It is as interrelated as the stones and bones and lichen to which he draws our attention in the natural cycle. The material collected from street people (their voices, songs, and writing) is placed alongside the material collected from published works and official records to put them on the same footing in an inventive, open, uncontained, and nonlinear form.Footnote ³⁷ This is not a narrative but, as Marilyn Gaull points out in relation to natural histories and oral traditions, an episodic, composite, collective, and unfinished form ideally suited to an urban ecology.Footnote ³⁸

Consider Mayhew's recycling of texts, for example. He crafts a definition of the “secondhand” by offering a secondhand account of Babbage's elaboration of the secondhand (notably, both in exact citation and in paraphrase). Similarly, he offers an account of waste recycling to make compost by recycling his own work, and of wool recycling to make shoddy by reprinting an article from the Morning Chronicle. My point, however, is not just that Mayhew was a recycler of speech and print but that (1) these documents, by being placed alongside one another, bring disparate genres and voices into conversation, and (2) they explicitly draw in material from outside the text and, in doing so, open its boundaries. The interviews exceed the bounds of the text as Mayhew sought to track down different informants between the various publication periods and as they also took on extended lives in the “Answers to Correspondents” to which I will turn in more detail below. The recycled print material, moreover, is rarely neatly demarcated: Babbage is cited, there is a digression, he is cited again, and so on; Mayhew imports his text from the Morning Chronicle but interrupts it in the middle to offer a fuller commentary and then returns to it. In both cases—and many more could be enumerated—the recycled text does not stay within its “boundaries” but generates new text that is equally recalcitrant to strict delimitation. Like the interviews that critics have come to realize are likely “composites” rather than case studies of single figures,Footnote ³⁹ the recycled material also shares a fuzziness of outline. Further, the print history of London Labour itself offers its own minihistory of “recycling” flexibly defined: the three volumes of London Labour published in 1861–62 are comprised, in part, of Mayhew's weekly numbers from 1850–52, which were themselves comprised, in part, of articles from the Morning Chronicle in 1849–50 (all of which also draw on a range of authors and experts reproduced from other print forums).

But if Mayhew was adept in crafting new usable forms by recycling old texts, he also wanted to mobilize these texts to generate political reform (1, xvi). Texts are “open” when they are in process, when material is added and deleted and adjusted, but at some point an author will typically conclude the text, at which point it will be bound between two covers and appear contained through all the familiar conventions of publication. We tend to forget there was once an “open” stage. This forgetting may be an even more pronounced disservice to Mayhew's unruly and disordered process in which the textual collisions, contradictions, and collaborations were very much part of the new form he developed. I want to turn to two examples of this open form that dovetail with Mayhew's political commitments and cannot possibly be captured in a print volume: his mass meetings and his “Answers to Correspondents.” They both pivot on how the text is used and illustrate how an open form animates relations to generate new alliances and collaborations. The vitality of this mix, however, is necessarily muted in the edited volumes through which many readers are introduced to Mayhew's work.

From the outset, Mayhew used his writing on the London poor to catalyze mass meetings in which he encouraged workers to condemn the living and working conditions that they endured. These meetings, held in public halls, were large even by today's standards, with upward of one to two thousand people in attendance. Indeed, a series of mass meetings in 1850 for needlewomen, tailors, and costermongers, respectively, likely led to Mayhew's break with the Morning Chronicle. The public meetings did not diminish in the following years, with large gatherings organized by Mayhew on topics ranging from trade unions to Sunday openings to dockworkers. As Anne Humpherys notes, moreover, he used public meetings instead of private interviews to gather information for his volumes and to develop a print form that allowed workers’ voices to enter the text en masse.Footnote ⁴⁰ These meetings accordingly serve as a canny example of the collective, collaborative practices that Latour and Haraway associate with a compositionist approach. But I also want to stress here that his innovative composition is inseparable from his treatment of compost, recycling, and reuse in an urban context, and his composition of London Labour combines print culture and public meetings to generate dissent and prompt political action.

The public meetings also clearly indicate that the people about whom Mayhew was writing were also reading his work, a point even more emphatically made in the “Answers to Correspondents,” introduced to the monthly part publications in January 1851.Footnote ⁴¹ “In compliance with the request of many Subscribers,” Mayhew writes, “the outer pages of this periodical will, in future, be used as a wrapper, intended to be cut off in binding.”Footnote ⁴² Mayhew calls these disposable wrappers “waste papers”;Footnote ⁴³ they will not only prevent the work from being “soiled,” he explains, but also open a dialogue with his readers.Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed, Bertrand Taithe calls his chapter on this correspondence “Open Letters” to spotlight the new dialogic form they introduced. Mayhew uses his responses to these letters, moreover, as a forum to expand on his political views and issue his calls for social reform. Not surprisingly, he also receives many letters from readers eager to advance the causes he elaborates (and, occasionally, to dispute the claims he makes). Taithe's reminder that each of London Labour’s “polymorphic” iterations was “read according to how it was presented”—“as part of an expensive newspaper; as a cheap, penny periodical sold alongside ‘penny dreadfuls,’ and as an expensive four-volume book”Footnote ⁴⁵—perhaps finds its best example in these disposable “Answers.”

To read something “according to how it was presented,” however, also raises the question of mediation. Indeed, another word to describe the various examples of textual recycling I've been discussing here could be remediation. To read Mayhew's article in the Morning Chronicle is to read it in one print form that shapes how it is received; to read its reprinting—that is, its remediation—in London Labour is another; and to read passages from the article recontextualized in this article is yet another. In all these contexts (and others), the reading experience will be shaped by the printed work one holds, the surrounding textual material, the font, and so on, as well as its broader material mediation in relation to its conditions of production. Mediation draws attention to the conditions of production and the medium of representation as well as its process—to what Raymond Williams calls “the material social process.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Williams speculates on whether mediation may offer a way to make more material interventions in cultural studies as well as an alternative to philosophical dualisms (subject/object, nature/culture, and so on).Footnote ⁴⁷ While Williams remains unsure of the merits of mediation in relation to resolving dualisms, I want to suggest that a focus on mediation allows us to sidestep representation and exposé (qualities that critics often celebrate in Mayhew's work) to emphasize, following my focus on recycling here, the text as a usable form. The “Answers” give us a particularly vivid example of this point insofar as they at once animate a political exchange and force the reader to use the text, to treat it as a material object, to cut it off, to turn it over, to turn it around. Similarly, a copy of a letter included in London Labour’s volume 1 confounds interpretation until one understands that to read it, one has to hold it up to a mirror (1, 241). Of course, when we read anything, we engage with it and, on some level, are aware of its weight (or lack thereof), its print, and its call to encourage certain practices. But these two examples, in their tactility, bring this point to the fore and remind us that the form of the text is an inseparable and dynamic dimension of its meaning.

If mediation, in other words, “is in the object itself” as Adorno puts it,Footnote ⁴⁸ when we are offered a summary or even an exact transcription, the object gains a new meaning bound up with its mediation. Often these distinctions may be so slight as not to seem to matter. But the point I want to make here is not the slightness of the difference but the fact that the remediation of texts draws our attention to their medium (the thin paper wrappers, the mirror-image text, for example); we become more alert to the way in which the work functions—what the work does, how it is used—in a multifaceted, ever-changing system in which, as Mayhew maintains with respect to nature, everything moves. This method, consonant with Benjamin's support of montage, mobilizes a commitment to reading the mediations of the text, its disjunctive moments, its composition process, as well as its loose ends, gaps, fissures, and repetitions. Many of the wrappers are now gone, a poignant reminder that Mayhew's work is part of the same “cycle of print” from rags to paper to printed page to “waste” that he documents. As Daniel Williams wryly notes, citing Mayhew, the last step in this process is composting “so that we again have the remains of the old garment in our beer or our bread,”Footnote ⁴⁹ and we may have all “consumed” Mayhew in one way or another.Footnote ⁵⁰ If Mayhew was drawn to the rag-pickers, to borrow Benjamin's terminology, and practiced their art of collecting by finding discarded material—people, practices, things, animals, plants, and so on—and making it resonate, if he also took his own previously used writing and reanimated it, can we read his composition practices, which dovetail in many ways with the composting practices about which he writes, as discarded matter made to resonate now in our ecologically precarious moment?

Mayhew was not only attuned to the interimplication of plants and animals, country and city, humans and soil, but also to ecological disorder. Put simply, when too many people gather together in one place—here, the city—natural cycles are disturbed. This observation could describe what we now call the Anthropocene, although now the place that is disturbed is not the city but the planet. Mayhew's response is to remind his readers of their roots—literally (their bones that derive from soil and lichen)—in order to recalibrate natural cycles (which could be yet another description of the Anthropocene and a practice of which we are now more wary) and to invent a new print form adequate to his moment of economic and urban precarity. This form arguably develops out of the open and unfinished city and its itinerant populations, rapid growth, and changing labor practices that are Mayhew's focus in London Labour. It is also interesting that in another precarious period almost ninety years later—when Horkheimer and Adorno directly confronted the threat posed by new technologies under capitalism—Benjamin developed a new collage method, derived from the retrieval of discarded urban forms, that resembles Mayhew's in so many ways, albeit considerably more theoretically sophisticated. Now, almost ninety years later again, we confront our own precarious moment that resonates with both Mayhew's period of industrial modernity and Benjamin's of capitalist expansion in the years leading up to the Second World War. From our vantage point, we can also recognize in these two historical moments—industrial modernity and the mid-twentieth century, respectively—two of the main contending time periods for the Anthropocene's origins.Footnote ⁵² But their forms are not our forms. Indeed, we would learn nothing from them—especially in the case of Benjamin—if we did not adjust our forms to the distinctiveness of our historical situation. Nevertheless, confronted by a climate precarity that, unchecked, spells unmitigated disaster for humans and other living things, we would do well to mobilize all the responses available, to loosen boundaries and classifications, to include more, to allow collisions, collaborations, and connections to flourish, and to explore what new possibilities may arise.

It is clear that the impact of climate change falls most heavily on the lives of those living in poorer nations and communities just as, in Mayhew's period, the impact of labor changes following from industrialization fell most heavily on the lives of the poor struggling to survive in a perilous urban environment. It is also clear that the climate changes we are now experiencing can be traced back, in part, to the very inventions that so disrupted the lives of the poor in Mayhew's London. But less often acknowledged are the ways we can use the insights, information, and practices of the poor as a way to address where we are now.Footnote ⁵³ In this context, I am interested in whether attending to questions of mediation might perhaps also offer a more robust response to social or climate injustice than the accumulation of knowledge approach on which we often rely and with which Mayhew is often credited. This attention to form as form that is used also makes me wonder about the potential of usable form in our own moment when, like Mayhew and Benjamin, we are confronted by an instability that seems to demand different—more lively, more unpredictable, more incisive, more open—forms.Footnote ⁵⁴