At first, I was baffled to see Robert J. Topinka refer to the protagonist of Racing the Street as a minor figure. From the outset, Henry Mayhew is referred to as “an original, if minor, figure” (2), and then again a few pages later, Topinka states that “Mayhew is considered a minor figure in Victorian Studies” (4). This appraisal annoyed me at first. Could he really be talking about the co-founder of Punch whose reports assembled into his four-volume magnum opus, London Labour and the London Poor, has been hugely influential on both politics, ethnography, and literature? But Topinka does not, it eventually transpires, mean to imply by this that Mayhew was a man of little importance or relevance. He uses the word minor to describe his way of dealing with the nineteenth-century city. As opposed to totalizing and abstract generalizations of urban modernity that resulted in such projects as Baron Haussmann's enormous rebuilding of Paris, Mayhew's many interviews with and descriptions of the people who lived and made a living in the London streets in the mid-nineteenth century constitutes a “minor approach to the street” (14). Because his work wavers between attempts at generalization and praise of the multitude, it is therefore, in Topinka's view, a flawed and failed project.

Topinka writes from within a certain school of thinking, signaled early on in the book by the citation of scholars such as Ann McClintock, Jacques Derrida, Rita Felski, and Michel Foucault. In this world, it is perhaps not a controversial thing to say that Henry Mayhew is a minor figure in Victorian studies. To the type of Victorianist I am, who scours the sources for details of the everyday lives and thinking of people living away from literature, the press, and academia, Henry Mayhew's great work is the bible. A flawed and biased bible, to be certain, but a bible nonetheless. But Topinka is not interested as much in the people Mayhew wrote about as in the way he wrote about them. And this “minor” methodology, characterized by Topinka as “the most thoroughgoing inquiry into urban sublimity in the modern era” (14), becomes both his inspiration and his subject.

A new approach and renewed attention to Henry Mayhew is welcome, and Topinka does his job with erudition and the type of shrewd deceptions exemplified by his twofold interpretation of the word minor. The aim of the study is quite straightforward. Through a number of case studies, Topinka strives to demonstrate how the category of race was used by Mayhew and other investigators of the Victorian city to make the unruly world of the street more manageable and controllable. Occasionally, Topinka somewhat obscures this perfectly reasonable and relevant purpose behind a smoke screen of unnecessarily complicated theories, as if he does not believe in his own study, or as if a historical investigation needs to be motivated by an ostensible advancement of critical theory, but his focus on the concept of race in Mayhew nevertheless adds new insights.

Topinka's main claim to originality is his reading of racism not as an ideology but as a technology that was used in the nineteenth century to organize or control urban diversity. This reading stems from Foucauldian theories of governance and governmentality that have been influential not least in studies of contemporary politics and sociology. Topinka argues that Mayhew turned to the language of race in his book in order to manage the overwhelming multitude that his project charted. In the course of his investigation, Topinka certainly does not ignore the wide array of individuals that people Mayhew's work, and we are served many interesting glimpses both of the world Mayhew explored and of how he perceived it, illuminated by Topinka's deep knowledge of the times and of Victorian London. Along the way, Mayhew's writings are connected to other contemporary projects of urban ordering and exploration, such as Joseph Bazalgette's renovation of London's sewer system in the 1860s, Francis Galton's system for measuring and cataloguing bodies, and photographer John Thomson's famous images of London's street people. The common denominator of all these is the use of race as “a technology of gathering, assembling, and networking the modern city” (130). Topinka identifies what he calls a “crisis in metonymy” (23) wherein the teeming street life of the growing metropolis threatened to undermine a sense of order and control. Race thus functioned as a technology more than an ideology that served to arrange and gather this commotion into something manageable and perspicuous, a technology that has informed the modern conception of race and of urbanism.

The primary virtue of this book is Topinka's lucid and profound analyses of Mayhew's and others’ writings against a backdrop of Victorian street life. One might perhaps question how original the use of the term race is, as it is hardly unused in Victorian studies or urban history. There are works on the emergence of Victorian discourses of race that are not mentioned here, such as Edward Beasley's The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences (2010), and a book as focused on Mayhew as this could do a better job of acknowledging recent related works, not least the group of articles in a 2014 issue of the Journal of Victorian Culture (vol. 19, no. 4) devoted to him. Topinka might also have been helped by situating his investigation more solidly in the historical development of race discourses, especially by considering its role in earlier periods. But these are marginal criticisms to a work that is essentially insightful and provides a new take on matters of much relevance.