This book ends on the streets.

For three weeks in the summer of 2019, the students of HNRS 380: ‘London Streets’ walked the alleys of Victorian London. They waited beside a young Dickens with his father in Marshalsea Prison. They crowded into the cloying humidity of the attic operating theatre in St Thomas’ Hospital and witnessed the frantic amputations in a race against infection. They stood over the cesspool where the 1854 cholera epidemic began, and scoured the streets with John Snow as he wrapped his head around a new theory of disease transmission.

Look at materiality, I told them. Think about the ways that new institutions lunged up from the cultural fabric, bent and warped the channels through which the city's bodies flowed. New feelings, new modes of embodiment became possible, even as those structures altered or cut off old formulations – sometimes for the benefit of the working people, sometimes not. Pay attention to the physical surfaces around you.

I completely missed him.

I would like to think I was concerned with my students’ safety, was looking at my phone to find a route to our next destination. But that is probably untrue. More likely, as I’ve trained myself to do, I skipped over him as part of the scenery. I was too busy interpreting and reading, too busy with exerting knowledge over the surfaces around us.

Open sores. Brittle, skeletal. Homeless.

I completely missed him.

But one of my students did not.

Victorian institutions create problems, to be sure. We shrank before the physical restraints in Bedlam psychiatric hospital. We cringed as the Salvation Army celebrated military metaphors like ‘opening fire’ to describe their social work. We balked as the hospital transformed patients into statistics and problems to solve.

They also open room to think about surfaces. Bedlam begins conversations about the expression of psychological pain, begins to embrace the infinite multiplicity of human experience. The Salvation Army insists that labourers matter, propels the welfare state to its prominence, protects the marginalised more than laissez-faire ever could. The hospital defeats cholera, extends life-expectancy, heals and helps those in need.

The Victorians had their problems: the Empire, horrific misogyny, paternalistic classism. But no one can say they didn't care.