John Seed

That Barrikins: Pictures from Mayhew II John Seed

The second volume of John Seed's exploration of Mayhew, recasting the voices from the original text in a Reznikoffian manner, freeing them from the confines of the narrative and thus letting usa hear the voices in a new context. Every word in the book is drawn from Henry Mayhew's writings on London, published in the Morning Chronicle from 1849 to 1850, and then in 63 editions of his own weekly paper, London Labour and the London Poor, between December 1850 and February 1852, and then again in the four-volume work of the same title. From the thousands of pages of Mayhew's investigations, John Seed has selected extracts from those passages where he attempted to record the voices of London's working people. He has cut and rearranged the source texts, and has re-set them as poetry, splitting the lines in such a way as to make them both more easily readable and less easily, or quickly read, in an attempt to get closer to the original voices. The author likens this process to a sound engineer editing a tape to try to get rid of interference or distortion.