Mathilde Blind and Ludwig Mond: Chemistry, Industry, and Waste in Late-Victorian Culture

This essay examines the friendship between the poet Mathilde Blind and the industrial chemist Ludwig Mond, arguing that Blind’s dialogue with Mond’s thinking about waste and productivity reveals surprising similarities between the concerns of Victorian industry and those of fin-de-siècle literary culture. Mond’s work was shaped by the productivist belief that industry, far from damaging the natural environment, exemplified humanity’s participation in a providential economy in which all waste, including industrial waste, could be recycled and again rendered productive. Blind found solace in this argument, refiguring it both to endorse the aestheticizing work of poetry and to support her speculations about personal immortality. But she was also sceptical of Mond’s productivism, and, especially in the notebook she used in the 1890s, voiced a concern that failure and waste could not be prevented entirely, whether by nature, the industrial nation, or the individual.