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Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 84; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-10189288

1527-1943

Carolyn Betensky,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

The wandering poor made frequent appearances in nineteenth-century British print and visual media. Objects of pity, derision, fear, and suspicion—but also, sometimes, of surprising kinds of identification—they compelled the attention of middle-class journalists, novelists, and painters, alongside legislators and philanthropists. For Victorian observers accustomed to thinking about the poor generally as a problem, the figure of the poor person on the move was especially loaded.Alistair Robinson’s meticulously researched study takes up the history of this figure’s representation in British literature and culture over the Victorian period while acknowledging the legacy of earlier narrative tropes of vagrancy. Reading a wide range of canonical and noncanonical texts—from articles published in popular periodicals; to the works of the “Gypsiologist” George Borrow; to fiction by Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson; to paintings by Luke Fildes—Robinson does a splendid job of showing how the meaning of the figure changed over time and in different racial and regional contexts. “The vagrant,” “the loafer,” “the Gypsy,” “the hawker,” “the poacher,” “the casual pauper,” “the vagabond,” “the beachcomber”: all these categories functioned tautologically to naturalize or justify the economic and social conditions that produced them. Whether viewed as picturesque or deviant, the triggers of nostalgia or disgust, the errant poor served as discursive flashpoints, encoding broad nineteenth-century concerns about the deserving and the undeserving poor, racial degeneration, cultural extinction, and the threat of a lumpenproletariat revolt.Robinson’s book is divided into three parts, representing the country, the city, and the frontier. Within each part he presents in separate chapters the designations the Victorians used to categorize the vagrant poor. By following Victorian taxonomies instead of attempting to synthesize the different referential traditions applied to “the vagrant,” Robinson shows contrasts but also unexpected commonalities and borrowings across discursive contexts. For the purposes of the 1835 Highways Act, for instance, “poachers” and “vagrants” were synonymous. Itinerant traders or hawkers, meanwhile, could be conceived of as industrious, whereas “Gypsies,” whose practices and economic conditions resembled those of their trader or hawker contemporaries, were racialized, linked to criminality, and viewed as doomed to extinction. “Beachcombers”—itinerant, poor white Europeans who settled in Pacific Islander communities—were described in terms previously developed to explain the “inevitable” fall of the Romani people and then of the “American Indians.”From a legal standpoint, vagrancy itself was a term that could encompass what may appear to us now as a bewildering grab bag of behaviors: “begging, wandering, sleeping-out, prostitution, indecent exposure, displaying obscene prints” (14). Robinson’s analysis of the history of vagrancy laws, their ambiguity, and their uneven application underscores the fact that conceptions of the migratory poor indexed broader and shifting fears of social instability. Over the century poor Britons had looked to escape seasons or sustained periods of systemic economic hardship by moving from rural areas into cities or from site to site within cities. Vagrants came to represent the potential for fraud, as their mobility made it hard to ascertain whether they should be identified as “deserving” or “undeserving” recipients of relief. For Kingsley, in Yeast (1848), and for Dickens, in “A Nightly Scene in London” (1856), the prospect of differentiating the deserving from the undeserving poor is a conundrum. Kingsley offers no solution to the inscrutability of the vagrant, whereas for Dickens, only personalized philanthropy can prevent the indiscriminate distribution of relief. Some ten years later, after the passage of the controversial Houseless Poor Act, some contemporaneous interpreters found that James Greenwood’s rendering of the vagrant in “A Night in the Workhouse” (1866) encoded a new kind of anxiety. Greenwood’s sordid and salacious account of intermingled pauper bodies made many of his readers worry less about relief ending up in the wrong hands than about undeserving vagrants contaminating the innocent poor.One of Robinson’s most thoroughly developed and tightly argued chapters rereads Wells’s dystopian science fiction novel The Time Machine (1895) through Francis Galton’s theories of eugenics and social Darwinian notions of racial degeneration. Robinson ties Wells’s rendering of the violent species of the Morlocks to earlier racist narratives that purported to explain the Romani people’s lapse from glory to extinction. The Morlocks track not a fear of proletarian revolution, as Bernard Bergonzi argued in 1961, so much as a fear of a lumpenproletarian devolution, in which the “residuum”—a term that connoted for late Victorians the great anarchic masses of “loafers” and criminals—would rise up and smash the social order. The Morlocks’ rule revealed the dangers of not segregating the residuum and allowing it to go extinct (on its own or through extermination).Among its many virtues, Vagrancy in the Victorian Age does not confine its analysis to the metropole. Robinson considers his subject in a transatlantic context, taking up representations of vagrancy in the United States by Frances Trollope, Dickens, and other British observers. While his discussion of the treatment of the (often Irish) pauper immigrant and the American vagabond in British travelogues is illuminating, what stands out is his examination of the way these figures extended to the American Indian tropes borrowed from their earlier representations of Romani people. The inability or disinclination of Indigenous Americans to adapt to the conditions imposed on them by their colonizers read to visiting British writers as vagrant behavior resembling that ascribed to the Romani people; like the latter, the American Indians’ sad but inevitable degeneration from former days of glory made them aesthetically poignant at the same time as it naturalized what was viewed as the necessary disappearance of their race.Perhaps the most surprising chapter of this book is its final one, on the figure of the beachcomber. Robinson’s inclusion of this white rover who lived precariously on the frontier among native Pacific Islanders allows him to evaluate a neglected genre of popular adventure novel for boys and resituate it in the context of colonization. In his reading of Stevenson’s novel The Ebb-Tide, he analyzes the role assigned to the degraded and debauched beachcomber in paving the way for the more “civilized” colonialism to come; in this novel, at least, Stevenson challenged the notion that there was a clear dividing line between these vagrant settlers and the missionaries and traders who followed them.I had not understood how ambitious this study was until I began to appreciate that its scope, which had seemed rather narrow before I started reading it, was in fact broad. My only reservation about this elegantly written and fascinating book (and it is hardly a reservation) is that in some spots, such as the three chapters on transatlantic traffic in vagrancy tropes, it introduces new vistas of inquiry I was sorry not to learn more about. In the end, this book significantly adds to our understanding not only of nineteenth-century representations of poor people on the move but also of the mobilizations of those representations themselves.