Of Mouchers and Men

Abstract

Vagrants loomed large in nineteenth-century consciousness. In quiet country lanes and crowded city streets, mouchers, lurkers, casuals and cadgers appeared to be everywhere. Provoking a mix of fear, pity, and plain old curiosity, these off-grid antipodes to a settled life – what Mayhew called the wandering or nomadic ‘tribes’ – seemed almost to demand attention (p. 6). Given the inherently elusive nature of the subject, where officialdom could not easily venture, perhaps writers, artists, and intrepid social investigators could. Encouraged by the massive expansion in print and visual media, plus the insatiable Victorian desire to taxonomize, the ‘imagined and represented vagrancy’ found in early modern England by David Hitchcock was given a vigorous new lease of life.1 This especially applied to those legally defined as ‘rogues and vagabonds’, or even worse as ‘incorrigible rogues’ (pp. 12–13). Although at the end of the period under review the number of so-called habitual vagrants (dark figure allowing) was roughly that of the clergy and priesthood, so dense was their cultural presence at home that they also now wandered the fertile imaginary spaces of the frontier. But while the colonies had their share of idlers and ‘loafers’, out on the geopolitical ‘edge of civilisation’ it was North America and the Pacific, argues Alistair Robinson, that offered the most productive sites for re-purposing the idea of the vagrant (p. 9, 130–31).