The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 by Luke Lewin Davies, and: Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Alistair Robinson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 by Luke Lewin Davies, and: Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Alistair Robinson Tamara S. Wagner (bio) Luke Lewin Davies. The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pp. xvi + 344. ISBN 978-3-030-73432-9. link. springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-73432-9 (open access). Alistair Robinson. Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Cambridge UP, 2021. Pp. xi + 254. £75.00. ISBN 978-1-316-51985-1 (hb). The most memorable representations of homelessness in Dickens's writing have chiefly been discussed as a central part of his social criticism. Poor Jo, the crossing-sweeper in Bleak House, after all, became a powerful icon in fund-raising campaigns at the time, reinforced by O. G. Rejlander's photographic interpretation of Dickens's character in Poor Jo (also known as Night in Town [ca. 1860]). However, Dickens's depictions of vagrancy range from the comical scene in which Mr. Pickwick is mistaken for a tramp when he falls asleep in a wheelbarrow, and consequently is carted away, to the escape that the former childminder Betty Higden makes in Our Mutual Friend by choosing itinerant trading over the workhouse. In his fullscale discussion of tramps in British literature, Luke Davies provocatively suggests that Higden therefore partially "fits the tramp conception of homelessness" as a viable option (251), foreshadowing aspects of what he terms "reverse discourse tramp fiction." Recent studies, in fact, have come to explore the divergent aspects of homelessness in Dickens's writing. His many, vastly different, vagrant characters, these studies show, may [End Page 116] productively be read through different lenses apart from the more familiar social issues of urban poverty, industrialization, or the condemnation of a "telescopic philanthropy" that refuses to see anything closer than exotic objects filtered precisely through a medium of distance. Luke Lewin Davies's The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 and Alistair Robinson's Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture instead provide detailed insight into Victorian perceptions of various forms of vagrancy. Their discussions reframe our perceptions of Dickens's wide-ranging, divergently represented characters, with their often very different experiences of and reasons for homelessness. Davies's The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 offers an immensely detailed account of the tramp in literary texts that span more than a century, with a focus on the late-Victorian age. Davies's main argument is based on the concept of the tramp as a cultural construct, which he suggests emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, and remained so until the mid-twentieth. Whereas in pre-industrial times vagabonds were associated with and could, in popular culture, be celebrated for their independence, in the wake of industrialization, the identity of this figure became reframed according to productivity versus inutility. Davies takes up the figure of the tramp to reconsider discourses on work in the nineteenth- and early twenty-first century. The literature on tramping that he traverses thus potentially expresses a critique or rejection of productivity as a form of resistance to the growing dichotomy of the deserving versus the underserving poor in nineteenth-century discourses. In such tramp literature, Davies argues, the tramp could represent an alternative to prevailing social norms and hence be connected to a "wider radical discourse that questions the fetishization of work" (3). While offering this intriguing, thought-provoking concept, The Tramp in British Literature displays wide-ranging research on the history and in particular the political discourse surrounding the homeless. The study is well-structured and indeed very clearly signposted, allowing the reader to navigate this wealth of information and detailed analysis. Thus, in order to define modern ideas of vagrancy, the book also offers a brief history that reaches back into the sixteenth century. Davies's strongest point, however, is the application of divergent theoretical paradigms (such as estrangement theory, the Frankfurt School, and postcapitalist theory, among others) to bring together different discourses on the tramp as a construct and a literary figure. Equally...