The Unsightly Spectacle of “Poor Houseless Wanderers”: De Quincey’s Confessions, the Malaysian Sailor, and Vagrancy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Between 1794 and 1814, thousands of lascars or Asian sailors arrived annually in Britain as replacements for British sailors impressed by the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. As a low-cost workforce that fueled east-west shipping, lascars were vital to the British empire’s maritime economy yet were barred by law from settling and working in Britain. To show how these noncitizens resisted their exclusion from civic life, this essay focuses on Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), which narrates the author’s anxious encounter in Grasmere with a dark-skinned Malaysian sailor who appears as his vagrant double. This encounter sheds light on the way that British citizenship was racialized as White vis-à-vis concurrent philanthropic and governmental efforts to conceal abject migrant populations from public view. The opium-eater’s hallucinatory visions of the Orient expose the fraught ideological processes by which Britain’s dependence on colonial labor became the crux for delimiting national belonging in racial, classed, and gendered terms. Using Confessions to track a transoceanic history of racial capitalism shows how the aesthetics of abjection—as projected onto London’s itinerant poor—enabled an Asian subaltern agency that has remained historically illegible in Romantic literary studies.