Sub City: Young People, Homelessness and Crime by Julia Wardhaugh

Author:Julia Wardhaugh [Wardhaugh, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9781351897167
Google: 2EQrDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05T03:26:03+00:00

From social realism to post-modern fiction

The postwar literature of homelessness can be characterised by one predominant theme: the persistence of premodern homelessness into modern or post-modern times, highlighting the stark evidence of abject need amidst affluence. This concern has been given expression within a variety of media, and the favoured investigative technique of going undercover has persisted into the late twentieth century.

The early 1960s was an interesting period of transition between the Christian philanthropy of the preceding century, and the social documentary genre of succeeding decades. Philip O’Connor (1963) continued the established tradition of taking to the roads as a tramp, and identified himself as ‘Mr Other’. His now classic work on vagrancy is part autobiography and part social commentary, inspired by the author’s Christian socialist beliefs, and written in an unusual stream-of-consciousness style.

O’Connor’s aim was to document the ethos of the tramp and the vagrant whom he tends to romanticise as anti-materialist heroes in the Franciscan tradition: ‘the tramp ... is the rebel against the bourgeois-Calvinist precept that all must work’ (1963:133). Like Higgs before him, he notes that St. Francis and Christ himself could be understood as tramps and beggars. At one level his concern is with the material welfare of vagrants, and he is one of the first postwar commentators to note the contradiction posed by the fact of poverty among plenty :

Tramping does, of course, pull one back centuries; emotion about food and shelter is old fashioned ... Security and plenty are utterly modern - futuristic, even (ibid: 137).

However, his concern is equally with spiritual matters, and he sees the act of wandering as an escape from both self and society. Continual motion is both physically and mentally numbing, and the vagrant thus becomes freed from ego in the way of the wandering saints. For the itinerant, time takes on a cyclical rather than linear dimension. O’Connor recognises that each age tends to romanticise the vagrants of a former era, yet he himself adopts a semi-mystical view of the vagabond life:

The tramp is on a road, and the road is a symbol, and tramping is metaphorical... So basic a metaphor of human progress is tramping that it is a pilgrimage neither of the body nor of the soul, but a prescientific and antique integration of both (ibid:79).

Such sentiments probably express more about the hopes and longings of the author than about the experiences of most men and women on the road.

The 1960s and 1970s saw the development of a striking new televisual genre, the docudrama, whose dramatic sequences and black-and-white air of gritty realism were perfectly suited to the subject of homelessness. This period also witnessed a shift in focus from the ‘old’ homelessness of the tramp, the vagrant and the middle-aged alcoholic, towards an awareness of ‘new’ homeless groups such as women, families and younger people. Edna the Inebriate Woman (1976) told the story of the often-forgotten homeless woman, Cathy Come Home (1966) famously documented the disintegration of homeless families within the modern welfare state,

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