Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London by Matthew Beaumont

Author:Matthew Beaumont [Beaumont, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Travel, History
ISBN: 9781784783785
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2015-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Apology for Vagrants

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a period in which, because of the systematic displacement of people through enclosures, and as a result of the rapid entrenchment of industrial capitalism, the numbers of unemployed wage-labourers multiplied visibly. Pre-industrial artisans and skilled workers were to an increasing extent recruited or press-ganged into the ranks of the itinerant proletariat – forced into a nomadic existence by the need simply to subsist. Economic migrants, especially from Ireland and Scotland, were familiar figures on rural roads. In England, border counties like Cumberland became especially susceptible to the problem of pauperism, because ‘the less liberal poor laws and settlement regulations of Scotland encouraged a persistent movement of destitute persons across the border’.37

From the mid 1790s in particular, female vagrants, left with little or no means of subsistence after their husbands had been sent to fight against France on the continent, were an especially striking feature of the social landscape. Several of Wordsworth’s poems from this period, in testifying to this parlous situation, developed something like a poetics of vagrancy. In ‘An Evening Walk’, for example, Wordsworth depicts a female vagrant who, as the neglected wife of a soldier, is one of the forgotten victims of war. As she drags her children along the road in the gathering darkness, the poet demonstrates that he is acutely conscious of her physical pain. He imagines the ‘arrowy fire’ that shoots ‘stinging through her stark o’er-laboured bones’ as she hopelessly attempts ‘To teach their limbs along the burning road / A few short steps to totter with their load’.38

The influence of John Langhorne’s The Country Justice (1774–1777), which Wordsworth praised as the first poem ‘that fairly brought the Muse into the Company of common life’, can be felt here. In his ‘Apology for Vagrants’, Langhorne had invoked a ‘houseless Wretch’, a soldier who is slain and who leaves behind him a wretched widow and her innocent child.39 But Langhorne’s allusion to society’s victims lacks immediacy. In Wordsworth’s poem, by contrast, the sense of the female vagrant’s acute physical pain as she inches forward on foot – communicated through language that is itself, admittedly, a little ‘o’er-laboured’ – derives its considerable force from the poet’s concrete observations and experiences on the roadside.

More importantly, in ‘The Female Vagrant’, first published in the Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth instead tried to narrate the life story of one of these victims of war, poverty and the depredations of class society in her own voice. Hence, the eponymous character recapitulates for the poet a devastating series of events. She relates that a rapacious landlord, determined to rid the landscape surrounding his mansion of its labourers’ cottages, dispossessed her pious father; that, after her father’s death, ‘the empty loom, cold hearth, and silent wheel’ pushed her and her children into deeper and deeper poverty; that her husband joined the army and, as a consequence, ‘dog-like, wading at the heels of war’, she was forced to emigrate with him, to ‘protract a curst

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