The Tramp in British Literature, 1850―1950 3030734315, 9783030734312

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The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 Luke Lewin Davies

The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 “A sophisticated exploration of the theoretical problems posed by the tramp as a speaking subject. Beautifully and accessibly written, this is both an exhilarating read and an important scholarly achievement.”

—Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Professor of English and Gender Studies, University of Tübingen

“Anyone interested in subaltern literature or the cultural production of homelessness needs to read this book.” —Todd DePastino, author of Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America “An engaging, nuanced, and impressively wide-ranging analysis that deserves to be widely read.” —Ben Clarke, Reader in English, University of North Carolina Greensboro “A much-needed critical description with a strong central argument of a series of textual worlds that have often received little attention.” —Luke Seaber, Reader in Modern European Culture,

University College London “Luke Lewin Davies offers fresh and powerful insights into literary and autobiographical constructions of this ubiquitous but often elusive figure.” —Mark Freeman, Reader in Social History, University College London

“Davies provides a welcome new reading of the tramp’s all-important role in literature.” —Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Digital History,

University of Sussex

Luke Lewin Davies

The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950

Luke Lewin Davies University of Tübingen Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-73431-2    ISBN 978-3-030-73432-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73432-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image © BG/OLOU / Alamy Stock Photo, Image ID: 2F5EH2N This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Nana (you don’t have to read it)

Acknowledgements

This book began life as an AHRC-funded PhD in the English Literature Department at University College London (UCL). Further research was then made possible by a funded postdoctoral teaching fellowship at the University of Tübingen in the Department of English Literature and by an Excellence Initiative Bridging Fund again at the University of Tübingen. From UCL my thanks go to my primary supervisor Michael Sayeau, to my secondary supervisor Matthew Beaumont and to everyone else who has offered their support and guidance, in particular Rachele Dini, Elsa Court, Eliza Cubitt, Neil Rennie and Luke Seaber. From Tübingen my thanks go to all the colleagues and students who helped me to develop my ideas for this book, in particular Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Rebecca Hahn, Hanne Roth and Robert McColl. I’m also grateful to Nick Hubble, Julia Jordan and to various anonymous readers for offering feedback on earlier versions of the text. From Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature and SPi Global my thanks go to everyone who has worked on this publication and made it possible, in particular Molly Beck, Rebecca Hinsley, Ben Doyle, Jasper Asir and Venkitesan Vinodh Kumar. I’m also genuinely grateful to everyone who has lived with and put up with me during the process of writing this book, in particular Hannah, Isobel, Bonnie, Melissa, Jessica, Grace, Tanya, Jenny and Kostya. My biggest thanks of all, however, go to my parents, and to the rest of my family.

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Book Description The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 offers an account of the emergence of a new conception of homelessness in the mid-nineteenth century, which it argues reflects the evolution of capitalism and disciplinary society in this period. In the process it uncovers a neglected body of literature on the subject of the tramp written by thirty-three memoir writers and eighteen fiction writers, most of whom were themselves homeless. In analysing these works, The Tramp in British Literature presents select texts as a unique and ignored contribution to a wider radical discourse defined by its opposition to a societal fixation upon the need to be productive.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 1 The Emergence of the Tramp  4 1.1 Definition of Terms  4 1.2 A Short History of Homelessness: 1500–1950  6 1.2.1 Sixteenth Century   6 1.2.2 Seventeenth Century   7 1.2.3 Eighteenth Century   8 1.2.4 Nineteenth Century   9 1.2.5 Twentieth Century  11 1.2.6 Summary  13 1.3 Tramp Literature: 1850–1950  14 2 Disciplinary Society and the Homeless 15 2.1 From Sovereign Power to Disciplinary Power 16 2.2 Sixteenth-Century Rogue Literature: The ­Pre-­ disciplinary Threat of Masterlessness 20 2.2.1 Thomas Harman (fl. 1547–1567)  21 2.3 Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Social Investigation and Exploration Literature: The Disciplinary Threat of Non-contribution 24 2.3.1 Nineteenth-Century Social Investigation and Exploration: Henry Mayhew (1812–1887) and James Greenwood (1832–1927)  25 2.3.2 Twentieth-Century Social Exploration: Mary Higgs (1854–1937), Ada Chesterton (1869–1962) and George Orwell (1903–1950)  28 xi

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3 The Tramp as a Symbol of Resistance Against Disciplinary and Productivist Ideology 29 3.1 Work, Gender and Sexuality, and Community 30 3.1.1 Work  32 3.1.2 Gender and Sexuality  34 3.1.3 Community  35 3.1.4 Summary  36 3.2 Estrangement Theory and the Tramp 38 4 Limitations of the Tramp Model: Representation and Otherness  43 4.1 Making the Subaltern Speak 44 4.2 Objections to the Category of Alterity 45 4.3 Proposed Critical Approach 48 5 Categorising Works of Reverse Discourse Tramp Literature: Three Models of Dissent 52 5.1 Radical Anti-productivist Theory 54 5.1.1 Utopianism  55 5.1.2 Nineteenth-Century Anarchism  56 5.1.3 The Frankfurt School  57 5.1.4 Italian Autonomist Marxism and Twentieth-­ Century Anarchism  58 5.1.5 Twenty-First-Century Communism  60 5.1.6 Postcapitalist Theory  62 5.1.7 Summary  63 5.2 Non-radical Identity-Oriented Anti-productivist Texts 63 5.2.1 Bohemian Literature  63 5.2.2 Nature Writing  64 5.2.3 Summary  65 5.3 Implicitly Radical Anti-productivist Narratives 65 5.3.1 Post-war Working-Class Fiction  67 5.4 Implications of Classifying Works of Reverse Discourse Tramp Literature as Radical, Non-­radical or Implicitly Radical 68 5.5 Summary 70 6 The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950  72 6.1 Methodology 72 6.2 Chapter Outline 73 6.3 Existing Criticism 75 6.4 British Focus 77 6.5 Literary Focus 78 Works Cited 79

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2 Reverse Discourse Tramp Memoirs 87 1 Chapter Outline 88 2 Life Writing: Origins of the Tramp Memoir 90 2.1 Definition of the Memoir Form 90 2.2 The Eighteenth Century: Lives of the Poor 92 2.2.1 The Newgate Calendar  92 2.2.2 Court Proceedings and Begging Letters  94 2.2.3 Summary  96 2.3 The Nineteenth Century: The ‘Age of Biography’ and the Emergence of Working-Class Life Writing 97 3 The Early Vagrant and Tramp Memoir100 3.1 Regency Era and Early Victorian Repentance Narratives: Mary Saxby, James Dawson Burn, ‘Colin’, William Cameron and Josiah Basset101 3.1.1 Working-Class Memoirs with Homeless Episodes: William Brown (b. 1782) 101 3.1.2 Mary Saxby (1738–1801) 102 3.1.3 James Dawson Burn (1806–1889) 106 3.1.4 ‘Colin’ (fl. 1855) 111 3.1.5 William Cameron (1784–1851) 115 3.1.6 Josiah Basset (b. 1812) 118 3.1.7 Summary 120 3.2 Late Victorian and Edwardian Reverse Discourse Tramp Memoirs: Morley Roberts, Bart Kennedy and W.H. Davies121 3.2.1 Overview of Other Late Victorian and Early Edwardian Reverse Discourse Tramp Memoirs: George Atkins Brine (1811–1881) 122 3.2.2 Morley Roberts (1857–1942) 124 3.2.3 Bart Kennedy (1861–1930) 128 3.2.4 W.H. Davies (1871–1940) 133 3.2.5 Summary 139 4 The Interwar Reverse Discourse Tramp Memoir140 4.1 Working-Class Memoirs with Tramping Episodes: Will Thorne (1857–1946), Albert Pugh (b. 1867) and Ben Tillett (1860–1943)140 4.2 Itinerant Labourer and Sailor Memoirs with Tramping Episodes: Fred Bower (1871–1942) and J.E. Patterson (1866–1919)141

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4.3 Social Explorers Who Became Tramps: Frank Gray (1880–1935), Frank Jennings (b. 1898) and George Orwell (1903–1950)142 4.4 Miscellaneous Tramp Memoirs: Terence Horsley (1904–1949), Frank Stanley Stuart (b. 1904), ‘Digit’ (fl. 1924) and Joseph Stamper (1886–1974)143 4.5 Literary Tramp Memoirs: Charles Landery and Chris Massie149 4.5.1 Overview of Other Literary Tramp Memoirs: Trader Horn (1861–1931) and George Garrett (1896–1966)149 4.5.2 Charles Landery (fl. 1938–1952) 151 4.5.3 Chris Massie (b. 1881) 155 4.6 Criminal Tramp Memoirs: James Milligan and John Worby159 4.6.1 Overview of Other Criminal Tramp Memoirs: Charles Prior (fl. 1937) and Hippo Neville (fl. 1935) 160 4.6.2 James Milligan (fl. 1936) 162 4.6.3 John Worby (fl. 1937–1939) 168 4.7 Peripatetic Tramp Memoirs: Matt Marshall and Jim Phelan176 4.7.1 Peripatetic Literature and Vagrancy: From Romanticism to the Peripatetic Tramp Memoir 177 4.7.2 Overview of Other Peripatetic Tramp Memoirs I: Stephen Graham (1884–1975) 179 4.7.3 Overview of Other Peripatetic Tramp Memoirs II: Harry Foster (1894–1932), Harry Clouston (fl. 1937), Jan Gordon (1882–1944), Cora Gordon (1879–1950) and Ryan MacMahon (fl. 1948) 181 4.7.4 Matt Marshall (fl. 1932–1935) 184 4.7.5 Jim Phelan (1895–1966) 189 4.8 Political Tramp Memoirs: John Brown, W.A. Gape and Liam O’Flaherty194 4.8.1 John Brown (b. 1907) 197 4.8.2 W.A. Gape (fl. 1936) 202 4.8.3 Liam O’Flaherty (1896–1984) 207 4.8.4 Summary 212

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5 Conclusion213 5.1 Tramp Memoirs as a Reverse Discourse214 5.2 Tramp Memoirs as Radical Anti-productivist Literature215 5.3 Broader Limitations216 5.4 Summary219 Works Cited221 3 Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction227 1 Chapter Outline229 2 Homelessness in Fiction: Origins of Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction231 2.1 Early Modern Representations of Homelessness: Rogue Literature, the Picaresque Tradition and Satire232 2.1.1 Evolution of Rogue Literature: Robert Greene (1558–1592) and Poverty Ballads (1550–1700) 232 2.1.2 Influence of Picaresque Tradition: Richard Head (1637–1686), Francis Kirkham (b. 1632), Bampfylde Moore Carew (1690–1758) and Robert Goadby (1721–1778) 235 2.1.3 Satire: John Gay (1685–1732) 240 2.1.4 Summary 242 2.2 Late Modern Representations of Homelessness: Realism, Romanticism, the Social Problem Novel, New Realism and the Socialist Novel243 2.2.1 Realism: George Crabbe (1754–1832) 244 2.2.2 Romanticism: William Wordsworth (1770–1850) 245 2.2.3 The Social Problem Novel: Charles Dickens (1812–1870)248 2.2.4 New Realism: Arthur Morrison (1863–1945) 252 2.2.5 Socialist Fiction: Margaret Harkness (1854–1923) 254 2.2.6 Summary 255 3 Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction256 3.1 Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction by Non-working-­class or Homeless Authors: Felicia Skene (1821–1899), James Hunter Crawford (1840–1916), Harold Brighouse (1882–1958), George Gissing (1857–1903) and Arthur Calder-­­Marshall (1908–1992)259

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3.2 Early Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction: Bart Kennedy and W.H. Davies264 3.2.1 Explanation for Non-inclusion: Morley Roberts (1857–1942)265 3.2.2 Bart Kennedy (1861–1930) 267 3.2.3 W.H. Davies (1871–1940) 270 3.3 Interwar Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction by Working-­Class Authors: Walter Brierley, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth and James Hanley277 3.3.1 Overview of Other Authors in the Genre: Leslie Halward (1905–1976), George Garrett (1896–1966), Patrick MacGill (1889–1963), Liam O’Flaherty (1896–1984), R.M. Fox (1891–1969) and Jack Hilton (1900–1983) 279 3.3.2 Walter Brierley (1900–1972) 286 3.3.3 Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886–1962) 291 3.3.4 James Hanley (1897–1985) 298 3.4 Interwar Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction by Homeless Authors: Jim Phelan and Chris Massie303 3.4.1 Explanation for Non-inclusion: Joseph Stamper (1886–1974)303 3.4.2 Jim Phelan (1895–1966) 304 3.4.3 Chris Massie (b.1881) 309 4 Conclusion314 4.1 Tramp Fiction as a Reverse Discourse314 4.2 Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction as Radical Anti-productivist Literature315 4.3 Broader Limitations316 4.4 Summary317 Works Cited317 4 Conclusion323 1 Summary of Findings324 2 Significance of Findings325 3 Coda328 Index331

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The tramp was a specific cultural construct—a variation of the vagrant or vagabond archetype that came into prominence in the mid-nineteenth century, and remained so until the mid-twentieth. A Google Ngram search of the word ‘tramp’ in works from the English corpus (including occasions when the word refers to heavy footsteps, promiscuous women, shipping vessels etc.) supports this claim: between 1850 and 1900 usage more than trebled; it then steadily declined, leading up to the present day with a return to 1845 levels (Google 2020). This drop is on the surface easy enough to explain: the word ‘tramp’ has fallen out of fashion as we now commonly use the word ‘homeless’—a term far broader than its antecedents as it currently includes (according to the definition offered by the charity Crisis, at least) people in temporary accommodation, people ‘living in unsuitable housing’ and households ‘in priority need’ (Crisis 2020). Leaving aside questions concerning this later development, we might ask: how and why did the term tramp come about? Shannon Marie Case, in her doctoral thesis on tramp writing in England between 1860 and 1940, observes that ‘[d]uring the Renaissance, the physical wandering and social uprootedness of vagrants had been read and represented as “masterlessness”’ (2006, 51–2). This appears to be a reference to A.L. Beier’s seminal study Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640, which argues that during the Elizabethan era vagrants were perceived less in relation to a ‘shortage of labour’, and more in terms of how they presented ‘a problem of disorder’: ‘The masterless man represented mutability, when © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Lewin Davies, The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73432-9_1

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those in power longed for stability’ (1985, 9–10). By the mid-nineteenth century, Case notes: ‘the vagrant’s mobility no longer signified masterlessness, in the pre-industrial sense’ (2006, 52). She continues: [vagrants] were discussed less as eruptions of the diabolical energy of the masterless than as further evidence of the general “uselessness” of the homeless and jobless—meaning their inutility as objects, as human material to be taken up by the industrial machine, as well as their presumed inability or unwillingness, as subjects, to make themselves useful, to contribute in any deliberate, productive way to the functioning of society. (2006, 52–3)

Case’s basic idea is that in the pre-industrial era the vagabond was both feared and celebrated for their independence, but that as industrialisation developed the identity of this same figure became framed around the question of their productivity. The newly emergent figure of the tramp was seen as a threat for being unable or unwilling to work, rather than for not being attached to a particular household or jurisdiction and thus for seeming to embody a troubling instability. Case writes: ‘vagrants had come to embody, symbolize, and threaten, not disorder, but the forces of nonproduction or antiproduction’ (2006, 53). In short, Case is implying that the tramp can be viewed as a variation of the vagabond or vagrant conception of homelessness that was responsive to the evolution of capitalism. This view is confirmed if we look to the example of America, where similar developments also took place. The historian Todd Depastino has, for instance, suggested that homelessness levels rose in the 1860s as a result of a transition towards a more industry-based model of employment: ‘unemployment did not become a widespread problem until roughly the eve of the Civil War, when, for the first time, a solid majority of Americans in the industrialising North worked for others’, having previously been ‘self-employed, either as farmers, artisans, or tradesmen’ (2003, 9). With this change, Depastino suggests that ‘Americans in 1873 coined the word “tramp” to describe the legion of men travelling the nation “with no visible means of support”’ in search of employment (2003, 5). Another historian of American homelessness, Kenneth Kusmer, confirms the view that the idea of the tramp emerged in America as a result of new patterns of employment, writing that as ‘industrial development began to take hold’ in the 1870s homelessness ‘emerged as a national issue’, while at the same time a ‘new, more aggressive type of homeless man emerged— the tramp’ (2002, 3). As well as solidifying the link between the tramp and

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industrialisation by suggesting how its emergence was a byproduct of shifting employment patterns, Kusmer’s notion that the tramp was more aggressive than previous models is key: underlining Case’s assertion that the tramp was not just a product of industrialisation, but a threat to it. This study sets out to uncover and to examine the legacy of this development in a British context by considering a body of work written by and about homeless individuals perceived as tramps between 1850 and 1950. It will suggest that as a social phenomenon defined in relation to industrialisation—the figure of the tramp provided the basis for a discourse spanning this period that questioned the value of work and of societal norms more generally. More specifically, it will explore various ways in which real-life and fictional homeless individuals represented in literature on tramping can be seen to have embraced their status as figures on the fringes of society—simultaneously critiquing the causes of their exclusion and celebrating the opportunities this afforded for investigating alternative ways of life beyond the mainstream. As well as inquiring into the possibility that by lauding the tramp’s exclusion both from the workplace and from the home the texts in question might be seen to present a rejection of prevailing social norms—this study will also attempt to determine the precise nature of the threat that select examples of tramp literature might be seen to have constituted: asking whether such works can be interpreted as significant and overlooked contributions to a wider radical discourse that questions the fetishisation of work within contemporary society, and in turn as precursors to current debates concerning the possibility of a world less oriented around work—or whether their status as works of literature exploring these themes is a little more limited than this implies. Before turning to the texts themselves this introductory essay aims to offer a fuller explanation of how exactly this culture emerged, and how it came to suggest these possibilities—as well as developing a theoretical model for analysing the social and cultural significances of tramp literature. As such, it sets out to do six things. First, to present a more detailed account of the emergence of the tramp and tramp literature in the middle of the nineteenth century by offering a fuller definition of the word ‘tramp’, an overview of the history of homelessness from the early modern period onwards, and a clearer indication of the nature of tramp literature produced in the period in question. Second, this introductory essay aims to offer a broader theoretical explanation—building on Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary society—for the evolution of attitudes towards homelessness, in the process illustrating more clearly how the transition

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from ‘masterlessness’ to ‘uselessness’ came about and what it looked like on the level of discourse. Third, it aims to define the potentially subversive attributes of tramp subculture in more detail by exploring specific areas (such as work, gender and sexuality, and community) in which it can be seen to have performed this function, as well as exploring the possibility that by being partially removed from capitalist society the tramp may have been liberated from various estrangement effects. Fourth, it seeks to reflect on what it means to attach significance to representations of an existing social group in this way, in the process exploring the possible limitations of a politics of resistance oriented around a marginalised social group. Fifth, having proposed an analytic framework according to which the texts in question might be read in terms of what they have to say about the world, rather than how representative they are of a given community—this introduction will outline the different discursive contexts within or alongside which the texts in question might then be placed, depending on what is deduced from them. Sixth and lastly, this introduction will offer an outline of the proposed methodology, alongside a chapter breakdown and a survey of key critical insights in the field.

1   The Emergence of the Tramp 1.1  Definition of Terms The word ‘tramp’ was one among a series of terms used to describe those who we now think of as homeless during the period under consideration. However dominant the idea of the tramp may have been between 1850 and 1950—it was still seen by many at the time as a specific category of homeless individual coexisting alongside a variety of others. For example, the homeless poet Ben Reitman argued in an American context that there were three categories of vagrant: ‘a hobo was someone who travelled and worked, a tramp was someone who travelled but didn’t work, and a bum was someone who didn’t travel and didn’t work’ (Adrian 1989, xvi). There were in America various other subcategories of what we might retrospectively term homelessness: the author Jack London, for example, described the differences between bindle-stiffs (itinerant workers), profeshes (experienced tramps/hoboes), gay-cats (the inexperienced), punks (the young and inexperienced) and prushuns (apprentices) (1907, 274). In Britain and in Ireland such categories were also in use, as we will see throughout the course of this study—not least for the reason that the homeless often

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travelled to America, where they inevitably picked up such terminology. In addition, there were also categories of homelessness that were seemingly only used in Britain and Ireland: for example, the self-professed tramp and novelist Jim Phelan made distinctions between three different types of tramp: padders (slow walkers), postmen (fast walkers) and casuals (those who used casual wards) (Anon. 1954, 514). Then there were the various types of begging professions with which the homeless were often categorised: George Orwell, for instance, mentions screevers (pavement artists), gaggers (street performers), moochers (plain beggars), clodhoppers (street dancers), chanters (street singers), hawkers (pedlars) and mugfakers (photographers) (1997, 176). We can begin to see that between Britain, Ireland and America there were many acknowledged categories of homelessness during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—while, of course, older terminology also coexisted alongside the new (such as vagrant, vagabond, mendicant and the entire taxonomy of rogues that will be explored later in this study). Finally, it is worth noting that there were several other social groups, not necessarily homeless, but who often overlapped with this social group and who were frequently referred to in connection with tramp culture—including navvies (part-time labourers), gypsies (a word used to connote Romany, Irish and various other travelling communities), tinkers (itinerant tinsmiths), roadmenders (stonebreakers and people who repair roads), yeggs (criminals) and spivs (small-time crooks). There were, in short, numerous different perceived  variations of the tramp, as well as a myriad of satellite ‘types’ of homelessness existing alongside them. Very often these terms were used interchangeably, and without any apparent awareness of the precise meanings attributed to them by authors like Reitman, London, Phelan and Orwell. For instance, in an American context the memoirist Edwin Brown writes of the words ‘“hobo,” “bum,” “tramp,” “vagrant,” “floater,” “vagabond,” “idler,” “shirker” [and] “mendicant”’ that they ‘are applied indiscriminately to the temporarily out-of-work man’ (1913, xiv). Of course this means that our understanding of these various categories has to be flexible. And yet, at the same time, it still remains possible to differentiate our understanding of the concept of the tramp—given the insights offered by Case, Kusmer, Depastino and others—from the multiple alternative descriptive categories of homelessness popular during this period. As already indicated, when referring to the tramp in what is to follow my understanding of the term is that it connotes the emergence of a new cultural construct denoting someone who is typically out of work, typically a wanderer, typically

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without a fixed abode—whose existence, unlike the vagabonds who went before him or her, may be seen to have been both brought about and defined by changing patterns of employment within Britain and elsewhere, and more generally by the process of industrialisation. 1.2  A Short History of Homelessness: 1500–1950 In order to substantiate the claim that the tramp was a byproduct of industrialisation and to indicate in greater detail the causes of a transition from the ‘masterless’ vagabond to the ‘useless’ tramp—but also in order to provide some general historical context to help ease us into the subject at hand—this section will offer an account of what historians have established regarding the place of homelessness in British history from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth. In particular it will do so by offering an overview of estimates concerning the size of the homeless population, claims concerning the causal factors behind given changes, and an account of key legislative landmarks—in the process hoping to give an indication of cultural shifts concerning how the homeless were viewed at different points in time. 1.2.1 Sixteenth Century During the sixteenth century it is widely believed that poverty and vagrancy levels in Britain increased significantly. The literary historian Arthur Kinney has suggested that the ‘birth and growth of the Tudor vagabonds’ is attributable to multiple factors including the enclosure movement, the dissolution of monasteries, the disbanding of professional soldiers and the ‘confluence of various strains on the economy’—including the growth of foreign markets, the introduction of piece-work production, population increase, inflation and debased money (1990, 19). Against this, in his study of early modern migration, Ian Whyte has argued that ‘the underlying cause’ of increased poverty levels was population growth—resulting in ‘subsistence crises’ that bankrupted small farmers (2000, 49). Corresponding with a rise in vagrancy, acts of legislation in this period were notoriously cruel—subjecting vagabonds initially to stocking and incarceration, and subsequently to ‘whipping, the loss of one ear or both and, on repeated offences, death’ (Kinney 1990, 43). For instance, in 1572 an act was passed declaring that ‘persons above the age of 14 being roges, vacabondes or sturdy Beggers are on conviction to bee grevousle whipped and burnte through the gristle of the right eare with a hot iron

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of the compasse of an inch about’ (Tschopp 1903, 7). In terms of what this says about existing attitudes towards the homeless in the sixteenth century—these acts of brutality may be seen to reflect Beier’s previously considered account of how Elizabethan vagrants were perceived as ‘a problem of disorder’. 1.2.2 Seventeenth Century In the early seventeenth century we see a continuation of the same trend in terms of vagrancy levels and perceived causes, with Whyte suggesting that vagrancy remained a ‘major concern’ during this period—again attributing this to an ‘increase in population’ in England and Scotland (2000, 51). Legislative practices similarly signal a continuation, with Whyte describing how the 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor (otherwise known as the Elizabethan Poor Law) formalised pre-existing Tudor practices by establishing ‘the responsibility of each township to the poor’ (2000, 57). This move was subsequently strengthened through the 1662 Act for the Better Relief of the Poor (or the Settlement Act), which made it easier to remove the homeless from parishes ‘on the grounds that they might become a charge on the poor rates’ (Ibid.). At the same time, there is the suggestion of a development here: in his history of English Poor Laws, Paul Slack has argued that these two acts represent an increase both in the punitive powers (continuing sixteenth-century trends) and in the welfare responsibilities of the local authorities concerned: on the one hand simplifying ‘penalties and procedures’, making it easier for parish officers to whip the homeless and to return them to their place of birth; on the other, increasing the responsibilities of churchwardens and overseers of the poor, tasking them with ‘raising rates, relieving the impotent […] and apprenticing poor children’ (1990, 10). On this basis, Slack argues that these laws can be viewed in three ways: as a response to rising poverty levels following population growth; as a symptom of ‘a new conception of what governments could and should do for the poor, inspired by humanism, Protestantism or Puritanism’; and as a reflection of a growing desire on behalf of governments ‘to control their subjects’ (1990, 3). Slack ultimately suggests that all of these claims are valid—while placing an emphasis on how central governing powers were motivated by a preoccupation with ‘public order’, particularly after uprisings in the north of England and in Oxfordshire in the late sixteenth century (1990, 11). This analysis would seem to further support Beier’s general claim that the homeless in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were perceived as a

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‘rootless and masterless’ threat—marking a shift away from ‘the Franciscan idealization of poverty’ in the High Middle Ages (1985, 12). This sense of a continuing preoccupation with masterlessness is confirmed if we look beyond the realm of legislation to John Locke’s famous definition of the social contract in the ‘Second Treatise’ from his 1689 text Two Treatises of Government, in which he includes the example of vagrants ‘barely travelling freely on the highway’ in his account of what constitutes ‘tacit consent’—arguably further illustrating the extent to which vagrancy in this period was conceptualised in terms of masterlessness, with Locke here seemingly seeking to diminish a perceived threat by suggesting that vagrants’ use of highways obligates them to comply with the terms of an unwritten social contract (2004, 70). 1.2.3 Eighteenth Century Moving towards the eighteenth century, quite a different situation emerges as a result of a ‘fall in the population’ of the homeless in Britain towards the end of the seventeenth century, attributed by Whyte to ‘the cessation of subsistence crises, and the spread of poor relief to virtually every parish’ (2000, 54). In his study of vagrancy in England between 1650 and 1750, David Hitchcock similarly underlines ‘increased spending on social policy and settlement’ in his account of the  decline in the number of cases of ‘permanent vagrancy’ between 1660 and 1700 (2016, 5). In his history of vagrancy in eighteenth-century London, Tim Hitchcock further argues that these trends were consolidated during the early eighteenth century— a period that he suggests was marked by a rise in charity and tolerance towards the poorer and homeless populations: so much so that, according to Hitchcock, ‘very few’ homeless individuals who migrated into London ‘died on the streets or were forcibly removed by overseers and constables’ (2017, 24). Hitchcock instead suggests that during this period ‘most of [the homeless] survived’—finding a place ‘in the complex world of London’ by begging, by becoming charwomen or sweepers, by surviving off the cast-offs of Covent Garden, or by going ‘“on charity” into the homes of the middling sort’ (Ibid.). Hitchcock also argues, like Whyte, that the system of poor relief in eighteenth-century London ‘was extensive, expensive and remarkably comprehensive’—with eighty-six workhouses in London by 1776, as well as a dozen or so pauper farms (2017, 132–3). He adds that these workhouses, far from being the ‘exclusive prison-like institutions of the sort that become commonplace in the mid nineteenth century’, were places in which no-one was ‘actively restrained’ and in which ‘receiving relief did not preclude begging on the street’ as it

1 INTRODUCTION 9

did in later years (2017, 132–3, 149). Hitchcock even goes so far as to argue that workhouses in the eighteenth century could sometimes be ‘calm and sociable’ spaces in which to live (2017, 136). This sense that during the eighteenth century the homeless were still perceived in terms of their masterlessness, but less as a threat and more as people to be assisted and sympathised with may be seen to be embodied by David Hume’s critique of Locke’s claims about vagrancy in his 1748 essay Of The Original Contract—in which he contests the idea that the vagrant ‘travelling freely on the highway’ should be considered to have tacitly consented to a social contract, writing: ‘Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives, from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires?’ (Hume 1998, 283) The implication is that the ‘new conception of what governments could and should do for the poor’ identified by Slack as a feature of seventeenth-century vagrancy legislation became an even more prominent characteristic in the eighteenth century. 1.2.4 Nineteenth Century Moving towards a consideration of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­ century responses to homelessness, in The Making of the English Working Class E.P. Thompson partly suggests a continuation of this trend by identifying a progression towards a more charitable outlook, pointing out that ‘[p]oor-rates had risen from under two million pounds per annum in the 1780s, to more than four millions in 1803, and over six millions after 1812’ (1970, 221). However, this observation is situated within the context of a wider analysis of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century developments—so that Thompson ultimately paints a picture that differs significantly from Hitchcock’s account of the preceding era. He writes: ‘between 1780 and 1840 the people of Britain suffered an experience of immiseration’—in particular as a result of ‘the enclosures, the Wars, the Poor Laws, the decline of rural industries, the counter-revolutionary stance of their rulers’ (1970, 445). Writing specifically of the enclosure process—in which small landholdings were consolidated into larger farms—Thompson notes how ‘between 1760 and 1820 […] in village after village, common rights [were] lost’ in what he describes as ‘a plain enough case of class robbery’ (1970, 198,  218). Although Raymond Williams claims in The Country and the City that ‘the continuing processes of rack-renting and short-lease policies’ in response to the pressures of capitalism caused just as many people to be ‘driven from the land’ during this period (2016, 139), Thompson’s suggestion that under such

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conditions poor relief in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was ‘impelled […] by necessity’ rather than marking a spirit of pure benevolence remains valid (1970, 221). Owing largely to the factors identified by Thompson and Williams, in the beginning of the nineteenth century it is generally accepted that the size of the homeless and pauper populations grew significantly. Though the precision of the following estimate is perhaps not to be trusted, historian of homelessness Lionel Rose has noted: ‘In 1806 the later eminent London magistrate Patrick Colquhoun, surmised that among England’s 10,000,000 people there were some 70,000 tramps, beggars, gypsies and the like’ (1998, 2). Whatever the actual figure may have been—it was to increase significantly over the first few decades of the nineteenth century owing to multiple factors: casualties from the Napoleonic wars; Irish emigration following several potato crop blights; a post-Napoleonic depression; new Corn Laws ‘barring foreign corn imports and keeping bread artificially expensive’ (Rose 1998, 2); and, of course, the continuing effects of industrialisation—resulting in the creation of what Karl Marx famously described as ‘a reserve army of unemployed workers for times of overproduction’ (1975, 433). As in the Elizabethan era, legislation soon followed this rise in homelessness—with Rose suggesting that the 1824 Vagrancy Act (which made it an offence for the homeless to sleep outdoors or to beg) should be ‘viewed in the context of Parliament’s concern about the mounting costs of public relief to the destitute’ (1998, 3). The 1824 Vagrancy Act was soon superseded by the better-known Poor Law of 1834—marking a key shift in government policy towards the homeless and the impoverished. As historian Ann Woodall puts it: The new Poor Law of 1834, based in part on the arguments to be found in the works of [Thomas] Malthus, sought to introduce a principle of “less-­ eligibility”, making relief available to the able bodied, only within the confines of the workhouse. It was hoped to make relief so unpalatable, both more meagre and more rigorous than the wages and work of the labouring poor, that only desperation would induce the poor to seek relief. (2005, 18)

In practice this meant an ‘exceptionally intense’ expansion of workhouse construction—including the building of large numbers of vagrant wards (or ‘casual wards’ providing temporary accommodation for homeless inmates in return for work) which, as Felix Driver puts it in his history of the workhouse system, ‘reflected the growing severity of official policy

1 INTRODUCTION 11

towards “casuals”’ by ensuring that relief was substituted by enforced labour (1993, 81, 89). These developments would appear to support Case’s claim that nineteenth-century attitudes towards homelessness were shaped by a narrow fixation on the question of utility: while seventeenthcentury legislation restricted itself to the ‘problem of disorder’ and eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century poor relief has been characterised as relatively ‘extensive’, mid  nineteenth-century attempts to separate apart the ‘able bodied’, to prohibit begging and to limit a culture of dependency through the expansion of the workhouse and casual ward system clearly signal a shift towards a growing preoccupation with the question of productivity. By the second half of the nineteenth century poverty levels in Britain had once again grown. In his history of Poor Law reform, David Englander writes that the pauper population in Britain ‘reached an all time high in 1868 when one in every twenty-four of the total population was a pauper’ (1998, 52). Such high levels of pauperism again coincided with the implementation of stricter deterrents against homelessness, such as the Houseless Poor Act of 1864, which ‘provided for a network of improved casual wards, centrally funded, into which the homeless poor were to be driven by police action’ (Englander 1998, 33). In subsequent acts, powers of detention were given to those who ran the casual wards, and the compulsory labour element was strengthened with the threat of imprisonment for those who did not comply (Ibid.). A major rise in pauper and homeless populations; concentrated efforts to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor; reductions in relief; stricter rules for those seeking relief: each of these developments may be seen to have consolidated mid nineteenth-century trends—reflecting the development of industrialisation and the entrenchment of a severe work ethic. In turn, they may be seen to have been key in contributing to the emergence of the figure of the tramp in the mid-nineteenth century. 1.2.5 Twentieth Century Moving into the twentieth century we see an interesting development— with historian Rachel Vorspan noting the paradox that as general poverty levels began to decrease, vagrancy levels appeared to rise: When in 1910 John Burns, president of the Local Government Board, boasted to the house of commons that in the preceding sixty years the proportion of paupers to population had declined from 6.2 to 2.6 per cent, he conveniently omitted the vagrancy figures which had concurrently risen over

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tenfold […] A Poor Law inspector frankly confessed in the same year that “vagrancy is the one and sole branch of the Poor Law question in which we have not made great advances in the last forty years.” (1977, 59)

The economic historian George Boyer confirms this view, writing that ‘the vagrancy rate […] increased in the 1890s and again after 1900’ (2003, 299)—leading to a 1906 Committee on Vagrancy report estimating that in England and Wales there was ‘a hard core of 20,000 to 30,000 permanent vagrants in a population of some 34,000,000’ (Rose 1998, 108). In response to these high levels of homelessness, the London County Council General Powers Acts of 1902 and 1907 implemented rules relating to space between beds, ventilation and sheet changing in lodging houses— measures interpreted by Rose as indicative of a desire to protect ‘mainstream society from disease’ rather than a concern for the welfare of the homeless (1998, 58). In line with this analysis, the historian of homelessness Robert Humphreys points out that the 1906 committee proposed ‘that the “real cause of vagrancy” was “indiscriminate dole-giving”’—suggesting that the ideology underlining the Poor Law of 1834 remained intact during this period (1999, 114). This said, a shift in the direction of welfare provision through the introduction of old-age pensions, the National Insurance Act and Labour Exchanges was to have the effect of reducing homelessness levels in the decades to come, in line with a general pattern of decreased poverty levels (Humphreys 1999, 122). However, any progress made here did not last long owing to a ‘rapid increase in unemployment from the middle of the 1920s’, following which ‘governments did their best to limit the numbers of people eligible for unemployment insurance benefits’ through the introduction of means-testing (Gazeley 2003, 125). The unemployment and poverty crisis that arose out of this was to be significantly worsened by the Great Depression of 1929, followed by the introduction of the Family Means Test in 1931—reducing the provision of welfare even further (Eadon and Renton 2002, 40). By 1933 the number of jobless in Britain had reached just under three million (Jupp 1982, 9), up from 1.25 million fifteen years earlier (Lloyd 1993, 125). So traumatic was this turn of events that it brought down the government of the day: with Ramsay MacDonald’s resignation in 1931 following a failure on the part of his cabinet to reach a consensus on whether unemployed workers should ‘pay for the crisis’ (Eadon and Renton 2002, 43). Political movements also grew in response to this national state of emergency, such as the National Unemployed

1 INTRODUCTION 13

Workers’ Movement, with its 50,000 members and 386 branches (Jupp 1982, 25). Unsurprisingly, homelessness levels soared—with Humphreys writing of 17,000 sleeping in casual wards in England and Wales in May 1932—the highest number ever recorded—while also noting that an additional 16,875 people (many of whom would have been homeless) were registered as living in doss-houses in the previous year (1999, 134, 147). During the interwar period estimates concerning the number of tramps ranged from 20,000 to 50,000 to 500,000 (Jennings 1958, 30; Anon. 1935, 12; Gape 1936, 351)—although what the term tramp connoted for each of these authors very likely varied. Whatever the actual figure, the general impression is that during this period the homeless became strikingly visible. The politician and social explorer Frank Gray perhaps summed this up best when he wrote: ‘the English public is accustomed to the sight on every main road of a procession of unhappy, ill-clad, and frequently unclean men ambling along to an unknown destination’ (1931, Author’s Preface, my italics). At the same time as means-testing exacerbated the unemployment crisis, the late interwar period also saw the beginnings of a shift away from the severity of the 1834 Poor Laws as regards legislation concerning the homeless. The Public Assistance (Casual Poor) Order of 1931, for instance, took the move of ensuring that ‘gruel was to be discontinued, and meat and fresh vegetables were to be added’ to the casual ward provisions for the homeless, while the Vagrancy Act of 1935 took the step of abolishing the ‘offence of “sleeping out”’ (Rose 1998, 159, 174). These measures when combined with the major expansion of the welfare state and the provision of social housing on a large scale in the post-war period ensured that by 1977 the recorded number of homeless people was ‘extremely low’ (Lowe 1993, 253)—although this figure was to rise again towards the end of the twentieth century during the Thatcher period and again during the austerity measures of the early twenty-first century. 1.2.6 Summary From this brief survey of the history of homelessness from 1500 to the present, we begin to gain a clearer sense of how and why the figure of the tramp emerged in the mid-nineteenth century before fading away in the middle of the twentieth. This was a period during which the poor and homeless population in Britain grew significantly on two separate occasions—owing primarily to industrialisation in the first instance, and to a global depression in the second. At the same time, both nineteenth- and

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twentieth-century legislation can be seen to have backtracked on the relative generosity of the eighteenth century through a series of acts enshrining a new regime for managing the poor that also clearly differed from the brutal measures and the preoccupation with disorder that defined sixteenth- and seventeenth-century responses to vagrancy. Attempts to minimise relief for the ‘able bodied’ through the 1834 Poor Law; insistence on compulsory labour for casual ward inhabitants with the 1864 Houseless Poor Act; concern about ‘indiscriminate dole-giving’ expressed in the 1906 Committee on Vagrancy; the implementation of means-testing in the 1920s and 1930s: all this suggests a new, more subtly invasive mode of dealing with the poor that did not end with the initial moves to build a welfare state in the early twentieth century—while also confirming Case’s suggestion that during this period the homeless came to be perceived more in terms of their ‘inutility’ than their masterlessness. All of this in turn goes some way towards confirming and building on the suggestion made by Kusmer and Depastino in an American context that nineteenthand twentieth-century employment conditions produced a new conception of homelessness, defined by and in opposition against the industrial conditions responsible for its emergence. 1.3  Tramp Literature: 1850–1950 While I am reluctant to make decisive claims about the genre of tramp literature here before a critical framework is in place—it is nonetheless no doubt helpful to briefly indicate what the developments described above may be seen to have led to in this regard, in the process giving a clearer sense of the body of work that this study will ultimately be looking at. Two genres of writing best represent the emergence of literature in the 1850–1950 period reflecting the new conception of homelessness described above: namely, tramp memoir writing and tramp fiction. Regarding the first of these: as will be described in greater detail in the next chapter, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of an entirely new cultural phenomenon in the form of homeless writers publishing memoirs chronicling their lived experiences on the road. To give a sense of the scale of this development: in the following chapter the memoirs of thirty-three homeless authors who published their memoirs between 1800 and 1950 will be identified and analysed. Running parallel with this trend, the figure of the tramp also became popular in fiction written during this same period: a development that will be explored in the third chapter of this

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study, in which the works of over twenty authors who wrote fiction prominently featuring homeless characters will also be explored. In short, the important thing to recognise at this stage is that the arrival of the tramp in the mid-nineteenth century as a result of the social and cultural shifts described above resulted in the emergence of a significant body of literature in which this new conception of homelessness was represented. Without characterising these works in too much detail before the ramifications of doing so have been fully explored—we still might acknowledge at this stage that many of these texts can be viewed as being in line with Kusmer and Case’s suggestion that the tramp was an inherently oppositional figure. In particular, we might note that a recurring motif among these texts (whether representative of the whole or not) is the attempt to challenge prevailing attitudes towards the idea of having to work and to live in a home. This, for instance, is strongly indicated by the tramp memoirist John Worby when he describes his fellow tramps as ‘rebels from everyday slavery’ (1939, 207), and by the tramp novelist Chris Massie when he presents tramps as individuals who have avoided being ‘sullied by civilization’ (1931, 30). Later in the course of this introduction this suggestion will be developed by looking at how literary critics and historians have similarly characterised homeless subcultures as performing an oppositional function in this period. Before we are ready to explore these possibilities in more detail, however—it is necessary to first take a step back and to ask whether we can offer a more comprehensive explanation concerning how exactly the tramp came to be perceived as a societal threat in the manner that has just been described, and in turn to ask whether more can be said about the conditions that made the apparent emergence of a tramp subculture possible.

2   Disciplinary Society and the Homeless Up to this point we have seen evidence of three broad trends regarding the tramp in Britain between 1850 and 1950. First, it has been suggested that industrialisation (among other related factors) created the conditions that led to a transformation in terms of how homelessness was perceived. Second, we have seen evidence of concentrated efforts to control the behaviour of homeless populations in this same period. Third, it has been hinted that these two conditions produced a tramp subculture defined in opposition to the workplace and the home, and that these values may have been embodied by the body of literature that this study will be focussing

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upon. At present, the links between these three claims may not seem to be entirely clear. In particular, it may appear that the first two observations— the move towards industrialisation and the persecution of the homeless— are distinct, or even unrelated phenomena. In attempting to paint a more detailed picture of attitudes towards the homeless in this period, this section will suggest that these two developments might, in fact, be seen to be intimately connected, which proposition will subsequently lead us to contemplate a fuller explanation for the emergence of the third identified development (the creation of a tramp subculture)—thus enabling us to understand the appearance of a discourse on tramps in the nineteenth century on a deeper level. The following analysis will initiate this process by exploring Foucault’s theories on disciplinary society in relation to the subject of homelessness, before comparing sixteenth-century attitudes towards vagrancy as represented in rogue literature to nineteenth-century attitudes towards tramps as represented within the genre of social investigation and exploration literature in order to both illustrate and test a Foucauldian explanation of the emergence of the tramp. 2.1  From Sovereign Power to Disciplinary Power Foucault’s 1975 text Discipline and Punish can be read as an attempt to make sense of the shift from punishment ‘in its most severe forms’ in the early modern period to the practice of ‘punishment without torture’ that emerged towards the end of the eighteenth century (1991, 16, 74). As is by now well known—rather than seeing this as evidence of a progression towards a better and more humane society, Foucault argued that this transition brought with it the development of ‘new tactics’ emblematised by Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison design, which he suggests ‘automatises and disindividualises power’ by forcing the prisoner—imagining that they are being watched—to themselves become a tool in the struggle to regulate collective behavioural conduct (1991, 89, 202). Foucault argues that this provides a clear example of how disciplinary society targets the soul rather than the body—suggesting that within this new disciplinary regime ‘[t]he expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations’ (1991, 16). The example of an attempt to ‘disindividualise’ power in the form of Bentham’s innovations in prison design is thus seen to be emblematic of the much wider practice of implementing

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strategies of ‘normalisation’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (1991, 307). Crucially, Foucault later argued in his 1978 College de France lecture entitled ‘Governmentality’ that such attempts to exert control by targeting the soul are justified on the basis that they are necessary procedures in the art of governing. Within disciplinary society he suggests that the objective is ‘to rationalise the problems posed for governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a group of living beings constituted as a population: health, hygiene, natality, longevity, races…’ (Macey 1993, 358) Dean Spade, in his 2011 essay Laws as Tactics, interprets this Foucauldian notion of disciplinary society as consisting of ‘destruction or killing’ being justified as attempts ‘to preserve and promote the life of the population’, continuing: ‘this population-focused power concerned with promoting life always includes the identification of threats and drains to the population’ (2011, 46). Foucault himself argued in his 1978 lecture that the imposition of normative values within disciplinary society is justified in terms of ‘the welfare of the population’ and that this also involves a preoccupation with ‘the increase of its wealth’ (2000a, 216). In Discipline and Punish, Foucault frequently discusses the subject of vagrancy—giving us helpful insights into what his theories might be seen to say about the relationship between homelessness and disciplinary society. In one passage, for instance, he describes how as ‘obstacle-signs’ must now ‘constitute the new arsenal of penalties’ rather the ‘the old public executions’ that were previously in existence, there is a need to ‘rob’ undesirable forms of behaviour—such as criminality and vagrancy—‘of any attraction’ (1991, 104). Rather than punishing vagrancy in a forceful way—for instance, by subjecting the homeless to ‘stocking, whipping, [or] the loss of one ear’—Foucault suggests that disciplinary society attempts to ‘[w]eaken the interest that brought it to birth’ (1991, 106). The way it achieves this, he argues, is (as with Bentham’s prisoner) to develop tactics that act ‘in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations’—in this case by fostering a belief that vagrants are lazy and unproductive, while at the same time suggesting that the solution is to reform them (rather than torture them) for the greater good of society as a whole. Mimicking this discourse in action, Foucault writes: Behind the offences of the vagabond, there is laziness; that is what one must fight against. “One will not succeed by locking beggars in filthy prisons that are more like cesspools”; they will have to be forced to work. “The best way

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of punishing them is to employ them”. Against a bad passion, a good habit; against a force, another force, but it must be the force of sensibility and passion, not that of armed power. (1991, 106)

Outwardly, the impression of a more humane society is conveyed as ‘armed power’ is replaced by ‘the force of sensibility and passion’—and yet beneath this gesture, Foucault insists, more sophisticated methods for controlling human behaviour are achieved as an emphasis is placed upon the ‘laziness’ of the beggar and the suggestion that they should be ‘forced to work’. Although Foucault is describing a cultural moment that narrowly preceded the appearance of the tramp (which, as I have indicated, emerged slightly later), his analysis concerning the increased pressures placed upon the homeless to work has clear resonances with Case’s claim that the figure of the tramp was defined by a heightened demand placed upon the homeless ‘to make themselves useful’. Foucault’s description of the new discrete and insidious forms of ‘force’ deployed against the homeless during this period also clearly aligns with my earlier description of nineteenth-century legislation—exemplified by the implementation of stricter criteria for determining who is ‘deserving’ of relief and by the decision to force the homeless to work as a condition of receiving assistance. And yet, Foucault’s analysis does more than merely confirm these two points. Recalling his suggestion regarding the emergence in the late modern period of attempts to replace sovereign power with intrusive strategies of ‘normalisation’ ostensibly in the service of ‘the welfare of the population’ while also reflecting a preoccupation with ‘the increase of its wealth’—it should be clear that in the context of his writing as a whole, in making such deductions about homelessness he is also asking that we recognise their interrelatedness. In other words: that the phenomenon of an increased pressure placed upon the homeless to be productive and the emergence of more sophisticated means of exercising control over homeless populations are in fact two intimately related manifestations of the same wider development. According to this view, rather than considering the tramp as a byproduct of industrialisation, or alternatively as the result of new legislative practices (as the analysis in the preceding sections might be seen to suggest), a Foucauldian analysis demands that we recognise evolving attitudes towards the homeless as a symbol of a new, disciplinary societal model for controlling populations. Robbing homelessness of its attractiveness; encouraging the homeless to take personal responsibility

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for their circumstances; emphasising their unproductiveness; advocating their reform—rather than seeing such developments as isolated phenomena linked to unrelated economic and legislative developments, Foucault asks us to recognise them as part of the same general movement of encouraging conformity through strategies of normalisation for the sake of regulating populations and generating wealth while maintaining a general illusion of benignity, or decreased severity. In turn, a Foucauldian analysis might be seen to suggest that we clarify our understanding of the emergence of a new conception of homelessness by recognising it as the product of an increased disciplinary demand placed upon the homeless to contribute to the welfare and wealth of the general population—typically taking the form of the demand that they cease being so unproductive. Before we integrate these claims into our own analysis, it is worth noting that Foucault’s suggestion regarding the emergence of disciplinary strategies for subjugating vagrant populations in the late modern period has been criticised by some historians of homelessness who suggest that the homeless were already subjected to similar tactics sometime earlier. David Hitchcock, for instance, has pointed out that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, vagrants were also the targets of disciplinary strategies of reform by being ‘improved or “corrected” at home’ and ‘constantly ostracized’ (2016, 12). Elsewhere he similarly remarks: ‘Long before Jeremy Bentham invented—or Michel Foucault theorized about— the panopticon, the vagrant was taken inside a working version of it to be disciplined and punished’ (2016, 18). Confirming this suggestion, some historians have argued that Elizabethan legislation involved disciplinary attempts to target the impoverished on the grounds of their unproductiveness by institutionalising ‘a distinction between the “impotent poor”, the “able-bodied poor” and the “idle poor”’ long before the late eighteenth century (Roberts 2017, 48). Further evidence to support such a claim is provided by Albert Tschopp, pointing to laws ‘especially directed against the “able-bodied” beggar who refused to work’ dating as far back as the reign of Edward III (1903, 5). All of this suggests the importance of not implying that a disciplinary preoccupation with punishing vagrants for their non-contribution was invented in or exclusive to the late eighteenth century and beyond, or that the tramp, in turn, signals an entirely new departure in terms of how the homeless were perceived. Undoubtedly disciplinary tactics preceded the late eighteenth century—and undoubtedly vagrants were similarly targeted on the ground of their levels of contribution and their compliance with societal norms before this point, as

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the analysis already offered in this introductory essay indicates. What might therefore be proposed—acknowledging Hitchcock’s suggestion that disciplinary tactics predate this era, but also recalling Beier and Slack’s suggestions (conversely affirming Foucault’s analysis) that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, treatment of vagrants primarily centred on the ‘problem of disorder’ rather than the problem of contribution—is that the emergence of disciplinary society and the subsequent arrival of the figure of the tramp signal an acceleration and a consolidation of formerly existent tendencies: thus the transition from a sovereign to a disciplinary mode of regulating the lives of the homeless, and the subsequent shift from an emphasis on the vagrant’s masterlessness to an emphasis on their unproductiveness, should not be mistaken for a wholesale transformation but instead should be seen as a change in emphasis. The following two sections will attempt to illustrate these claims and consolidate our understanding of the emergence of the tramp by considering two discourses on homelessness—one preceding industrialisation and the emergence of disciplinary society, the other following it. While comparing sixteenth-century representations of homelessness oriented around the figure of the rogue with nineteenth- and twentieth-century social investigation and exploration literature concerning the figure of the tramp in order to demonstrate the impact of disciplinary society upon cultural perceptions of homelessness, the following two sections will also underline how this shift was one of emphasis and thus by no means entirely clear cut. 2.2  Sixteenth-Century Rogue Literature: The Pre-disciplinary Threat of Masterlessness Rogue literature is perhaps the first major example within early modern Britain of a body of literature involving homeless characters. As Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz write in their introduction to a collection of essays on the subject: in sixteenth-century England, at a time when homelessness levels were unusually high, an array of displaced figures ‘exploded onto the scene’—referred to, variously, as rogues, molls, doxies, cony-­ catchers, masterless men and caterpillars of the commonwealth (2006, 1). These characters appeared in pamphlets, plays, poems, ballads and other forms of literature that presented ‘often satirical tales of the lives of vagrants, whose criminal subculture the authors “discover” and expose in the service of society’ (Comensoli 2007, 38). Recent scholarship has emphasised how unrepresentative these depictions of homelessness may have been—with Beier, for instance, pointing out that ‘less than a third of

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all career vagabonds were criminal in nature’ during this period (Hitchcock 2016, 4). Relatedly, some critics have emphasised how the rogue should be seen as a literary phenomenon—for example, with Dionne and Mentz suggesting that rogue literature is responsible for ‘manufacturing an imaginary criminal underworld’ (2006, 7), although this point is indirectly challenged by Beier when he argues that in spite of being unrepresentative these texts still remain a ‘valuable source’ for historians (2006, 99). Whether representative of social reality or not, the existence of such a discourse is clearly of interest for illustrating what we might now define as a pre-disciplinary preoccupation with disorder and masterlessness. As Beier notes, Thomas Harman’s 1568 A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds has long been regarded as ‘the most original and credible exemplar of the genre’ (2006, 98): for the present purposes it will thus serve as a representative of the wider trend of which it is a part, although a more detailed analysis of the rogue literature genre will also be offered in the third chapter. 2.2.1 Thomas Harman (fl. 1547–1567) In A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Harman boasts of an intimate knowledge of the ‘depe dissimulation and detestable dealing’ of a group of ‘wyly wanderers’ with whom he claims to have regularly conferred (1814, ii). In keeping with the literary critic Viviana Comensoli’s suggestion that in rogue literature ‘the image of the unfortunate vagabond’ was reshaped ‘into a willing and stealthy member of a vast criminal network of organised gangs’ (2007, 1, 7), Harman’s text is notable for its clear attempts to illustrate the claim that the vagrant community is a ‘rablement of rascals’ (1814, 61). In the course of the text, Harman justifies this by suggesting that it is his ‘bounden duty’ to present a detailed account of ‘the abhominable, wicked and detestable behauiour’ (1814, i– ii) of rogues he has encountered—suggesting, as Stephen Greenblatt has noted, that he believes himself to be acting out of ‘civility’ (1988, 52). The bulk of Harman’s text consists of detailed descriptions of the various strategies devised by the ‘wyly wander, to the vtter deludynge of the good gevers’—such as ‘[t]hese that do counterfet the Cranke’ by pretending to be epileptic, ‘Dommerars’ who feign dumbness and ‘Demaunders for glymmar’ who pretend to have lost their homes in a fire (1814, ii, 33, 40, 43). Some have noted that the emphasis placed by Harman and others on the ingenious schemes of deception deployed by vagabonds in this

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era—whether representative of reality or not—may be seen to signify shifting perceptions of vagrancy as a result of the emergence of capitalism. Dionne and Mentz, for instance, suggest that the figure of the rogue signifies ‘a potent image of the social adeptness’ borne out of the ‘endlessly changing conditions of exchange that constitute modern capitalism’ (2006, 8). Similarly Beier proposes that the ‘stereotype of the sturdy beggar’ emerged out of the ‘buffetings of the market economy’ (1985, 12). This may appear to problematise the suggestion that attitudes towards vagrancy became especially oriented around a preoccupation with contributing to the welfare of society and increasing societal wealth during the late eighteenth century. However, two crucial points might be made to counter this objection—in the process indicating how sixteenth-century representations of vagrancy may be seen to differ from later manifestations, and rescuing the claim that the tramp can be seen to be a configuration of homelessness especially responsive to the evolution of capitalism and the emergence of disciplinary society. The first concerns the tone of rogue literature texts—indicated by the clear sense of enjoyment that Harman appears to derive from describing the lives of these ‘mischeuous myslyvers’ (1814, v). This is something that literary critics have been quick to notice—in particular Linda Woodbridge, who suggests that ‘[t]hroughout A Caveat or Warening for Common Curestors, Harman’s moral outrage at vagrants’ wicked lives modulates with callous ease into a flippant giggle’ (2003, 205). She notes, for example, that ‘[s]everal of the Caveat’s many anecdotes end with neighbours laughing at victims of vagrants: an old man stuck up by highway robbers […] a parson tricked by two pretended nephews who grab his arm out of a window’ (Ibid.). Woodbridge offers an explanation for this by suggesting that the rogue literature of Harman draws ‘fulsomely on comic storytelling and jest books’ (2001, 11). The second thing to observe is that though these commentators identify the characterisation of vagrancy in rogue literature as bearing a relation to capitalism—in emphasising the rogue’s ‘social adeptness’ it is at the same time clear that the rogue’s symbolic relation to capitalism differs from that of the tramp, summarised by Case’s description of its symbolic ‘inutility’. The suggestion seems to be that the rogue negotiates existing systems of exchange—with Harman’s wanderer ‘deludynge […] the good gevers’—rather than that they challenge early modern capitalism’s productivist logic. In other words, Harman does not appear to have been preoccupied with the threat of unproductiveness, but with what Case

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refers to as the ‘diabolical energy of the masterless’ that is suggested by the rogue’s apparent capacity to manage and manipulate their way through the capitalist system. Both of these factors may be considered attributable to the fact that Harman and his contemporaries were operating in a pre-industrial and predisciplinary era. Thus, while Dionne and Mentz may be right in suggesting that the perceived ‘social adeptness’ of the rogue was borne out of the ‘endlessly changing conditions of exchange that constitute modern capitalism’—it was crucially early modern capitalism that Harman’s rogues were depicted as having navigated: a less aggressive form of commodity exchange in a pre-disciplinary era, in which tactics of subjugation no doubt existed but in a less sophisticated form. In other words, though the homeless in Harman’s era may have been whipped, branded, disfigured and put to death, they were still not yet subject to the intrusive methods of control described as a ‘new arsenal of penalties’ by Foucault and embodied by the casual ward system—forcing the homeless to walk from ward to ward, subjecting them to involuntary labour and depriving them of beds and proper nourishment. They were, in short, not yet subject to a series of invasive strategies that targeted ‘the soul’ in an attempt to ‘[w]eaken the interest’ in unproductive lifestyles. First, this might be seen to both explain and be illustrated by the jocular tone of Harman’s text: while Harman’s demonisation of rogue culture shows outward signs of severity—its simultaneous flippancy can be seen as evidence that the agenda of discrediting vagrants on account of their unproductivity and non-conformity was less developed in the early modern period than it would later be. Second, this sense that disciplinary strategies of disincentivisation were less developed may be seen to explain Harman’s belief that the rogue was able to negotiate and exploit— instead of being rendered useless by—existing systems of exchange. In other words, though the homeless were treated exceptionally harshly in the early modern period—the fact that a disciplinary framework was not yet fully developed suggests how it was conceivable that they could still be characterised in terms of their ‘social adeptness’ (whether accurately or not). While generally seeming to comply with a Foucauldian analysis of the evolution of the threat of homelessness—this assessment of the rogue literature tradition as represented here by Harman clearly adds layers of complexity to our understanding of early modern perceptions of vagrancy. It is, for instance, apparent that the vagrant has long signified ‘a social and political danger’—while it is at the same time evident that in pre-­disciplinary discourse this threat, though significant, appears not always to have been

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taken entirely seriously. We also find evidence suggesting that the figure of the early modern vagrant was, like the tramp, defined in relation to capitalism—but crucially as a symbol of the possibility of exploiting existing systems of exchange rather than as an emblem of a failure to configure within them, thus reinforcing a sense of the vagrant’s relative freedom in an era with severe but less effective controls. Following on from these conclusions, we might expect to find (in line with Foucault’s observations) that as we turn to the example of nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of homelessness—these two trends were reversed. First, a Foucauldian analysis should perhaps lead us to expect a tonal shift—with a grave preoccupation concerning the souls of the homeless substituting the occasional flippancy of rogue literature as we transition into the late modern period. Second, we might expect less of a sense in which the vagrant was perceived to have been able to negotiate the system—reflecting their disempowerment as a consequence of more effective (though less overtly brutal) disciplinary strategies of control. In the following section— this will be shown to have broadly been the case, while it will also be argued that the transition between these two discourses was less distinct than this suggests, as remnants of pre-disciplinary discourse remained prominent in nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourse. The following section will relatedly propose that among representations of homelessness in this era, there was more diversity of outlook than a dogged application of Foucauldian theory might permit. 2.3  Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Social Investigation and Exploration Literature: The Disciplinary Threat of Non-contribution Outside of memoir and fiction writing, social investigation and exploration literature very likely constitute the largest body of writing on the subject of the tramp produced between the mid-nineteenth and mid-­ twentieth centuries. Both genres consist of written accounts of the lives of the poor (and very often the homeless) that were a result of close observation—bringing to mind Harman’s efforts to ‘conferre daily’ with ‘wyly wanderers’ (1814, ii), except that these authors developed considerably more advanced methodologies for doing so. The social investigation text was a form of ‘quantitative social survey’ (Freeman 2003, 3) developed out of the process of systematic observation, in the manner of Charles Booth’s 1892–1897 Life and Labour of the People in London. The social

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exploration text was a form of literature written by ‘representatives of upper- or middle-class life’ who disguised themselves in order to enter ‘a world inhabited by the poor and the destitute’ (Keating 1978, 9) in the manner of Mary Higgs’s 1906 ‘A Night in a Salvation Army Shelter’. As the critic Peter Keating writes, the underlying motive driving many of these authors—as for authors of rogue literature acting ‘in the service of society’—was to try to answer the question: ‘“What is the actual condition of Society?”’ while in the process, if possible, making a ‘contribution […] to social change’ (1978, 12–13). Perhaps unsurprisingly given its apparently reformist bent, social investigation and exploration literature often failed to accept the examined communities on their own terms. In his recent study of what he terms incognito social investigation literature, Luke Seaber appropriates the terms ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ from the linguist and anthropologist Kenneth L.  Pike to assess the genre—writing: ‘an etic description is one made from outside the system being described; an emic description is one made from within the system being described’, before concluding that the incognito social investigation form is ‘overwhelmingly etic’, despite ‘various implicit and explicit protestations to the contrary’ (2017, 19, 128). The question we might ask ourselves is: does this ‘overwhelmingly etic’ genre of literature embody altered perceptions of the homeless in the manner described above? 2.3.1

 ineteenth-Century Social Investigation and Exploration: N Henry Mayhew (1812–1887) and James Greenwood (1832–1927) Beginning with one of the earliest and most famous of the social investigators, Henry Mayhew—I would suggest that in this example we find evidence of both a continuation of and an evolution away from earlier trends. Mayhew described his text London Labour and the London Poor—consisting of four volumes: the first three published in 1851, and the last (which was in fact co-written) in 1861—as ‘the first attempt to publish the history of a people, from the lips of the people themselves’ (1851, iii). The sense of a continuation of the rogue literature tradition is most strongly evident in the fourth volume, which focusses on ‘Those That Will Not Work’, among them prostitutes, thieves, swindlers and beggars. As with earlier rogue literature texts, the object of this analysis appears to have been to prove a link between criminality and the impoverished classes. This is most obviously apparent in a section on beggars written by Mayhew’s collaborator Andrew Halliday, in which he argues that ‘the state of mendicancy in 1629, was very much what it is now’, with the ‘artifices and dodges

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resorted to at that period’ strongly resembling ‘more modern impostures’ (1861, 394). Here there is a clear emphasis on the social adeptness of vagrant classes, and upon the threat of criminality—echoing earlier anxieties about the sixteenth-century vagabond. However, elsewhere in London Labour and the London Poor we find evidence of a newly emergent outlook in which the threat of failing to contribute to the welfare and wealth of the population instead configures as the leading priority—indicated from the outset by the aforementioned classification of vagrant and criminal classes as ‘Those That Will Not Work’. In the first volume, for example, Mayhew consistently defines vagrants in terms of their unproductiveness—at one point defining the ‘vagabond’ as ‘essentially non-producing and, consequently, predatory’ (1851, 322). This tendency is reflected in the stark contrast created between the deserving poor—such as the homeless ‘labourer or artisan who cannot get work to do’ and who is worthy of the reader’s ‘commiseration’—and the ‘purely vagabond’ who do ‘nothing whatsoever for their living’ but move ‘from place to place preying upon the earnings of the more industrious portion of the community’ (1851, 417–9, 2). As already indicated, the attempt to distinguish between a deserving and an undeserving poor was nothing new: what does however seem to indicate a development is Mayhew’s routine and prominent emphasis on the importance of contribution levels in determining this. Corresponding with this, London Labour and the London Poor may also be seen to reflect a tonal shift in terms of how the poor are represented— as the flippancy discernible in Harman seems to have been substituted by gravity and the adoption of a pitying mood. For instance, Mayhew opens his fourth volume by remarking: ‘I enter upon this part of my subject with a deep sense of the misery, the vice, the ignorance, and the want that encompass us on every side’ (1861, 1). The sombreness of this pronouncement, combined with a sense that Mayhew is interested in the souls of those concerned (corrupted, as they are, by misery, vice, ignorance and want), clearly indicates a disciplinary focus. Although the suggestion of criminality has by no means disappeared—the ‘wyly wanderer’ configures less as a diabolical threat and more as an object of pity, suggesting that Mayhew’s writing marks a transitional phase between a conception of vagabondage that harks back to rogue literature and a new disciplinary configuration in which the homeless are denigrated in ostensibly sympathetic terms on the basis of their non-contribution.

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Turning to the slightly later example of James Greenwood—widely considered to be a pioneer of the social exploration tradition—we find evidence of a similar convergence. In his 1869 text The Seven Curses of London Greenwood also suggests a link between criminality and the vagrant community—writing of ‘clumsy whining cadgers’ who paint ‘horrid sores on their arms and legs’ and attempt to imitate ‘the bloodless pallor of consumption’ (1869, 178). And yet at the same time, The Seven Curses of London places a clear emphasis on the vagrant’s perceived failure to contribute as, like Mayhew, Greenwood continually draws distinctions between the ‘deserving poor’ and the ‘inveterate vagrant’—prioritising a sense in which the homeless are a drain on national resources as he writes of ‘the confirmed and habitual recipient of the workhouse dole’ (1869, 231,  332). Continuing to discuss homelessness in mercenary terms, Greenwood even goes so far as to propose ‘emigration’ as the ‘best remedy’ for dealing with the problem of pauperism on the grounds that it is the ‘cheapest’ and ‘most lasting’ solution (1869, 332)—rendering the disciplinary agenda fully explicit. In terms of the tonal register of The Seven Curses of London—while Greenwood is perhaps less drawn to pity than Mayhew, several comments do at least suggest a change in attitude. He is, for instance, keen to disabuse the reader of the myth that the criminal vagrant has ‘money to live on the fat of the land and get drunk and enjoy happy spells of ease and plenty’—suggesting instead that ‘the criminal who in police nomenclature is a “low thief” […] is without exception of all men the most comfortless and miserable’ (1869, 81, 85), emphasising the hopelessness of the homeless in contrast with attempts to draw attention to their ability to negotiate the existing system. This brief survey of the writings of Mayhew and Greenwood suggests that it is a mistake to think that the emergence of a disciplinary outlook simply displaced an earlier discourse fixated on the threat of masterlessness. While both authors seem to have in common a growing perception of the relative powerlessness of the poor, distinguishing their narratives from sixteenth-century rogue literature, aspects of this earlier discourse still clearly linger, although they do so alongside a stronger focus on the question of productivity and a clearer mood of either pity or disregard.

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2.3.2

 wentieth-Century Social Exploration: Mary Higgs T (1854–1937), Ada Chesterton (1869–1962) and George Orwell (1903–1950) Fast-forwarding to the twentieth century, we find that within the social exploration tradition as represented by Mary Higgs, Ada Chesterton and George Orwell—three prominent authors in the genre—the shift towards a disciplinary outlook feels significantly more complete, as a clear emphasis on the hardships suffered by the figure of the tramp is immediately discernible, while the insinuation of criminality appears to have faded into the distant past. In her 1904 text The Tramp Ward, for instance, Higgs writes: ‘I had not realised the pressure our system exerts in the direction of a wandering life’ (1904, 12). Similarly in her 1926 text In Darkest London, Chesterton emphasises the ‘the misery and starvation of the outcast’ (1926, 37). Lastly, in his 1933 text Down and Out in Paris and London Orwell insists: ‘if one remembers that a tramp is only an Englishman out of work, forced by law to live as a vagabond, then the tramp-monster vanishes’ (1997, 205). In each of these authors there is thus a clear tonal shift in the form of an emerging sense of pity for the homeless. This is accompanied by recurring passages in which the authors reflect upon the damaging impact that poverty has upon the soul. For example, in her 1906 essay ‘A Night in a Salvation Army Shelter’, Higgs claims that ‘a woman who has sunk into poverty […] and who still retains all her desire for it […] must be a woman out of whom womanhood is perishing’ (1906a, 177). In In Darkest London Chesterton similarly declares, having put herself in the position of a tramp: ‘I had acquired a new psychology. I not only looked, but felt destitute’ (1926, 164). Lastly, in Down and Out Orwell announces that ‘[t]he evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually’ (1997, 206–7). Throughout the works of these three authors, these tendencies are also clearly accompanied by a preoccupation with the question of contribution—with the procurement of employment typically being presented as an obvious solution to the problems identified. In Glimpses Into the Abyss, for instance, Higgs proposes a series of reforms concerning ‘the vagrancy question’: among them measures against ‘promiscuous almsgiving’, efforts to sort those ‘willing to work […] from those unwilling’ and finally ‘labour colonies for defective industrials’ (1906b, 72–6). Chesterton’s In Darkest London is less severe in its advocacy of disciplinary measures—but still, its purported aim is to challenge the suggestion that ‘for a woman who is willing to work, employment can always be found’ (1926, 11), implicitly condoning the remedial benefits of employment by lamenting the

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difficulty of obtaining it. Lastly, Orwell echoes Higgs by concluding Down and Out with the suggestion that ‘every able-bodied tramp’ should be ‘made to do a sound day’s work’ through a proposed workhouse farm system (1997, 208). In Higgs, Chesterton and Orwell, we thus see a much more decisive shift towards a perception of homelessness oriented not around masterlessness, but a failure to contribute to the welfare and wealth of society as a whole—with a fixation upon the impact that poverty has upon the soul and a distinct preoccupation with productivity betraying a definite disciplinary focus, while concerns about the criminal threat posed by the vagrant no longer seem a priority. At the same time, there is clearly a degree of difference in outlook between Higgs’s emphasis on ‘promiscuous almsgiving’ and Orwell’s suggestion that ‘a tramp is only an Englishman out of work’—bringing us back to Seaber’s suggestion that in spite of general trends there still remain ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ social investigation and exploration texts: or in other words, varying degrees of sympathy. Nonetheless in all of these authors, whether the tone is sympathetic or not, there is a distinct emphasis on the negative impact of homelessness, combined with the suggestion that this can be resolved by putting the homeless to work. In this sense, in these examples we see strong evidence of an evolution away from tendencies represented by rogue literature— with a transition from a focus on masterlessness towards a focus on productiveness manifesting itself through a pitying tone and a preoccupation with the benefits of employment.

3   The Tramp as a Symbol of Resistance Against Disciplinary and Productivist Ideology In addition to identifying the phenomenon of disciplinary society, Foucault is also well known for having explored multiple different ways in which this same societal development can be seen to have produced resistant subcultures—hinted at in his 1967 essay ‘Of Different Spaces: Heterotopias’, in which he describes the existence of ‘counter-sites’ (such as brothels, prisons and carnivals) in which mainstream values are ‘represented, contested, and inverted’ (2000b, 174). Perhaps the most famous example of this can be found in his 1976 The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge—in which he argues that nineteenth-century discourse within the domain of ‘psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature’ designed to exert disciplinary control over unproductive forms of sexuality not only enabled the ‘advance

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of social controls’ but ‘also made possible the formation of a “reverse” discourse’ (1998, 101). In short, Foucault argues in this text that attempts to categorise and control undesirable forms of sexuality unintentionally precipitated the formation of resistant identities—such as gay subcultures, within which ‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf’ (1998, 101). Of greater relevance to this research project, in his earlier text Discipline and Punish Foucault also explored the idea that such a reverse tendency can be found within the domain of discourse on poverty, in particular in relation to the question of homelessness. For instance, in this text he writes of Fourierist ‘anti-penal polemic’ in which ‘illegalities’ are ‘reformulated as the affirmation of a living force’, including ‘the lack of a home as vagabondage, the lack of a master as independence, the lack of work as freedom, the lack of a time-table as the fullness of days and nights’ (1991, 289–90)—clearly indicating the possibility of disciplinary discourse concerning homeless individuals being inverted so that criticisms and objections are reclaimed as positive values. This section builds on this suggestion by tentatively developing the hypothesis that a disciplinary recasting of vagrancy may have produced a wider resistant counter-trend than Foucault ever acknowledged, as evidenced by historical accounts of homeless subculture that may be seen to have paralleled the emergence of tramp literature in the nineteenth century—in the process hoping to solidify our understanding of the emergence of what Kusmer describes as a ‘new, more aggressive type’ of homelessness in this period by emphasising how the supposed confrontational status of the tramp may have been a byproduct of (or a retaliation against) the network of disciplinary norms described by Foucault combined with the disciplinary attempt to depict the homeless as emblems of inutility, and not just the outcome of newly emergent patterns of employment or legislation practices. 3.1  Work, Gender and Sexuality, and Community To begin with, this section identifies three different areas within which nineteenth- and twentieth-century homeless subcultures can be seen to have stood in opposition against the normalising strategies of disciplinary society—namely, the domains of work, gender and sexuality, and community. In particular, it is proposed that in these three areas we can see in finer detail how the perceived threat of the homeless as a symbol of non-contribution may have been inverted, with homeless subculture being viewed within each context as an embodiment of an alternative way of life defined in opposition against established norms designed to regulate human

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behaviour without recourse to the more brutal tactics of early modern society. In the process we will come to see that the threat of a perceived non-contribution can be seen to have related to more than an ostensible refusal to be productive in the literal sense of not working, but also to an apparent refusal to cooperate with broader expectations deemed to be relevant within disciplinary society to a preoccupation with the welfare and wealth of the general population, for instance in relation to gender and sexuality, and community. These claims will be illustrated by drawing on existing accounts in studies of American homeless communities during the period under consideration written by literary and social historians. I am focussing on studies of American homelessness because far more has been written about homeless subcultures in America than has been written in a British context, meaning that this analysis must serve as a substitute. It should also be noted that the focus here is not so much specifically on tramp subculture as on homeless subculture in general (including hobo subculture) during the period in question—in part because existing accounts do not draw such clear distinctions, and in part because in the American examples that we are forced to draw upon the hobo is more prominent. At the same time—as has been suggested previously—there is a lot of overlapping between these subdivisions, and so many if not most of the more general conclusions made by historians about homeless subcultures are directly applicable to a more narrow consideration of the tramp. I am also deliberately avoiding presenting my own analysis of tramp literature texts in this section by focussing instead on historical accounts of American homeless subculture—partly to reserve this for later chapters, but more importantly to try to keep the current analysis of the subversive potential of homeless subcultures as disinterested as possible. For now I am attempting only to demonstrate how homelessness during this period could be seen to present a challenge to disciplinary values—leaving room for me to ask later in this introductory essay whether indeed we should accept this possibility, given the potentially problematic nature of making generalisations about homeless communities in this way (as well as the potentially problematic nature of conflating homeless communities with textual representations of homelessness), while also leaving room to ask whether such a model of resistance is entirely satisfactory. In other words, as we have not yet established whether it is reasonable to present textual representations of homelessness in the manner proposed—and indeed if it is, whether there are any caveats in terms of how they should be

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analysed—it is at this stage necessary to remain somewhat more impartial by sticking to examples of how homeless communities have been critically interpreted elsewhere, temporarily leaving aside questions concerning the validity and efficacy of such claims. 3.1.1 Work As has already been suggested—an increased demand upon homeless subjects to contribute to the welfare and wealth of society by working may be seen to have been a primary factor in the emergence of the figure of the tramp in the nineteenth century. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that the area in which homeless subculture has most commonly been identified by historians as representing a challenge to existing societal values between 1850 and 1950 is, indeed, work. In an American context, the historian of American homelessness Frank Higbie has noted the especially intense pressure upon the homeless to work owing to the large number of seasonal industries, such as ‘logging’, ‘crop harvesting’ and ‘construction’—resulting in the paradox that the American homeless were both ‘marginalised socially and central to the extraordinary economy’ (2003, 2–4). More importantly in this context, emerging out of this sense of the American homeless’s indispensability grew what Depastino has described as ‘a swaggering counter-culture known as “hobohemia”’ tied to the arrival of a series of unions and pressure groups representing the interests of migratory workers (2003, xviii). These include Coxey’s Army, the Industrial Workers of the World (or IWW) and the International Brotherhood Welfare Association—as well as other hobo institutions such as the Hobo College run by James Eades How (Kusmer 2002, 161), newspapers like The Hobo Jungles Scout and The Hobo, a ‘fraternal order’ set up by the Millionaire Hobo Jeff Davis called the Hoboes of America Incorporated (Bruns 1980, 112, 115) and lastly the emergence of ‘a whole subgenre of approximately forty hobo autobiographies written between 1890 and 1940’ (Adrian 1989, vvii). Perhaps unsurprisingly, attitudes within American homeless subculture towards the subject of work are perceived to have been varied. On the one hand, pro-labour attitudes have been routinely identified—with historian Roger Bruns offering the following example from a publication called the Iron Molders’ Journal: ‘“Our tramp,” […] is not the “bummer, the periodical inmate of our work-houses and county jails,” but rather “the hardfisted mechanic or labourer to whom work would be a blessing”’ (1980, 33). On the other, Depastino writes of a contingent within the homeless

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community of ‘“idlers” seeking “a temporary means of subsistence and entertainment”’ (2003, 61). Kusmer similarly suggests that many ‘young workers voluntarily left their jobs and took to the road, either because they sought jobs elsewhere or because they had decided to temporarily “opt out” of the industrial system’ (2002, 8). For instance, Depastino describes a group led by the activist J.H.  Walsh who ‘instead of burnishing their reputations as “honest workingmen” […] celebrated their identities as “sons of rest” who preferred the “simple life in the jungles” to the workaday world of the homeward’ (2003, 98). Kusmer has indicates that this anti-work strain is reflected in a number of American hobo / tramp memoirs—identifying ‘more than two dozen’ American memoirs written during this period that may be seen to represent ‘an incipient rebellion against the new work disciplines and institutional strictures of industrial society’ (2002, 9). One such example can be found in the writing of Jack London— who was a member of Kelley’s Army (a subgroup of Coxey’s Army), and who Depastino identifies as having belonged to a contingent of ‘job-shirking adventurers’ within this community (2003, 61). London’s 1907 memoir The Road can certainly be seen to fit Kusmer’s description of a genre of life writing that contains ‘an incipient rebellion’ against work—as its author proudly boasts of times in his life in which he ‘didn’t want to work’ (1907, 5). Depastino also suggests that this kind of attitude is reflected in the song Hallelujah, I’m a Bum! taken from the highly popular 1916 Little Red Song Book—a publication associated with the Industrial Workers of the World: Oh, why don’t I work. Like the other men do? How the hell can I work. When the skies are so blue? (Depastino 2003, 62)

Here we see quite clearly evidence of literary and social historians presenting homeless individuals—be they tramp, hobo or bum—as having embraced the possibility of a refusal to work. Although these claims are situated within an American context—where reliance on migratory labour may be seen to have created a distinct dynamic—the suggestion of such a virulent anti-work homeless subculture nonetheless remains indicative of the likelihood of a wider trend.

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3.1.2 Gender and Sexuality Suggesting that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century homeless individual’s perceived refusal to contribute to the welfare and wealth of the population extended beyond an apparent resistance against work, and in turn that the definition of non-contribution within disciplinary society carries a broader meaning than a narrow fixation on unproductiveness would allow (in line with Foucault’s analysis of the disciplinary ‘advance of social controls’ within the domain of sexuality in The History of Sexuality), the next area within which historians considering the subject of nineteenth- and twentieth-century homelessness have found viewpoints and practices that confront existing norms is that of gender and sexuality. The sense that conventions pertaining to sexuality may have been challenged within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century homeless communities is plainly indicated by Kusmer when he writes: ‘Life on the road […] allowed a variety of sexual practices to flourish that normally would have been condemned by a larger society’ (2002, 143). On the subject of gender, the picture painted by historians of American homelessness is a little more complex. Depastino has, for instance, argued that ‘the absence of domesticity’ within the jungles (a term used to describe temporary encampments frequented by homeless populations) ensured that ‘the IWW’s imagined community of masculinity flourished’ (2003, 114). Depastino even goes so far as to suggest that ‘Wobblies [IWW members] exploited concerns about white masculine virility in order to craft an authoritative myth about the hobo that linked themes of racial regeneration and authentic manhood with those of class warfare’ (2003, 117). This suggests that while ‘a variety of sexual practices’ were apparently able to develop within American homeless communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, norms pertaining to gender may have been less fluid, as a culture of masculinity prevailed. This point is reinforced by Kusmer’s assertion that by the end of the nineteenth century in America ‘the world of the homeless had become an overwhelmingly masculine realm’ (2002, 10). And yet against this reading, Kusmer has also pointed out that ‘[p]art of the extraordinarily hostile reaction to tramps and beggars in the late nineteenth century was outrage over the fact that these outsiders had seemingly rejected male responsibility by embracing a vagabond lifestyle free from the bonds of marriage and family’ (2002, 11). The American homeless in their symbolic rejection of domestic life have thus been presented by historians as both hyper-masculine and its inverse.

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Nonetheless, the suggestion stands that through the wider tolerance of same-sex desire and through the rejection of the stereotype of the male provider, homeless subculture (at least in America) has been seen, albeit inconsistently, to have provided an alternative to prevailing attitudes towards sexuality and gender, in this sense signalling that homelessness may have to some extent embodied a less literal form of non-contribution in the shape of a refusal to fully comply with existing gender and sexuality norms. 3.1.3 Community Closely related to the suggestion that homeless subcultures may have provided an environment in which norms relating to gender and sexuality could be challenged is the sense, noted by several historians, that they also provided a space in which existing community values could be confronted and reconfigured more generally. Historian Mark Pittenger in his analysis of undercover investigations of homeless culture in America has for instance described a subdivision within this social grouping: ‘romantic “bohoboes,”’ who sought out a life on the road in order to provide ‘a summer’s hiatus from classes and family life’ (2012, 52–53). There is a clear implication here that the homeless way of life presented itself to certain individuals as an escape from modes of social organisation developed around the twin concepts of class and family. Bruns further suggests that it was not just the ‘bohoboes’ who stood in opposition to traditional values relating to these two areas—describing the American homeless community of the early twentieth century collectively as ‘a desperate throng of individuals wandering the country for numberless reasons, alienated from traditional American life-styles, homeless with few or no ties to family or community’ (1980, 16). He continues: ‘It was in the hobo jungles that they found a fleeting sense of social bond’ (Ibid.). Jungles again here feature at the centre of a perceived sense among historians that American tramps and hoboes were able to reconfigure established norms—this time in relation to the communities within which they lived. For instance, Depastino writes: ‘In the literature of hoboing, the jungles often appear utopian, and indeed they sometimes were, in the sense that bohemian communities experiment with forms of living that deviate from despoiled norms’ (2003, 70). This deviation ‘from despoiled norms’ has already in part been suggested by the two points above: a work-free lifestyle and a more open attitude towards gender and sexuality. At the same time, the suggestion of a ‘utopian’ dimension to homeless subculture—severed

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from former ties to ‘family’ and ‘community’—is clearly indicative of a more comprehensive reassessment of what constitutes a community. This is also reflected in the recurring suggestion that homeless subcultures in the period under consideration were more inclusive than mainstream society. Kusmer, for example, writes of ‘the egalitarian nature of the culture of the road’ and of the ‘racial tolerance among tramps’ suggested by the acceptance of African Americans into homeless communities (2002, 140). However—as with the gender issue, indications of progressive values within homeless subculture coexist alongside evidence of the reverse. Depastino’s aforementioned remarks about the theme of ‘racial regeneration’ as an aspect of hobo mythology are indicative of a concurrent lack of racial tolerance within sections of the American homeless community, to put it mildly. Again, we are left with a mixed impression, with signs of tolerance and egalitarianism coexisting alongside impressions of lingering prejudice in existing accounts of community values within American tramp and hobo culture. Nonetheless, there remains an indication of the possibility of these spaces providing an opportunity for bold reconfigurations of community values—thus further reinforcing a sense that homeless subcultures may have counteracted the disciplinary ‘advance of social controls’ in more subtle ways than by simply embodying a resistance of work. 3.1.4 Summary The sense derived from this brief overview of historical accounts of American homeless subcultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is that tramp and hobo communities are widely presented as having challenged behavioural norms by embodying alternative models of social organisation. Within the domains of work, gender and sexuality, and community, we have seen clear evidence in existing studies of homelessness—albeit within an American context, owing to the relative shortage of analysis of homeless subcultures in Britain during this period—of what Foucault would describe as a ‘reverse discourse’, with negative stereotypes being inverted so that not working, not conforming with gender and sexuality norms, and not accepting existing community organisation and values are all seen to provide the basis for a new collective identity defined in opposition against disciplinary pressures to conform and contribute. This is not to suggest that homelessness is depicted as having been an entirely utopian enclave during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America: we have also seen historians providing evidence of an aggressive strain of masculinity and of a eugenicist racial intolerance, indicating a

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continuation of some of the worst attributes of mainstream society. Nonetheless, there exists within these accounts the possibility of disciplinary society’s marginalisation of homeless communities producing a counter-­culture defined in opposition to its normalising demands and its fixation on productivity—primarily oriented around the idea of the homeless individual as someone who often refuses to work, while also connected to the idea of the homeless individual as someone who refuses to conform with norms relating to gender and sexuality, and community. It’s worth clarifying that such descriptions of vagrancy are not unique to historical accounts of the late modern period—given that Beier has for instance argued that vagrants in late sixteenth- and early seventieth-­ century Britain similarly ‘deviated from official norms in their relationships, itinerant life-styles and trades’ (1985, xix). More specifically, Beier has isolated ways in which Elizabethan vagrants can be seen to have presented a threat to ‘the patriarchal household’ by making a ‘radical departure’ from the ‘normal household’ model of ‘a married couple, children and servants’ (1985, 51). He also suggests that vagabonds in this era ‘were promiscuous’—though adding ‘whether they were more so than the rest of the population is ambiguous’ (1985, 65). It might be argued, then, that the perceived opposition to normative values is not a specific attribute of historical accounts of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century homelessness, and might in turn be considered to be more broadly suggestive of the way in which homeless people generally exist outside of restraints related to existing societal frameworks. And yet, again, we might counter this by repeating the suggestion that following industrialisation and the emergence of more sophisticated disciplinary strategies for regulating behaviour in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries efforts to subjugate the homeless may not have been invented but that they may nonetheless have become more advanced, as well as becoming more decidedly oriented around the drive towards increasing levels of productivity—and that this may be seen to explain why descriptions of anti-normative tendencies are more prominent in (though not unique to) historical accounts of late modern homelessness in America. Thus, in summary, we might argue that these historical accounts of homeless subcultures both confirm and help us to develop the Foucauldian hypothesis that homeless subculture in this period, after being recast in terms determined by a heightened societal fixation upon productivity and the imposition of societal norms, may be seen to have developed a more

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consistently oppositional function in various different domains: a conclusion that might enable us to in turn understand more fully the conditions of the emergence of the phenomenon of tramp literature described above, as well as giving us some indication as to how its oppositionality (assuming it can be characterised in this way) may have manifested itself. 3.2  Estrangement Theory and the Tramp Having established that,  according to historical accounts of American homelessness, instances can be found of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­ century homeless subcultures embodying a rejection of prevailing attitudes within productivist and disciplinary society relating to work, gender and sexuality, and community—we may also wish to consider the related and this time theoretical possibility that by refusing to conform in these ways, homeless subcultures  may also have been (in theory, at least) capable of circumnavigating the phenomenon of estrangement identified by Marx and others as a byproduct of participating in capitalist society. In order to demonstrate how this might be so, this section offers an overview of Marx’s theories of estrangement and critical responses to them, before suggesting how they may in theory be seen to relate to the figure of the tramp. The central tenets of Marx’s theory of estrangement can be found in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Here, Marx argues that in capitalist society workers (who he genders as male) are estranged in four ways. First, the worker is alienated from ‘the products of his labour’, in the sense that labourers do not own what they produce (2012, 72). Second, the worker is estranged ‘within the producing activity itself’, in the sense that the activity of working serves a purpose that is ‘external to the worker’ (Ibid.). Third, the worker is estranged from ‘the life of the species’ by being removed from ‘nature’ and ‘himself’, in the sense that the individual ‘need to maintain […] physical existence’ replaces a collective feeling of belonging to both one’s natural environment and one’s community (2012, 75). Fourth and finally, Marx argues that labour results in the ‘estrangement of man from man’, in the sense that workers are left feeling that they are ‘under the dominion, the coercion and the yoke of another man’ (2012, 77–9). In his later text Capital, Marx famously built on these earlier suggestions regarding the estranging effects of labour by indicating how the capitalist system of exchange has resulted in humanity’s perception of value becoming warped—as the values of material and social relations are determined by the different levels of ‘homogenous human labour’ that

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they represent, rather than by a sense of what they might mean to those concerned (1915, 45). In short, the fact of not being able to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour, of having to dedicate one’s life to working for another’s benefit, of having lost a sense of shared identity and belonging, of having lost a sense of kinship, and of value itself having been warped by the process of commodity exchange—all are seen by Marx to indicate precisely how industrialisation has destabilised the working community’s relationship with material and social reality. Given previously considered claims regarding the refusal to work within sections of the homeless community (whether a truthful account of social reality or not)—we might now contemplate the theoretical possibility of a perceived or actual avoidance of various alienation effects associated by Marx with the life of a worker within capitalist society. To begin with, for example, we might hypothesise that the homeless during this period may have been (or have been seen to have been) less estranged than workers on the grounds that by ostensibly refusing to work they avoided being robbed of the fruits of their labour, or being forced to dedicate time to labouring for another’s benefit. Beyond this, we might venture to propose the theoretical possibility that because the late nineteenth-century homeless individual’s relationship to their environment and their community may not have been (or may have been perceived not to have been) disrupted in the way that it was for the worker within capitalist society, the figure of the tramp may have in turn been (or been seen to have been) more deeply connected to ‘the life of the species’. Of course, the homeless in this era still often worked and participated in capitalist society—so the theoretical likelihood of them avoiding estrangement in these ways (whether in reality or not) would have to be viewed as proportionately limited: but we nonetheless have a basis here for imagining the possibility that the tramp lifestyle may have either literally or symbolically denoted liberation in these different ways. However, before asserting these claims too boldly we should note that in recent years Marx’s various theories of alienation have been questioned in a way that might cause us to exercise caution. In particular—the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan have caused cultural theorists such as Slavoj Žižek to ask whether the broader phenomenon of estrangement can be explained away as easily as Marx imagined, given Lacan’s suggestion that there is ‘a fundamental alienation of the human subject’ for the reason that its ‘truth lies outside itself, in the decentered symbolic order which forever eludes human control’ (with the ‘symbolic order’ here referred to denoting the network of inter-subjective socio-linguistic structures through which Lacan suggests that the human subject’s perception

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of itself and the world is partly mediated) (Žižek 2017, 447). However, rather than suggesting that this means it is no longer possible to talk about estrangement, Žižek proposes that an acknowledgement of the fundamentally alienated nature of the human subject instead requires us to narrow our attention upon ways in which the world around us ‘is in itself inconsistent, lacking’ without in the process deluding ourselves into thinking (as Marx perhaps sometimes did) that by addressing these inconsistencies we might, in turn, break free from the alienation that ‘is constitutive of being-human’ (2017, 456; my emphasis). In other words, it is proposed that we can still try to locate societally produced estrangement effects so long as we refrain from succumbing to ‘utopian-ideological’ notions of the possibility of totally disalienating ourselves (2017, 459). Following on from this we might revise the suggestion above by proposing that the figure of the tramp may in theory be seen to emblematise an avoidance of the alienating effects of capitalism identified by Marx (e.g. by apparently refusing to work, and thus avoiding being robbed of the fruits of its labour)—while cautioning against claiming, again in line with Marx, that this can ever amount to a utopian circumnavigation of the broader effects of alienation that are constitutive of being human (e.g. by suggesting that the avoidance of capitalist work might lead to a recovery of the ‘life of the species’). In other words, to the extent that the tramp lifestyle may be seen to expose inconsistencies and failures that belong to the symbolic order (i.e. shortcomings that are societally produced), for example by revealing the downsides of capitalist work, we can hypothesise that it might be possible to celebrate it (or representations of it) as a potential example of the partial overcoming of alienation—but we should avoid theorising the possibility that tramps, because they are ostensibly partly liberated from the effects of capitalism, can be seen to represent a utopic existence in which the ‘fundamental alienation of the human subject’ is no longer a reality. Subsequently we might also ask: these concessions aside, are we then limiting ourselves in other unnecessary ways when developing these theoretical possibilities by only taking into consideration the specific forms of societally produced estrangement identified by Marx? In particular, might we also identify (and subsequently link to tramp subculture) societally produced estrangement effects identified in later works seeking to apply Marx’s theories of estrangement beyond the domain of economics? One example of such a text is Henri Lefebvre’s 1947 Critique of Everyday Life, Volume One, which (as Stuart Elden in his study of Lefebvre notes) presents ‘a detailed reading of how capitalism […] increased its scope in the

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twentieth century to dominate the cultural and social world as well as the economic’ (2004, 9). The cultural effect of estrangement that Lefebvre identifies and traces back to the Enlightenment concerns a Kantian fixation upon reason, which he argues has obscured the value of what he calls ‘everyday life’ (2008, 144). As Rob Shields puts it in another study of Lefebvre, in Critique of Everyday Life Lefebvre argues that this ‘displacement of direct experience’ has found a correlative in ‘the consumption of commodities, of entertainment, and of experiences’, which all offer ‘compensation’ for the wider experience of estrangement (1999, 63). Of course, we might argue that in promising a return to ‘everyday life’ and to ‘direct experience’, Lefebvre is guilty of imagining that aspects of estrangement that are constitutive of the human experience can be surmounted. This analysis is reinforced by a consideration of Lefebvre’s remarks in a Foreword to Critique of Everyday Life written in 1956/7, in which he confesses that Marx’s concept of a ‘total man […] entirely won back from alienation’ is a ‘figure on a distant horizon’, before proposing instead the idea of a ‘transitional man’ moving ‘towards the total man’ by attempting to ‘disalienate’ himself (2008, 64–6). While Lefebvre here acknowledges the unlikelihood of total disalienation, it is clear that this notion still defines the objective. Nonetheless, we might rescue Lefebvre by proposing that while his suggestion that we can move ‘towards the total man’ perhaps borders on fantasy, his critique of a ‘displacement of direct experience’ produced by ‘the consumption of commodities, of entertainment, and of experiences’ remains valid as an account of an estrangement effect that has been societally produced. This in turn might lead us to hypothesise that the figure of the tramp, by perhaps being less exposed to commodity culture and the entertainment industry (as a consequence of its refusal of established norms within the domains of community and cultural participation), may in theory be seen to have functioned as an agent facilitating disalienation in these domains—while remaining sceptical about the idea that the tramp may in turn be seen to have been on a path ‘towards the total man’. Another Marxist estrangement theory that might be considered in a similar light can be found in Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 text One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. In this text Marcuse concentrates on a different aspect of the alienating effects of capitalism: namely, the spirit of optimism that he argues defines ­ ­twentieth-century capitalist society, according to which individuals are encouraged to believe that ‘[i]t is a good life’ (2013, 14). Marcuse argues

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that this process works by overwhelming people with ‘ideas, aspirations, and objectives’ so that ‘discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe’ (Ibid.). In pursuing abstract, ameliorating objectives he suggests that subjects operating within twentieth-­century capitalist society thus lose a sense of ‘the larger context of experience’, or ‘this real empirical world’—described as ‘that of gas chambers and concentration camps, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of American Cadillacs and German Mercedes’ (2013, 185). The key addition that Marcuse’s thinking brings to estrangement theory is the idea that under capitalism subjects are not only estranged in economic terms—but that they are  also estranged from pressing political realities. At the same time, a potential hazard can be found in the suggestion that without capitalism our eyes would be opened to ‘the larger context of experience’—which may be seen to indicate a ‘utopian-ideological’ conviction in the possibility of total disalienation. If we want to rescue Marcuse in the same manner in which we have just attempted to rescue Lefebvre, we might suggest that the criticism that capitalism produces an estrangement effect by partially obscuring the ‘real empirical world’ through the proliferation of ‘ideas, aspirations, and objectives’ can still be seen to remain valid if we refuse to succumb to the utopian dimension of this critique by maintaining that ‘the larger context of experience’ may in turn be fully elucidated. In terms of how this can be seen to apply to the figure of the tramp, this suggests the possibility that by potentially and obviously only partially avoiding a culture of delusional optimism perceived by Marcuse to be characteristic of life under capitalism (again, through an ostensible refusal to conform with established norms within the domain of community participation), tramp subculture may in theory be seen to signal the possibility of a heightened political awareness—though not a total awakening. In summary, having in the previous section noted how historical accounts of homeless subcultures suggest that the homeless may have been able to resist norms pertaining to work, gender and sexuality, and community—this section has explored the theoretical possibility that by partly circumnavigating various aspects of capitalist society in this way, the figure of the tramp may be seen to have also avoided the societally produced effects of estrangement identified by Marx, Lefebvre and Marcuse. To begin with, by apparently refusing to work—the tramp may theoretically be seen to have avoided some of the alienation effects pinpointed by Marx as attributes of working life under capitalism. Next, by in supposedly existing outside of consumerist society—the tramp may in theory be seen to have been less directly exposed to the ‘displacement of direct

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experience’ identified by Lefebvre. Finally, by ostensibly circumnavigating the proliferation of ‘ideas, aspirations, and objectives’ within advanced industrial society—the tramp may potentially be seen to have been less prone to the political estrangement identified by Marcuse. Thus, while Žižek’s analysis indicates the importance of avoiding claiming that the figure of the tramp can be seen to have been ‘entirely won back from alienation’—for instance by suggesting that by existing outside of or on the fringes of society the tramp represents a return to ‘the life of the species’, a full recovery of ‘everyday life’ or a complete re-immersion in ‘this real empirical world’—we can still argue that given what we have so far learnt about its possible relation to capitalist and disciplinary society, the figure of the tramp may be seen (at least, in theory) to have both avoided and exposed the historically contingent components of estrangement that are attributable to nineteenth- and twentieth-century society. This, in turn, may be seen to give us an indication of qualities we might look for in seeking to define the oppositional nature of the tramp literature phenomenon that we will later be studying.

4   Limitations of the Tramp Model: Representation and Otherness So far we have found the claim to be supported in existing studies that late nineteenth and early twentieth-century homeless subcultures may be seen (in line with my description of a reverse discourse tendency) to have embodied a rejection of disciplinary values relating primarily to work, but also to gender, sexuality and community—while it has also been theorised that through an apparent eschewal of the productivist paradigm and its associated disciplinary fields the figure of the tramp might simultaneously be seen to have either embodied or symbolised a partial immunity to associated societally produced estrangement effects, from the economic to the everyday to the political. As of yet, however, the implications of heralding homeless communities as a subculture in this way—or of suggesting that a group of texts embodying this subversive potential can be seen to be representative of these communities—have not come under much scrutiny. This section, therefore, will explore in greater detail what is happening when we emphasise the subversive potential of homelessness in this way. To begin with, it will inquire into the potential ramifications of attributing values in such a manner to an existing social group. It will then move on

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to a consideration of the wider implications of more generally orienting our discussion around an identity perceived as ‘other’. Subsequently, a critical framework will be proposed that should enable us to avoid the identified pitfalls. 4.1  Making the Subaltern Speak In her 1988 essay Can the Subaltern Speak? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously challenged Foucault for the way in which he assigns a figurative role to marginalised communities. In the essay, Spivak focusses on a text entitled Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze—pointing out the contradiction that while Western intellectuals are ‘named and differentiated’ in Foucault and Deleuze’s conversation, Maoists and workers feature as ‘monolithic and anonymous’ revolutionary subjects (1988, 272). As well as contradicting Foucault and Deleuze’s supposed eschewal of subject-based analysis, Spivak argues that this generalised depiction of non-Western and working-class subjectivity demonstrates a Eurocentric prejudice within the margins of their thought. She writes: the innocent appropriation of the proper name “Maoism” for the eccentric phenomenon of French intellectual “Maoism” […] symptomatically renders “Asia” transparent. (1988, 272)

Spivak argues that slippages like these expose the dismissiveness of these two theorists towards non-Western thought, asking: ‘Why should such occlusions be sanctioned in precisely those intellectuals who are our best prophets of heterogeneity and the Other?’ (1988, 272). Spivak argues that at the heart of this contradiction are the ‘[t]wo senses of representation’ that Foucault and Deleuze move between: ‘representation as “speaking for”, as in politics, and representation as “re-presentation”, as in art or philosophy’ (1988, 275). She suggests that Foucault and Deleuze’s error is to allow these two forms of representation to be ‘run together’—and offers an obvious solution by proposing that ‘radical practice should attend to this double session of representations’ instead of ignoring it (1988, 275–9). In short, Spivak challenges Foucault and Deleuze to be consistent in their identification of ‘heterogeneity and the Other’ by paying due attention to the viewpoints of those who are implicated by their theories. In her 1999 text A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the

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Vanishing Present, she develops this theory through the concept of ethical singularity, defined as ‘neither “mass contact” nor engagement with “the common sense of the people”’—but rather as ‘an encounter […] when responses flow from both sides’ (1999, 384). 4.2  Objections to the Category of Alterity Spivak’s analysis clearly presents possible difficulties as far as this study is concerned—suggesting that by attempting to cast tramp subculture in a certain light (by for instance drawing on historical accounts of the subversion of established norms within homeless communities, developing theories relating to the tramp community’s possible circumnavigation of various estrangement effects, or insinuating that tramp literature texts might be seen to embody such values), we run the risk of claiming to represent homeless communities in general without allowing the discourse to ‘flow from both sides’. This section, however, addresses criticisms of Spivak’s approach that may be seen to create a whole new set of obstacles, in turn potentially rendering these initial concerns obsolete. At the heart of Alain Badiou’s 1998 Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil lies an objection to the idea of an ‘ethics in general’—as Badiou advocates instead ‘an ethics of singular truths’ each responsive to a ‘particular situation’ (2001, lvi). In the course of his analysis he goes on to explain that present-day society—while it is invested in developing ethical models, for instance in the domain of bioethics—routinely fails to respond to crisis situations that arise by using ‘all the means’ at its disposal, in the manner of a doctor acting ‘according to the rule of maximum possibility’ (2001, 15). Badiou thus argues that systematised ethics prevents present-­ day society from recognising ‘the singularity of situations’ and from responding to each given crisis by treating it ‘right to the limit of the possible’ (2001, 14–5). In present-day society, Badiou suggests that this generalised system of ethics takes the form of an ‘ethics of differences’, which defines itself as being, for example, against the exclusion of immigrants, or as being against sexism (2001, 20). Behind such generalised expressions of concern for disenfranchised groups, Badiou detects an ideological agenda that is at odds with his own expressed interest in responding to each given situation ‘right to the limit of the possible’. For instance, he writes of the advantages gained by those who promote so-called humanitarian projects grounded in an ‘ethics of differences’:

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Who can fail to see that in our humanitarian expeditions, interventions, embarcations of charitable légionnaires, the Subject presumed to be universal is split? On the side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on television screens. On the side of the benefactors, conscience and the imperative to intervene. And why does this splitting always assign the same roles to the same sides? Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man? (2001, 12–13)

In other words, Badiou suggests that the act of presenting the ‘other’ as a victim involves a certain privileged section of society putting itself forward as a potential saviour. The contention here is that beneath the victimisation of the poor and the outcast that defines the ‘ethics of differences’ that is so prominent within present-day society can be found civilising impulses reminiscent of missionary work and imperialism. Badiou goes on to argue that the assimilative drive behind this apparent concern for the ‘victimMan’ is quickly exposed when we consider how inconsistent such expressions of concern often turn out to be: Our suspicions are first aroused when we see that the self-declared apostles of ethics and of the “right to difference” are clearly horrified by any vigorously sustained difference. For them, African customs are barbaric, Muslims are dreadful, the Chinese are totalitarian, and so on. As a matter of fact, this celebrated “other” is acceptable only if he is a good other—which is to say what, exactly, if not the same as us? (2001, 24)

In short, Badiou argues that behaviour based around the ‘right to difference’ or an ‘ethics of differences’ in which the ‘other’ typically configures as a victim paradoxically often masks a contempt for any meaningful difference, as sympathy for this ‘other’ is premised on the desire to assimilate them into ‘our’ way of being. Building on these criticisms of the Western bias behind attempts to construct and defend the rights of the ‘other’, Badiou proceeds to challenge the whole idea that ‘otherness’ should be an ethical or a philosophical category in the first place. He does this in passages in which he proposes that the real challenge should not be that of respecting difference, but ‘of recognizing the Same’ (2001, 25). In other words, rather than engaging in identity politics he suggests that we should be trying to re-­establish Kant’s famous principle: ‘Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’—although with

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this invocation of universalism qualified by a Lacanian insistence that the human subject has ‘no substance, no “nature”, being a function both of the contingent laws of language and of the always singular history of objects of desire’ (2001, 2, 6). As Peter Hallward argues in his introduction to Ethics—in the process of challenging the assimilationist undercurrent beneath the identified ‘ethics of differences’, together with its failure to develop ideas that can function on a ‘universal’ plane, Badiou’s essay can be seen to challenge the entire basis upon which a Spivakian critique rests. He writes: ‘Badiou’s book does nothing less than evacuate the foundation upon which every deconstructive, “multicultural” or “postcolonial” ethics is built: the (ethical) category of alterity’ (2001, xxxv). If we indeed take ‘multicultural’ and ‘postcolonial’ ethics to be among the targets of Badiou’s critique of an ‘ethics of differences’, the implication is that such ethical models (with which Spivak’s writing may be seen to be aligned) not only support an assimilationist agenda by condescendingly asserting the value of difference—for instance by proposing the sanctioning of subaltern discourse through the advocacy of some kind of supposedly mutual ‘encounter’— but that, more importantly perhaps, they also act as an impediment when it comes to reinstating the more radical objective of attempting universal transformation, or acting ‘according to the rule of maximum possibility’. We might add that this second point is especially devastating for the reason that most of the crisis situations that the marginalised ‘other’ find themselves in (arising from structural inequalities, pandemics, climate change etc.) very likely aren’t resolvable without global system change of the kind implied by Badiou’s ‘rule of maximum possibility’: ‘multicultural’ and ‘postcolonial’ ethical models can thus be characterised as situating assimilationist ‘encounters’ in place of the possibility of intervention on the scale that is necessary to transform the situations that present the greatest risks to those concerned. The ramifications of all this in terms of what I have proposed would appear to be fairly serious. In the previous section, Spivak’s remarks were seen to indicate the dubiousness of theorising the symbolic function of an actually existing group without their involvement. In reflecting on Badiou’s subsequent criticisms of postcolonial theory—we have been confronted with the still more troubling possibility that this attempt to foreground the marginalised ‘other’ itself betrays an assimilationist impulse, as well as being indicative of an approach that prohibits radical, global responses to existing crises. The implications for this study should be clear.

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A Spivakian analysis suggests that to make general claims concerning either the figure of the tramp or a group of texts claiming to represent it might be problematic because it potentially consists of ‘speaking for’ the homeless community. A Badiouian analysis suggests two things: first, that expressing an interest in foregrounding the marginalised figure of the tramp indicates a desire to demarcate, rescue and potentially thereafter assimilate those in question; and second, that prioritising the experience of the oppressed ‘other’ is indicative of the limited scope of an ethics of alterity that fails to envisage intervention on the scale that is needed to limit the threats that the marginalised are faced with. Badiou’s criticisms of a prevalent preoccupation with the ‘other’ and his insistence on the need to attend to the ‘whole’ might be seen to be especially significant given the precise nature of the threats that this study may be seen to be concerned with. If we are interested in the figure of the tramp as a byproduct of capitalist and disciplinary society that can also be seen to represent a challenge to it—then we surely have to defend ourselves against the charge that in choosing to centre our interest upon a marginalised social group we are inadvertently inhibiting the kind of totalising discourses that are necessary if precisely this intrinsically cruel and troublingly intrusive social order is to be effectively challenged. 4.3  Proposed Critical Approach There are thus two clear issues: first, it is questionable whether we should claim that works of literature that reflect the tendencies described in this chapter can be seen to be representative of the homeless experience, or indeed whether we can claim that the general hypothesis developed in this chapter concerning the figure of the tramp is in any way representative; second, we are also perhaps obliged to acknowledge the limitations of celebrating the experience of marginality—as this suggests an attempt to demarcate and assimilate, and as it promotes a model of resistance that is inherently limited. However, rather than responding by abandoning our interest in literature that deals with the subject of the tramp—or in other words writing off an entire body of work as an expression of an identity experience that we should avoid othering, and that is of limited efficacy anyway as a reflection of the experiences of a single identity group—we might at this stage ask whether it is possible to circumnavigate these hazards. In order to do this I propose that three steps are necessary:

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First, that we from now on insist that though the developments and characteristics described in this introductory essay may be seen to a certain extent to indicate evolving perceptions of (and possibly experiences of) homelessness in the late modern period, they should not be considered wholly representative of homeless culture or the homeless experience at this time. Second, that accordingly—rather than making general claims about the figure of the tramp as a symbol of resistance, we from now on narrow our focus upon specific texts that may be seen to reflect the pattern of oppositionality described in this introductory essay, while crucially avoiding suggesting that they are representative of the homeless or  tramp experience. This would immediately require us to make a distinction between works on the subject of tramping (as opposed to texts on homelessness removed from this new conception of vagrancy) that reflect the outlined spirit of oppositionality and other texts that also deal with the subject of tramping but that do not reflect these qualities: and to hereafter refer to the former as reverse discourse tramp literature and the latter as part of a wider body of tramp literature—so as to emphasise that the first of these is a subcategory of a wider literature on homelessness, and in turn to avoid implying that it is representative of literature on the subject of the tramp produced during this period, or indeed of the homeless experience more generally. Third, it is proposed that we answer Badiou’s reservations about the limitations of celebrating a discourse that narrowly concentrates on the experiences of a marginal social group by attempting to isolate examples within the reverse discourse tramp literature genre in which given texts transcend these limits by pushing beyond a celebration of tramp subculture and actively encouraging contemplation of the wider ramifications of the oppositionality that is represented.

In thus narrowing our focus on the subcategory of reverse discourse tramp literature, and in then proposing that we seek within this body of work examples that push beyond a narrow preoccupation with subcultural values—we in theory achieve two objectives: first, we save ourselves from being guilty of claiming that these texts are representative of the homeless experience (vide Spivak) or in turn of literature on homelessness; second, we both avoid othering the texts and at the same time enable them to be read as more than subcultural expressions that are in truth relatively powerless in the face of the forces that they define themselves against (vide Badiou). There is an obvious potential issue regarding the second objective of reading these texts for moments in which they push beyond an interest in

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the merely subcultural, however: namely that the very idea of a reverse discourse tramp literature is inherently subcultural and inherently identity oriented—in the sense that (according to my account, at least) it describes an appropriation by select authors of an identity formation that has supposedly arisen from disciplinary attempts to subjugate and increase the productivity of the homeless. This means that while we might want to avoid an analysis that concentrates in a reductive way on the marginal identity of given authors and protagonists—we are also forced to admit that the texts that do qualify for consideration as examples of reverse discourse tramp literature are best viewed as representations of an identity formation initially imposed upon the homeless and then adopted. If we are to deal with this seeming contradiction, the obvious solution is to openly acknowledge that though we might want to read these texts in terms of how they pertain to the social totality, we also need to attend to the fact that as examples of a reverse discourse that is inherently identity-oriented there may be obstacles in the way when doing so. In short, we should try to read these texts as works of radical literature—while simultaneously acknowledging that they might not comply with this agenda. What all of this means in practice is: first, in what is to follow we will be drawing distinctions throughout between reverse discourse tramp literature and other works of tramp literature that do not reflect the attributes described in this introductory essay; second, within the category of reverse discourse tramp literature we will be seeking to differentiate models that suggest a Badiouian interest in the social totality apart from those that don’t; and third, in doing so we will remain cognisant at all times that given the status of reverse discourse tramp literature as an inherently identity-­oriented discourse, this may not always be possible. It might be seen that this approach amounts to a kind of test. This is in the sense that by suggesting that we attempt to read texts that function as a reverse discourse in terms of what they say about the social totality, while admitting that it is as representations of experiences associated with a group identity that they came into being—we are asking whether they can indeed be read along these lines. To put it another way: we have already established that reverse discourse tramp literature may be seen to depict an experience that symbolises a challenge to existing behavioural codes, for instance by representing an inversion of established values in the domain of work, gender and sexuality, and community—echoing claims made by historians in relation to American homelessness. We have also theorised the possibility that reverse discourse tramp literature may

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be seen to reflect the possibility of partial disalienation from societally produced estrangement effects. The question now becomes, however, as we choose to read these texts in relation to what they say about the social totality rather than in terms of what they say about the social group whose experiences they chronicle: can these representations of tramping as an embodiment of subversion and disalienation (assuming they fit this description) be read in terms of their ramifications for everyone else? Certainly we can choose to read them in terms of their wider significance: but do the texts lend themselves to being read in this way? The question of whether reverse discourse texts are capable of reflecting a radical outlook is one that may be seen to have wider political and philosophical ramifications beyond the immediate confines of this study. In his book Foucault Gilles Deleuze writes: ‘Foucault’s fundamental idea is that of a dimension of subjectivity derived from power and knowledge without being dependent on them’ (2006, 84). In a sense, then, by acknowledging that representations of tramping in these works reflect an identity formation that may be considered to be a byproduct of disciplinary power (albeit one that should not be seen to be wholly representative of the homeless experience) while simultaneously creating a critical framework that enables given texts to be read in terms of their wider meaning— the question we are inadvertently asking is: are identity formations derived from power structures suited to developing into discourses that pertain to society as a whole? In other words: how readily does the model of resistance described by Foucault (the reverse discourse here embodied by select examples within the wider genre of tramp literature) result in ‘a dimension of subjectivity’ independent from the power and knowledge structures responsible for its emergence, to the point of being compatible with a Badiouian insistence upon pushing beyond an ‘ethics of differences’ and pertaining to society as a whole? Thus in a sense the line of inquiry that can be seen to have emerged from this exploration of Spivakian and Badiouian critiques of a discourse that concentrates on the experiences of a marginalised social group is twofold: first, we have determined to try to read these texts in terms of their radical credentials, and in the process to discover whether they lend themselves to this (with my definition of radical here describing something that pertains to the social totality rather than being merely subcultural); second, we have in turn established a basis for testing whether reverse discourses of the kind described by Foucault (assuming select works of tramp memoir and tramp fiction writing can be read as such) are suited to the development of a totalising dimension—or, in other words, whether in the given

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example of representations of subversive identities there is a prevalence of radical outlooks demanding global transformation, instead of a focus on local interests and gains. If the latter—this does not mean that these texts are without value, but rather that our attempt to defend our interest in them by presenting them as works of radical literature will have failed.

5   Categorising Works of Reverse Discourse Tramp Literature: Three Models of Dissent The proposed approach outlined in the previous section may be seen, broadly speaking, to point to two possible outcomes: one in which we are able to characterise select works within the reverse discourse tramp literature tradition as pertaining to the social totality; the other in which our ability to read these texts in this way is restricted by the conditions of their emergence—as we struggle to develop the kind of analysis proposed without superimposing our own readings onto them. To be clear: in either scenario, we will still have avoided reading the texts reductively by analysing them in terms of their representativeness of the minority group whose experiences they depict, or by confining them to an expression of ‘otherness’—as we will instead have attempted to read them in terms of what they have to say about the world more generally. But in the first instance, we would have observed that the texts lend themselves to being read in this way, and in the second we would have observed that they put up more of a fight—for instance by functioning as circumscribed expressions of a group identity that envisage subversion of existing norms only in a selfcontained way. The texts are not consigned to irrelevance if they fall into this second category—but if we are able to read them in the former sense, it can be claimed that they more effectively embody oppositionality against the forces responsible for their emergence, in turn providing a stronger justification for our interest in them. This section attempts to help provide a clearer idea of what these different eventualities might look like by describing three discursive categories alongside which (or possibly within which) works of reverse discourse tramp literature might be situated depending on how the texts are read in relation to the inquiries just outlined—in the process offering an overview of the nature of the conversation to which works of reverse discourse tramp literature as a whole may be seen to have contributed. The first of these categories I have chosen to define as radical anti-productivist theory: a grouping that includes works within the utopian, nineteenth-century anarchist, Frankfurt School, Autonomist Marxist, twentieth-century

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anarchist, twenty-first-century communist and postcapitalist schools of thought. Works in this category explore the theoretical possibilities of a world without or with less work, with my use of the term ‘anti-­productivist’ being designed to indicate an outlook that questions a disciplinary preoccupation with productive behaviour (without necessarily being anti-work— a point that will be elaborated on later in this section). The second category I have labelled non-radical identity-oriented anti-productivist texts: a grouping that includes works of bohemian literature and nature writing. This category similarly focusses on texts that question a disciplinary preoccupation with productive behaviour—this time by foregrounding the refusal of work within subcultural groups, while also (crucially) actively discouraging radical interpretation. The third category I have chosen to define as implicitly radical anti-productivist narratives: a grouping that includes works of post-war working-class fiction. This third and final category acknowledges the limitations of the radical / non-radical binary by proposing that some texts may not be explicitly radical but might nonetheless encourage readers to draw radical conclusions relating to a disciplinary preoccupation with productive behaviour. Having outlined these three discursive categories, this section will reflect on the contribution that works of reverse discourse tramp literature might be seen to offer to the wider genre of anti-productivist literature as a whole depending on how they are categorised. Before commencing this section—it should be noted that in suggesting that these are the three discursive categories alongside which or within which works of reverse discourse tramp literature might be situated if we are to shift the focus away from how representative they are of the experience of being homeless, I am quite explicitly choosing to place special emphasis on a specific aspect of this body of work: namely, the way in which it explores the possibility of a world less oriented around productive behaviour. The reason for this may seem obvious, but it is nonetheless worth clarifying. The hypothesis developed in this introductory essay is that the phenomenon of reverse discourse tramp literature may be seen to embody a simultaneous rejection and appropriation of a new conception of homelessness (by no means representative of the homeless experience as a whole) according to which the homeless are defined by their apparent failure to contribute to the welfare and wealth of the population. I have thus chosen to focus on the anti-productivist aspect of these texts as this relates to the key defining aspect of reverse discourse tramp literature as it has been presented. However, it should be stressed that in highlighting

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this attribute I do not intend to undermine the significance of other related possible aspects of the texts to be explored, some of which have been indicated previously (such as their defiance of norms within the domains of gender and sexuality, and community): instead, by focussing on the anti-productivist dimension of both the reverse discourse tramp literature texts to be considered and the three categories of related literature about to be described, I am merely underlining what might be seen to be their most significant shared characteristic, while leaving the door open for us to also explore other attributes. It should also be stressed that I am not suggesting these are the three discursive categories into which reverse discourse tramp literature texts must be placed: rather, it is proposed that they may be adjacent to or situated within  these categories, while also allowing for the possibility that reverse discourse tramp literature texts might be anti-productivist in different ways, or that they may not be anti-productivist at all—in the sense that they could potentially subvert and celebrate the qualities of the tramp without this being oriented around the specific question of productive behaviour, for instance by concentrating narrowly upon the defiance of gender norms (although it might be argued that in such cases there is still a link to productivist ideology, albeit less obvious—in line with Foucault’s hypothesis concerning the interrelatedness of a wide array of disciplinary norms and the pressure to contribute). 5.1  Radical Anti-productivist Theory This section will pass chronologically through the key landmarks in radical anti-productivist theory, from the nineteenth century to the present. As indicated, the aim in doing so is to establish a sense of the central emerging themes within one of the two discourses that works of reverse discourse tramp literature could be situated within or alongside were they to prove to be compliant with the objective of being read in relation to what they say about the social totality. In particular, we will be highlighting three points: first, how radical anti-productivist theory takes as its central motif the idea that a life less oriented around work would be preferable; second, how it has traditionally been defined in opposition to labourist anti-capitalist discourse; and third, how theorists in this domain have tended to emphasise its demise during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As indicated above—the intention behind offering a

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relatively detailed account of this body of work is not purely taxonomical, as the objective is also to illustrate the significance of this specific discourse, and in particular the urgency of its message regarding the shortcomings of alternative models of anti-capitalist resistance (which would in turn be seen to indicate the urgency of reverse discourse tramp literature were texts within this genre to prove comparable to works in a radical anti-­ productivist vein). 5.1.1 Utopianism An obvious place to start in exploring radical thought that questions a disciplinary preoccupation with productive behaviour is the example of utopian socialism—perhaps best represented by the French early nineteenth-­century philosopher Charles Fourier, who believed in the need for ‘small self-supporting communities’ within which ‘labour would cease to be an imposition’ (Levitas 2010, 44). For instance, in writing about his envisaged phalanstère (his model of a utopian community), Fourier wrote of the need to limit and vary work on the grounds that it is ‘impossible to sustain enthusiasm more than an hour and a half or two hours in the exercise of any one branch of agriculture or manufactures’—as well as writing of the importance of liberating workers ‘from all anxiety either for himself or his family’ (1876, 34–5). Just as important for our purposes as acknowledging the existence of early nineteenth-century theoretical texts challenging the role of work, however, is the need to recognise their subsequent suppression. In his 1880 text Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels derided the ‘eclectic, average Socialism’ of early nineteenth-­century ‘utopian’ socialists including Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon and Robert Owen on the grounds that they did ‘not claim to emancipate a particular class […] but all humanity at once’ (1999, 70,  61). In this text Engels proposes that socialism did not advance into a ‘science of Socialism’ until Marx’s materialistic conception of history and theory of surplus-value tied this emancipatory agenda to the objective of ‘seizing [...] the means of production’ specifically for the working-classes (1999, 94). Engels’s account arguably pinpoints the precise moment at which the earlier attempt to challenge the needfulness of work, or to reduce its role within the worker’s life, was overtaken by an agenda within which work played a central role—a moment that, according to his account, coincided with the demise of a radical universal agenda (which fact Engels perversely celebrates). The sense in which both the idea of not working and the idea of universal emancipation were repudiated within this new syndicalist

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programme is strongly indicated by Marx’s own expressed derision for the lumpenproletariat—for instance in The  Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which he writes derisively of the Bonapartist effort to mobilise ‘vagabonds’ and ‘the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass’ (1968, 138). Despite Engels’s remarks, utopianism following Marx may be seen to have survived to some degree—most notably in the ‘discursive explosion’ of utopian literature especially ‘in the field of fiction’ at the end of the Victorian era (Beaumont 2009, 1). A number of fictional works produced in this period contemplate the possibility of a world without work: for instance, Charlotte Perkins Gilmore’s Herland, serialised between 1909 and 1916, envisages the prospect of a world in which no man or woman ‘would work without incentive’ (1915, 129). However, as Matthew Beaumont has suggested in his study of late nineteenth-century utopianism, utopian fiction was generally reformist rather than revolutionary— seeking imaginary resolutions to ‘the social contradictions of capitalist society’, while simultaneously frequently hoping ‘to conjure away the spectre of communism that threatened to destroy the prospect of a peaceful evolution to the coming social order’: an example being ‘state-socialist’ utopias that ‘reassured their largely middle-class readers that social change could occur without seriously altering the present system’ (2009, 5, 7). It might be argued that the anti-productivist strain of late Victorian utopian fiction serves as evidence of a counter-trend in this respect—just as Beaumont argues that ‘the prevailing limits of the late-Victorian political imaginary’ did not prevent radical strains from surfacing in William Morris’s 1890 News from Nowhere. At the same time, it should be noted that there is a strong counter-tendency within the utopian fiction tradition of valorising the experience of work: Morris’s novel in fact being a possible example, as it envisages a future in which people are able to look upon the conditions of labour in the past and exclaim: ‘Fancy people not liking to work!’ (1890, 59) Thus if the anti-productivist strain of utopian fiction is to be acknowledged—this must coexist alongside an appreciation both of how the genre was on the whole non-radical in nature and of how there was also a tendency within it to conversely valorise the experience of work. 5.1.2 Nineteenth-Century Anarchism Another example that might be seen to challenge Engels’s account of the ascendence of a ‘science of Socialism’ in lieu of alternative models of emancipation is the continuing prevalence (albeit with a perhaps marginal

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status) of anarchist theory and practice in the late nineteenth century. An earlier example of anarchist discourse can of course be found in the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon—a philosopher and politician widely considered to have been the first self-described anarchist, whose political philosophy synthesised elements of collectivism (favouring worker associations) and individualism (promoting the individual ownership of land by workers) (Ryley 2013, 18). Proudhon himself was far from having an anti-­ productivist outlook: as the historian Peter Ryley puts it, he argued that ‘work is a necessity, not merely as an act of production but also of moral education’ (2013, 19)—and yet among the subcategories of anarchism that emerged in his wake, such an outlook can be discerned. Anarchism in the late nineteenth century had many guises, but perhaps the two most significant factions—strongly suggested by Proudhon’s admixture of collectivism and individualism—were individualist anarchism and anarcho-­ communism. The former category is a broad church, but in general can be seen to have maintained Proudhon’s defence of work: for instance, when challenging the spectre of ‘communistic’ anarchism in his 1894 essay The Two Anarchisms, the English individualist anarchist Henry Seymour characterises anarcho-communism as encouraging people ‘to work when, where, and how they pleased’ and firmly objects ‘to the exploitation of industrious labor through idleness’ (1894). Conversely, as is perhaps suggested by this tirade, anarcho-communists can be seen to have been more sympathetic to the idea of freedom from work: for instance, the Russian anarcho-communist Pyotr Kropotkin’s 1892 The Conquest of Bread argues that ‘such vague formulae as “[t]he right to work”’ should be abandoned in favour of ‘the Right to Well-Being’, as well as advocating a reduction in labour to less than six half-days a week (1995, 20, 90). There is, then, a clear strain of anti-productivist contention within anarchist discourse, and in particular its anarcho-communist strand—and yet, again, this remark should coexist alongside recognition both of the marginal status of anarchist discourse in this period and of the fact that much anarchist discourse was conversely pro-labour. 5.1.3 The Frankfurt School While allowing that the existence of figures like Kropotkin may be seen to serve as evidence to the contrary, the ramifications of Engels’s suggestion that with Marx the two objectives of universal emancipation and emancipation from work were superseded by a narrower form of ‘scientific’ socialism focussed on obtaining ‘the means of production’ for the working-classes

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can be seen to have been further explored in a 1956 dialogue between the two ‘Frankfurt School’ theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, transcribed by Gretel Adorno. In this dialogue, the two philosophers attempt to develop a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto in part by critiquing Marx’s emancipatory vision. In this vein, Adorno at one point reflects that while Marx did imagine ‘liberation from work’, he ultimately presented the idea of working ‘in a very bright light’—thus embodying a wider societal conviction summarised by Horkheimer with the words: ‘[m]an is worth something only as long as he works’ (2019, 15–6). This prompts Adorno to reflect that, as a consequence of the left’s decision to follow Marx in placing a premium on the value of work, ‘[t]he idea of freedom from labour’ has been replaced by ‘the possibility of choosing one’s own work’ (2019, 16). Horkheimer appears to agree, adding: The idea that freedom consists in self-determination is really rather pathetic, if all it means is that the work my master formerly ordered me to do is the same as the work I now seek to carry out of my own free will. (2019, 16–17)

This leads Adorno to reflect on what society misses out on because of this narrow conception of freedom—as he proposes that as we nowadays ‘have enough by way of productive forces’ it would be possible to ‘supply the entire world with goods’ and then to ‘attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings’ were it not for such impediments (2019, 21). Although in their dialogue Adorno and Horkheimer reflect and differ on the question of the relationship between theory and practice, and on their prognoses for society as a whole—their argument that the ‘idea of freedom from labour’ has been replaced by a narrow preoccupation with working-class ‘self-determination’ is clearly significant, and undoubtedly suggests a plea for a new radical anti-productivist agenda. 5.1.4 Italian Autonomist Marxism and Twentieth-Century Anarchism If Adorno and Horkheimer’s remarks concerning the demise of the ‘idea of freedom from labour’ following the emergence of Marxist ideology in the middle of the nineteenth century are to be considered valid—while also noting that select works of utopian fiction and anarcho-communist theory may be considered an exception—then the emergence of Italian Autonomist Marxism as well as the resurgence of American anarchism in

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the second half of the twentieth century might be viewed as a sign of a counter-trend within Western political discourse. Deriving from the Italian operaismo (or workerist) movement, and generally associated with the writing of Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti and others—Autonomist Marxist theory is arguably one of the clearest existing examples of a twentieth-century anti-capitalist movement that questions labourist assumptions. The autonomist theorist Mario Tronti, for instance, in his 1966 text Workers and Capital (widely considered to have been the seminal text of the operaismo movement) proposes ‘mass passivity at the level of production’ (2019, 260)—before in a later essay rendering the implications of this explicit by suggesting that only when workers learn to ‘suppress labor’ will they be able to ‘abolish class domination’ (1972, 25). In common with Adorno and Horkheimer, Tronti takes aim at Marx in reflecting on this possibility—criticising Marx’s assertion that labour is ‘the prime necessity of human existence’ by suggesting that workers should ‘drop’ this belief ‘and consign it to the bosses’ (Ibid.). A legacy of Autonomist Marxist thought can be found in the writings of Silvia Federici, who while campaigning against unwaged female labour in the 1970s argued that the fact that housework is in this way unrecognised prevents ‘women from struggling against it’, thus offering a gender-oriented extension of the critique of labour in Tronti and others (2012, 16). In a comparable development, in a 1986 essay by the American anarchist Bob Black entitled ‘The Abolition of Work’, Black reignites the anarchist anti-productivist debate by similarly suggesting that while ‘[l]eftists favor full employment’, the ideal objective should be the pursuit of ‘full unemployment’—justified off the back of a Foucauldian analysis of the ‘totalitarian controls at the workplace’ and Black’s subsequent desire for ‘a new way of life based on play’ (1986, 17–18, 20, 17). A distinction we might note between Black’s conception of freedom from work and this line of thinking in authors like Tronti and Federici is that whereas for the latter the refusal configures as a means of abolishing working-class and female oppression respectively, with less of an emphasis on what autonomy might subsequently look like—for Black the clear focus is upon the freedoms and possibilities that refusing work might enable. Regardless of their differences, however, these two schools of thought may be grouped together for marking a clear resurgence of interest in questioning a disciplinary preoccupation with productive behaviour previously represented by Kropotkin and others.

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5.1.5 Twenty-First-Century Communism Following this apparent reawakening, the attempt to scrutinise society and the left’s attitudes towards the question of productivity has also been developed within a more recent school of thought, yet to be formalised or given a label—but involving a group of leading theorists and activists, many of whom were involved in a 2011 conference held in New York entitled Communism: A New Beginning, organised by Badiou and Žižek. The objective of the conference was perhaps best summarised by Badiou when he wrote in an accompanying series of essays of the need to re-­ establish ‘the absolute necessity for the communist Idea in opposition to the unbounded barbarism of capitalism’—which he suggests must involve redefining the concept of communism on the basis of an acknowledgement of the ‘undeniably terroristic nature of the first effort to embody this Idea in a state’ (2013, 6). Unlike in other examples we have considered, the idea of freedom from work cannot be seen to be a central tenet of the particular group of theorists and activists brought together at this 2011 conference—and yet in their attempts to critique existing models of left wing dissent this nonetheless becomes a theme that is hinted at in their writing, with Žižek serving as an example of someone who has interrogated the left’s adoption of a capitalist preoccupation with productivity and growth. For instance, in his 2001 text The Fragile Absolute Žižek suggests that an adopted obsession with economic growth has prevented the left from presenting an adequate alternative to capitalism, writing: Marxian Communism, this notion of a society of pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of Capital, was a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself, the capitalist inherent transgression at its purest, a strictly ideological fantasy of maintaining the thrust towards productivity generated by capitalism, while getting rid of the “obstacles” and antagonisms that were—as the sad experience of “actually existing capitalism” demonstrates—the only possible framework of the actual material existence of a society of permanent self-enhancing productivity. (2001, 14)

In other words, Žižek is suggesting here that it isn’t possible to have economic growth without a cost—without ‘obstacles’ and ‘antagonisms’— and that it might be a mistake to fantasise that this is not the case. It’s worth remembering Marx’s initial observation that as ‘[c]irculation, or the exchange of commodities, begets no value’ the rate of surplus-value must be seen to be ‘an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital’ to understand Žižek’s point here (1915,

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182, 241). The implication is that growth and profit are inextricable from exploitation—with Žižek criticising ‘Marxian Communism’ for its mistaken denial of this in its contention that ‘unbridled productivity’ can happen independently of the exploitation that is its driving force, or in other words for believing that it is possible to ‘have one’s cake and eat it’ (2001, 15). It is important to note Žižek’s caution about where this critique of the left’s adoption of a capitalist ‘notion of a society of pure unleashed productivity’ might lead—as he simultaneously places an emphasis on the danger that when critiquing the ‘utopian-ideological notion of Communism’ (which may be taken to include those on the left who have adopted the capitalist fantasy of ‘unbridled productivity’) we run the risk of falling ‘into the trap of returning to the eminently premodern notion of a balanced, self-restrained society’ (2001, 16). By warning against the hazard of reacting to the left’s adoption of capitalist productivist fantasies by retreating into a ‘premodern’ vision of pre-capitalist society, Žižek underlines the importance of not replacing one fantasy with another—implying a cynicism that might be seen to relate to the position adopted by anti-­ productivist theorists who respond to the left’s fetishisation of work by hoping to ‘abolish work as a necessity for human beings’ (e.g. Adorno) or by imagining the possibility of ‘full unemployment’ (e.g. Black). This supposition is confirmed if we consider Žižek’s response when asked in an interview about his opinion regarding the idea of a ‘luxury communism’ in which humans are sustained by an automated economy—leading him to wryly announce himself to be ‘against happiness’ and to assert his desire to be ‘traumatised to work’ (Žižek 2019): comments which may appear facetious, but that are at the same time in line with his general proposition (as outlined above) that we should be wary of any approach that indulges in the fantasy of overcoming the ‘fundamental alienation of the human subject’. The implication is that the idea of a world in which no-one works and everyone is happy may be just as disengaged from what is possible within the parameters of human experience as the ‘utopian-ideological’ notion of unrestrained productivity. And yet, recalling Žižek’s general suggestion that even though we should refrain from succumbing to fantasies of total disalienation we should continue to identify ways in which the world is lacking, it is clear that his objections to the idea of ‘luxury communism’ do not invalidate his critique of the left’s adoption of a fantasy of ‘pure unleashed productivity’, as he is instead merely emphasising the need for a response to this problem that is grounded in an understanding both of what is achievable and of what is desirable.

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5.1.6 Postcapitalist Theory A final development to consider within radical discourse that questions the role of labour (and one that is perhaps alluded to in the critique of ‘luxury communism’ above—although, as we will see, not all postcapitalist theorists fully fit this description) is the emergence of a series of texts exploring the postcapitalist possibility of an automated future. At the heart of much postcapitalist theory is an appreciation of the threat posed by automation. For instance, in their 2015 publication Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams point to ‘estimates suggesting that anything from 47 to 80 per cent of current jobs are likely to be automatable in the next two decades’—suggesting that already the ‘viability of full employment has practically disappeared’ as ‘the average new business creates 40 per cent fewer jobs than it did twenty years ago’ (2015, 88, 99, 100). Rather than despairing at this prospect, however—postcapitalist theorists are generally united in their desire to harness the potential that automation presents. For instance, Srnicek and Williams argue that ‘the newest wave of automation is creating the possibility for huge swathes of boring and demeaning work to be permanently eliminated’ (2015, 1–2). Other texts that similarly point to the threat posed by automation and that also call for a collective determination to exploit this potential—typically through the implementation of a universal basic income—include Paul Mason’s 2015 PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, which calls for ‘a change in our thinking about technology, ownership and work itself’ (2015, xv), and the anarchist and postcapitalist theorist David Graeber’s 2019 Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, which argues for ‘a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas’ (2019, xvii). As this quote from Graeber’s text suggests: rather than heeding Žižek’s warning against indulging in (arguably undesirable) fantasies of a return to a precapitalist work-free society, some of these authors may be seen to have chosen the same route as Adorno and Black in exploring the utopian possibilities suggested by automation (and thus to perhaps be deserving of the moniker ‘luxury communists’). At the same time, this is perhaps not universally true of all theorists in this category: for instance, in the writing of Srnicek and Williams there is a more grounded focus—resembling Tronti—on the working conditions and the impending hazards that automation might partially liberate workers from, as well as an emphasis on reducing rather than abolishing work.

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5.1.7 Summary Clearly there are some notable differences between the writers and theorists considered above. Some of them emphasise the utopian possibilities created by the idea of avoiding work, while others express cynicism about this or lay an emphasis upon the need to limit the hostile conditions that workers are subjected to. Either way, the thing that clearly unites all of these authors is the explicit contention that a critique of the capitalist and disciplinary fixation on productivity is necessary—which claim is added to in literature after Marx with the recurring suggestion that consequently there is a need for anti-capitalist resistance to develop a more comprehensive vision of emancipation. It is this suggestion that may be seen to certify the radical credentials of each of these works—given that it suggests a clear preoccupation with the social totality—in turn illustrating how works of reverse discourse tramp literature might be viewed if they prove comparable. 5.2  Non-radical Identity-Oriented Anti-productivist Texts If, on the other hand, works of reverse discourse tramp literature cannot be seen to reflect a preoccupation with the social totality in common with the radical anti-productivist texts just described, then it might be that we have to situate them alongside two related but distinct contemporary genres of writing—bohemian literature and nature writing—both of which question a disciplinary preoccupation with productive behaviour but within set identity-oriented bounds, coinciding with what might be described as the presence of active efforts to counteract the wider implications of a refusal of work. 5.2.1 Bohemian Literature In Arthur Ransome’s 1907 Bohemia in London the figure of the bohemian is defined as someone ‘not cut to the regular pattern’ who decides to abandon the existence ‘arranged for them by their relations, for a life that is seldom as comfortable, scarcely ever as healthful, and nearly always more precarious’ (1984, 19). It is perhaps unsurprising given this account to find that critics of bohemian literature often emphasise the manner in which bohemianism presents itself in opposition to work-oriented capitalist culture—with Peter Brooker in his 2004 study of London bohemia

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presenting the bohemian as ‘an artist or artist type, a poseur, a degenerate, a hanger-on’ who defines themselves ‘against the codes and priorities of industrialising societies’ (2004, viii). At the same time, in spite of this claim—the genre has frequently been criticised by cultural historians for its traditionalism. Mary Gluck has for instance noted that it represents ‘a conservative repudiation of the modern world’—the shallowness of which is revealed as it transpires that while bohemians challenge the prevailing social order, they are still ultimately presented as ‘artistic professionals’ whose products are ‘able to command a price comparable to that of other commodities’ (2005, 30, 18). While Gluck is here writing of the Parisian example, her observations are easily applicable to the British bohemian tradition as it is represented within the existing literature, with the protagonists of George Du Maurier’s 1894 bohemian novel Trilby for instance railing against the ‘meanness and paltriness’ of modern life, while ultimately proving quite happy to abandon this repudiation in order to pursue the ‘useful, humdrum, happy domestic existence’ of professional artists (1895, 202, 464). 5.2.2 Nature Writing Another body of work that similarly explores the possibility of a world with less work but in a generally non-radical fashion is a genre of writing described by the literary critic Thomas Wilson as the ‘English tradition of non-fiction writing about nature’—beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with authors like William Cobbett and George Borrow, and ending in the twentieth century with authors including ‘W.H. Hudson, Edward Thomas [and] H.J. Massingham’ (2006, 13–14). Although surprisingly little has been written about these authors—their celebration of the lives of rural outcasts can easily be seen to embody a challenge against work-oriented city life. For instance, in his nature writing the poet Edward Thomas writes of the ‘primeval wildness and simplicity’ of rural characters—and posits such individuals against those who plead for the ‘right to work’ because they are ‘too broken spirited to think of a right to live’ (2009, 170, 79). Richard Jefferies’s invectives against the ‘piling up of fortunes, the building of cities, the establishment of immense commerce’ (1898, 91) and H.J. Massingham’s tirades against ‘[t]he modern theory of Progress’ (1988, 108) can similarly be seen to constitute a concentrated effort to challenge the basis of modern, urban society by implicitly positing a rural existence as a preferable alternative. Here, perhaps, the impression is more varied than in bohemian literature—as while

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Borrow, Hudson and Thomas generally fixate on rural communities, Jefferies and Massingham do so while also engaging in discourse of a more speculative, totalising nature, as the two passages quoted above might be seen to indicate. And yet again, as with the example of bohemian literature, there is an underlying tendency towards conservatism or political apathy within the genre—as is reflected in remarks made by critics and biographers of these authors: with Caroline Sumpter writing in an essay on Jefferies that he ‘endorsed neither a liberal nor a Marxist vision of progress’ (2011, 316); with Hudson’s biographer Robert Hamilton stressing how he was ‘conservative’ although not ‘a party man’ (1946, 19); and with Thomas’s biographer Jean Moorcroft Wilson noting how Thomas ‘rarely involved himself in politics throughout his life’ (2015, 17). Accordingly, rather than embracing the radical potential of rural characters who exist outside of a productivist paradigm—authors within this genre tend to elect for an atavistic vision of retreat: with, for instance, Massingham heralding the Isle of Axholme (a region in Lincolnshire that had apparently not advanced beyond feudalism) as an example of the ‘old system’ and thus as an antidote to ‘[t]he gigantic muddle of modernity’ (1988, 60, 68). 5.2.3 Summary Here, then, we have seen evidence of the kind of discourse within which works of reverse discourse tramp literature might be situated if we are to conclude that while they do explore the possibility of a world without or with less work—they ultimately resist being read in a manner that relates to the social totality. In particular: of the two examples offered it has been suggested that the failure to envisage the radical ramifications of a resistance of work culture relate to conservative tendencies manifesting themselves in either conformism or atavism. We may in turn note the coincidence that, in common with reverse discourse tramp literature—these two bodies of work are marked by a narrow identity-bound focus, which it might be hypothesised could be related to the failure to arrive at a radical perspective, if the identity-focussed aspect of these two discourses is seen to have enabled the diminishment of a totalising dimension. 5.3  Implicitly Radical Anti-productivist Narratives So far, then, we have identified two bodies of literature alongside which works of reverse discourse tramp literature might be situated: the first

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being (primarily, at least) overtly political theoretical works, and the second being non-radical literary works. This might prompt us to ask two questions: first, whether it is possible to imagine a form of anti-­productivist radical writing (in the Badiouian sense of literature that pertains to the social totality) that isn’t overtly political; and second, whether it is possible to envisage non-theoretical forms of anti-productivist radical writing—for instance taking the form of imaginative literature—beyond the isolated and somewhat dubious example of utopian fiction? An answer to both of these questions is hinted at if we again turn to Badiou, and in particular to his reflections on the attributes needed for art forms to perform a radical function. In his 1990 text Rhapsody for Theatre Badiou identifies theatre as an exemplary art form in terms of its radical potential, before suggesting that it is at its most effective in this regard when it ‘demands that its spectator […] attach the development of the meaning to the lacunae of the play’ in the sense that it inserts ‘the spectator at the impasse of a form of thought’ (2013, 24, xxii). In other words, Badiou argues that performance functions best as a radical art form when it asks its audiences to make sense of what is not expounded—or when it situates the spectator at the site of a deadlock (or ‘impasse’) and does not attempt to resolve it, but leaves it as an empty space (or ‘lacunae’) that the spectator is responsible for making sense of. In short, Badiou argues that theatre is most impactful when it refuses to offer answers and instead encourages the spectator to try to imagine solutions to a problem that the playwright or theatre-makers have struck upon. Clearly, although these remarks have been made in the specific context of a reflection on theatre, they remain relevant to a discussion concerning radical literature—as what is being suggested is that an artwork needn’t be explicitly political (or didactic) in order to serve a radical function, and on the contrary that works that merely pose problems without explicitly stating answers may be more effective as works of radical literature in the sense that they activate the role of the spectator or reader. In terms of answering the two inquiries above, Badiou’s comments thus clearly suggest that literature needn’t be explicitly political to be radical, and that non-theoretical literature can also be radical—as he presents imaginative works that depict a problem without spelling out the solution as being in fact exemplary in terms of their radical potential. A question that remains to be asked, however, is whether we are able to conceive of works performing a similar such function, but in a manner that points towards anti-­productivist possibilities? In other words: are

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there any examples of literature that can be seen to implicitly promote an anti-productivist interpretation by similarly staging an impasse (in the sense of an unresolved issue), but one that is specifically related to the pressure to be productive? 5.3.1 Post-war Working-Class Fiction It is perhaps unsurprising to find that there are few critical studies invested in identifying examples of such a trend. One notable exception however, which also offers us an insight into a collection of implicitly radical antiproductivist narratives, is Roberto del Valle Alcalá’s 2016 study British Working-Class Fiction: Narratives of Refusal and the Struggle Against Work: a study that makes explicit references to Italian Autonomist Marxism as its author argues that the vindication of labour within the working-class movement is ‘symptomatic of its co-optation by a socially mature form of capitalism’ and as he suggests that ‘the adoption of an identity linked to the enforced logic of capitalist work cannot possibly result in a truly revolutionary position’ (2016, 3). Alcalá begins his analysis by proposing that literary representations of work ‘have been traditionally aligned, especially in Britain, with a socially transformative aspiration’—for instance arguing that the pre-war working-­ class novels of authors like Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Harold Heslop and Lewis Jones generally seek to ‘resolve the structural injustice’ of ‘unemployment’ (2016, 1,  4–5). Having established this, Alcalá sets out to uncover examples of literature that conversely challenge ‘the traditional vindication of labour by the working-class movement’ (2016, 3). Alcalá finds such an example in the form of a selection of post-war texts such as Alan Sillitoe’s 1958 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Irvine Welsh’s 2012 Skagboys—which phenomenon he explains by arguing that in a post-war context the negation of labour becomes more frequent because ‘as work begins to command the entire horizon of social relations […] the antagonistic profile of the exploited becomes enhanced and radicalised’ (an analysis which might also serve to explain the resurgence of radical anti-productivist theory in the post-war period described above) (2016, 6). Thus, Alcalá suggests that texts such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Skagboys ‘end up embracing a logic of negativity and “impotantiality”, of radical passivity and capacity to not do, to abstain— either militantly or evasively, joyfully or traumatically—from the socially structured injunctions of capitalist work’ (2016, 7). Clearly, then, Alcalá considers these texts works of radical anti-productivist literature. More

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importantly, in this context—in acknowledging how they emphasise the ‘impotentiality’ and ‘passivity’ of their protagonists, he also strongly indicates that they are in an implicitly radical vein. Alcalá for instance writes of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning that by depicting the confusion of its protagonist Arthur Seaton—as his ‘antagonistic consciousness’ is counteracted by his ‘vacuous hedonism’—Sillitoe ‘calls for a radicalization of the strategy of refusal’ (2016, 27, 29). Thus, what is radical about Seaton’s ‘impotentiality’ and ‘passivity’, according to Alcalá’s reading of it at least, is what it points to—rather than what it embodies. In this sense, Alcalá echoes Tronti (who he repeatedly references in his text)—who argued in Workers and Capital that ‘mass passivity at the level of production is the material fact from which we must begin’ before stressing that ‘at a certain point all this must be reversed into its opposite’ as ‘the refusal must also become political, and therefore active, subjective and organised’ (2019, 260). Tronti, in other words, sees passivity as implicitly radical in the sense that it frustrates and thus precipitates its opposite in the form of positive action. Applying this logic to Alcalá’s analysis of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, we might argue that it is implicitly radical for the reason that as an embodiment of passivity it points to the possibility of transcending this condition by arriving at the point of ‘active, subjective and organised’ political action. We might further clarify that what differentiates a text like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning from texts in the non-radical anti-productivist tradition is that Sillitoe’s novel points towards this outcome by staging an impasse in the form of Seaton’s confusion—rather than providing escape routes in the form of conformism or atavism (as in the examples of bohemian literature and nature writing). At the same time, it might be argued that far from this making texts like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning less radical as works of literature, from a Badiouian perspective the fact that they hint towards radical possibilities without offering a clear resolution makes them exemplary as works of radical literature, in the sense that they challenge readers to draw radical conclusions themselves rather than delivering the conclusions in a manner that requires no critical engagement. 5.4  Implications of Classifying Works of Reverse Discourse Tramp Literature as Radical, Non-radical or Implicitly Radical As well as illustrating more clearly how we might begin to classify works of reverse discourse tramp literature—the survey of anti-productivist

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literature offered above also enables us to reflect on the nature of the contribution that reverse discourse tramp memoir and tramp fiction texts might have to offer if it turns out that it is possible to classify works within these traditions as contributions to radical discourse (of either an explicit or an implicit nature), or alternatively if a large number of the texts in question turn out to be non-radical in nature. Most obviously, it is significant to note that the survey above has pointed to a shortage of radical anti-­productivist literature between 1850 and 1950, generally confirming Engels’s suggestion that ‘scientific’ socialism superseded ‘average’ socialism in the mid-nineteenth century, and Adorno and Horkheimer’s confirmation that the idea of freedom from labour appeared to have become obsolete by the middle of the twentieth century. The majority of the notable examples of anti-productivist discourse identified above appear on either side of this period—with most of the anti-­productivist literature produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coming in the non-radical identity-oriented category. Thus, the survey above indicates that were we to be able to classify select works of reverse discourse tramp literature as offering a significant contribution to radical anti-productivist discourse—as well as confirming that the Foucauldian model of resistance described above is capable of producing radical subjectivities that comply with a Badiouian insistence on pertaining to the social totality, we also might be seen in a modest way to have developed the history of radical literature by highlighting the existence of an additional and significant body of work in a radical anti-productivist vein during the 1850–1950 period. However, all of this of course assumes that works of reverse discourse tramp literature can be read as contributions to the radical anti-­productivist discourses identified above. As has already been suggested, it is possible that the texts in question may resist such a reading. If this turns out to be the case—and we end up having to categorise the genre as a whole alongside the non-radical identity-oriented anti-productivist bodies of work described above (such as bohemian literature and nature writing)—the obvious point to observe will be the coincidence that each of the non-­ radical anti-productivist texts included in this category would then be united in being identity-oriented, in turn implying that the Foucauldian reverse discourse identity-oriented model of resistance struggles to produce radical perspectives in a Badiouian sense—possibly for the reason that narrowing the focus on the interests and outlook of a single minority group hinders the potential for engaging in totalising speculations.

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Additionally, there is also of course the possibility that select works of reverse discourse tramp literature will fall into none of these categories, by resisting being defined as anti-productivist—in the sense that they might less obviously embody a questioning of the demand to be productive within disciplinary society (by for instance celebrating the tramp’s contestation of other less directly productivity-oriented norms). This would of course force us to revise the hypothesis that a questioning of the value of work is the key defining characteristic of these texts. These, then, are the possible implications of categorising works of reverse discourse tramp literature as being (generally speaking) anti-­ productivist in an implicitly radical, explicitly radical or non-radical sense, or as being not in fact anti-productivist at all. At the same time it should be emphasised that—as suggested above—it is quite likely that reverse discourse tramp literature as a whole will not fall neatly into one of the categories described above and that this overview will have served as a framework (itself no doubt containing generalities) enabling us to better identify the nuances of the genre. 5.5  Summary In summary, then, having previously suggested that there is a need to avoid presenting works in the reverse discourse mode as representative of the homeless experience, and to instead focus on what they have to say about the world and whether they can be viewed as radical—this section has proposed that a clearer idea of what this might be seen to amount to can be gained by considering their possible relation to other works of anti-­ productivist literature (defined as works that similarly question the disciplinary demand to be productive), within which three different models of dissent have been discerned that reverse discourse tramp literature texts may in turn be seen to correspond with: radical anti-productivist theory, non-radical identity-oriented anti-productivist texts and implicitly radical anti-productivist narratives. Speaking plainly, the hope is that a significant number of reverse discourse tramp literature texts may be seen to align with one or both of the two radical discursive subcategories described above—for the reason that this would make our interest in them as embodiments of a resistance against capitalist and disciplinary attitudes towards work and associated norms more justifiable. And yet, at the same time, in approaching the works in question it has been stressed that it is necessary to do so with a willingness to concede that they might resist

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against being read as radical, which would confirm Adorno and Horkheimer’s suggestion concerning the relative obsolescence of anti-­ productivist radical thinking during the period under consideration. Either way, we will be refusing to knowingly circumscribe these texts by at least attempting to read them in terms of their wider meaning as works that embody a resistance against work, rather than narrowly fixating upon how representative they are of the homeless experience. Whether we are led to conclude that selected texts are radical in nature or not (or indeed anti-­ productivist or not) will simply reflect how responsive they are to this approach. If a significant number of works do prove compatible with this approach, and can be read as an overlooked contribution to radical anti-­ productivist discourse, we have further argued that this might be seen to indicate the compatibility of Foucauldian identity-oriented models of resistance with a Badiouian demand to universalise. On a final note, it should be added that while the objective is thus to explore the possibility that texts within the reverse discourse tramp memoir and fiction traditions can be read as contributions to anti-productivist discourse by questioning a disciplinary preoccupation with productive behaviour or by expressing the need for a degree of ‘freedom from labour’—as previously indicated, it does not follow that the texts in question have to present all work as bad in order to be classified as anti-­productivist. As we have learnt from the survey above, not all anti-productivist theorists agree on the value of an anti-work position—with some theorists (like Black) arguing for ‘full unemployment’, while others (like Žižek) qualify their criticisms of the left’s adoption of the capitalist fantasy of ‘pure unleashed productivity’ by refusing to promote a vision of a work-free utopia. The important point to make is that the summary above can thus be seen to demonstrate the diversity of anti-­productivist discourse—and how it is in no way necessary to express a complete aversion to labour, or to advocate its total abolition (although of course this remains possible) in order to qualify for consideration as a text that offers a critical outlook upon a wider societal preoccupation with productive behaviour. In the concluding remarks to this study, however, we may return to this question—and attempt to assess whether the contribution to anti-productivist discourse offered by these texts (assuming they can be read in this way) can in general be seen to endorse the total abolition of work (following Black) or instead to object to the capitalist conditions of work while resisting depicting all work as inherently bad or engaging in fantastical speculations about the possibility of entirely abandoning it (following Žižek).

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6   The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 In what remains of this introductory essay a proposed methodology, a chapter breakdown, a survey of the existing criticism, an explanation of the decision to focus on works produced in Britain and an explanation regarding the decision to concentrate on literary works will be offered. 6.1  Methodology In line with my earlier suggestions concerning a proposed solution to the methodological difficulties outlined by Spivak and Badiou—the approach taken in this study is to first distinguish between reverse discourse and non-reverse discourse examples of what might be termed tramp literature (i.e. literature involving representations of homelessness that are in alignment with the account of the conception of the tramp described above), and then within the former category to attempt to identify radical elements. What this means in practice is that each of the two chapters in this study will begin by describing the discursive conditions that led to the emergence of reverse discourse tramp literature (within the separate domains of life writing and fiction), and then focussing on texts that fit this description—in the process offering a more general overview of literature on homelessness and indicating in greater detail how reverse discourse tramp literature may be seen to be distinct. In subsequently exploring examples of reverse discourse tramp literature, there will then be three stages of analysis: in the first, we will establish various ways in which select examples of texts featuring tramps can be seen to perform a subversive function by embodying an alternative set of values (in the realm of work, gender and sexuality, and community, and in terms of their embodiment of partial disalienation from societally produced estrangement effects)— while in the process also determining whether they can indeed be considered to be anti-productivist; in the second, we will ask whether there is a totalising dimension at play in these works—and in turn how this manifests itself in relation to the models outlined in this introduction (i.e. whether the radical elements are explicit or implicit); lastly,  in the third stage of analysis we will seek to identify broader limitations, and various ways in which the texts may be seen to be circumscribed by the conditions of their emergence. I should stress that what is to follow is hopefully not as painstakingly programmatic as this makes it out to be. Though we are seeking out ways in which reverse discourse tramp literature texts can be viewed as

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subversive, radical and limited—all with the ultimate objective of determining whether they should be seen merely to embody a subversion of societal norms, or conversely whether they can be presented as encouraging reflection on the wider meaning and radical potential of this embodiment—this does not have to be as formulaic as it sounds. While this is clearly the underlying agenda that this introductory essay points towards, there is another more immediate objective at play here, which is to introduce a neglected body of work that deals with the subject of homelessness—very often in ways that are unusual and entertaining, and on several occasions in ways that are indicative of significant literary merit. Accordingly, the main work in what is to follow will consist of introducing each relevant author as well as offering an analysis of the themes that preoccupy them and any striking points of interest concerning their work— while at the same time hoping to give an indication of how they came into being and the wider discursive trends to which they belong. 6.2  Chapter Outline Along these lines, Chap. 2 of this study offers a survey and analysis of the tramp memoir genre as a whole, while seeking to identify examples within it that conform with the description of a reverse discourse outlined in this introduction. It begins with an overview of antecedents to the tramp memoir, exploring attempts to tell the life stories of vagrants in The Newgate Calendar alongside eighteenth-century documentary evidence of homeless life writing, before considering the emergence of the working-­ class autobiography. It then explores the first complete attempts at life writing by members of the homeless community, written by Mary Saxby, James Dawson Burn, ‘Colin’, William Cameron and Josiah Basset—analysed in the context of nineteenth-century working-class, spiritual and temperance autobiography. Having explored these antecedents, a detailed analysis is offered of the late nineteenth-century authors who went on to firmly establish the genre’s reverse discourse credentials: namely, Morley Roberts, Bart Kennedy and W.H. Davies. The remainder of this chapter is then dedicated to reverse discourse tramp memoir writing in the early twentieth century—when most of the tramp memoirs that I have been able to identify were produced—involving analysis of texts by John Worby, James Milligan, Chris Massie, Charles Landery, Jim Phelan, Matt Marshall, John Brown, W.A. Gape and Liam O’Flaherty. This selection of seventeen authors of homeless life writing texts has been chosen from a collection of

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thirty-three identified authors who published similar such works during this period on the grounds that they best exemplify the development of the reverse discourse trend, as well as exhibiting the strongest signs of anti-productivist tendencies—although the works of the remaining sixteen authors will also be accounted for. As suggested above, the reverse discourse texts selected for detailed analysis will be scrutinised to ascertain the extent to which they can indeed be seen to be classifiable as such, as well as to determine whether they can be characterised as radical, and whether they reflect any broader limitations. Chapter 3 explores the parallel phenomenon of reverse discourse tramp fiction writing produced between 1850 and 1950—while also offering a more general overview of fiction writing on homelessness produced in the modern era in Britain. It begins by exploring early modern antecedents to reverse discourse tramp fiction in the form of rogue literature, picaresque narratives and satirical works in which homeless characters feature permanently—analysing texts by Robert Greene, Richard Head, Francis Kirkham, Bampfylde Moore Carew, Robert Goadby and John Gay, among others, in the process indicating key trends and how this body of literature may be seen to differ from later reverse discourse tramp fiction. This chapter then proceeds to explore late modern representations of homelessness within realism, Romantic literature, the social problem novel, ‘new realism’ and the socialist novel, including analysis of works by George Crabbe, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Arthur Morrison, Margaret Harkness and others—again indicating how these examples may be seen to differ from the model represented by reverse discourse tramp fiction. Having established a broad sense of the various forms of representations of homelessness in the early and late modern periods, this chapter will move on to explore fiction in which the tramp is celebrated as a figure of subversion. This analysis will begin by exploring the reverse discourse tramp fiction of Bart Kennedy and W.H. Davies, before moving on to consider the output of working-class authors including Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, Walter Brierley and James Hanley, alongside the fiction of  homeless interwar authors including Jim Phelan and Chris Massie. These authors have again been selected from a sizeable bibliography of authors who wrote fiction either prominently featuring tramps or written by individuals who might be described as tramps during the early twentieth century (much of which will be reviewed) again on the grounds that they are considered exemplary of the reverse discourse and anti-­productivist trends—although the work of an additional eleven authors of texts classifiable as reverse discourse

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tramp fiction will also be accounted for. As in the previous chapter, the texts will be analysed in order to determine how readily they can be characterised in this way, as well as whether they can in turn be classified as radical, and whether they reflect any broader limitations. Chapter 4 completes this study by offering a summary overview of these two surveys, while also tying the analysis that has been developed back to the themes explored in this introductory essay. 6.3  Existing Criticism As previously indicated—the area that this study covers is one that has been unreasonably neglected. Early modern rogue and vagabond literature, social exploration literature on homelessness, and American tramp and hobo life writing: each of these domains has received due critical attention1—and yet very little critical attention has been paid to British tramp literature produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are of course some exceptions. Research carried out by the historians John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall has uncovered a large body of working-class autobiographies written between 1790 and 1945—several of which they identify as describing experiences of tramping. As the authors write in their introduction to the first volume of an annotated bibliography of these texts: ‘Periods of unemployment and under-­employment were within the experience of a high proportion’ of the working-class authors whose autobiographies they have gathered together—explaining ‘the frequency of tramping by all grades of labour’ and the ‘surprisingly high number’ of autobiographies that cover the experience of vagrancy (Burnett et al. 1984, xxvii). However, of the one thousand and twenty-eight texts documented in the first volume, only sixty-one contain incidents of ‘tramping’, and the overwhelming majority of these—such as William Brown’s 1829 A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of William Brown and Fred Bower’s 1936 Rolling Stonemason: An Autobiography—document the lives of working men who spend a brief period on the road owing to temporary 1  For studies of rogue and vagabond literature in the early modern period, see: Beier (1985); Kinney (1990); Woodbridge (2001); Fumerton (2006); Dionne and Mentz (2006); Hitchcock (2016); Hitchcock (2017). For studies of social exploration literature, see Keating (1978); Nord (1995); Freeman (2003); Koven (2004); Freeman and Nelson (2008); Seaber (2017). For studies that focus more particularly on social investigation, see Bulmer (1985); McIlhiney (1988); Englander and O’Day (1995); Ross (2007). For studies of American tramp and hobo life writing, see Kusmer (2002); Depastino (2003); Higbie (2003); Allen (2004); Cresswell (2004); Pittenger (2012); Cutler (2020).

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unemployment. Though Burnett, Vincent and Mayall’s work has been a valuable resource in conducting the research necessary for this book—it is clear that their priorities lie with working-class life writing, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that in accompanying critical texts few insights are offered into the life writing of the homeless. Two other bibliographical studies have similarly contributed to the task of identifying tramp life writing: William Matthews’s British Autobiographies: An Annotated Bibliography of British Autobiographies Published or Written Before 1951, and The Encyclopedia of Homelessness Volumes 1 and 2, edited by David Levinson. Matthews’s British Autobiographies offers an overview of British life writing leading up to 1951, in the process identifying twenty-two homeless life writing works. A ‘Bibliography of Autobiographical and Fictional Accounts of Homelessness’ in The Encyclopedia of Homelessness Volumes 1 and 2 identifies thirteen British homeless life writing works published before 1950, alongside many more American tramp and hobo autobiographies and a limited number of fiction examples. However, while these texts have again been useful—neither offers much in the way of critical analysis of the tramp life writing and fiction works they have begun to uncover. This kind of analysis is, conversely, offered in a handful of existing critical studies of homelessness in American fiction and life writing—for instance, John Allen’s Homelessness in American Literature: Romanticism, Realism and Testimony and Lynne Adrian’s introduction to Tales of an American Hobo, both of which will be referred to in the course of this study. In a British context, four literary and social historians stand out for having made significant attempts to analyse the phenomenon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century tramp literature. The first of these is H. Gustav Klaus. In an introduction to a collection of stories edited by Klaus entitled Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries: Working-class Stores of the 1920s—the only existing collection of British tramp fiction—Klaus observes ‘that there is a different, if minor strand of working-class narratives “based not on place and continuity but on dislocation and transience”’ and which centres around the figure of the tramp (1993, 4). It is possible that Klaus has written more on the subject of tramps in fiction than anyone else, covering the question in passing in his classic text The Socialist Novel in Britain (1982, 57) and more recently publishing a chapter on the tramp memoirist Bart Kennedy (2019)—as well as an essay on tramps in Scottish writing between 1880 and 1920 (Goodridge and Keegan 2017). Beyond Klaus’s attempts to acknowledge tramp writing as a subgenre of working-class literature, Case’s aforementioned doctoral thesis also represents a significant attempt

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to address ‘English’ literary representations of tramps in fictional or life writing form—although it is true that she identifies only a handful of the authors here considered. Simon Featherstone’s 2014 essay ‘Tramping: The Cult of the Vagabond in Early Twentieth-Century England’ is also of interest for drawing attention to representations of the ‘figure of the tramp as a socially unconstrained aesthete’ in a number of early twentieth-century texts, although the scope is again limited (2014, 235). More recently, in his 2020 The Lives and Extraordinary Adventures of Fifteen Tramp Writers from the Golden Age of Vagabondage Ian Cutler has come closer to acknowledging the scale of the tramp literature phenomenon during this period than any critic before him. Although his study is divided between British and American authors, and is also restricted to a consideration of life writing texts—he offers enlightening insights into the memoirs of British tramps including Roberts, Kennedy, Horn, Davies and Phelan, many of which will be drawn upon in this study. Cutler’s book is perhaps most significant, however, for the reason that he comes the closest of any literary critic to identifying a subversive dimension to this tradition—describing how between 1870 and the start of the Second World War, ‘tramping developed into a significant parallel culture […] that was about more than simply homelessness and joblessness’ (2020, ix). Cutler even goes so far as to describe tramp discourse during this period as suggestive of ‘a philosophy and way of life for those alienated from, and dispossessed by, the rest of society—a society drunk on the capitalist dream’ (Ibid.)—while also finding parallels with ‘the philosophy of Cynicism’ (2020, vi). Thus we see in Klaus, Case, Featherstone and Cutler significant steps towards an acknowledgement of a body of work that Matthews, Levinson, Burnett, Vincent and Mayall have laid the groundwork in identifying. And yet, still, the current study is the first book-length publication to offer a detailed account of tramp literature produced specifically in Britain, in spite of the scale and uniqueness of the genre. It is also (as far as I am aware) the first recent attempt to offer a detailed overview of British fiction on homelessness more generally in the modern period. More importantly, perhaps—this is the first serious effort to attempt to situate select examples of literature on homelessness within the wider context of radical literature. 6.4  British Focus It is of course necessary before concluding this introduction to explain the decision to label the texts covered in this study British—especially seeing how not all of the authors to be considered were of British origin, and

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how many of them describe experiences outside of Britain (in particular, we will see that a large number of tramp literature texts chronicle experiences in North America and Ireland). Rather than defining these texts on the basis of the nationalities of their authors, or the countries in which they are set—I have decided to categorise them according to where their authors resided at the time of writing, and relatedly to where the texts were published. In substituting place of publication for author’s place of birth, my intention is to limit questions of nationality (although without ignoring them, or suggesting that they are insignificant) and to instead make the focus a consideration of discourses produced within established geographical bounds—for the by now hopefully obvious reason that I would like to try to shift the focus away from identity differences and towards existing common ground, in line with my interest in reorienting critical discourse around questions pertaining to the social totality. In terms of the decision to choose Britain as the location for this so-called common ground, and not somewhere else: beyond the obvious need to restrict the confines of this study by focussing on a single area, the most honest explanation I can offer is that (being half Welsh and half English) British culture is the culture that I am personally most familiar with. At the same time, however, in a study intent on exploring strategies of resistance against capitalism and disciplinary society—it does make sense to focus on Britain as a locality within which these trends have historically been especially developed and aggressive: explaining why, for instance, the British example has also preoccupied theorists like Marx and Foucault when they have explored related issues. 6.5  Literary Focus It is also perhaps necessary to justify the decision to focus on works of literature given the tramp’s presence in cinema and visual art during the period under consideration. On the subject of film: in an American context—a large number of films were produced in the early twentieth century featuring tramp characters: with the Biograph Company and Edison Studios producing a significant number of films with tramp characters in the first decade of the century, followed by a number of interwar feature films prominently featuring tramp characters directed by the likes of William Wellman, Lewis Milestone, Frank Borzage, D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin. As Amanda Grzyb writes, these depictions generally fall into two camps: on the one hand, pre-depression era representations in

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which the figure of the tramp is ‘both comedic and sentimental’; and on the other, post-depression era representations in which a sense of hardship is emphasised in a ‘prosaic’ and ‘factual’ manner (2004, 293). Both trends may be seen to consist of presenting the tramp as a victim in compliance with a wider disciplinary agenda—and yet, Grzyb does also find evidence of a minor counter-trend represented by Lewis Milestone’s 1933 Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, which exhibits signs of a reverse discourse tendency as its protagonist proclaims: ‘I find great enjoyment in unemployment’ (2004, 293). A handful of British films produced in this same era also prominently feature homeless characters: for instance, Gentlemen’s Agreement directed by George Pearson in 1935 and Strangers on Honeymoon directed by Albert de Courville in 1936. Undoubtedly such works are of interest, and yet I have not chosen to include them in this study for the reason that they do not in general embody a reverse discourse of the kind described in the introduction to this text—instead complying with the American trend described above of depicting the figure of the tramp as an either comic or tragic victim. A counter-trend can again be found in a 1922 film called A Sailor Tramp directed by Floyd Martin Thornton and in a 1935 comedy entitled The Guv’nor directed by Milton Rosmer—both of which are perhaps classifiable as examples of reverse discourse anti-productivist representations of homelessness. And yet beyond these two examples—the first of which is an adaptation of a novel by Bart Kennedy that we will already be looking at—I have found no strong evidence of this being a meaningful pattern. On the subject of art: a number of British artists produced artworks featuring tramps during this period— for instance, Archibald MacKinnon’s 1877 Jamie Morrison, John Templeton Lucas’s 1878 The Tramp, Isabel Codrington’s 1929 Old Tramp and Morgan Rendle’s 1936 Tramp’s Heritage. Again, however, these works generally exemplify the victim status of the tramp, indicating no clear sign of a reverse discourse tendency.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. [1956] 2019. Towards a New Manifesto, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Ian Macdonald and Martin Shuster. London: Verso. Adrian, Lynne. 1989. ‘Introduction’ to Tales of an American Hobo by Charles Elmer Fox. US: University of Iowa Press. Alcalá, Roberto del Valle. 2016. British Working-Class Fiction: Narratives of Refusal and the Struggle Against Work. London: Bloomsbury.

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Cutler, Ian. 2020. The Lives and Extraordinary Adventures of Fifteen Tramp Writers from the Golden Age of Vagabondage. US: Feral House. Deleuze, Gilles. [1988] 2006. Foucault, trans. Sean Hand. New York and London: Continuum Books. Depastino, Todd. 2003. Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. US: University of Chicago Press. Dionne, Craig, and Steve Mentz. 2006. Rogues and Early Modern English Culture. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Driver, Felix. 1993. Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834–1884. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Du Maurier, George. [1894] 1895. Trilby. New  York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. Eadon, James, and David Renton. 2002. The British Communist Party of Great Britain Since 1920. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Elden, Stuart. 2004. Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. London and New York: Continuum. Engels, Friedrich. [1880] 1999. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Australia: Resistance Books. Englander, David. 1998. Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain: From Chadwick to Booth, 1834–1919. London: Longman. Englander, David, and Rosemary O’Day, eds. 1995. Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in Britain 1840–1914. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Featherstone, Simon. 2014. ‘Tramping: The Cult of the Vagabond in Early Twentieth-Century England.’ In Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature, ed. Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi. London: Palgrave: 235–251. Federici, Silvia. [1975] 2012. ‘Wages Against Housework.’ In: Revolution at Point Zero Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. New York: PM Press: 15–23. Foucault, Michel. [1975] 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin. ———. [1976] 1998. The History of Sexuality: Volume One, The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin. ———. [1978–1979] 2000a. ‘Governmentality.’ In Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984: Volume Two, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley. London: Allen Lane. ———. [1967] 2000b. ‘Of Different Spaces: Heterotopias.’ In Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984: Volume Two, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley. London: Allen Lane. Fourier, Charles. 1876. Theory of Social Organization,  trans. Albert Brisbane. New York: C.P. Somerby.

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Freeman, Mark. 2003. Social Investigation and Rural England, 1870–1914. Suffolk: The Boydell Press. Freeman, Mark, and Gillian Nelson, eds. 2008. Vicarious Vagrants: Incognito Social Explorers and the Homeless in England, 1860–1910. Lambertville, NJ: True Bill Press. Fumerton, Patricia. 2006. Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Gape, W.A. 1936. Half a Million Tramps. London: Routledge. Gazeley, Ian. 2003. Poverty in Britain, 1900–1965. London: Palgrave. Gilmore, Charlotte Perkins. 1915. ‘A Unique History: From Herland.’  The Forerunner 6 (5): 123–129. Gluck, Mary. 2005. Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth Century Paris. London: Harvard University Press. Goodridge, John, and Bridget Keegan, eds. 2017. A History of British Working Class Literature. US: Sheridan Books. Google. 2020. Google Ngram Viewer. Accessed March 30, 2020. https://books. google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tramp&year_start=1800&year_end=200 0&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1;,tramp;,c0. Graeber, David. 2019. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. London: Simon and Schuster. Gray, Frank. 1931. The Tramp: His Meaning and Being. London: J. M. Dent. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1988. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Greenwood, James. 1869. The Seven Curses of London. Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co. Grzyb, Amanda. 2004. ‘Images of Homelessness in Narrative Film.’ In The Encyclopedia of Homelessness, Volume 1, ed. David Levinson. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage: 291–3. Hamilton, Robert. 1946. W.H.  Hudson: The Vision of Earth. New  York: Kennikat Press. Harman, Thomas. [1568] 1814. A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds. London: T. Bensley. Higbie, Frank Tobias. 2003. Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Higgs, Mary. 1904. The Tramp Ward. London: John Heywood. ———. 1906a. ‘A Night in a Salvation Army Shelter.’ In Glimpses into the Abyss. London: P.S. King & Son: 175–197. ———. 1906b. Glimpses Into the Abyss. London: P.S. King & Son. Hitchcock, David. 2016. Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Hitchcock, Tim. [2004] 2017. Down and Out in Eighteenth Century London. London: Continuum. Hume, David. 1998. Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Humphreys, Robert. 1999. No Fixed Abode. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jefferies, Richard. [1883] 1898. The Story of My Heart: An Autobiography. Maine: Thomas B. Mosher. Jennings, Frank. 1958. Men of the Lanes: The Autobiography of the Tramp’s Parson. London: Oldbourne Books. Jupp, James. 1982. The Radical Left in Britain: 1931–1941. London: Cass. Keating, Peter. 1978. Into Unknown England: Selections from the Social Explorers. Glasgow: Fontana. Kinney, Arthur. 1990. Rogues and Vagabonds & Study Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press. Klaus, H. Gustav. 1982. The Socialist Novel in Britain. Sussex: Edward Everett Root. ———. 1993. Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries; Working-class Stories of the 1920s. London and Colorado: Journeyman. ———. 2019. Voices of Anger and Hope: Studies in the Literature of About and Socialism. UK: Edward Everett Root Publishers Co. Ltd. Koven, Seth. 2004. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Kropotkin, Peter. [1892] 1995. The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings, ed. Marshall Shatz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kusmer, Kenneth. 2002. Down and Out on the Road: The Homeless in American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. [1947] 2008. Critique of Everyday Life, Volume One, trans. John Moore. London: Verso. Levitas, Ruth. 2010. The Concept of Utopia. UK: Peter Land. Lloyd, T.O. 1993. Empire, Welfare State, Europe: English History, 1906–1992. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Locke, John. [1689] 2004. Second Treatise of Government. London: Barnes & Noble Publishing. London, Jack. 1907. The Road. London: Macmillan. Lowe, Rodney. 1993. The Welfare State in Britain since 1945. Hampshire: Macmillan. Macey, David. 1993. The Lives of Michel Foucault. London: Hutchinson. Marcuse, Herbert. 2013. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. London: Routledge. Marx, Karl. [1867] 1915. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1: The Process of Capitalist Production, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr & Company. ———. [1845–8] 1975. Vol. 6 Marx and Engels Works: 1845–48. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ———. [1844] 2012. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan. US: Dover.

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Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. [1885] 1968. ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.’ In Selected Works in One Volume. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Mason, Paul. 2015. PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. London: Allen Lane. Massie, Chris. 1931. The Confessions of a Vagabond. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co. Ltd. Massingham, H.J. 1988. A Mirror of England; An Anthology of the Writings of H.J. Massingham, 1888-1952. Devon: Green Books. Mayhew, Henry. 1851. London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1. London: George Woodfall and Son. ———. 1861. London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 4. London: Griffin, Bohn & Co. McIlhiney, David. 1988. A Gentleman in Every Slum; Church of England Missions in East London 1837–1914. Pennsylvania: Pickwick Publications. Morris, William. 1890. News from Nowhere: Or an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance. Boston: Roberts Brothers. Nord, Deborah Epstein. 1995. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City. London: Cornell University Press. Orwell, George. [1933] 1997. The Complete Works of George Orwell: Down and Out in London and Paris, ed. Peter Davison. London: Secker and Warburg. Pittenger, Mark. 2012. Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present. London: New  York University Press. Ransome, Arthur. [1907] 1984. Bohemia in London. New  York: Oxford University Press. Ryley, Peter. 2013. Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-Capitalism and Ecology in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Britain. London: Bloomsbury. Roberts, Adrienne. 2017. Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare: Feminist Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation and the Law. London and New York: Routledge. Rose, Lionel. 1998. Rogues and Vagabonds: Vagrant Underworld in Britain 1815–1985. London: Routledge. Ross, Ellen, ed. 2007. Slum Travellers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920. US: University of California Press. Seaber, Luke. 2017. Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation. London: Palgrave. Seymour, Henry. 1894. The Two Anarchisms. London: Proudhon Press. Shields, Rob. 1999. Lefebvre, Love, and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics. London and New York: Routledge. Slack, Paul. 1990. The English Poor Law, 1531–1782. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Spade, Dean. 2011. ‘Laws as Tactics.’  Columbia Journal of Gender Law 21 (2): 40–71. Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. ‘Can The Subaltern Speak?’ In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Illinois: University of Illinois Press: 271–313. ———. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. US: Harvard University Press. Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. 2015. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso. Sumpter, Caroline. 2011. ‘Machiavelli Writes the Future: History and Progress in Richard Jefferies’s After London.’ Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 33 (4): 315–31. Thomas, Edward. [1906] 2009. The South Country. Dorset: Little Toller Books. Thompson, E.P. [1964] 1970. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon Books. Tronti, Mario. 1972. ‘Struggle Against Labour.’ In Radical America 6 (3): 22-6. ———. [1966] 2019. Workers and Capital. London: Verso Books. Tschopp, Albert. 1903. The Beggars of England in Prose and Poetry: From the Earliest Times to the End of the 17th Century. Basel: Franz Wittmer. Vorspan, Rachel. 1977. ‘Vagrancy and the New Poor Law in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England.’ The English Historical Review 92 (362): 59–81. Whyte, Ian. 2000. Migration and Society in Britain, 1550–1830. London: Macmillan. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. 2015. Edward Thomas: From Adlestrop to Arras: A Biography. London: Bloomsbury. Wilson, Thomas. 2006. The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles. Netherlands: Rodopi. Woodall, Ann. 2005. What Price the Poor? William Booth, Karl Marx and the London Residuum. Aldershot: Ashgate. Woodbridge, Linda. 2001. Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2003. ‘Jest Books, the Literature of Roguery, and the Vagrant Poor in Renaissance England.’ English Literary Renaissance 33 (2): 201–210. Worby, John. 1939. Spiv’s Progress. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. The Fragile Absolute, Or, Why Is The Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London: Verso. ———. 2017. ‘The Politics of Alienation and Separation: From Hegel to Marx … and Back.’ Crisis and Critique 4 (1): 477–480. ———. 2019. Slavoj Žižek Interview: ‘Trump Created a Crack in the Liberal Centrist Hegemony.’ Interview by George Eaton. New Statesman. January 9th.

CHAPTER 2

Reverse Discourse Tramp Memoirs

This chapter will analyse in detail the output of seventeen homeless authors who published life writing texts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and whose depictions of their experiences may be seen to reflect a new perception of homelessness oriented around the figure of the tramp: namely, Mary Saxby, James Dawson Burn, ‘Colin’, William Cameron, Josiah Basset, Morley Roberts, Bart Kennedy, W.H. Davies, Charles Landery, Chris Massie, James Milligan, John Worby, Jim Phelan, Matt Marshall, W.A. Gape, John Brown and Liam O’Flaherty. In addition to this it will also cover (although in less detail) the output of another sixteen homeless authors of life writing texts produced in this period  who might also be considered tramp memoirists: namely, George Atkins Brine, Terrence Horsley, Frank Stanley Stuart, ‘Digit’, Joseph Stamper, Trader Horn, George Garrett, Charles Prior, Hippo Neville, Stephen Graham, Harry Foster, Harry Clouston, Jan and Cora Gordon, Ryan MacMahon and John A. Bentley. As this brief overview indicates, by the early twentieth century the ‘tramp memoir’ had established itself as a definite and sizeable genre—and yet, this is a phenomenon that has received little critical attention. The only dedicated critical studies of tramp life writing currently in existence are Shannon Marie Case’s 2006 doctoral thesis on ‘literary vagrancy’ and Ian Cutler’s 2020 study of fifteen Irish, British and American tramp writers—while several authors, including John Allen and Lynne Adrian, have identified the phenomenon in an American context. Although these authors have each made significant contributions to the field, between © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Lewin Davies, The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73432-9_2

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them they have identified a third of the life writing authors presented in this chapter: Case’s study offers an analysis of the writings of Kennedy, Davies, Brine, Stamper, Massie, Gape and Worby; Cutler, meanwhile, analyses the writing of six tramp writers relevant to this study: Roberts, Kennedy, Horn, Davies, Graham and Phelan. To this list of eleven tramp memoirists who published works in Britain identified by Case and Cutler— this study adds an additional twenty-two, bringing the total to thirty-­ three. No doubt the list remains incomplete.

1   Chapter Outline As suggested in the previous chapter, the focus of this study—as well as being to demonstrate how these texts as ‘tramp memoirs’ reflect a new conception of homelessness—is to explore how some of them may be seen to signify a form of resistance against the capitalist and disciplinary tendencies that produced the figure of the tramp in the middle of the nineteenth century by either embodying (in life writing form) or representing (in fiction form) an appropriation and defence of this identity through a celebration of the tramp’s apparent freedom from norms relating to work, gender and sexuality, and community, and relatedly through a valorisation of the tramp’s potential and partial ability to escape the estranging effects of capitalism. In the process, the following analysis will avoid claiming that this trend (assuming it exists) is representative of tramp literature in general, or of the experiences of actually existent homeless communities. At the same time, in the following analysis we will attempt to determine whether select reverse discourse tramp literature texts that nonetheless present the experience of homelessness in this way are capable of being classified as part of a wider radical anti-productivist discourse, either in an explicit or in an implicit sense (in line with examples offered in the introduction to this text), or whether they should instead be classified as works of non-radical anti-productivist literature (or indeed as works that aren’t anti-­productivist at all)—while acknowledging that the texts will likely not fall neatly into one of these categories. In short, in addition to defining the attributes of the tramp memoir, we will be seeking to separate reverse discourse from non-reverse discourse tramp memoirs (as well as clarifying whether reverse discourse examples are indeed anti-productivist), before then distinguishing the radical from the merely subversive elements of identified reverse discourse texts, while also drawing attention to their limitations and simultaneously reinforcing the analysis from the previous chapter by underlining the discursive conditions that may be seen to have made all of this possible. While there is here the underlying intention of classifying the

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texts in question—the overarching objective is at the same time to offer as comprehensive an introduction to this body of work as we are able: contextualising its emergence and uncovering the major themes of its most significant contributors in the knowledge that this is the first study to shine a light on many if not most of the works that it explores. In practical terms all this means that this chapter will begin by outlining the discursive conditions that enabled the tramp memoir to come into being—attempting to establish key precursors to the emergence of homeless life writing texts—before offering a detailed analysis of texts in the reverse discourse tradition, in the process attempting to identify their subversive and radical credentials (as well as their anti-productivist credentials) alongside a sense of their immediate limitations. This chapter will therefore commence by offering a definition of the term ‘memoir’ in the context of life writing studies, and by providing an overview of life writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In looking at some of the major antecedents to the tramp memoir form—most notably The Newgate Calendar and the nineteenth-century Victorian (auto)biography—it will argue that while the first of these examples subtly preconfigured the reverse discourse tramp memoir, the latter more decisively laid the foundations for it by cultivating an interest in presenting the perspectives of the poor in compliance with a disciplinary agenda, either by discrediting the lifestyle or by celebrating exemplary individuals for having reformed. By then turning to the first-known homeless authors to have written life writing texts in Britain— namely Saxby, Burn, ‘Colin’, Cameron and Basset—and exploring how each of these writers was influenced by nineteenth-century repentance narrative life writing traditions, this chapter will reinforce this claim by suggesting that the origins of the genre can be traced to efforts to denigrate the homeless lifestyle as unproductive and immoral. At the same time, it will propose that in these authors we already find a discernible countertrend: with disciplinary repentance narratives simultaneously providing a platform for their authors to celebrate the more subversive aspects of the homeless experience, including a perceived unproductivity. Having explored these early prototypes, this chapter will then proceed onto three authors who were perhaps the first to decidedly develop the tramp memoir form in the direction of the reverse discourse: namely, Roberts, Kennedy and Davies—whose texts, we will see, mark a major progression towards celebratory accounts of the subversive elements of tramp culture described in the introduction to this study. The focus will then shift to the interwar years—presenting an analysis of nine homeless

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memoirists who published during this era and who might similarly be seen to follow this trend: namely, Landery, Massie, Milligan, Worby, Marshall, Phelan, Gape, Brown and O’Flaherty. These texts will be divided into four categories, each bringing a particular set of influences, idiosyncrasies and agendas: first, texts written by fiction writers; second, works written by authors who present themselves as criminals; third, travelogue memoirs combining life writing with accounts of the authors’ walking expeditions; and fourth, political tramp memoirs. These texts have been chosen for exhibiting signs of the reverse discourse and anti-productivist trends described in the introduction to this text—although in also offering an overview of the memoirs of Brine, Horsley, Stuart, ‘Digit’, Stamper, Horn, Garrett, Prior, Neville, Graham, Foster, Clouston, the Gordons, MacMahon and Bentley a sense of the wider tramp memoir genre and how it did not always conform with the reverse discourse mould will also be conveyed. Ultimately it will be argued that the overarching tendency within the later texts confirms the general hypothesis outlined in this book’s introduction regarding the emergence of a reverse discourse on homelessness in which the tramp features as a figure of subversion primarily on the grounds of questioning the disciplinary pressure to be productive (although not in a way that should be seen to be wholly representative of the experience of being homeless during this period)—while at the same time it will also be suggested that the extent to which these works can be considered to be radical in a Badiouian sense is more varied, though far from insignificant. In addition to this, several limitations of this body of work that impact our ability to interpret select works within it as a contribution to radical anti-productivist discourse will be highlighted.

2   Life Writing: Origins of the Tramp Memoir 2.1  Definition of the Memoir Form Within the critical lexicon, ‘life writing’ has become a popular substitute for the various other descriptive terms that it attempts to encompass, such as biography, autobiography, diary writing and memoir. This is in part owing to the cultural specificity of these earlier expressions: for example, it might be considered anachronistic to apply the term autobiography—not developed until the early nineteenth century (Booth 2010, 54)—to texts such as Plutarch’s Life of Alexander or Saint Augustine’s Confessions. It is also partly due to scepticism about the justification behind attempts to

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distinguish between life writing forms given the ‘generic blurring’ between them, and a growing awareness that life writing is ‘fundamentally intertextual’ (Saunders 2010, 5). Nonetheless, in this chapter the term ‘memoir’ will be made use of on the grounds that it may be seen to reflect formal attributes common to the texts to be considered. The critic Max Saunders has offered some clarifying definitions of the various forms of life writing text, suggesting that biographers ‘quote freely from their subjects’ letters or diaries or speeches where available’, that autobiographers rely ‘only on acts of memory for […] sources’ while also quoting from ‘documents, others’ biographies [and] their own journals or novels’, and that memoirists ‘quote conversation they claim to remember verbatim’ (2010, 6). Though Saunders emphasises that these distinctions are far from final—given how ‘individual works tend to combine’ different ‘varieties of life writing’ (2010, 5)—this account of the formal distinctions between different modes of life writing may nevertheless be seen to be of interest as an analytical tool. We might for instance infer from Saunder’s remarks that the concept of memoir writing differs from other life writing forms because within this model the mechanics of the process of recollection are rendered less clearly visible: the memoir is more of a verbatim than a documentary form, and thus may be seen to be closer to the dramatic monologue or first-person narrative than the conventional biography or autobiography. Another related hypothesis that might be developed from these remarks is that in autobiography the authorial persona is split—with the author admitting that time and experience separate them from the person they were at the time of the events described—while in memoir writing the two personas tend to be conflated. Though the memoirist doesn’t deny that time has passed—events in memoir form are perhaps more often described as if they are happening. In other words, we might make the claim that in general biography and autobiography situate the subject in a historical setting, while the memoir attempts to situate them in the present. Again, it’s important to stress that these are theoretical distinctions— and that, as Saunders insists, individual works tend to combine different approaches. Nonetheless, this distinction concerning the memoir’s verbatim qualities—suggestive of a focus on narrative in contrast with the supposed facticity and tendency towards historicisation within biography and autobiography—may be considered useful in helping to identify some of the key distinguishing formal and tonal characteristics of the tramp memoir. As we will see in what is to follow, there is in these texts an overarching

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tendency towards a verbatim approach: they tend to be, in other words, at the novelistic end of the life writing spectrum. At the risk of seeming to downplay the significance of ‘generic blurring’ between life writing forms, the term memoir is therefore adopted in what is to follow in order to highlight this characteristic. 2.2  The Eighteenth Century: Lives of the Poor As indicated, the first stages of analysis in this chapter are concerned with the conditions that led to the emergence of the tramp memoir form, and in particular with its significant precursors. In line with this, the next section will outline how the nineteenth century was the first period in British history in which large numbers of the poorer classes—predominantly working-class—were encouraged to write their life stories in their own words. Before exploring this development, however—the current section aims to contextualise it by offering an account of two crucial antecedents to the tramp memoir: first, those represented within The Newgate Calendar; and second, documentary evidence of first-hand accounts written or spoken by the homeless during the eighteenth century. In the process it will be suggested that both of these developments to some extent preconfigured the reverse discourse tramp memoir by depicting the outlook of the homeless poor and by occasionally embodying a mood of subversion, but that they can also be seen to reflect the disciplinary tendencies against which the reverse discourse tramp memoir was defined. In the process this analysis will confirm the general hypothesis developed in the introduction to this text concerning the evolution of attitudes towards homelessness and the formation of a reverse tendency, while of course avoiding suggesting that these developments can be seen to be wholly representative of the experience of homelessness during this period. 2.2.1 The Newgate Calendar The Newgate Calendar was a monthly bulletin of executions at Newgate Prison (London’s most notorious prison throughout most of the late medieval and modern periods) that became a popular form of eighteenthand nineteenth-century chapbook offering sometimes lurid descriptions of the lives of criminals, many of whom were described as vagrants or vagabonds. Clearly, there is a continuity here with the rogue literature tradition outlined in the introduction to this study—described by Dionne and Mentz as responsible for ‘manufacturing an imaginary criminal

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underworld’. And yet, at the same time The Newgate Calendar may be seen to represent something of a development—indicated by Heather Worthington’s description of the original version of The Newgate Calendar as ‘a frame of narrative […] purported to be the criminal’s own confessional and repentant story’ (2010, 14). Unlike texts in the sixteenth-­ century rogue literature tradition, in which (as we saw Comensoli argue in the previous chapter) authors ‘“discover” and expose in the service of society’, this would imply that The Newgate Calendar presents its criminal and vagrant narratives from the perspective of those concerned and that these texts therefore might be seen to belong to the life writing tradition. In other words, while Harman used ‘flattering wordes, money, and good cheere’ to wheedle stories out of vagabonds (1814, ii)—it would appear to be the case that The Newgate Calendar gave the homeless the opportunity to tell their own life stories in their own words. However, Worthington’s use of the word ‘purported’ in the quote above is worth attending to before drawing such conclusions. In reality, while these texts often claimed to be faithful accounts, they were compiled and in most cases written by various Ordinaries of Newgate Prison, and typically took the form of third-person narratives through which the perspectives of criminal and homeless individuals are mediated (Worthington 2010, 14). In this sense The Newgate Calendar is not dissimilar to other texts in the rogue literature tradition that came shortly after Harman—for instance, Robert Greene’s 1592 A Dispvtation Betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a Shee Conny-catcher, which as the title suggests takes the form of a dialogue between two cony-catchers (or con artists in the rogue tradition), thus purporting to represent the vagrant perspective (1964, 197). In the next chapter we will see that by the eighteenth century a literary tradition of narratives dubiously claiming to represent the perspective of homeless individuals had in fact long been established: from Stuart poverty ballads through to the picaresque and satirical fiction of authors such as Richard Head, Francis Kirkham, Bampfylde Moore Carew, Robert Goadby and John Gay. On the one hand, The Newgate Calendar may still be seen to mark a stage of development from these examples as the effort to present ‘the criminal’s own confessional and repentant story’ (albeit often in the third person) acquires a greater degree of legitimacy, being tied to the institution of a prison and to the lives of indubitably real convicted individuals. On the other hand, it marks a clear continuation of these earlier trends as it remains doubtful whether The Newgate Calendar can be categorised as an instance of homeless life writing.

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Nonetheless, acknowledging that though of a dubious status The Newgate Calendar remains an important precursor to the tramp memoir, we might ask how attitudes towards homelessness expressed within it can be seen to differ from the account of reverse discourse tramp literature outlined in the introduction to this text. An example of a depiction of homelessness in The Newgate Calendar can be found in a 1779 edition of it, which offers a description of the experiences of Humphrey Angier: ‘a native of Ireland’ who was an apprentice to a cooper in Dublin before ‘his master desired to get rid of him, on account of his untoward disposition’ so that he ended up living ‘the life of a vagabond for two years’ before subsequently engaging in ‘lawless depredations’ and running ‘a house of ill fame’ (1779, 357–8). After being sentenced to hang for a series of robberies, we are told that Angier ‘behaved with great penitence’ and ‘confessed his crimes’—following which the editors reflect: ‘We find he confessed he had never been happy; nor indeed can any criminal ever expect to be so’ (1779, 361). On the one hand, the account of Angier’s inclinations towards ‘lawless depredations’ and the allusion to him running ‘a house of ill fame’ may be seen to carry a trace of subversion as his masterlessness is to some degree sensationalised (a tendency that will be further proven to be characteristic of early modern representations of homelessness in the following chapter). On the other hand, the editors’ attempts to equate Angier’s criminality with unhappiness and to emphasise his ‘penitence’ are strongly suggestive of the disciplinary tendencies found in the examples of social investigation and exploration literature— and which Foucault indicates first began to emerge in a serious way in this period. This contradictory aspect of Angier’s narrative (as it concurrently sensationalises and disapproves) is clearly foreshadowed in a ‘preliminary advertisement’ to the text, in which the editors announce ‘the professed intention of the compilers of this work to exert their utmost endeavours to let entertainment and improvement go hand in hand’ (1779, 9). In turn, the depiction of Angier the criminal vagabond in The Newgate Calendar might be viewed both as a predecessor to the reverse discourse tramp memoir in its subtle subversiveness and as a prototype of the disciplinary discourses against which it was arguably defined. 2.2.2 Court Proceedings and Begging Letters This example of an eighteenth-century interest in the life stories of the homeless might prompt us to ask whether there were any other attempts to document the lives of vagrants during this period that were free from

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the mediating input of a compiler—and whether in turn such examples can be seen to more effectively foreshadow the reverse discourse trend outlined in the introduction to this text by, for instance, suggesting a riposte against denigratory accounts of the lives of the poor. Tim Hitchcock’s history of eighteenth-century homelessness, Down and Out in Eighteenth Century London—which uses a range of documents to try to present an account of the experience of being homeless during this period—may be seen to offer some possible answers to this question. General documents that he uses to chronicle the existence of the homeless include the ‘volumous records of the dozens of workhouses’ offering ‘detailed life histories’ of those seeking poor relief, as well as court records such as those documenting the life of Thomas Shaw—who after losing his job as a porter ended up ‘begging about the streets’ (2017, 7, 26). More relevant to this inquiry, Hitchcock also makes use of first-hand testimonies of eighteenth-century vagrancy in the form of court testimonies and begging letters. A clear example of the former category that Hitchcock alludes to is the testimony of the ‘adult male beggar’ Samuel Badham, whose story was ‘dictated to the Ordinary of Newgate’ after he strangled his wife to death in 1740 (2017, 215). Badham’s ‘account of himself’ is primarily a description of the circumstances leading to the murder of his second wife—and, as one might expect of someone who ‘seem’d desirous of being thought Innocent’, it is largely defensive (Anon. 2020). As for Badham’s descriptions of his experiences as a beggar—few details are offered, but it is indicated that he lamented the circumstances that led to him becoming homeless: for instance, he explains how he used to have ‘good Business’ as a shoemaker before his first wife passed away, following which he ‘came to Decay’ (Ibid.). There is hardly a trace of subversion here, as Badham extols the virtue of employment and regrets his status as a beggar. This may be attributed to the context in which Badham presented his account: Hitchcock warns against placing too much trust in court testimonies— describing how statements found in court proceedings would likely have been ‘rehearsed in depositions’, as well as noting that they may have been ‘mistranscribed’ (2017, 235). On the other hand, the absence of subversion might be attributed to the era: Badham was homeless at a time when relief was, according to Hitchcock, ‘remarkably comprehensive’—thus, there may have been less of a climate of hostility  for him to kick back against (2017, 133). Alternatively, Badham may have simply lacked a

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subversive inclination (for any number of additional reasons that we are not aware of). Whatever the case, the combined questionability of the court testimony as a form of life writing and the absence of a subversive agenda suggests that Badham’s account is clearly distinct from the later example of the reverse discourse tramp memoir, although like Angier’s narrative in The Newgate Calendar it remains a significant precursor. An example of the begging letters of the homeless that Hitchcock makes use of are those of the ‘disabled pauper’ Catherine Jones, who wrote to churchwardens asking for assistance in the late 1750s (2017, 131). Jones’s letters are occasionally bold—as Hitchcock notes, she at one point ‘berates the churchwardens for their lack of care’ (2017, 132). However, as one might expect from a series of begging letters, they are generally contrite—as Jones describes how she is ‘very soray to be so trubelsum’ (2017, 131). In general, then, there is again little here to indicate a transgressive spirit of the kind described in the introduction to this text. As with Badham, this relative lack of oppositionality might be attributed to the form of the text (as begging letters, the attitude may have been shaped by the ultimate objective of asking for assistance), or to the era in which they were written (as, like Badham, Jones may have been partly pacified by its charitable spirit), or to any number of additional external considerations. The important point is that, again, these texts do not significantly preconfigure the reverse discourse tramp memoir in terms of their general mood. 2.2.3 Summary Acknowledging the combination of The Newgate Calendar, court proceedings and begging letters—it is clear that multiple texts can be seen to have foreshadowed the tramp memoir during the eighteenth century in claiming to represent the outlook of the homeless, in addition to the multiple rogue literature, picaresque and satirical texts to be considered in the next chapter. And yet, this brief overview of a selection of non-fictional homeless life writing texts produced in the eighteenth century also indicates that such works were distinct from the development of working-class and tramp life writing that followed. To begin with, all of the texts just described were mediated by editors or compliers, transcribed inside a courtroom or written for the express purpose of eliciting charity—in each case compromising their validity as works of life writing. In addition to this, although there are some traces of subversion to be found, the general shortage—while accepting that there are multiple possible explanations in

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each individual case—is nonetheless suggestive in its consistency of how these texts were produced in a period in which attitudes towards the homeless may be seen to have been generally speaking pre-disciplinary, meaning that the reverse discourse tendency would very likely have been less developed, or not developed at all. And yet, while these texts perhaps offer less in the way of a heterotopic inversion of prevailing norms than we might expect to find in the later example of the reverse discourse tramp memoir—as prototypes for this development, they are clearly still of interest. First, this is in the sense that they serve as evidence of an emerging interest in documenting the life stories of the poor and the disadvantaged. Second, this is in the sense that they do still subtly preconfigure subversive aspects of the reverse discourse tramp memoir—even while reflecting a general tendency not to. 2.3  The Nineteenth Century: The ‘Age of Biography’ and the Emergence of Working-Class Life Writing In the nineteenth century, the eighteenth-century fascination with documenting the lives of society’s criminal underclass—embodied by The Newgate Calendar and by rogue, picaresque and satirical fiction traditions to be explored in the next chapter—may be seen to have evolved significantly as large numbers of the poorer classes (predominantly working-­ class) began to write their life stories in their own words, arguably for the first time in history. This section explores the emergence of working-class life writing in this period in the context of a wider nineteenth-century preoccupation with biography—in the process further developing our understanding of the life writing traditions that the reverse discourse tramp memoir may be seen to have grown out of, and against which it may be seen to have been defined. The literary critic Richard Altick once described the Victorian era as the ‘age of biography’, with James Boswell’s 1791 Life of Samuel Johnson serving as a late eighteenth-century model for what was to come (Booth 2006, 41). This is a contention that the literary historian Alison Booth cautiously accredits—writing that ‘nineteenth-century Britain could fairly be described as a period that sped up production of collective portraiture of “men of the time”’ (Ibid.). Corresponding with this, the historian Donna Loftus has pointed to an ‘increased production of autobiographical writing’ in this period, which she claims may be related to ‘the growth of print culture and a general interest in life stories and retrospection at the turn of the century’

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(2006, 67). This apparent interest in the lives of others is in itself nothing extraordinary. What perhaps distinguishes early nineteenth-century life writing apart from its predecessors is its aspiration towards the status of a science and its fixation upon the success of its subjects. Regarding the former attribute, the literary critic David Amigoni has written of the ‘call for biographical writing in the late nineteenth century to become disinterested and professionalized’ (2006, 14)—suggesting an interest in recording the lives of others with scientific exactness. Regarding the latter attribute, in describing the late nineteenth-century life writing habit of chronicling ‘the “exemplary” life of the author’, Loftus specifies that this usually consisted of an account of the ‘profession or occupation’ of the (auto)biographical subject, typically relaying ‘the challenges and battles that defined [their] early manhood, and the security that rewarded success’ (2006, 68). On the basis of these remarks, we can perhaps characterise Victorian biography and autobiography as subgenres of life writing that sought to describe the lives of professionally successful men in objective and exacting terms. This development is clearly at odds with the eighteenth-century interest in telling the life stories of Britain’s criminal underclass in a memoir-­ like and arguably sensationalised form—exemplified by texts such as The Newgate Calendar and by the literary works to be considered in the next chapter. It might further be hypothesised that this direction of travel is related to the general developments outlined in the introduction to this study: namely, the nineteenth-century acceleration of industrialisation that cemented a newly emergent disciplinary era in which attempts to regulate and control human behaviour were increasingly justified in terms of ‘the welfare of the population’ and ‘the increase of its wealth’. The transition within the domain of life writing from sensationalised accounts of the lives of the poor (which also admittedly often reflected proto-disciplinary tendencies) towards a new inclination oriented around rigorously documenting the occupational achievements of successful men can be seen to parallel this shift if we read the ascendence of the latter as a counterpart to previously described disciplinary attempts to punish the unproductive for their failure to contribute, replacing an earlier model of life writing text that was by comparison significantly more relaxed on this subject. We might then ask: how does this claim configure with my suggestion that the nineteenth century was also an age in which large numbers of the working-classes set about writing their life stories in their own words? To begin with—though the emergence of working-class life writing during this period is clearly a significant development, its prominence

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should not be overstated. It is true that John Burnett and others have identified a large number of working-class life writing texts produced around about this time—assembling a bibliography of ‘nearly two thousand documents’ chronicling working-class life in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all written in the first person (Rose 2008, 2). However, Burnett has himself been keen to stress that though this development demands recognition—the working-class autobiography was low down on the list of popular forms of Victorian life writing. He for instance writes: ‘in the nineteenth century the list was headed by politicians and statesmen, followed by the clergy (especially the non-conformist clergy), missionaries, doctors and soldiers’ (2013, xi). It is also worth noting—as Jonathan Rose has pointed out—that ‘the majority of these surviving memoirs’ were either ‘unpublished, or were self-published, or were published by local or radical presses’ (2008, 2). In short, although a significant and perhaps unprecedented trend—working-class autobiography was, in relative terms, a minor strand of life writing in the nineteenth century. Perhaps more importantly in the context of my suggestion that the nineteenth-century preoccupation with biography reflects the solidification of a disciplinary agenda by foregrounding the experiences of professionally successful men, Burnett also indicates that most working-class life writing texts very much attempted to conform with the established Victorian life writing model of celebrating the professional achievements of their authors. As he writes in his study Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s: In the Victorian age [the message communicated by working-class autobiographers] was often triumph over difficulties and misfortunes, the classic account of a rise from humble origins to a position of honour and respectability through hard work, self-education, thrift and a concern for the ­betterment of mankind. Equally commonly it was the story of redemption from early sin, profligacy or drunkenness by divine grace. (2013, xii)

A glance at just the titles of two working-class autobiographies from the mid-nineteenth century will serve to illustrate this claim: John Britton’s 1850 Autobiography of John Britton, F.S.A. Honorary member of numerous English and foreign societies and Samuel Catton’s 1863 Short sketch of a long life of Samuel Catton, once a Suffolk ploughboy, showing what prayer and perseverance may do. Accordingly, Burnett writes of the working-class autobiography tradition: ‘There are more memoirs of skilled workers than

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of unskilled, more of upper domestic servants than of lower, more of school-teachers than of farm labourers’ (2013, xii). In short, nineteenth-­ century working-class autobiographies can be seen in general to have followed the mainstream life writing trend of celebrating the occupational (and sometimes spiritual) successes of their authors—in the process also functioning as a counterpart to disciplinary attempts to punish the unproductive by illustrating the value of contributing to ‘the welfare of the population’ and ‘the increase of its wealth’. This, then, is the immediate backdrop against which the emergence of the reverse discourse tramp memoir might be set. The nineteenth century was an era in which, in keeping with an emerging disciplinary agenda, life writing tended to emphasise the importance of (auto)biographical precision and to concentrate on the professional achievements of its subjects, in contrast against former eighteenth-century tendencies. It is true that working-class life writing represents a significant development as the first example of a major body of work documenting the life experiences of the poor written in their own words—consolidating a trend that The Newgate Calendar perhaps marks a step towards in expressing an interest in hearing the dispossessed tell their own life stories. And yet, as Burnett’s analysis suggests, working-class autobiographies nonetheless tended to conform with wider trends within nineteenth-century life writing by promoting the value of reform and professional success (although there were undoubtedly exceptions). As we will see, a number of tramp memoirs (especially the earliest examples) can be seen to have functioned in the same way— using the life writing form to chronicle an experience of reform in line with a disciplinary agenda. However, in later examples classifiable as reverse discourse tramp memoirs, we will soon see that instead of being used as a tool to promote disciplinary values, the life writing form was transformed into a means of challenging this same disciplinary agenda by documenting the lives of the professionally unsuccessful coincidentally in a memoiristic style at odds with a Victorian fixation upon biographical precision—seeming to confirm Foucault’s suggestion that disciplinary modes of discourse can sometimes unintentionally lay the foundations for the formation of resistant identities.

3   The Early Vagrant and Tramp Memoir In what is to follow this section will begin to explore the emergence of the tramp memoir—beginning with the earliest examples of this new genre of homeless life writing, before proceeding to offer a detailed account of

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three tramp memoirists who produced works in the late Victorian and Edwardian era and who can be seen to have been the first to fully fit into the reverse discourse mould. As just indicated, the earliest attempts at life writing written by homeless authors were more strongly influenced by the discursive trends described above and will be seen to have been correspondingly limited in terms of their subversive and radical potential, although they do still contain indications of what was to come. In the earliest examples of Regency era and early Victorian homeless life writing—it is questionable whether all of the authors to be considered can even necessarily be described as tramps, with some of them perhaps more accurately being seen to reflect an earlier conception of vagrancy (hence my decision to label their works as vagrant and tramp memoirs). Nonetheless, the need to attend to the earliest examples of homeless life writing should become clear—in part because they foreshadow the reverse discourse that was to come, and in part because they simultaneously indicate what the later reverse discourse tramp memoir may be seen to have defined itself against. 3.1  Regency Era and Early Victorian Repentance Narratives: Mary Saxby, James Dawson Burn, ‘Colin’, William Cameron and Josiah Basset Before commencing with an analysis of the five Regency era and early Victorian homeless life writing authors to form the focus of this section, however, it is worth very briefly reminding ourselves of something previously alluded to—namely, the existence of working-class life writing texts in which descriptions of homelessness feature—in order to clarify what exactly it is that qualifies a text for consideration as a vagrant or tramp memoir, as well as to give an indication of adjacent literary developments. 3.1.1

 orking-Class Memoirs with Homeless Episodes: William Brown W (b. 1782) One example of such a text produced in the early nineteenth century is William Brown’s 1829 A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of William Brown, now schoolmaster at Middleham, Yorkshire: who was Thirteen Years on Board of His Majesty’s Ships, Glory, Barfleur, Triumph, Zealous, Ganges, Lively, Stag, Spartan, &c. As the title suggests, Brown’s memoir is primarily a sailor memoir—although it also contains descriptions of Brown’s life as a vagrant before and after his various sea voyages. In common with other texts to be considered in this section, Brown’s text adopts a repentant position—with a Preface to the text describing the ‘intention’ behind

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the work as being ‘to guard others against the fatal rocks upon which [Brown] has split’ (1829, iii–iv). There is, at the same time, a hint of subversion as in the course of his memoir Brown describes rogues he has encountered and his own cadging expeditions in vivid enough detail to suggest that the experiences are being partly glorified (1829, 113, 117). However, although this text is of interest for its clear crossovers with other texts soon to be considered, and for showing signs of a reverse discourse tendency, given its focus on Brown’s thirteen years at sea, I would suggest that A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of William Brown is better classified as a working-class memoir with episodes of homelessness than as a vagrant or tramp memoir. The five authors we are about to focus on are thus distinguished from authors like Brown on the basis that the homelessness experience is the dominant experience in their texts. 3.1.2 Mary Saxby (1738–1801) Turning, now, to the year 1806: although (as we have seen) earlier examples exist of vagrants speaking and writing about their lives in the form of prison ordinary accounts, begging letters and court testimonies—not to mention the semi-fictionalised accounts found in rogue, picaresque and satirical narratives—it would appear that it was not until the very start of the nineteenth century that a full-length publication appeared in Britain featuring the non-fictionalised life story of a homeless person written in their own words. Memoirs of a Female Vagrant; Written by Herself is a posthumously published eighty-two-page tract written in the first person by a homeless woman called Mary Saxby. In it, Saxby chronicles her various experiences on the road, including running away from home at a young age, a year spent living with gypsies, hop-picking in Kent, and time spent begging as a ballad singer. The text ends tragically, with Saxby renouncing her life as a vagrant and turning to God following the death of a child in a fire. Published in 1806, Memoirs of a Female Vagrant predates the period identified in this study as the zenith of tramp literature—so it is perhaps unsurprising to find that Saxby’s account of her life is suggestive more of the ‘masterless’ wanderer described by Beier than the tramp, characterising homelessness as a ‘problem of disorder’ rather than as the result of  a pitiable inability to find work. Nonetheless, Memoirs of a Female Vagrant is clearly worthy of inclusion in a study of tramp memoirs as the first example I have been able to identify of a full-length published life writing text written by a homeless person—and as a text that also exhibits signs of subversion.

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In addition to this, Memoirs of a Female Vagrant is worthy of consideration as a rare example of a memoir of homelessness written by a female author: in fact, it is the only text of this nature to be considered in any detail in this chapter. Other examples of life writing texts by homeless women do exist—for instance, Ben Reitman’s Sisters of the Road: The Autobiography of a Box-Car Bertha, the multiple memoirs of Jan and Cora Gordon, and Kathleen Phelan’s What Lamp Has Destiny—but as Reitman’s text is American (as well as being transcribed by a male author) and as Phelan’s text was written in the post-war period (Cutler 2020, 354), neither of these works fall within the purview of this study, while the Gordons’ writing will be explored in what is to follow but only briefly, owing to its questionable status as tramp memoir writing. As a rare instance of homeless life writing written by a female—Memoirs of a Female Vagrant is thus clearly of additional interest not least for the insights it offers into hardships that may have been either exaggerated or unique among homeless women, as we shall soon see (although at the same time it should be stressed that the text cannot be seen to be wholly representative of these experiences). In an essay on female working-class life writing, Jane Rendall has suggested that Saxby’s text is best categorised as belonging to a ‘particular form of the spiritual autobiography’ that she terms the ‘repentance tract’ genre: a form of writing ‘usually encouraged, sometimes forged, by middle-­class patrons’ (1997, 35). Indeed, as the description above suggests—Memoirs of a Female Vagrant is oriented around Saxby’s eventual renouncement of the vagrant lifestyle, echoing Brown. As one contemporary reviewer wrote: ‘This interesting, and authentic narrative records the immorality, distress, and conversion of the writer; with some account of the happy effects of her religious profession produced on several of her near relations’ (Anon. 1806, 470). Memoirs of a Female Vagrant also matches Rendall’s description of the repentance tract subgenre in the sense that it comes with a middle-class patron in the form of the Reverend Samuel Greatheed. In a Preface to the text Greatheed explains how he posthumously compiled Memoirs of a Female Vagrant—retaining ‘the writer’s phraseology wherever correction did not seem requisite for greater perspicuity and precision’ and taking ‘no other liberty with her narrative, than that of omitting a few passages, which appeared to me irrelevant to the leading subject, or liable to misconstruction’ (Saxby 1806, iv). The text also contains an editorial commentary, with footnotes underlining the author’s former misguided ways and reinforcing a sense of the value of her spiritual awakening. For example, at one point in the commentary

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Greatheed remarks: ‘A wandering life affords opportunities of eluding the effect of laws, while it tends to eradicate social affections, and to preclude religious instruction. The vagrant classes of the British poor appear to be inferior in civilisation to the Bedouin Arabs’ (Saxby 1806, 19). Saxby’s text itself generally affirms the negative attitude towards vagrancy so clearly apparent in Greatheed’s commentary—mostly by attributing Saxby’s homelessness to her supposed character defects. Initially, Saxby suggests that her impoverishment is attributable to forces outside of her control—writing that with her mother dying when she was ‘very young’ and with her ‘father going into the army’, she ‘was exposed to distress’ from an early age (1806, 1). However, as the memoir progresses an emphasis is placed upon her own culpability for her eventual fate. Saxby for instance writes that she was ‘continually removed from the charge of one relation to that of another’ owing to the fact of her ‘perverse temper’ and how she ‘scorned to be under the controul of any of my fiends, even at the early period’ (1806, 1–2). She also describes running away on several occasions in pursuit of a life on the road—again attributing this to her ‘proud, imperious temper’ and to her lack of ‘restraint’, before suggesting that this ultimately ensured that she forsook the possibility of being ‘very happy’ (1806, 8–9). In addition to this, Saxby openly regrets the pain she believes she has caused others by running away from home because of her ‘headstrong passions’: creating a ‘scene of distress, sorrow, and trouble’ through her ‘unguarded action’ (1806, 6, 9). At the same time, against these overt demonstrations of repentance there is a discernible tendency within Saxby’s text to romanticise the vagrant lifestyle. Rendall writes of Memoirs of a Female Vagrant that as well as being a spiritual autobiography: ‘it is also a lively story of her travels, an almost picaresque narrative’ (1997, 36). As a consequence she notes that the tract was ‘condemned by one reviewer in the Evangelical Magazine for its inclusion of so much unnecessary and improper detail of a past life’ (Ibid.). Indeed, multiple passages in Saxby’s text seem to reminisce fondly on the freedoms of a life on the road in a manner that contradicts the ostensible repentance of her pursuit of ‘liberty’ and lack of ‘restraint’. For instance, she at one point describes an occasion in which she managed to convince another young female to abandon her home and take to the road with her, writing:

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wholly left to ourselves, without anyone to controul us, we ran wherever our blind fancy led us, into all sorts of company, singing in alehouses, at feasts and fairs, for a few pence and a little drink. (1806, 9)

In this same passage Saxby describes befriending a group of gypsies—one of whom ‘had allured me with his dancing’ and who she describes as having ‘loved […] too well’—leading her to ultimately consent ‘to co-­habit with him’, in which state she ‘continued more than a year’ (1806, 10). In spite of Saxby’s insistence on the immorality of this arrangement—there are clear grounds here for the Evangelical Magazine reviewer’s objections to ‘improper detail’. One senses Greatheed’s anxiety that this passage might be misconstrued as he condemns Saxby for having ‘seduced’ her female tramping companion ‘to elope with her’—suggesting that this demonstrates ‘the fatal effects of vicious habits; and the inefficiency of every motive not arising from religious principle’ (1806, 9). Remembering that Greatheed omitted ‘passages […] liable to misconstruction’, we can only speculate on what other narrative digressions may have been removed on the grounds of being inappropriate for a repentance narrative of this kind. And yet, for all that we may attempt to emphasise its subtle transgressiveness—Saxby’s account of her life lays too strong an emphasis on the gruesome details to be regarded as a wilful celebration of vagrancy. In the course of her narrative she offers detailed descriptions of severe hardships—including the death of a child, losing her hearing and a life-­ threatening blood-poisoning episode. She also emphasises struggles uniquely related to being homeless and female: describing only narrowly avoiding being forced into sex work and how she has repeatedly been the subject of unwanted sexual advances. These factors—crucially combined with the repentant tone and the fact that the text ultimately resolves with Saxby renouncing her past and deciding ‘to settle; and […] be very good’—clearly warrant Greatheed’s suggestion that Memoirs of a Female Vagrant should be seen as a demonstrative account of the ‘vice and miseries of a vagrant life’, together with his hope that it might ‘prompt the active beneficence of the present age, to regard the wandering classes of the poor, with that attention which it is needful for their relief and reformation’ (1806, 27, v). Memoirs of a Female Vagrant can thus be seen as a meeting point of multiple different discourses concerning the subject of vagrancy. On the one hand, there are echoes of eighteenth-century traditions—with the

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influence of an editor and the ‘almost picaresque’ narrativisation feeling reminiscent of The Newgate Calendar and of other eighteenth-century fictional depictions of homelessness to be explored in the next chapter. At the same time, nineteenth-century tendencies are also clearly present, with the emphasis on repentance and reform indicating a disciplinary agenda— coalescing around the emerging (auto)biography tradition of chronicling ‘exemplary’ achievements (in this case, Saxby’s spiritual reform). And yet still, though disciplinary tendencies are clearly evident—it might be argued that they remain comparatively mild. While Greatheed may speak of the need for the ‘reformation’ of the homeless, he also writes of the need to offer them ‘relief’—suggesting a mood of greater tolerance, evocative of previously described accounts of eighteenth-century attitudes towards the homeless. Relatedly, this is clearly not a text in which homelessness is seen primarily in terms of the question of contribution: Saxby is defined throughout (both by herself and by Greatheed) in terms of her lack of restraint, or her masterlessness, rather than her unproductivity—as her decision to take to the road is presented more as a wilful defiance of authority than as a response to the pressures of working life. In short, the life story she recounts is closer to the masterless vagrant than the tramp conception of homelessness—which in turn might be seen to offer a possible explanation as to why her text offers little in the way of a riposte against capitalist and disciplinary society of the kind described in the introduction to this study, although there are moments in which the vagrant’s liberty and unconventionality do appear to be discretely enjoyed. 3.1.3 James Dawson Burn (1806–1889) Jumping forward half a century, James Dawson Burn was arguably the first author to publish a life writing text that might reasonably be described as a tramp memoir—although, as we will see, his text shows few signs of the reverse discourse trend outlined in the introduction to this study. As David Vincent writes in an introduction to a critical edition of the text, though The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy is ‘now scarcely known, even by historians working in the fields covered by Burn’s life’—it was ‘a popular commercial success’ in its time, with the first version going through four editions (1978, 1). The text itself takes the form of thirteen letters addressed to Burn’s eldest son, Thomas—initially published in 1856 and subsequently revised and republished in 1882. I will be referring to the 1856 version—described by Vincent as being ‘in every respect far superior’ (1978, 31). The letters describe Burn’s wide-ranging

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experiences—starting with his early life being raised by a pedlar mother and an alcoholic stepfather, before chronicling several years spent on the road and working as a navvy, prior to Burn becoming a hatter. The second half of the memoir focusses on Burn’s activities as a representative of a hatter’s union in Glasgow, his subsequent involvement in the Chartist movement and various vicissitudes relating to the ‘sixteen births, and twelve deaths’ that defined his married life—together with the pressures of having to ‘provide for’ his many children (1978, 200). As indicated, Burn was perhaps the first homeless memoirist to make extensive use of the word ‘tramp’ and to refer to the act of tramping. Accordingly, The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy might be seen to reflect the new conception of vagrancy described in the introduction to this text: oriented around increasing pressures to work and to be seen to contribute, rather than a sense of masterlessness. Confirming this supposition, Vincent suggests that Burn’s text offers ‘rare and invaluable insights into the consciousness of a working man as he struggles to make sense of his experience in an industrializing society’ (1978, 1). While this may be the case—in what is to follow, it will ultimately be suggested that The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy’s close proximity to the working-class autobiography and repentance narrative traditions limit its subversive potential, although a trace of this remains discernible. In attempting to classify The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy, Vincent suggests that it belongs to the working-class autobiography tradition, although acknowledging that Burn differs from other working-class autobiographers in that his childhood was ‘furthest of all from “civilized” society’—an observation that could well be linked to his claim that it is ‘the most consistently interesting of all the nineteenth century working men’s autobiographies’ (1978, 8, 31). At the same time, Vincent also suggests that like Saxby’s text, Burn’s memoir can be viewed as belonging to the tradition of spiritual autobiography. Although acknowledging that The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy ‘marks a sharp departure’ from this seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tradition in that it is a ‘secular work’, he insists: ‘Burn is deeply concerned with the history of his spiritual being and the extent to which he succeeded in avoiding the “temptations” which the outside world placed before him’ (1978, 3). Further substantiating this claim, Vincent notes that ‘reviewers saw the book as a gratifying example of self-improvement’ (1978, 28). Given the suggestion that Burn’s text might be seen to reflect both the working-class autobiography and

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repentance tract traditions (although I would still insist that it be classified as a tramp memoir, as homelessness remains the dominant experience), it is perhaps unsurprising to find that, like Saxby, Burn renounces his former tramping ways in the course of his narrative. As he writes at one point— summing up his attitude towards the experience of being a tramp and providing some justification for Vincent’s decision to classify him as a working-class autobiographer: Although I had been accustomed to a wandering life from my infancy, nobody could more heartily despise the calling than I did. My great desire was to learn a trade, whereby I could be looked upon as an honest member of society, but my great difficulty was to find a person who would venture to take one who had led such a vagrant life. (1978, 105)

As already indicated, The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy ends with this ambition having been achieved—as Burn writes: ‘For the last two years, I have held a situation of considerable responsibility, during that time I have come in contact with many of the first-class commercial men in the United Kingdom’ (1978, 201). As well as confirming the value of a productive life, Burn also writes favourably of the normative framework that accompanies it—reflecting at one point: ‘My home is the abode of happiness, and my own, and the lives of my family gently glide down the stream of existence in peace and contentment’ (1978, 201). Burn’s renunciation of his former life as a tramp and his celebration of the value of work and the home is accompanied in The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy by bitter invectives against the rest of the vagrant community. For instance, Burn writes of a homeless man called ‘Cheap John’ that he is ‘one of the most consummate vagabonds ever manufactured into the shape of humanity’—committed to ‘three points in the compass of human action, namely, fighting, whoring, and roguery’ (1978, 98). This passage is clearly suggestive of the rogue literature tradition of connecting vagabondage with criminality—but there is also an emphasis on unproductivity that is characteristic of a disciplinary outlook as Burn insists that Cheap John ‘would rather be fighting, than taking his supper after a hard day’s work’ (Ibid.). Throughout the text, Burn’s negative outlook towards the rest of the homeless community results in him shifting between feelings of self-pity on the grounds that he is a member of it, and feelings of hubris on the grounds that he considers himself above it. For example, when on the road he describes how he would sometimes pour out his ‘pent-up

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feelings in floods of tears’—while at other moments boasting that he is ‘taken for the son of respectable parents’ and believed to ‘have had a good education’ (1978, 73,  122). Ultimately, the narrative arc of The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy causes the second impulse to triumph, as Burn is able to brag that his application to ‘honest industry’ can be seen as proof of a ‘determination of character’ (1978, 199). In all this, Burn’s text clearly conforms with the general trend within working-class memoirs of describing a ‘triumph over difficulties and misfortunes’ and of chronicling a ‘rise from humble origins to a position of honour and respectability’—in turn conforming with the wider nineteenth-­ century (auto)biographical tradition of celebrating the lives of ‘exemplary’ individuals. It is true that there are moments in The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy in which reverse tendencies arise. As Burn writes towards the end of his text on the subject of tramping: ‘although this unenviable state was surrounded with innumerable hardships, and even occasional privations, yet it was not without its sunny spots’ (1978, 199). For example, at one point Burn seems to suggest that tramping encourages a heightened appreciation of nature—describing how his heart is ‘filled with unspeakable emotions of joy’ upon returning to Kielder (a village in Northumberland) on a day in which ‘Nature was in her loveliest mood’ (1978, 84). And yet, elsewhere Burn is pretty unequivocal regarding the impossibility of savouring nature or enjoying one’s freedom when on the road, as he writes: ‘A being in my situation could have very little sympathy with external nature: my sores made me savage, and my isolated condition turned all my thoughts upon myself’ (1978, 76–7). Whatever ‘sunny spots’ may feature on the road—they are transient: brief interludes in what is otherwise presented as an ‘unenviable state surrounded with innumerable hardships’. While The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy might thus fail to fully embody a subversion of established work-related norms in the manner described in the introduction to this text, there are moments in which Burn’s text shows some sign of radical potential in the Badiouian sense of pertaining to the social totality, most notably concerning its digressions on politics— although, again, I would suggest that it ultimately fails to fulfil this promise. A clue as to Burn’s political outlook can be found at the start of the text, in which he reflects on how his autobiography differs from that of ‘statesmen’ and argues: ‘men of this class have looked down upon the people as a distinct and separate creation from themselves, worthy of their notice only when they could make use of them for their own sordid

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interest or petty ambition’ (1978, 1). Burn’s objection to the ‘petty ambition’ of statesmen and his partisanship with ‘the people’ presents a clear indication of a populist strain that becomes prominent later in his text, as Burn attacks ‘the aristocracy’ who have been ‘found wanting in the management of the state’ (1978, 103). As suggested previously, Burn’s convictions ultimately lead to a career in politics as he is ‘appointed to represent the hatters’ in a Glasgow-based committee of trade delegates (1978, 139). However, perhaps unsurprisingly we soon discover that Burn’s political career and his subsequent foray into Chartism were characterised by a distaste for revolutionary ideas and an objection to indolence suggestive of his wider views on vagrancy. In the following passage Burn reflects on attending a session of the People’s Parliament in which ‘the sacred month’ was proposed as part of the agenda (a month-long strike proposed in 1839  in response to parliament’s rejection of the Chartist National Petition). Burn writes: A meeting was held in Greenock, in order to carry this hellish suggestion into execution; and I was not only invited to attend, but was pressed to take the chair. At this meeting I told the working men of Greenock that if they wished to cover themselves with infamy, by assisting in bringing the industry of the nation to a stand, they would do well to proceed. I told them also that one of the immediate consequences of their conduct would be, to let loose the whole vagabondage of the country, who would rob, plunder, and murder the defenceless members of society. (1978, 150–1)

Burn’s suggestion that a general strike would threaten the ‘industry of the nation’ and unleash murderous vagrant impulses is a clear indication of the extent to which he not only disowned his homeless identity, but also defined his political outlook in opposition to a perceived vagrant mentality. Further suggesting how an aversion to indolence is central to Burn’s political philosophy, he later reflects: I think it is very questionable, whether a more equal distribution of property would be beneficial to the community. Riches furnish an immunity from physical labour; if, therefore, wealth was more equally divided, it is very likely that industry would be cripped in proportion, and as a consequence, society would be a loser. (1978, 189)

This pro-industry strain to Burn’s thinking strongly indicates that his text cannot be viewed as part of an anti-productivist radical discourse of the

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kind described in the introduction to this text, although it might be considered radical in other regards. Instead, like Saxby’s memoir, it is clearly in a repentant strain—indicating that rather than resisting the disciplinary tendency of casting the tramp as both pitiable and unproductive, Burn chose to reinforce it. This said, in Burn’s political partisanship with ‘the people’, in his admittance of the ‘sunny spots’ that come with a life on the road, and perhaps more than anything else in the ‘consistently interesting’ nature of his narrative—Burn’s text may be seen to at least hint towards the direction that some texts within the tramp memoir tradition would later take. 3.1.4 ‘Colin’ (fl. 1855) The Life and Adventures of Colin: An Autobiography has (in common with several tramp memoirs) an anonymous—or perhaps more accurately, a pseudonymous—author, with a note in the Preface explaining: ‘the subject of the following narrative withheld his name in compliance with the wishes of his family, and adopted, as a Scotchman, that of Colin’ (1864, 4). The very existence of a Preface might seem to indicate that the text has been ‘encouraged’ by a patron of some kind, in common with Saxby’s. Accordingly, The Life and Adventures of Colin turns out to also belong to the repentance narrative tradition—although, to a distinct strand of it: in particular, a subcategory associated with the temperance movement. As the editor notes in the Preface, Colin’s narrative was initially ‘dispersed over twelve monthly numbers of the “Bristol Temperance Herald”’, first published in 1855 (1864, 7). Accordingly, The Life and Adventures of Colin is primarily an account of its  author’s alcoholism—describing  how after growing up in Scotland Colin  was apprenticed as a leather dresser before a predilection for drink forced him out of work and onto the road. While the employment-­ oriented and tragic aspect of this depiction of vagrancy clearly reflects the altered conception of homelessness described throughout this study, the focus on alcoholism also renders it somewhat unique. The following passage gives a sense of the general pattern of events in The Life and Adventures of Colin—with the author, in spite of being a skilled leather worker, losing job after job, sometimes owing to fluctuations in the labour market but most often owing to his appetite for drink (having been a ‘confirmed drunkard for upwards of thirty years’, although since reformed) (1864, 8):

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At last I got work at Ipswich, where my wife came to me. I continued there a year; and I regret that the birth of a son gave no rise to those kind parental feelings which are experienced by many. Having but little regard for persons or places, I left Ipswich, and went to London, where I got a good situation. My wife’s relations wished her to come down to Hitchin to see them, and bring the boy with her. She went, and I got so acquainted with a set of drunken shopmates, that when wanted by my employer I was generally in the public-house, and so I lost my situation. (1864, 29)

Almost six pages later, having found himself employment, the same scenario is repeated: But all my high wages could not keep me out of debt to the publicans. Having been away from the factory drinking for above a week, I was ashamed to return. I made ready, therefore, to start again on the tramp. (1864, 35)

As in Saxby and Burn’s narratives, we see here how Colin blames himself for the circumstances he finds himself in—with shame and regret featuring as recurring themes. An editorial commentary on the text (resembling the commentary in Saxby’s memoir)  confirms a sense of the bleakness of this vision: We have seen Colin still a wanderer, as he lost one situation after another— and a constant succession of accidents marks his whole career—a sad career of sin—denoting the wickedness of the man, and the long-suffering of God. No prosperity or happiness ever appears. (1864, 63)

Again mirroring Saxby and Burn, this situation is turned around when the author renounces his former way of life. In the accompanying commentary, the editor remarks that after Colin eventually manages to give up drink he is transformed both in ‘personal appearance’ and in terms of his ‘mental state’ (1864, 84). Thus reformed, we learn that he is able to reconnect with his wife and son and to return to a working life—following which the editor remarks that ‘the wanderer’ has finally been ‘brought home’ (1864, 100). In this emphasis on the restoration of Colin’s workplace and home life (albeit temporary, as his wife soon passes away), the disciplinary undertones are clear—as it is evident that Colin’s quality of life is assessed primarily in terms of his ability to work and his compliance with norms associated with the home.

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At the same time, in spite of this emphasis on repentance, there is in Colin’s text—as there is in Saxby’s, and to some extent in Burn’s—a sense in which the vivid detail offered in reminiscences of a life on the road threatens to undermine the general mood of self-reproach. Most notably, Colin’s narrative frequently centres on illegal activities and digressions— for example, when he describes fraudulently rewriting a letter from a Sherriff that he has been asked to deliver to a town Mayor. The initial letter explains how he has ‘broken the law by begging in the street’: Colin rewrites it as a request for assistance, forging the signature, and successfully presenting it to the Mayor—resulting in his being given a free meal and a new outfit (1864, 24). Though this criminal act is ostensibly regretted—there is an unavoidable ring of triumph to the account of Colin successfully duping the Sherriff and avoiding being punished on account of his homelessness. The same sense of conflicting impulses can be found in the following passage—in which Colin describes fashioning a human skull into a drinking vessel: One day as some labourers were digging to sink tan-pits, they came to a place where there were a number of human bones; and amongst them a skull uncommonly large. One of the men offered to give me a gallon of beer if I would drink it all out of the human skull. If I did not I was to pay for the beer. If I did, he was to pay; a wager no more to his credit than it was to mine. I took the skull, washed it clean, and drank every drop of the beer, out of it, using it as my glass. I drank the gallon of strong beer in twenty minutes. (1864, 59)

Colin goes on to describe keeping the skull ‘as a drinking cup’ for some time, until suffering from an episode of delirium tremens in which he is haunted by its former incumbent. Although Colin is keen to point out that the episode is not to his ‘credit’, he may well be accused—as Saxby was—of indulging in ‘improper detail’ in passages such as these, suggestive as they are of the illicit pleasures to be found in escaping the bounds of conventional morality by living as both a drunkard and a tramp. The editor’s commentary clearly indicates their anxiety that the text might be misconstrued along these lines, as they insist: ‘While much will be found to amuse, there will be yet more to excite feelings of pity for those who are enslaved to the use of intoxicating liquors’ (1864, 7).

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As well as containing a germ of subversion, there are moments in Colin’s text that are also suggestive of a wider radical agenda, as—again echoing Burn—we learn of the author’s interest in politics. In the following passage, Colin describes an incident relating to the controversial Corn Laws: After I got better, there was a gentleman of the name of Thompson came to Gloucester to give a lecture against the Corn Laws. My master—a great Tory and Protectionist—gave out that if anyone of his men went to hear it, he would turn him off his premises. But I and some of my shopmates went and heard the lecture. Our master said but little, but when he next paid us he told us that he should be compelled by the depression of trade to take off twenty-five per cent, from our wages. I would not submit to it, and left Gloucester in search of work. (1864, 60)

In this particular instance, the act of taking to the road can be read as a show of defiance against an employer determined to punish his employees for opposing protectionism. By thus presenting tramping as a form of riposte against the proprietary classes—as well as by elsewhere revelling in the details of its author’s former misdemeanours—The Life and Adventures of Colin can be seen to at least hint at the subversive and even the radical potential of the tramp memoir form, perhaps more explicitly than either Saxby or Burn’s texts. And yet, any attempt to read Colin’s memoir along these lines must be qualified by recognition of two significant caveats: first, that these traces of subversion show few signs of being especially anti-productivist; and second, that they are few and far between—with the greater tendency by far being to cast the author’s experiences on the road as the unfortunate byproduct of an over-dependence on alcohol. Remarks made by Colin towards the end of his memoir neatly sum up his position on this subject: I will now close my wretched history, so far as it has gone, with just observing that until observation and serious reflection shall teach a majority of the working men of England to become calm, sober, thinking men, uniting themselves to a Temperance Society, formed for the emancipation of the drunkard, and the preservation of the sober, they will continue to be at the mercy of the publicans, who thrive by the quantity of liquor that is rank, and who can look with indifference on the rags that are made by drinking, and view with unconcern the tears of the orphan, and the lamentations of the widow. (1864, 69)

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As we have already seen in the examples of Saxby and Burn, experiences on the road primarily configure here as regrettable—in line with the general focus on repentance that characterises these early memoirs of homelessness, and which is clearly contiguous with a wider disciplinary agenda. 3.1.5 William Cameron (1784–1851) William Cameron’s Hawkie: The Autobiography of a Gangrel may be seen to conform with this general pattern, while also showing signs of a reverse tendency. In a Preface to the 1888 publication, its editor John Strathesk recounts how Hawkie initially came to be written in the mid-nineteenth century, describing how Cameron penned his memoir as a ‘winter inmate of the Glasgow Town’s Hospital between 1840–1850 […] at the request of the late Mr David Robertson, Her Majesty’s Bookseller, and a kind friend to the poor waif’—explaining my decision to categorise it as an early Victorian memoir (1888, 5–6). A series of letters written by Cameron to Robertson that feature in an appendix to the text indicate that he may not have been entirely happy about publishing his life story, as he comments: ‘ye ken, I was alyes unwilling to tell the publick of my poverty’ before requesting ‘a morsel of tobacco’ as compensation (1888, 115). The persistent request for tobacco throughout these letters—‘I do not wish to be greedy but a bit of tobaco would be aceptibal’ (1888, 114)—combined with Cameron’s clear reservations about publishing his life story almost seem to indicate that he was bribed into the task. In addition to this, Strathesk’s commentary suggests (in common with Saxby’s) that the original manuscript may have been tampered with by either him or the compiler, Robert Donaldson—as he admits to ‘changes in spelling &c.’ and the removal of ‘some spicy bits here and there’ before the final publication in 1888 (1888, 6–7). In common with other editors previously considered, Strathesk also indicates a disciplinary motive behind the decision to publish the text—suggesting that anyone reading Hawkie ‘will be convinced by its perusal of the great evils of promiscuous alms-giving, sometimes called—CHARITY’ (1888, 7). Another contextual factor that is worth briefly considering is Cameron’s hybrid status as a vagrant who also worked as a hawker. As already indicated, Cameron was a ‘street ballads and chapbook seller’ (Beavan 2017, 159)—or in other words, a vendor of literature ‘aimed at the lower reaches of the market’ (Atkinson and Roud 2017, xvi). As Jeroen Salman has noted in his history of pedlars and the popular press, Cameron was not

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alone in being a chapbook selling memoirist, with several authors publishing such texts during the nineteenth century—for example, Douglas Graham, whose ‘life is described and fictionalised in the anonymous chapbook The History of John Cheap the Chapman’, published in 1785 (2013, 78). Given the content of this and other chapbook seller memoirs, it is tempting to classify the genre as a subcategory of homeless life writing. A Preface to Graham’s memoir, for instance, emphasises his vagrant-like qualities—suggesting that he is ‘a hater of hard labour’ and indicating his acquaintance with ‘the danger of deep ditches, midden-dubs, biting dogs and bogles in barns’ (1785, 2, 3). However, while Graham’s existence was both peripatetic and precarious, The History of John Cheap the Chapman is ultimately a description of a working life—spent moving from town to town, knocking on people’s doors in the hope of selling chapbooks and being offered ‘quarters’ (1785, 8). Graham (in common with others in this tradition) was first and foremost one among a network of ‘hawkers who carried chapbooks for sale in their packs’ (Beavan 2017, 154). Conversely, in Hawkie the bulk of the narrative is dedicated to describing Cameron’s experiences as a ‘gangrel’ (a Scottish term for a vagabond) from his early twenties to his mid-thirties, at which point he first ‘spurned the name of a cadger’ by selling chapbooks (1888, 91)—suggesting that unlike The History of John Cheap the Chapman it belongs in the homeless memoir category. In terms of the account that Cameron offers of his life of homelessness, Hawkie begins with a description of him entering into an apprenticeship as a tailor aged twelve, alongside the suggestion that it ‘did not suit’ his ‘disposition’ (1888, 12). It is perhaps significant to note that around this time Cameron was disabled in a harvesting accident (1888, 11). This circumstance is not dwelt upon in detail however, as the text then quickly summarises the next few years—with Cameron joining ‘a company of strolling play-actors’, spending a spell as a ‘toy-maker’, working for nine months as a ‘china mender’, and enjoying a ‘lucrative’ period as a Methodist preacher in Newcastle (1888, 15–6). In short, Hawkie outlines a series of attempts ‘to work a passage through the world’,  before explaining how ‘partly through the want of good resolution, or from simplicity’, the author ‘always failed’ (1888, 16)—thus indicating  an employment- and pity-oriented conception of homelessness suggestive of the figure of the tramp, although as we will shortly see the depiction of vagrancy  constructed in this text also shows traces of the earlier vagabond stereotype.

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Like Saxby and Colin, Cameron clearly enjoys regaling tales of his life on the road. In particular—he repeatedly describes ingenious schemes for deceiving almsgivers he encounters in a manner that echoes the rogue literature tradition already seen in Harman and to be explored in greater detail in the next chapter. For example, he at one point describes a group of ‘real or pretended wives or widows of soldiers or sailors’ who he claims were ‘the greatest sharpers and imposters I have ever met in the course of my twenty years’ travel’ (1888, 18–19). Cameron even recollects how he himself has frequently participated in such schemes: for instance, when he recalls falling in ‘with a piper who was shamming madness’—with whom he describes having managed ‘to extort, both fun and a good living’ (1888, 67). As well as feeling like a throwback to the eighteenth-century vagrant tradition—being more a celebration of masterlessness than of the vagrant’s non-compliance with disciplinary norms—this passage is clearly  suggestive of  a subversive edge, indicating the possibility of a reverse discourse inclination while also proving Strathesk’s contention that the text is ‘racy and dramatic’ (1888, 7). At other points in Hawkie, however, this sense of subversion is quite distinctly undermined. Initially this arises as Cameron presents his slide into vagrancy as regrettable—suggesting that he only ever joined ‘a company of wanderers’ because he saw ‘no possibility of ever redeeming myself ’ following a stretch of unemployment (1888, 17). Later this sense of disapproval is confirmed as Cameron seems to conform with Strathesk’s expressed desire that Hawkie serve as evidence of ‘the great evils of promiscuous alms-giving’ by objecting: ‘I have seen masons and wrights coming to the lodging-houses begging for a night’s lodging without a morsel of supper or breakfast; while the low beggars, taking advantage of their distress, and making money “like slatestanes,” never offered these unfortunate, real tradesmen a morsel of food’—prompting him to reflect: ‘I was sorry to see the public so ignorantly blind, to think that it was doing charity to put their money in the hands of imposters’ (1888, 36). As well as marking a distinct convergence between two models of vagrancy—the early eighteenth-century masterless vagabond and the nineteenth-century victim of unemployment—this passage is significant for signalling how Cameron ultimately succumbed to disciplinary tendencies by renouncing ‘low beggars’ on the grounds of their undeservingness. This pattern is repeated later as Cameron attacks a beggar who feigns blindness for a living after he catches him

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praying—questioning how he dares ‘to address God at night’ when he has spent the day ‘sneaking through the country […] begging and imposing on the public’ (1888, 84). Later in his text Cameron explains the contradiction that he objects to beggars and imposters when he himself used to be one by insisting that though he may have ‘often imposed’ on others, he did so while avoiding ‘charitable institutions’ and was ‘always sorry to see the imposter step forward’ (1888, 108). Confirming his allegiance to a disciplinary outlook, Cameron even goes so far as to reflect at one point—perhaps with reference to the 1845 Scottish Poor Law Act, which extended the disciplinary measures included in the Malthusian 1834 Poor Laws to Scotland: ‘I am aware that the authorities are taking steps against vagrancy, and it is time they did’ (Ibid.). In moments such as these—Hawkie quite clearly conforms with a disciplinary agenda in a manner that resembles The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy. This may have been because as an itinerant salesman Cameron saw himself as a run above such ‘low beggars’; it may have been that he was trying to please the individuals who had requested that he write his life story: whatever the case, it seems clear that Cameron’s text, while celebrating subversive aspects of a life of cadging and roguery (although not in a way that can be defined as anti-productivist), ultimately repents against this lifestyle in a manner that conforms with the general trend detected in these early examples of homeless life writing. 3.1.6 Josiah Basset (b. 1812) A final early homeless memoirist worth briefly taking into account is Josiah Basset—author of an 1850 memoir entitled The Life of a Vagrant, or the Testimony of an Outcast. In common with Saxby, Burn, Colin and Cameron’s texts, Basset’s memoir is a repentance narrative—with a Preface to the text containing a letter in which Basset openly declares his wish that publishing his life story ‘may be the means of leading some poor sinners to Christ, and of encouraging the people of God, and of bringing some glory to God’ (1852, v–vi). The narrative itself describes how Basset was born ‘near the Old Kent-­road’ in London to parents who were ‘pious, and had been in comfortable circumstances’, but who were soon after his birth ‘reduced to abject poverty’ (1852, 10). Basset then describes growing up in a workhouse in London before, shortly after the death of his mother,

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becoming ‘weary’ and determining ‘with my youngest brother to run away’ (1852, 14). What follows is a three-part narrative: in the first part, Basset describes his travels around Britain from John o’ Groats to Land’s End; the second part then deals with his conversion to Christianity in 1838 while a prisoner in Beverley Gaol, Yorkshire, along with his subsequent efforts to obtain work and to avoid deceitful begging; the third and final part describes how he joins the Union Street Chapel in Southwark and begins teaching in ‘a school for ragged children’ (1852, 131). Predictably, the narrative is strongly repentant in tone. Basset frequently describes how he ‘fell into vice’ when on the road—and in particular concentrates on the ‘most shameful falsehoods’ he used to invent in order to ‘excite pity’, suggesting that he was ‘in the habit of telling lies in selling [his] goods’ (1852, 32, 49, 57–8). At the same time, it is hinted throughout the text that Basset also regrets the idle aspect of his vagrant lifestyle: describing at one point how God apparently considers labour ‘commendable’ and how ‘Solomon reproved the sluggard’—as well as frequently referring to his desire to ‘obtain the necessaries of life by honest industry’ (1852, 86,  89), indicating that (as we just saw in  Cameron) Basset’s depiction of vagrancy both conforms with productivist-oriented conception of homelessness and adopts a disciplinary outlook. Unlike Saxby, Burn, Colin and Cameron’s texts, there are few moments in which this pro-work disciplinary agenda is undermined by a strain of subversion in Basset’s memoir: at points he does seem to point to the external prejudices that have perhaps inclined him to idleness and deceit—for instance, describing being ‘exposed to the frowns and sneers of the thoughtless and cruel’ when begging—and yet, his compliance with the repentant narrative model feels the most convincing of the five authors considered in this section, as he for instance describes how though he has made no ‘earthly friends’ on the road, God ‘has more than made up the loss in Himself ’ (1852, 105, 106). At the same time as he appears compliant with a disciplinary and repentant agenda, Basset roundly refutes the suggestion that any radical conclusions might be drawn from his experience on the road—describing at one point encountering a man ‘who had imbibed the principles of Socialism’ and who ‘endeavored to make me believe that the Bible was false, and tried to persuade me to leave off going to chapel’—leading him to respond: ‘I will part with health, with liberty, with life, rather than with my religion’ (1852, 85, 86).

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Nonetheless, although Basset promotes a disciplinary outlook and refuses to be drawn into reflections of a radical nature, his account of the experience of being homeless was still apparently considered insufficiently damning by the author of an appendix to the text to warrant the observation that ‘The EVILS OF VAGRANCY are not so vividly depicted in the work of my humble friend as might be desired’—prompting them to feel the need to underline the dangers of indiscriminate almsgiving together with ‘the necessity of continuous and systematic industry’ (1852, 148–50). The attempt to criticise The Life of a Vagrant for not emphasising these points clearly enough—in spite of the lengths that Basset goes to—may be seen to be indicative of the extreme pressure early vagrant and tramp memoirists were under to comply with a wider disciplinary agenda. 3.1.7 Summary In most of the authors considered in this section we have discerned a shift towards a productivity- and pity-oriented conception of homelessness strongly suggestive of the figure of the tramp. In  the majority of these authors, however, we have also  detected  a repentance motif which has typically been tied to a disciplinary agenda, with Burn fixating on the shamefulness of not working, with Colin regretting his failure to maintain a job and with Basset underlining the sinfulness of idleness (while Saxby and Cameron appear to repent their masterlessness more than their unproductiveness). In the case of Saxby it has been suggested that the absence of what Foucault would describe as a reverse discourse may be attributable to the fact that the figure of the tramp had not fully emerged at the time of writing. In also discerning a relative lack of this kind of subversion of the homeless identity in the other later authors considered, it is perhaps necessary to revise this hypothesis—and to suggest that though by the middle of the nineteenth century notions of the tramp as a pitiable and idle figure appear to have been fully developed on the evidence of these texts, it would seem that there was not yet at this stage much evidence of a strong counter-narrative. Although we see moments of transgression in most of the early Victorian texts considered here—there is little sense of this having had a clear anti-productivist aspect, and in each case the instances of subversion are (as they were for Saxby) generally superseded by an overarching narrative emphasis on the author’s reform: in Colin’s memoir by abstaining from drink, in Burn’s by finding gainful employment, and in Cameron and Basset’s by realising the shamefulness of deceitful begging. The two moments that hint at radical potential in Burn and

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Colin’s texts similarly fail to deliver—as an expressed interest in politics ultimately translates into pro-industry rhetoric and a singular act of protest, respectively. We might hypothesise that the failure of these early examples of the tramp and vagrant memoir to embrace even the subversive potential of the genre relates not only to the active role of commissioners and editors in shaping the texts, but also (and relatedly) to the fact that these authors were clearly bound by the conventions of Victorian (auto)biography and working-class autobiography, with its narrow fixation upon ‘the “exemplary” life of the author’ and upon their triumphs over ‘difficulties and misfortunes’. Whatever the cause: though these texts might be seen to foreshadow the reverse discourse tramp fiction trend described in the introduction to this text in various ways—they crucially do not exhibit strong levels of commitment to either the subversive or the radical possibilities signified by the figure of the tramp. 3.2  Late Victorian and Edwardian Reverse Discourse Tramp Memoirs: Morley Roberts, Bart Kennedy and W.H. Davies Conversely, towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, a group of three authors emerged who as well as being more consistently and  readily  definable as tramps also  shifted the emphasis away from the reform-oriented agenda that defined earlier works in the genre, and started to exhibit a greater degree of confidence in speaking positively about subversive aspects of the tramp experience—in the process developing novelistic narratives that echo elements of eighteenth-­ century life writing traditions but in a manner more generally responsive to a disciplinary preoccupation with the unproductiveness of the homeless, in turn enabling them to be categorised as reverse discourse tramp memoirists. At the same time, there are moments when these three authors—namely, Morley Roberts, Bart Kennedy and W.H. Davies—can also be seen to have followed the pattern established in Saxby, Burn, Colin, Cameron and Basset’s texts of promoting disciplinary values, clearly counteracting the tendency towards subversion (especially in the case of Roberts, whose status as an anti-productivist reverse discourse tramp memoirist is relatedly somewhat questionable). Similarly, in what is to follow we will also see that at times the literary ambitions of these authors— all three of whom went on to become established writers of fiction (as we will see in the next chapter)—appear to have fused with the lingering influence of nineteenth-­century (auto)biographical traditions, as they present

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themselves as ‘exemplary’ figures in a manner that suggests that the trope of reform did not entirely disappear with their arrival. Nonetheless—the primary trend that we will discern in these three writers is the growing establishment of a bold and novel approach, reversing disciplinary efforts to besmirch all vagrants on account of their non-compliance with disciplinary norms by celebrating the tramp as a figure of dissent—although instances exhibiting radical potential will be seen to be infrequent. 3.2.1

 verview of Other Late Victorian and Early Edwardian O Reverse Discourse Tramp Memoirs: George Atkins Brine (1811–1881) Before commencing with this analysis, however, it is worth briefly accounting for an additional reverse discourse tramp memoir that has not been included for detailed consideration and to explain the basis of this decision—namely, George Atkins Brine’s 1883 The King of the Beggars: The Life and Adventures of George Atkins Brine. In common with several of the early tramp memoirs considered previously—Brine’s memoir has a perhaps dubious status in terms of its authorship. In an introduction to the text the editor explains that the memoir emerged because Brine ‘wrote sketches of his history in a series of letters to Mr. Ribton Turner, then secretary of the Charity Organisation Society’—which it is suggested that Brine subsequently sought to prevent from being published (1883, 9). The posthumously published 1883 memoir is then described by the editor as being an amalgamation of ‘these letters’, ‘other memoranda’, the account of ‘a personal acquaintance’ and information obtained from Brine himself when he was later living in a workhouse in Sherborne (1883, 9). The distinctive narrative voice of The King of the Beggars might be seen to indicate that a significant portion of the text is Brine’s own account—and yet this description clearly raises questions about its verifiability as a whole. In terms of Brine’s life story, his account begins by describing how he was born in Sherborne the son of a ‘quiet, inoffensive’ postman, before being educated at a ‘Blue Coat School’ (a type of charitable school for the poor) in Sherborne for ‘six or seven years’ (1883, 10). Brine then describes getting an apprenticeship as a butcher but succumbing to ‘mischief and drink’—ultimately leading to his home town becoming ‘too hot’ for him after ‘thirty-two trips to Dorchester gaol’, following which he determined to ‘set off on tramp’ (1883, 11, 13). The rest of the memoir describes how Brine lived for over thirty years as a tramp in Britain (never venturing

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abroad on account of suffering from seasickness). At the same time, however, the editor at one point remarks that Brine was ‘not exactly’ a tramp ‘in the sense of the term as generally used’: a claim that is justified with the explanation that ‘he tried many dodges, from that of the travelling parson, “high flyer”, quack doctor, schoolmaster, and other professions’ (1883, 9). The implication here is that Brine was more of a ‘rogue and a vagabond’ than a tramp: an inference that Brine may be seen to have himself encouraged by alluding to ‘the celebrated’ vagabond Bampfylde Moore Carew— known as the ‘King of the Beggars’—in the title to his work (1883, 10, 184). Indeed, like Carew’s text (more of which later), much of the narrative of The King of the Beggars consists of Brine describing his successful adoption of disguises and begging ruses, such as pretending to be ‘incurable of fits’, posing as a ‘sham sailor’, masquerading as an ‘actor whose voice was lost by a severe illness’ and adopting the persona of a minister ‘fresh from Glamorganshire’ (1883, 29, 108, 160, 171). Also in common with works in the rogue tradition, Brine describes his multiple relationships with women—including ‘a black woman’ called Linda who used to be ‘a lady’s maid’ in New Orleans, a ‘blind woman’ called Mary with whom he travelled for three years and a woman called Nell ‘of a fiery, passionate nature, said to have gipsy blood in her veins’ (1883, 31–5, 41, 142). At the same time as being a sensational and novelistic account of imposture, criminality and womanising, The King of the Beggars also resembles literature in the earlier rogue and picaresque traditions in the sense that its protagonist and narrator is presented as an educated figure: as the editor remarks, capable of reciting ‘whole acts of most of Shakespeare’s plays’ (1883, 8). Perhaps unsurprisingly given its clear evocativeness of earlier literature on vagabondage, Brine’s text carries with it more than a hint of subversion, as its narrator describes stealing from the well-off—such as when he takes ‘a silk “wipe” from the pocket of a city gentleman’—and as he boasts of getting one over an ‘old magistrate’ who has had him incarcerated on ‘no charge whatever’ (1883, 71, 153). There are even moments in which Brine’s subversion appears to suggest an anti-work strain—for instance, when he is offered work and a home by a woman whose abducted child he has tracked down and restored to her, only to decline the offer, declaring the prospect ‘too humdrum an existence for me’ (1883, 146). And yet at the same time, Brine’s memoir can also be seen to backtrack on these moments of subversion—as it ends with the narrator reflecting, following the death of a fellow tramp, how ‘there was nothing before me but a similar fate’, leaving him ‘half resolved to go home and try to begin life afresh’ (1883, 181). The

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sense that Brine—echoing earlier vagrant and tramp memoirists like Saxby, Burn, Colin, Cameron and Basset—ultimately repents his existence is reinforced by a closing passage in which the editor refers to Brine proposing that ‘low lodging houses’ should be suppressed on the grounds that they are ‘great receptacles of vice’ (1883, 185). There are then three grounds upon which Brine’s memoir is perhaps less worthy of detailed attention than those of Roberts, Kennedy and Davies: first, its status as a work of life writing is clearly dubious; second, in resembling early modern literature on vagabondage to be considered in the following chapter, it is perhaps better classified as a celebration of the vagrant’s masterlessness than of the tramp’s inutility; and third, the disciplinary strain (which could well be attributable to its questionable authorship) may be seen to counteract the subversive and anti-productivist potential of Brine’s memoir. Nonetheless, The King of the Beggars is clearly a text of interest for its sensational subject matter, for its moments of subversion and for representing a curious amalgam of rogue and picaresque literature, repentance narratives and the reverse discourse tramp memoir. 3.2.2 Morley Roberts (1857–1942) The background of the first author to be considered in detail in this section, Morley Roberts, is somewhat unusual for a tramp memoirist. Roberts was born in London as the son of an inspector of income tax, and went to Bradford Grammar School before moving on to Owens College in Manchester, where he became part of a literary set that included his lifetime friend George Gissing (Jameson 1961, 10). A reviewer of his first book—which chronicles his experiences as a self-professed  tramp— described Roberts as ‘a highly cultivated, refined, thoughtful man, steeped in the latest London phases of philosophy and art’ who only in his more recent history had experienced ‘poverty, hard toil, and privation’ (Anon. 1887, 3). So how to explain the apparent disparity between Roberts the ‘cultivated’ cosmopolitan and Roberts the victim of ‘poverty’ and ‘privation’? As his biographer the novelist Storm Jameson points out, in Roberts’s text The Private Life of Henry Maitland—an account ‘of his own life at the time as well as the story of Gissing’s’—he writes: ‘In the middle of 1876, I had a very serious disagreement with my father, who was a man of great ability but very violent temper, and left home’ (1961, 10). Though Roberts may have experienced a degree of privilege in his youth—this account strongly indicates that he was forced into homelessness out of necessity. Later in the course of my analysis this view will be complicated by the suggestion of other possible explanations for Roberts’s

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decision to take to the road, but the key point for the present is that it was at least partially precipitated by hostile circumstances. On balance it therefore seems best to suggest that Roberts was a hybrid figure—part class interloper, part genuinely homeless. This ambiguousness is further reinforced by the fact that while Roberts spent enough time on the road to qualify as a tramp memoirist, his experiences of this way of life were only temporary: as he makes clear in The Private Life of Henry Maitland, after three years tramping he would eventually return to ‘life in a city, and the humaner world of books’ (1912, 31). In what is to follow we will see that Roberts’s uncertain status as a temporary tramp from a privileged background—whose experiences of homelessness were nonetheless framed (in the manner of a tramp) around struggles with work—is reflected in a general mood of ambivalence throughout his writing. Roberts wrote two memoirs—one entitled The Western Avernus: Three Years in the Frontier West published in 1887; the other entitled A Tramp’s Notebook, published several years later in 1904—both of which (like Brine’s text) mark a shift away from the repentance narrative origins of the tramp memoir form and towards a style that has echoes of an adventure narrative, given the novelistic rendering of events and the sensational subject matter. In The Western Avernus Roberts concentrates on his experiences in North America, and on his constant struggle to find work—at one point prompting him to reflect: ‘It really seemed to me that it was my fate to be perpetually in financial difficulties, for no sooner did I get anything than it vanished again, and when I got a good job it would not last’ (1924, 178). By the end of the memoir this situation has not improved as Roberts finds himself still hard up in San Francisco: ‘For three months San Francisco was a city of sorrow and despair to me, of laborious occupation or worse, of none at all, of poverty, of starvation, of discomfort’ (1924, 231). A Tramp’s Notebook ostensibly picks up from where The Western Avernus leaves off—reinforcing a sense of the horror of the winter of 1885 in San Francisco, living with ‘a quarter of a dollar, two bits, or one shilling and a halfpenny’ to his name (1904, 4)—before concentrating on his tramping experiences in Europe, Australia, India, Africa and elsewhere in North America. The cause of Roberts’s destitution as suggested in The Private Life of Henry Maitland is only referred to obliquely in the two memoirs—with Roberts hinting at ‘misfortunes’ endured in England at the start of A Tramp’s Notebook (1904, 2). Both texts are similarly evasive about Roberts’s background—although The Western Avernus contains several telling allusions, for instance with Roberts referring to having

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played chess ‘regularly at Gatti’s’ (a fashionable bohemian restaurant near the Strand) (1924, 144). In attempting to discern Roberts’s attitude towards the homeless experience—some differences in perspective between The Western Avernus and A Tramp’s Notebook might be noted. To begin with, The Western Avernus can be said to be more generally ambivalent in tone. On the one hand, it contains passages in which Roberts describes his enthusiasm for a life lived outdoors—indicating how, enjoying ‘a pastoral life, cooking rude meals in the open air’ on a ranch in Texas, he was ‘glad to be so far apart from men in that sweet fresh air’ and ‘to feel alive, volitional, not dead and most basely mechanical as at home in England’ (1924, 4). And yet by the end of The Western Avernus, Roberts’s enthusiasm for the tramp life appears to have diminished. The text ends with him confessing his desire to return to ‘England and civilisation’—with Roberts explaining how ‘converse with uneducated men’ has become ‘intolerable’ (1924, 238). There is a clear suggestion here of Roberts’s pining for the ‘the humaner world of books’—reflecting his ambiguous status as a tramp from a middle-class background with aspirations towards becoming a writer. At the same time, Roberts’s fatigue and weariness of the tramping life as it is described here is clearly related to his emphasis elsewhere on the ‘starvation’ and ‘discomfort’ that comes with homelessness (1924, 231). In contrast to this emphasis on the downsides of life on the road, A Tramp’s Notebook may be seen to offer a more reflective viewpoint. It opens with Roberts ruminating on the possible value to be found in adversity, in a passage that might be seen to set the tone for the book as a whole. Roberts writes: ‘But time is the vehicle of philosophy; as the years pass we learn that in all our misfortunes was something not without value’ (1904, 2). In this text, Roberts’s view on tramping is so imbued with nostalgia that he even appears to suggest an alternative motive for his decision to take to the road to the one offered in The Private Life of Henry Maitland, as he writes: ‘The travel-micrococcus infected me early. Before I can remember I travelled in England, and, when my memory begins, a stay of two years in any town made me weary’ (1904, 51). Following on from this, whereas The Western Avernus ends with Roberts keen to return to ‘life in a city’ and the ‘world of books’, A Tramp’s Notebook contains passages in which he expresses gratitude that his eyes have been opened ‘to world realities’ by a life of travel and adventure—going so far as to suggest that such experiences are of greater value than the ‘substitutes for vision favoured by […] schoolmasters, professors, and good parents’ (1904, 53).

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Roberts’s esteem for the autonomy of the tramp is paralleled elsewhere in A Tramp’s Notebook by his expressed admiration for other socially marginalised cultures—which may in turn be seen to offer an insight into his wider outlook, and thus into how we might classify him as a tramp memoirist. For instance, at one point Roberts describes encountering a group of Boers in Mafeking, characterised as ‘wandering folks who once came out of crowded Holland to resume a more ancient type’ and who ‘instructed me in what a false relation they stand to the rolling dun war-­ cloud of “Progress”’ (1904, 104). Imagining the Boers—no doubt dubiously—as wanderers seeking relief from modernity and progress, Roberts sympathises with them against the British largely on the basis of their ‘abhorrence’ for Johannesburg: a city in which he suggests there is ‘neither rest, nor peace, nor any school for nobility of thought’ (1904, 106). A sense that Roberts’s admiration of ‘wandering folk’ who have shunned prevailing notions of progress by escaping city life extends into a wider philosophy is communicated when we later find him questioning the civilising influence of ‘[r]ailroads and modern progress’, before writing: ‘I am by no means sure that civilisation is a good thing in itself’ (1904, 122–3). On the one hand, there is a definite sense here in which Roberts’s contestation of ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’ is indicative of a broader outlook that sets its sights on societal transformation. This is something that Roberts’s contemporary critics picked up on—with one writing of his ‘spirit of contest’ (Sherren 1915, 157) and with another describing him as ‘a rebel’ and ‘a scorner of the hard-and-fast restrictions of society’ (Gibson 1910, 122–3). On the other hand, however, the implied vision of transformation may be seen to have clearly atavistic and pastoral undertones of a kind that brings to mind the nature writers considered in the introduction to this text—such as W.H.  Hudson, who Roberts wrote a biography of, and with whom he was friends (Jameson 1961, 15). More problematic still if we are to attempt to present Roberts as a contributor to a wider radical anti-productivist discourse is the fact that routinely in the course of his memoirs he can be found to defend the virtues of a working life. In A Tramp’s Notebook, for example, Roberts writes of the two different types of tramp that exist in America: ‘those who take the road to look for work, and those (the larger number, I confess) who look for work and pray to heaven that they may never find it’ (1904, 267). He then explains: ‘When I was on the tramp myself in Oregon I was much annoyed by being taken for one of the truly idle kind’ (Ibid.). We might qualify this observation by noting that Roberts simultaneously objects to

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disciplinary attempts to judge the tramp for not working—suggesting that ‘Americans are too ready to confound two distinct classes of tramps’, and insisting that the ‘poor tramp is a much-abused person’ who should ‘extort at the least a little sympathy’ (Ibid.). And yet at the same time—this concession comes with the admittance that the tramp also ‘often deserves what is said of him’ (Ibid.). Roberts is, then, a complex author in terms of his attitude towards tramping—as might be expected given his status as a temporary tramp from a privileged background with literary ambitions. On the one hand, he clearly embraces the subversive potential of the tramp lifestyle: expressing an appreciation of the pastoral life, praising the value of an education in ‘world realities’ and arguing that tramps should not be divided into ‘classes’. On the other, he also distances himself from this same community: objecting that tramps are uneducated and idle in a manner that conforms with broader disciplinary tendencies. In terms of the texts’ radical potential, Roberts seems to also fall short as moments that hint towards the need for societal transformation—such as when he questions the value of civilisation and progress—ultimately resemble non-radical identity-­ oriented anti-productivist texts considered in the introduction to this text on account of their atavistic outlook. More problematic still, Roberts’s anti-productivist credentials become doubtful as he can be found to repeatedly extol the virtue of work. Given Roberts’s unwillingness either to commit to the radical potential of the figure of the tramp, or to celebrate the tramp’s refusal of work—it is questionable whether he should be classified as having made a contribution to anti-productivist discourse at all, yet alone whether he should be seen to be at the radical end of the spectrum. Nonetheless, in his clear willingness to celebrate the subversive dimension of the tramp experience in other domains less overtly connected to an eschewal of work (although it might be argued that his celebration of the tramp’s ability to enjoy nature and to become better educated in ‘world realities’ depends upon a partial liberation from work, in spite of a refusal to embrace this aspect of the homeless experience), Roberts clearly marks a significant contribution to the reverse discourse tramp memoir. 3.2.3 Bart Kennedy (1861–1930) Bart Kennedy was born in Leeds, and grew up in Manchester—one of seven children in a working-class family of Irish descent (Cutler 2020, 31). By the age of twenty he had decided to work his passage to

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America—thus beginning his life as a self-declared tramp (Anon. 1930, 13). Like Roberts, he ultimately gave up the tramp lifestyle in order to enjoy a successful literary career, publishing twenty titles between 1897 and 1926 before experiencing an ‘absolute drop from common fame’ towards the end of his life (D. 1930, 6). As Klaus has written in an essay on Kennedy, he ‘thrived in the 1900s when his name became a byword for the literature of “trampdom”’—before being ‘eclipsed by the rise of a new star’ in the form of W.H. Davies (2017, 167). Kennedy’s fiction output will be explored in greater detail in the next chapter, but for now the main focus is his 1899 memoir A Man Adrift; Being Leaves From a Nomad’s Portfolio—although other non-fiction works published by Kennedy will also be taken into consideration. A Man Adrift offers a novelistic account of Kennedy’s adventures and tramping experiences in North America as a sailor, an oyster pirate, a tramp, a prison inmate and a prospector in the Rockies. This sequence may to some sound strongly reminiscent of the American author Jack London’s better-known 1907 memoir The Road—but as we will see in the course of this chapter, this was in fact a fairly standard trajectory for homeless individuals passing through North America during this period. Unlike Roberts, in A Man Adrift Kennedy emphasises that his decision to take to the road was largely volitional: My great desire was to see and feel experience—to meet new and strange phases. To live is a fine and brave thing, even if you have neither a penny in your pocket nor a home nor friends. It is only the weakling and the coward who is afraid of it. (1899, 2–3)

While this may be suggestive of a spirit of adventure, Kennedy makes no attempt to deny the ‘hardships’ associated with homelessness in the course of his narrative. Like Roberts, he acknowledges that there are causes for the homeless to feel ‘sharp resentment’—arguing that to become a tramp is to be rendered ‘impotent’ as ‘your pulse is down’ and ‘you shuffle along’, in a manner that is clearly evocative of a new perception of homelessness in which the pitiable and unproductive attributes of the lifestyle are highlighted (1899, 78). Kennedy’s sense of the acute suffering endured by the homeless is one that runs throughout his work—prompting him to protest against ‘organised charity’ and the view that ‘one should but give to those that are deserving’ in his 1905 Slavery: Pictures from the Depths

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(1905, 40). And yet, while there is a clear emphasis here on the suffering  of the homeless—Kennedy might simultaneously be seen to lay a stronger emphasis on the upsides of tramping than other authors like Roberts. In part this is a question of tone—for instance in the following passage, in which Kennedy writes enthusiastically of the tramp’s proximity to nature and freedom from restraint: Though I had no idea where I would sleep that night, I felt to the full the joy of life. There was something so vital and clear in the air […] It was worthwhile being a nameless and homeless tramp for the sake of living and moving through a scene like this. (1899, 82)

At other times, Kennedy’s assessment of the tramp way of life seems to differ from Roberts’s in a more fundamental way. For instance, describing the aspects of tramping that counteract its obvious shortcomings, Kennedy writes: Still there are times when a fine moment comes to you. It may be that you will feel the curious sense of power that belongs to utter loneliness. It may be that you will feel the sense of freedom that comes from total lack of responsibility. No one is dependent upon you. No one is waiting for you. If people have a contempt for you, at least they let you alone. That is something. (1899, 79)

To begin with, this passage is of interest for reinforcing a sense—reminiscent of Roberts—of the possible value to be found in hardship and solitariness. In Kennedy’s 1904 A Tramp in Spain: From Andalusia to Andorra, this contention is reiterated, as he suggests that ‘the fine, stern test of hunger and cold and loneliness’ is of value for revealing ‘the real meaning of life’ (1904, 48).1 More of interest to us, however, in terms of suggesting how Kennedy’s attitudes towards tramping are distinct from Roberts’, is the emphasis placed on the tramp’s ‘lack of responsibility’ in the above passage. On the one hand, this may be seen to signal the possible outcome of a release from disciplinary norms relating to family life (a reading

1  In spite of its title, A Tramp in Spain is better thought of as a travelogue than as a tramp memoir—although Kennedy does travel in a vagrant spirit, describing how he enters Spain with nothing but a revolver, a passport and a knapsack (1904, 4).

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reinforced by Kennedy’s following remark concerning the advantages of having no-one ‘dependent upon you’). On the other hand, it may be seen to indicate a sense of Kennedy celebrating the tramp’s freedom from work. This second interpretation is validated if we attend to passages elsewhere in the text in which Kennedy’s objections to working life are unequivocally expressed as he writes: ‘Labour had brought me nothing but hardship and degradation. I had worked the blood and muscle out of my body to create wealth for others’ (1899, 75). Later, Kennedy insists that this aversion to work is representative of the general outlook of others forced to work to make a living: ‘I have been a navvy, and have necessarily mixed with navvies a great deal, and I must bear witness to the fact that I have never heard one of them speak of his work in other than tones of disgust’ (1899, 138). Kennedy even goes so far at one point as to depict tramp subculture as a form of revolt against these conditions—writing with characteristic wryness: ‘I should like to say a word as to the tramp in America […] He is a man who has come to the conclusion that hard, sustained labouring is bad for his general health’ (1899, 287). As well as signalling a significant divergence from Roberts, in these remarks we find perhaps the clearest expression yet of the tendency described in the introduction to this study—concerning the formation of a reverse discourse that takes ownership of the charge of indolence levelled against the tramp, redefining it as a symbol of the tramp’s freedom from norms that might be associated with capitalist and disciplinary society. These implications were something that reviewers of A Man Adrift were quick to pick up on, with one writing of Kennedy’s ‘preference for vagabondage, with all its shifts and hardships, to civilisation’—before objecting on the grounds that ‘he puts it rather too strongly’ (Anon. 1900, 32). As with Roberts, Kennedy’s reflections on the virtues of the tramp lifestyle are paralleled by an admiration for other communities that similarly appear on the fringes of society. In such passages we also find a basis for exploring how Kennedy may be seen to have pushed beyond a narrow concentration on the subversive qualities of tramp subculture, as he comes to reflect on the wider possibilities implied by a contestation of established norms. For instance, in writing about his encounters with indigenous peoples from British Columbia (who he refers to problematically as ‘Siwash Indians’2), Kennedy describes an experience of a ‘potlatch’—a feast at 2  As Cutler notes: ‘“siwash”—from the French sauvage, savage—became a generic insult for indigenous Canadians’—although Cutler suggests that this was ‘clearly not the way Kennedy intended it’ (2020, 40).

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which people distribute their belongings amongst one another—prompting him to remark that the ‘religion of the Indian taught him to amass wealth so that he might give it to others’ (1899, 241). He continues: ‘At this potlatch a feeling of disgust and shame came over me when I thought of the men of my own race who had the presumption to try and thrust their religion on a race who possessed a religion of their own that could impel them to such noble and fine acts’ (Ibid.). Kennedy sets up a clear opposition here between the altruism and immaterialism of this indigenous group and the imperialistic society to which he belongs, which he elsewhere describes as being ‘based upon the principle of theft’ (1899, 138). In A Tramp in Spain, Kennedy similarly sets up a contrast between the blind pursuit of wealth that characterises late nineteenth-century British society and an alternative model of social organisation—in this case provided by the people of Spain. Here, however, Kennedy’s interest is oriented not just around questions of equality and wealth—but work, as he writes: ‘the man of Spain is better off than the man of England’ on the grounds that they apparently have ‘less work to do’, and thus do not ‘have to conform as our people have to conform to that sinister and horrible paradox—to kill one’s self to live’ (1904, 254–6). Having established that the tramp is ‘a man who has come to the conclusion that hard, sustained labouring is bad for his general health’, Kennedy’s valorisation of examples of other communities who practise radical immaterialism and a refusal of work might be read as an attempt to translate the tramp’s values into a broader political agenda in a manner that verges on being explicit. However, this view of Kennedy’s writing is challenged by a consideration of his 1908 A Tramp’s Philosophy—a text that, though not a memoir, as its title suggests lays bare Kennedy’s views on tramping. On the one hand, there are moments in this text in which the critique of existing modes of civilisation is extended as Kennedy argues that ‘[n]o social system or state can be really worth anything where the paramount aim is not to allow the individual to develop to the fullest, both mentally and physically’ before suggesting that ‘this aim has never been the aim of any civilised state’ (1908, 249). And yet on the other hand, A Tramp’s Philosophy forces us to question Kennedy’s commitment to what this might be seen to imply, as he clarifies—objecting to the ‘baseless’ illusion that ‘the tramp is a danger to the State’: ‘The tramp is too much of a philosopher to be a revolutionist’ (1908, 11). This assertion is clearly significant, suggesting that though Kennedy is prepared to embrace the subversive potential of tramp subculture as an embodiment of a refusal to

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work, and though he is also prepared to celebrate equivalent examples of societies that have eschewed associated norms—he is in the end either unwilling or unable to commit to the idea that the tramp might serve as an agent for such change, instead electing to present tramping as an essentially passive (and perhaps even private) mode of resistance. Thus, while Kennedy’s writing may represent a significant development in the sense that it exhibits a greater willingness to embrace the subversive potential of not working than anything we have so far seen—it remains uncertain whether it can be read as radical, as while it points in this direction it ultimately withdraws from fully committing to what this might be seen to entail in a broader, societal sense. In this regard, Kennedy’s texts (like Roberts’) resemble those considered in the non-radical identity-oriented anti-productivist bracket described in the introduction to this text as any radical potential is redirected away from a totalising agenda. 3.2.4 W.H. Davies (1871–1940) W.H.  Davies is undoubtedly the best known of all the tramp memoirists who published works in Britain. George Orwell considered him a key early progenitor of ‘proletarian’ literature (1997b, 283), and he was also widely read and discussed by several of the authors considered in the course of this study: for instance, the memoirist and novelist Stephen Graham wrote that ‘one naturally thinks of W.H.  Davies’ autobiography’ when reflecting on tramp life writing (1927, 133), while the novelist and journalist Arthur Ransome would eulogise Davies in a fictionalised account of a doss-house poet (1984, xv). Davies was also unquestionably the most well-connected of the tramp memoirists—being a member of ‘a small coterie, that included W.H. Hudson and Edward Garnett’ (Waters 1953, 12), counting Edward Thomas as a ‘close friend’ (Hyland 1984, 7), and allegedly being ‘close to’ Hilaire Belloc, Walter de la Mare, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Jacob Epstein, Augustus John and Edith Sitwell (Cutler 2020, 161). Davies’s rise to fame was swift—and was perhaps aided by the patronage of George Bernard Shaw. One contemporary reviewer noted of Davies’s 1908 memoir The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp that ‘the name of Mr Bernard Shaw’ was ‘printed in exactly the same type’ and had ‘exactly the same prominence as the name of the author’ (Anon.  1908d, 3). Another put it more bluntly—questioning whether the book ‘would have attracted rapid attention’ without the ‘personal advertisement’ of Shaw (Anon. 1908c, 12). The suggestion that Shaw was responsible for Davies’s success may be considered a little unfair given that—as another reviewer

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also noted—he had already ‘received […] a chorus of discriminating praise’ with a volume of poetry published prior to The Autobiography of a SuperTramp (Anon. 1908b, 836). Nonetheless, the involvement of Shaw does perhaps go some way towards explaining how it is that Davies enjoys a different status to the other authors to be considered in this chapter. Davies wrote a number of tramp memoirs following the success of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, including Beggars in 1909, The True Traveller in 1912 and The Adventures of Johnny Walker, Tramp in 1926. In addition to this he also wrote three novels and a large quantity of poetry, much of which will be considered in the next chapter. The analysis in this section will concentrate primarily on The Autobiography of a Super-­ Tramp while also offering an overview of later memoir texts.3 The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp begins by recounting how Davies was adopted and raised by his grandparents in Newport. Davies then describes how in his early twenties, following the death of both grandparents—he abandoned a picture framing apprenticeship in which he had ‘no interest’ and boarded a ship to America (2011, 18–20). His narrative proceeds to outline a long period of tramping in North America (including an incident in which he loses a leg in a railroad accident) and Davies’s subsequent return to Britain, where he spent several years living in a common lodging house in London. Like Roberts and Kennedy, Davies takes ownership of the appellation ‘tramp’, and his depiction of the tramp experience is accordingly in line with the conception of homelessness outlined in the introduction to this text—as we shall shortly see, being primarily oriented around the question of productiveness. In common with much of the writing of Roberts and Kennedy, Davies’s memoir was also  written from a position of relative comfort—with Davies describing towards its end how he was picked up by ‘a critic of fine literature’, before managing to draw ‘the attention of some other papers of good standing’ with his poetry, enabling him to rent a ‘beautiful […] four storied villa’—albeit at a cheap rate (2011, 243, 244, 248). Later explaining the circumstances under which he was encouraged to write his memoirs, Davies wrote in a 1920 Preface to The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp: ‘This Autobiography was written on the advice of a number of friends who claimed that my life of adventure would have an interest for the public, distinct from any merit I might have as a poet’ (2011, 31). 3  Although excluding consideration of The Adventures of Johnny Walker, Tramp, which is of limited interest because it draws heavily from previously published works.

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The sense that Davies wrote his memoirs both from a distance and at the behest of his friends might initially prompt us to ask whether this is reflected in its content. Certainly, contemporary critics of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp picked up a sense in which the author—as the title of the memoir suggests—distinguished himself above the common run of tramps. Reviewers were quick to emphasise Davies’s ‘decent education’ (Anon. 1908c, 12) and to insist that he ‘is in reality a literary man’ (Anon. 1908d, 3). In a sense, Davies may be seen to have encouraged this: he makes his ‘literary ambition’ clear from an early stage in the memoir, and as has already been indicated—the book ends with a description of his success in this regard (2011, 18). Occasionally, in the course of Davies’s narrative his distinguished status can be seen to correspond with a negative view of the tramp community—for instance, when he writes of common lodging houses in which ‘no sign of authority was to be seen’ and in which everything seems to have been ‘entirely left to the control of these noisy men’ (2011, 147). Davies’s expressed preference for the more respectable Rowton House (2011, 148)—a chain of working men and women’s hostels designed specifically to cater for those in employment (Rose 1998, 62)—is also indicative of a strain of superiority that undoubtedly runs through the text and that has resonances of Roberts’s final weariness of the company of ‘uneducated men’. And yet, in spite of signs of Davies presenting himself as being above the common lot of tramps, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp is simultaneously full of praise for the tramp way of life. In part, Davies’s celebration of the tramp lifestyle resembles earlier accounts of vagrancy that romanticise the art of begging—to be considered in the next chapter in the works of authors such as Head, Kirkham, Carew, Goadby and Gay. This is especially true of Davies’s descriptions of tramping in America, in which he writes of times when as a tramp he was able to ‘get as much enjoyment out of life as the summer visitor’—being ‘well-dressed from head to foot’ and eating cake as if it is a ‘common food’ (2011, 31). In other moments, Davies’s remarks are suggestive of the later reverse discourse tramp literature phenomenon as it has been presented in the introduction to this study—as, like Kennedy, he praises the tramp lifestyle as an escape from work. At one point, for example, he boasts of having more spare time as a tramp than ‘rich merchants [who] could not spare more than a month or six weeks from business’ (2011, 27). Relatedly, as well as seeming to praise tramping as a respite from work—he also offers a positive appraisal of the community values that he argues characterise tramp subculture. Overlooking his previous objections, he for instance writes at one point of a common lodging house:

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We are all equal, without a question of what a man’s past may have been, or what his future is likely to realise. (2011, 245)

Certainly, Davies’s reviewers picked up on the way in which The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp  can be seen to herald tramping as an escape from work and the values that are associated with working culture. One wrote: ‘It is a prose poem in praise of Liberty, a polemic against the conventions which would make Duty and Work synonymous’ (Anon. 1908d, 3). And another: ‘As a record of a life lived in defiance of all the conventional rules of our modern civilization this volume is of priceless value’ (Anon. 1908b, 836). Undoubtedly, then, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp can be seen to embody both the reverse discourse and the anti-productivist trends described in the introduction to this text by inverting negative perceptions of the stereotype of the unproductive tramp. And yet, in spite of this—the final note of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp reminds us of the gap between Davies the successful author and Davies the tramp, and may be seen to partially undermine the subversive possibilities suggested elsewhere as Davies expresses his relief that he has escaped the shackles of poverty in order to enjoy a modicum of success as an author. He writes— as if his existence had been of no value until this reversal of his fortunes: Such has been my life, rolling unseen and unnoted, like a dark planet among the bright, and at last emitting a few rays of its own to show its whereabouts. (2011, 252)

One reviewer of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp picked up on this apologetic tone—describing Davies as ‘a weak-kneed “immoralist” who soothes himself with moral anodynes, and thinks confession good for the soul; a beggar ashamed of begging’ (Anon. 1908a, 728). The extreme difference between this interpretation of Davies’s memoir and that of the critic who saw the same text as ‘a prose poem in praise of Liberty’ makes clear the ambivalence of Davies’s position. One possible explanation for this mixed message—recalling Davies’s remark that the text was written with a view towards what might ‘have an interest for the public’—is that the regretful tone of his account of years spent ‘unseen and unnoted’ as a tramp betrays a commitment to meet public expectations. Regardless of the cause, Davies’s later memoirs are unquestionably more confident in positively evaluating the tramp

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lifestyle—as well as developing the memoir form further by blurring the boundaries between fiction and life writing, as they typically take the shape of essay collections or episodic accounts reminiscent of the short story format, and as Davies frequently conceals his identity behind semi-fictional guises. His 1909 Beggars, for example, offers a series of reflections and anecdotes on the art of begging—while presenting a much bolder and, indeed, provocative assertion of the merits of a life on the road. In the course of his narrative Davies defines the countercultural dimension of begging culture in explicit terms, setting up an opposition between beggars and stiffs—or ‘hard working men’—before remarking: ‘what aggravated me most was to be called a stiff’ (1912a, 42, 48). Echoing Kennedy, he suggests that American tramps and hoboes alike are united in their distrust of working types: describing how any tramp seen wearing a ‘heavy working pair’ of boots is ‘despised for being a shovel stiff’ (1912a, 43). In a British context Davies sets up a comparable opposition between ‘the true beggar’ and the ‘workhouse tramp’—suggesting that workhouse tramps discredit the wider homeless community by looking ‘on common bread as a luxury, and [receiving] it with so many thanks’ (1912a, 122–6). In moments such as these, Davies wilfully acknowledges the entitlement and resourcefulness of beggars as well as suggesting that working and workhouse culture devalue the oppositional function that homelessness has come to serve through its symbolic rejection of labour. Davies’s 1912 The True Traveller—a series of loosely connected autobiographical essays focussing on Davies’s tramping experiences in Britain— similarly does not hold back in terms of presenting the tramp way of life as preferable. In this text Davies writes: ‘when I had money [...] it was a blessing when it was gone and I was poor again’—before continuing: ‘I slept on summer nights with more pleasure under a tree or in a freight car than in a soft bed in a boarding-house; and the plain food I begged at houses, when I had no money, and ate in the open air, was as much enjoyed as the hot meals I bought at restaurants’ (1912b, 46). This passage can easily be read in relation to Lefebvre’s argument that a twentieth-century obsession with consumption has resulted in a ‘displacement of direct experience’—as Davies’s belief that there is more pleasure to be found in being a tramp than sleeping in a soft bed or dining in restaurants clearly suggests that a preoccupation with comfort and materialism limits one’s capacity to experience one’s surroundings. However, while passages such as those found in Beggars and The True Traveller perfectly exemplify the reverse discourse trend described in the

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introduction to this text—it is uncertain whether any of this qualifies for consideration as evidence of an active interest in the social totality on Davies’s part. An episode from A True Traveller might be seen to be elucidating in this regard. In this passage a stranger accosts a companion of the narrator, asking what it’s like to be a tramp and prompting the reply: ‘It is a hard life mate, indeed it is’ (1912b, 236). As soon as the companion is told by the stranger that they are themselves considering pursuing a life on the road, however, we are told that they ‘changed immediately’, before replying: ‘Take to the road, mate, and be a working slave no longer. I was in exactly the same position as you a few years ago, but I became wise; for I am just as well off now as I was a hard-working man’ (1912b, 237). The comic duplicity of this passage could well be seen to emblematise Davies’s position on tramping—as for the tramp companion, the pleasures and advantages of the tramp lifestyle are a secret that they have little interest in sharing except with those already on board. Another passage from a chapter entitled ‘The Happy Life’ in Davies’s memoir Beggars might be seen to validate the suggestion that the advantages of the tramp lifestyle are considered personal rather than political, as Davies opines: It is certainly a mystery how man got into this tangle, having to conform to the rules of civilization—up in the morning at a certain hour, and to bed at a certain time at night, with certain limited intervals for meals […] When I consider what pleasure it gives me to lie abed in the mornings at my own sweet will, I cannot help but feel pity for the great majority who must needs rise to answer the demands of civilization. (1912a, 74)

There is the hint here of a radical perspective as Davies bemoans the condition of civilisation—and yet rather than this translating into a wider impetus it is contained at the level of pity, with the implication that Davies continues to live a separate existence of contented idleness. In short, Davies’s continual efforts to cast the life of the tramp as superior in terms of the freedom from work, the spirit of equality, the avoidance of commodity culture and the capacity to appreciate one’s surroundings—all indicate how his memoirs in many ways supersede the example offered by Roberts and Kennedy in terms of representing a reverse discourse that subverts established norms and revels in the transgressiveness of the tramp lifestyle. It might also be noted that Davies’s texts do not make concerted efforts to reroute the celebration of the tramp way of life away from radical possibilities in the manner of these two authors. And yet at the same time, there is not much to suggest an overt

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radical agenda here, or to suggest that Davies was interested in demanding of the reader that they draw radical conclusions having been confronted with an unresolved issue, in the manner described in the introduction to this text. Instead, Davies appears to remain satisfied with the idea of tramping functioning on an individual level as a viable alternative to a more conventional existence. While this sometimes involves explicit criticisms of the established order—the suggestion of an alternative way of life thus exists primarily on the level of embodiment, with a limited amount of expressed interest in the possibility of more widespread societal transformation. 3.2.5 Summary In the three authors considered in this section we have seen firm evidence of a consolidation of the transition discerned in earlier authors towards a new conception of homelessness, as the figure of the tramp looms large alongside depictions in which the defining attribute is typically an avoidance of work. In addition to this, we have seen a clear shift away from the repentance narrative format and a move towards the more novelistic memoir form as each of these writers present their narratives as adventures or in semi-fictionalised formats. Relatedly, in wilfully confirming negative stereotypes of the tramp, Kennedy and Davies in particular—but also Roberts—clearly present themselves in an antagonistic relation to negative discourses reflected in social exploration literature, working-class memoirs and even in the earlier homeless memoirs of authors like Saxby, Burn, Colin, Cameron and Basset. In short, these three authors can be seen to represent the moment at which a reverse discourse on the subject of homelessness was clearly and forcefully articulated for the first time— opening the doors to prospective reverse discourse tramp memoirists in Britain. As for the question of whether these innovations translated into a properly radical anti-productivist perspective—the impression is more varied: in Roberts we find an interest in alternative models of society but combined with an atavistic outlook, and in no way oriented around a refusal of work; in Kennedy we conversely find a commitment to anti-­ productivist ideas, but alongside a refusal to imagine tramps as agents of social change as he instead elects to cast them as philosophers; and lastly in Davies we find invectives against civilisation in its current form but compromised by a contentedness to present tramping as an isolated act of resistance. Thus, in short, Roberts’s status as either a radical or an anti-­ productivist author is questionable, Kennedy resembles authors of non-­ radical identity-oriented anti-productivist texts considered in the

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introduction to this text, and Davies permits but does not actively encourage radical interpretation as he instead appears content with emphasising the subversiveness of the tramp identity as an embodied mode of resistance.

4   The Interwar Reverse Discourse Tramp Memoir It has already been suggested that the tramp memoir tradition was one that grew over time, finding its fullest expression in the early twentieth century. Undoubtedly the interwar years represent its zenith: with over twenty different authors publishing tramp memoirs during this period. In what remains of this chapter these texts will be divided into four subcategories— defined as literary, criminal, peripatetic and political tramp memoirs. While an attempt will be made to situate each of the identified authors within one of these categories, and to give an overview of their work—the bulk of what is to follow will consist of detailed analysis of two or three authors within each category, selected (on the whole) for being most clearly indicative of the reverse discourse and anti-productivist trends. Before commencing with this review, however, this section will begin by describing a collection of works not classifiable as tramp memoirs—including the writing of five working-class memoirists and three social explorers—each of which describes experiences of homelessness: the intention being to further highlight the distinguishing characteristics of the tramp memoir, while also to give a sense of the wider discourse. Following this, a brief overview will be offered of the works of four miscellaneous interwar tramp memoirists whose writing does not fit into any of the four identified categories, and whose status as tramp memoirists is in some cases ambiguous. 4.1  Working-Class Memoirs with Tramping Episodes: Will Thorne (1857–1946), Albert Pugh (b. 1867) and Ben Tillett (1860–1943) As was the case in the nineteenth century, multiple working-class memoirs published in the early twentieth century feature episodes describing how their authors spent time on the road. In his study Idle Hands, John Burnett has identified several of these—for instance, the Labour MP Will Thorne’s 1925 autobiography My Life’s Battles, which describes how at the age of eighteen Thorne and a friend went tramping ‘along the country roads, inquiring in villages and towns for work as we went’ (Burnett 1994, 161). Other texts identified by Burnett include the railroad worker Albert Pugh’s 1946 memoir ‘I Helped to Build Railroads’ in which the author similarly

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describes how he spent ‘many years in the late eighties and nineties as a navvy, tramping from one new line to another, with spells of unemployment between’ (Ibid.), and the dockworker and trade union activist Ben Tillett’s 1931 Memories and Reflections, in which the author describes having been fated to ‘tramp footsore, for many miles, through many docks in London’—as well as confessing to having ‘tasted the squalor of a tramp’s life’ as a child (1994, 167). Although each of these texts reflects a conception of homelessness in line with the account offered in the introduction to this text, as formerly I would suggest that they are best understood as working-class autobiographies that feature episodes of tramping, rather than as tramp memoirs that feature episodes of working life. This said—the distinction is not always so easy to draw, and some texts in the working-­class life writing tradition undoubtedly have a stronger claim. Of these, perhaps the most significant are the memoirs of itinerant labourers and the memoirs of sailors—both of which are often on the cusp of being tramp memoirs. 4.2  Itinerant Labourer and Sailor Memoirs with Tramping Episodes: Fred Bower (1871–1942) and J.E. Patterson (1866–1919) An example of the former category can be found in Fred Bower’s 1936 Rolling Stonemason: An Autobiography, which describes the author’s experiences as ‘what, in America, is called a hobo’—travelling up and down Britain (and across four continents) ‘working on town halls, cathedrals, art galleries, churches, mansions, houses, and business premises’ as a stone mason (2015, 22). Rolling Stonemason also contains passages in which Bower describes his ‘wanderlust’ and recalls riding the rails in America (2015, 60). An example of the latter category can be found in J.E. Patterson’s 1911 My Vagabondgage, a sailor memoir that includes an account of Patterson running away from home as a child, an episode in which he describes being ‘a tramp with “no visible means of subsistence”’ and a passage in which he is forced to ‘cast about for employment’ (1911, 42,  300). Patterson’s descriptions of these experiences may at times be seen to resemble those of other authors considered in this chapter as he extols the ‘feeling of pleasure, a sensation of being more my own master than ever’ (1911, 42). As these accounts suggest, Bower and Patterson’s texts undoubtedly come closer than Thorne, Pugh or Tillett’s autobiographies to being classifiable as tramp memoirs—and yet, the focus for Bower is clearly on his identity as a stone mason and for Patterson on his identity as a sailor, making it hard to classify either of these authors as tramp memoirists. At the same time, there are perhaps traces of subversion in each of

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these authors—indicating that they may still be seen to have contributed (in a discrete way) to a reverse discourse on homelessness. 4.3  Social Explorers Who Became Tramps: Frank Gray (1880–1935), Frank Jennings (b. 1898) and George Orwell (1903–1950) Another group of interwar authors worth briefly considering whose texts may seem to cross over into tramp memoir territory are those who wrote of their experiences of homelessness but in the social exploration tradition—a genre in which ‘representatives of upper- or middle-class life […] cast themselves as “explorers”, entering […] a world inhabited by the poor and the destitute’ (Keating 1978, 9). In the introduction to this text an overview of this genre has already been offered—suggesting that it might be read as an example of a disciplinary discourse that denigrates the homeless. The genre is worth reconsidering here, however, on account of an interesting development that occurred within it during the interwar period: namely the fact that—perhaps influenced by the emergence of workingclass life writing and other documentary forms—social explorers writing about homelessness can be seen to have taken the art of ‘becoming temporarily one of’ those they were observing to extreme lengths (Keating 1978, 16). One example of this tendency can be found in the writings of the social explorer and politician Frank Gray, who not only describes having smeared his ‘whole body over with dirty oil from a motor engine’ in order to pass as a tramp, but also relays his attempts to adopt the tramp’s mindset—telling the reader: ‘I hate the owner of each passing car. I am at war with society’ (1931, 9, 47). Another example of a social explorer going to extreme lengths to imitate the tramp is the parson Frank Jennings, who wrote multiple accounts of his various sojourns ‘in London’s “down-­and-­ out” world’ during the twenties and thirties (1926, 11)—and who later described how over a period of thirty-six years he went tramping for ‘three to four months’ every year (1958, 11). Jennings similarly attempted to adopt the psychology of a tramp: writing in a US context of his desire to ‘learn what went on in the mind and heart of a man on the Bowery’ (1947, 14). Finally we might consider the example of George Orwell, who wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London of his efforts ‘to understand what really goes on in the souls of plongeurs and tramps and Embankment sleepers—resulting in a text that could easily be mistaken for the account of someone who was genuinely impoverished, as he describes how when in Paris his ‘money oozed away’ and he spent ‘several days on dry bread’ (1997a, 36, 215), conveniently forgetting to mention that his aunt, Nellie

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Limousin, lived just around the corner (Crick 1980, 114). Clearly all three of these authors—each of whom explicitly refers to the figure of the tramp—reflect a new conception of homelessness. And yet, although the extreme efforts of authors like Gray, Jennings and Orwell to experience life as a tramp sometimes cause their texts to read like tramp memoirs—I would suggest that they still remain in the social exploration tradition. At the same time, it is also questionable whether any of these three authors can be seen to have contributed to the reverse discourse trend described throughout this study—as each of them can at various moments be found to betray their status as interlopers motivated by a disciplinary agenda: for example, when Gray suggests that the sight of these ‘unhappy, ill-clad, and frequently unclean men’ is not ‘creditable to a nation’ (1931, Preface); when Jennings proposes a ‘farm colony system’ for dealing with tramps (1926, 181); and when Orwell (as we have already seen) likewise proposes a ‘workhouse farm system’ (1997a, 208). Thus, while these texts are clearly of interest for indicating increased levels of intrigue during this period in the figure of the tramp—the interloping statuses of their authors and the disciplinary outlooks offered in the texts indicate that they are distinct from both the tramp memoir and the reverse discourse traditions (although it is worth remarking that closer scrutiny of their works may also indicate traces of the latter). 4.4  Miscellaneous Tramp Memoirs: Terence Horsley (1904–1949), Frank Stanley Stuart (b. 1904), ‘Digit’ (fl. 1924) and Joseph Stamper (1886–1974) In addition to acknowledging the two adjacent genres of working-class memoirs and social exploration texts featuring episodes of tramping, it is also worth briefly summarising the work of four authors who conversely can just about be classified as tramp memoirists but whose writing resists being placed in any of the identified interwar subcategories and whose status as tramp memoirists remains somewhat dubious. The first two such instances are perhaps best described as ghostwritten tramp memoirs: Terrence Horsley’s 1931 The Odyssey of an Out of Work and Frank Stanley Stuart’s 1937 Vagabond. The third is a 1924 publication by an author writing under the pseudonym ‘Digit’ entitled The Confessions of a Twentieth Century Hobo—a text that sits somewhere between a tramp memoir and a social exploration text. The fourth, Joseph Stamper’s 1931 memoir Less Than Dust, can be read as a fusion of the tramp memoir and a work of fiction. As should be clear from this description: all of these authors can be seen to have volatile statuses as tramp memoirists. My primary reason for

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not offering a detailed analysis of their works and thus confining them to the margins of this study is, however, the fact that they are also not wholly exemplary of either the reverse discourse or the anti-productivist trends described throughout the course of this study—although traces of each can still be discerned within their writing. Terence Horsely, the author of The Odyssey of an Out of Work, was a journalist from Hartlepool who wrote a number of books on sporting activities, including fishing, aviation, shooting and motoring—and who had a predilection for rounding up tramps in his car. In his 1932 text Round England in an Eight Pound Car, for instance, Horsley describes picking up a woman who ‘in official circles […] would have been classed as a female tramp and a suspicious person’—‘a post-war tragedy en route for the casual ward’ (1932, 19, 28). In a Preface to The Odyssey of an Out of Work a parallel incident is presented as Horsley describes driving past a ‘lonely, upright’ figure on a road just outside of Durham—‘more like a ghost than a man’—before resolving to give him ‘the job of making a book’ (1931, vii, xi). It is implied that the subsequent authorship of The Odyssey of an Out of Work was a collaborative effort—as Horsley explains: ‘While we were writing he had fifteen shillings on which to live’ (Ibid.). This seems to confirm the suggestion made by a reviewer that the text was transcribed from an oral account given by the homeless man encountered in Durham: ‘This book is, I am assured, the true and authentic record, taken down almost word for word by Mr. Horsley, of the experiences of a skilled workman’ (Anon. 1931a, 4). The text itself is the life story of an unemployed electrician from Glasgow, relayed in the first person. As the title suggests, The Odyssey of an Out of Work centres on its narrator’s unemployment—as is reflected in one reviewer’s description of it as a chronicle of the narrator’s ‘disappointments in the search after his great desire—honest work’ (Anon. 1931b, 2). Perhaps unsurprisingly given this narrative framing, the narrator clearly distinguishes himself apart from other tramps—indicating that it is ‘against the principles of a tramp to engage in work’, and explaining: ‘A man comes down to the social state of a professional tramp through his own failings combined, to a very limited extent, with circumstance’ (1931, 100,  243). The narrator even suggests at one point that abandoned children of the poor—‘tramps of the future’—‘should never have been allowed to live’ (1931, 245). In spite of The Odyssey of an Out of Work clearly conforming with a disciplinary agenda in passages such as

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these, there are other moments that hint at a reverse discourse, for instance when the narrator reflects upon the experience of being forced onto the road: Had I been told that I should still feel happy when they took away my shoes and gave me clumsy boots that made my feet ache, I should not have believed them. But I lost these and much more: I was left with a few rags besides my life, and I was frequently the happiest of all the people I met on a day’s march. The clerk is always too cramped, the factory worker breathes in a bad atmosphere. Soot and dust get into their lungs, and the very nature of their work means that they are huddled over machinery, or desks, all day long. A man doesn’t get the same chance to throw out his chest and breathe the air as I have had. (1931, 237–8)

There is in this passage a clear inference that the tramp way of life offers a release from the pressures that arise if one complies with the demand to work. Thus—as might be expected of a text co-authored by a homeless individual and a professional writer—The Odyssey of an Out of Work shows signs of quite distinctly different attitudes towards homelessness, with the narrator at times distinguishing themselves from other idle tramps and extolling the virtues of work, while at others writing positively of the tramp’s freedom from labour. Though there may be some signs of subversion, however, the former outlook undoubtedly dominates. Like Horsley, the author of Vagabond was a journalist—as well as being a professional ghostwriter (Stuart 1954, 225). There has been some controversy over Frank Stanley Stuart’s approach to ghostwriting—with the historian Richard Stokes claiming that his memoir Magic: Top Secret contained ‘invented facts, dubious provenance, and untraceable chronologies’, although these accusations have subsequently been contested (Dimolianis 2011, 143). Certainly, Vagabond contains much that could arouse our suspicion: a claim that the narrator once unknowingly knocked out the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in a bar in Epping Forest should suffice to convey a sense of the heights of improbability that are reached (Stuart 1937, 244). One reviewer relatedly noted that much in Vagabond ‘seems incredible’—leading them to question whether it is the ‘plain unvarnished truth’ (Anon. 1937a, 8). The text itself tells the story of ‘a modern companion of the great Odysseus, a wanderer over the wide earth, bound by no ties, crippled by

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no conventions’—and ‘far too lazy’ to write his own memoirs (1937, 11,  213). The narrator, allegedly of Belgian origin, is unlike any of the other tramp memoirists considered in this chapter—having been educated at ‘a famous private school at Bahrenfeld, near Hamburg’, the son to ‘a machinery manufacturer’ and ‘an English actress of Mrs. Beringer’s Company’ (1937, 13, 14, 40). His decision to take to the road is presented as being in part because his father was executed for gunrunning and in part because of ‘what we call in Germany Wanderlust’ (1937, 13, 52). As this brief summary perhaps suggests, Stuart’s Vagabond is a strange and incredible narrative that feels strongly influenced by the rogue and picaresque fiction traditions to be considered in the next chapter— offering a heavily idealised vision of a gentlemanly existence on the road as the narrator writes: ‘I was as free as the clouds that marched above me’ (1937, 28). It is true that although Vagabond embodies a naïve idealisation of the homeless lifestyle that sometimes seems to reflect pre-disciplinary perceptions of the masterlessness vagrant more than it does twentieth-century conceptions of homelessness, it nonetheless also reflects the experience of the latter—as the narrator describes being forced to plough fields, work in the army and to join a travelling circus in order to survive, as well as being subjected to the ‘condescending assistance of various charitable bodies’ (1937, 178). It is also true that Vagabond carries traces of subversion, as it contains invectives against ‘dwellers in houses’ who have ‘lost man’s heritage from his Mother Nature’ (1937, 28). And yet, there is little here to suggest a strongly anti-productivist strain—or indeed a radical strain—as the subversive tendencies in Vagabond tend to be idealised and atavistic. The next text that I would again classify as a tramp memoir but that I have decided not to subject to a detailed analysis is Digit’s The Confessions of a Twentieth Century Hobo. My reasons for pushing this text to the margins of this study are similar to those described above: the status of the author is a little dubious, and perhaps relatedly the subversive dimensions of the text are limited—although not absent. As one reviewer put it, the author is ‘rather different from the orthodox hobo’—for the reason that he apparently has ‘resources upon which he could fall back if necessary’ (Anon. 1925, 11). And yet, in spite of his comfortable background it would be inaccurate to describe Digit as a social explorer (or as a representative of ‘upper- or middle-class life’ entering a world inhabited by the poor in order to determine ‘the actual condition of Society’)—as he instead claims to have been motivated by a personal sense of dissatisfaction

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and a spirit of wanderlust, writing: ‘No doubt Surrey is a beautiful county, quiet and restful, but it is liable to pall on the temperament of an energetic youth who has spent the last seven years in the trenches and the African bush’ (1924, 13). Still, as this description indicates—Digit is also far from being typical of the average tramp: his decision to take to the road appears to have been entirely volitional, and the fact that he comes from a position of relative comfort ensures that his experiences on the road are quite unusual. For instance, at one point when he is arrested for vagrancy he protests: ‘I would not plead guilty and told the Judge that the term “vagrant,” as I understood it, did not include me’ (1924, 175). When the judge replies that he has no ‘visible means of subsistence’ and is ‘just wandering around’—he retorts: ‘I have a home, but am now making my way to San Francisco preparatory to going down to Australia’ (1924, 175–6). As well as the fact that the author of The Confessions of a Twentieth Century Hobo was perhaps not a tramp or a hobo in the conventional sense, the text also shows few signs of functioning as a reverse discourse. In reality, Digit spends much of the text asserting his difference from other hoboes and tramps—for instance, describing incidences in which people he encounters can’t believe he’s on the road, such as when a senator asks him: ‘What the dickens are you, man? You have got me guessing’ (1924, 98), or when someone he attempts to hitch a lift with asks his companion: ‘Say, you two guys aren’t on the road? […] You keep up a good front’ (1924, 43). And yet, as with Horsley and Stuart’s texts, there still remain moments of subversion—for instance, when Digit appears to reflect on the freedom he enjoys on the road, as he proclaims: ‘It was good to be alive!’, and as he frequently presents himself as an object of envy, recalling the admiration he has provoked: ‘“How nice it must be to be a man and wander around just as you please”’ (1924, 36, 51). Nonetheless, as with Horsley and Stuart’s texts, these moments of subversion remain peripheral, and there is no strong evidence to suggest that The Confessions of a Twentieth Century Hobo contains a strongly anti-productivist or radical dimension. The final text worth considering as a work that qualifies as a tramp memoir but that is perhaps not exemplary of the reverse discourse or anti-­ productivist tendencies is Joseph Stamper’s Less Than Dust—a memoir that is unique within the tramp memoir tradition for combining short stories with life writing, as its chapters alternate between the two. Stamper was born in Lancashire, where he worked in the office of a local newspaper and as an iron moulder before embarking upon a life on the road

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(Anon.  1933, 5). As Burnett has suggested, Stamper was one of many who during the interwar period ‘were forced onto the road unwillingly and resentfully’ (1994, 163). Accordingly, the view of tramp life presented in his 1931 memoir Less Than Dust is not an entirely positive one. Although Stamper suggests that he ‘was exhilarated’ upon first taking to the road— we learn that he quickly became ‘hopelessly apathetic’ (1966, 11, 32). Less Than Dust subsequently argues that the dehumanising conditions to which the poor are subjected have an unremittingly negative effect: for instance, Stamper writes of life on the road that it is ‘a miserable life even at the best of times; even when the days are warm and the weather is fair, because of the uncertainty, the lack of objective, the dreariness, the boredom’ (1966, 247). At the same time, although Stamper elsewhere unquestionably confirms negative stereotypes of the tramp community as ‘hopeless, apathetic, visionless and self-helpless, the slimy dregs of humanity’—he does so while simultaneously demanding ‘sympathy’ and drawing attention to the structural causes of these apparent shortcomings: suggesting that the homeless are not this way ‘from any fault of their own, but from pressures and circumstances, from forces that operated even before they were born’ (1966, 9). In another passage, Stamper is merciless in his invectives against these same societal forces—objecting that as ‘[p]rogress marches forward, it never looks back upon rotting beams or rotting humans’ (1966, 62). Nonetheless, although it is far from being an apolitical text—the emphasis upon the dehumanising effects of life on the road in Less Than Dust precludes the possibility of Stamper celebrating the tramp lifestyle in the manner of a reverse discourse tramp memoirist, and there are in turn few traces of anti-productivist sentiment. In the following chapter, Stamper’s fiction writing will also be considered, from which similar conclusions will be drawn. From this brief account of Horsley, Stuart, Digit and Stamper’s memoirs, it is clear that though all of these texts reflect a new productivity-­ oriented conception of the tramp, though all of them can just about be classified as tramp memoirs (although the ghostwriting element in Horsley and Stuart’s texts renders this point questionable), and though some of these texts demonstrate distinct signs of subversion—in general, they are on the whole less exemplary of the reverse discourse tramp memoir tradition (or of its anti-productivist tendencies) than the selected examples we are about to focus upon as we turn to the first of the four subcategories of the interwar tramp memoir to be analysed in detail in this chapter.

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4.5  Literary Tramp Memoirs: Charles Landery and Chris Massie The two writers to be considered in this section have been grouped together on the basis that, like Roberts, Kennedy and Davies, they were also published authors of fiction. As tramp memoirists who published fictional works, these authors were indeed far from being alone: as well as Roberts, Kennedy and Davies—Trader Horn, George Garrett, Jim Phelan, Liam O’Flaherty and Stamper all also published both memoirs and fiction. Before turning to the two authors selected for detailed analysis in this section, a brief overview of the output of two of the authors just named— namely, Horn and Garrett—will be offered, in order to give a broader overview of this subcategory of tramp memoir and at the same time to indicate why they have not been included for detailed analysis. In terms of the remaining three authors: Phelan and O’Flaherty’s writing will be considered later on in this chapter, while Stamper’s has of course just been covered. 4.5.1

 verview of Other Literary Tramp Memoirs: Trader Horn O (1861–1931) and George Garrett (1896–1966) Born Alfred Aloysius Smith, Trader Horn grew up in Lancashire before spending much of his life as an ivory and rubber trader in West Africa, as well as living in Mexico, Australia, Madagascar and Britain (Cahill 2002, xi). His life was a full and active one—involving incidents of piracy, hostage-­taking and highway robbery (Cutler 2020, 60) as well as experiences as a reporter and as a police officer. Towards the end of his life Horn became a wandering pedlar of goods in South Africa—selling ‘gridirons, toast-forks and the like’ (Horn 2002, xvii)—in which condition he was discovered by the novelist Etherelda Lewis, who subsequently encouraged him to collaborate on a number of publications. The three works published during Horn’s lifetime are a mix of semi-fictional and fully fictional texts written by Horn himself (and typed up by Lewis’s husband) alongside transcriptions of conversations with Horn, written up by Lewis (Cutler 2020, 61). As Cutler writes, the boundary between fact and fiction is blurred throughout Horn’s writing: ‘Horn’s first book, Trader Horn, was mainly autobiography embellished with fiction. His last book, The Waters of Africa, was fiction embellished with fact. Harold the Webbed was Horn’s attempt at writing a purely fictional adventure story’ (2020, 63). Horn’s status as a tramp memoir writer is perhaps questionable owing

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to the fact that the components of his published works written by himself tend not to focus on his tramping experiences: for instance—his most faithfully autobiographical work, Trader Horn, is an account of his experiences as an ivory trader in Equatorial Africa. It is really in the conversations transcribed by Lewis that a sense of Horn’s experiences as a tramp is most clearly communicated—as in Harold the Webbed, in which Horn describes tramping through America (1928, 158). As for whether the transcribed conversations can be seen to be indicative of a reverse discourse celebrating the tramp lifestyle: there are hints of subversion in some of these passages—for instance in The Waters of Africa, when Horn reflects that ‘civilization’ is ‘but child’s play—a toy horse he’s got to whip faster and faster’ (1932, 225). In a 1932 foreword to Trader Horn in Madagascar, Lewis reflects on this tendency—suggesting that the ‘rich and sane philosophy of life’ expressed in the transcribed passages is of more interest than the ‘old man’s attempts in the Victorian style’ found in The Chesterfields in the Earlies (the fictional component of The Waters of Africa) and Harold the Webbed (1932, 9–10). Nonetheless, though there are traces of subversion in the transcribed conversations—as is perhaps unsurprising given the trend we have identified in other co-authored or transcribed memoirs (such as Colin, Horsley and Stuart’s), this remains relatively muted, and there is relatedly little to indicate a strongly anti-­ productivist or radical perspective. The second writer worth considering before turning to the two authors who will form the focus of this section is George Garrett. Garrett was born in Seacombe to parents of Irish descent, and spent most of his life in Liverpool. As well as being a sailor and a tramp, he was a writer of short stories, plays and non-fiction, and was a founding member of the Unity Theatre. Garrett spent a considerable portion of his life homeless—sleeping out in Liverpool from a young age, and spending time as a beachcomber in Argentina (Murphy 1999, xi). While tramping in America he became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, and when he returned to Britain he was also involved in the 1922 Hunger March—an experience that he subsequently wrote about (Murphy 1999, xii). Garrett also penned an autobiography—described by Michael Murphy in his introduction to the Nottingham Trent collected works of Garrett as ‘an unfinished and now sadly fragmented’ work (1999, xi). The fragment published in the same Nottingham Trent edition offers a brief insight into Garrett’s early experiences of homelessness—describing how it was ‘extremely difficult’ for ‘a boy from the slum streets of dockland to obtain

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a job on one of the ships’ (1999, 249)—but it primarily focusses on Garrett’s experiences as a stowaway. Accordingly, there is not much here to indicate the presence of a reverse discourse of the kind described in the introduction to this text. In Horn and Garrett we thus find two examples of homeless memoirists whose conceptions of homelessness reflect  the evolution of attitudes described throughout this study, and who both wrote a combination of life writing and fiction suggesting that they should be considered literary tramp memoirists—and yet who probably don’t qualify for consideration as authors of reverse discourse literary tramp memoirs. The two authors singled out for more detailed consideration in what is to follow have accordingly been chosen for the reason that their texts can on the contrary be seen to be more representative of both the reverse discourse and the anti-productivist trends described throughout this study. In addition to this, Charles Landery and Chris Massie might be seen to be of interest for a defining feature of their writing that may be related to their status as fiction writers: namely, the mood of ambivalence in both of their works. In short, Landery and Massie were both tramps who while choosing a life on the road and while presenting this as strongly preferable to a life of work, at the same time refused to sugar-coat the experience. Their status as writers may be linked to this on the grounds that it suggests, as we sometimes saw in Roberts, Kennedy and Davies, a sense of exceptionalism—of being destined for another fate, and so of not entirely fitting in with the tramp community. Regardless of the cause, this section will explore how in emphasising a sense of deadlock between the liberating effects of homelessness and the vicissitudes it brings, these two authors can be seen to have resisted finding refuge in the subversive potential of tramp subculture, and in turn to have developed an implicitly radical dimension to their texts by encouraging their readers to draw their own conclusions about the impasse with which they are confronted. At the same time, it will be argued that the nihilistic and defeatist tendencies in these two authors might be seen to dissuade readers from inferring radical meanings in this way. 4.5.2 Charles Landery (fl. 1938–1952) Charles Landery was a journalist and novelist, perhaps best known for writing the novel Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, made into a film by Frank Capra in 1939. His 1940 memoir Hollywood is the Place! describes how in the late 1930s he became a freelance writer in Hollywood—a job he managed to acquire by the skin of his teeth, having only published one book

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(Landery 1940, 60–4). That book was his 1938 memoir So What? A Young Man’s Odyssey—a clear example of the tramp conception of homelessness that chronicles Landery’s decision to leave his native Scotland in order to spend several years tramping across North America, before returning to Britain in search of work. Ostensibly, Landery’s decision to leave was motivated by a desire to pursue a life of travel and adventure, as he declares of his incredulous aunt and uncle: ‘They had never travelled, that was easily seen. They did not understand adventure or anything’ (1938, 3). What follows, however, is an unromantic and at times despairing appraisal of the relative merits of life on the road considered in relation to the intolerable conditions of a life of work—remarkable for the extreme mood swings of its author as he vacillates between a sense of adventure and an acknowledgement of the severity of his experiences, rendering the psychology of his personal tramp experience explicit in a manner that exemplifies the novelistic tone of the tramp memoir form. Landery’s description of his initial decision to take to the road immediately embodies this mood of ambivalence. Early on in the memoir, while working on a job sewing buttons in a factory in Canada he complains: ‘It was all too useless, I was lonely, I hated Toronto, the job, the boarding-­ house. I hated everything but it all came back to the same thing. I was lonely and I was dissatisfied with myself’ (1938, 33). Attempting to relieve him of his despondency, his friend Ryan suggests: Why don’t you get out? […] I told you about when I was on the road, bumming? It’s a swell time when you get used to it […] A week on the road […] and you’ll feel absolutely different. In one week you’ll be in the south— green grass and sun. That’s what you want, and it’s free. (1938, 33)

Landery follows his friend’s advice and takes to the road—before discovering that, far from being a miracle cure, it exacerbates his sense of isolation as he continues to find himself ‘lonely and depressed’ (1938, 39). His depression is, however, soon lifted as he describes the freedom and proximity to nature he is able to enjoy living the life of a tramp: As suddenly as it had fallen upon me the gloom vanished. The sun sieved through the winter clouds and the snow sparkled. There was a time for futures; now was the moment to feel the faint warmth of the sun, the crack-

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ling snow underfoot, the exhilaration of walking briskly into a keen wind that whipped your blood into a frenzy of tingling sensation. (1938, 40)

And yet, as the mention of a ‘time for futures’ suggests—the pleasure is only temporary: no longer enjoying the ‘comparative security’ of his former life, Landery soon finds himself struggling to pay for food and is forced to search for work. After moving to Boston and working a succession of jobs in a department store and a garage, he is invited to the home of a bootlegger. Hoping for ‘something dramatic’ Landery is shocked to find that the bootlegger lives in ‘a suburban place’ and that he spends his time ‘thinking drearily of another similar day to follow’—prompting him to reflect on how all forms of work ultimately lead to tediousness and convention: Oh well, all jobs seemed much the same—all the jobs I had had at any rate. At first they were excitingly different and then they were monotonously similar. (1938, 75)

Landery’s book ultimately ends with him committing to the tramp lifestyle and defiantly rejecting this monotony—even if this entails hardship. In the final few chapters, now in London—Landery finds himself on the receiving end of a philanthropic barrister who has employed him as a clerk, causing him to reflect: Respectability was enfolding me with a sour suggestion of philanthropy on her smug, class-conscious features. I was an individual saved—from what? The road, the hostel, hotel-work, tramping from door to door with refrigerators. Instead, I was to visit an office from nine until five-thirty every day except the half-day Saturday and Sunday. (1938, 289)

There is, here, no romanticisation of life on the road, but a simple sense that it is preferable to a life of permanent employment and respectability. After deciding to leave—Landery is confronted by a senior member of staff who describes him as ‘a fool’, objecting: We took you, I am sorry to say, but we took you from the gutter. We treated you with respect, never mentioned your past, and helped you to become a self-respecting citizen. We don’t mind your leaving us like this, but we are disappointed in you. You are letting us down. (1938, 304)

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Landery, however, is unable to concentrate: ‘I looked at his neck. The soft skin begged and bulged over the tight, glossy, stiff collar. Dandruff on his coat, ink stains on his fingers, tired pouches under his pale eyes’ (Ibid.). The ugliness of the working, civilised way of life is starkly conveyed through this grotesque characterisation—prompting Landery to tear up the reference that he has been given before reflecting on the fact that, from now on, he ‘will have no home—only hostels’, together with ‘no security’ and ‘no money’ (1938, 305). In short, he thinks to himself: ‘You will have nothing’. The two words with which he ends the book are, predictably: ‘So what?’ (Ibid.) It is not entirely clear whether these two words—which of course also provide the book with its title—amount to a statement of nihilism or cheerful disregard: whether, in short, they signify Landery giving up in the face of the bleak options he is confronted with, or whether they suggest that he isn’t bothered by the hardships he now faces so long as he is free from the drudgery of employment and rented accommodation. Reflecting this ambiguity, one reviewer wrote that ‘the story ends drearily’ (M. 1938, 8), while another characterised Landery as having adopted an entirely different outlook: ‘he went from job to job and put up with hardships, and does not seem to have minded very much’ (C. 1938, 7). What is clear is that though Landery is willing to accept life on the road as an alternative to the idea of having to work and to conform, the picture of tramp life depicted here is by no means ideal—as it is presented as either dreary or the product of resigned indifference. And yet—although neither nihilism nor cheerful disregard is overtly suggestive of an interest in developing the objection to work-based culture into a political agenda, these possible readings may be seen to be indicative of the account of implicitly radical anti-productivist narratives offered in the introduction to this text, in which it was proposed (drawing on Alcalá’s analysis of select examples of post-war working-class fiction) that ‘embracing a logic of negativity and “impotentiality”’ heightens the radical aspect of a given text in the sense that (now drawing on Badiou) it places the reader at an impasse and challenges them to envisage an alternative solution. In other words, just as Alcalá suggests that Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ‘calls for a radicalization’ of its protagonist’s ‘strategy of refusal’ by communicating a sense of Arthur Seaton’s confusion, so can Landery’s memoir be seen to challenge its reader to resolve the impasse that its author finds himself at—thus, it might be argued, more effectively activating the reader

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by encouraging them to draw radical conclusions from the narrator’s dissatisfaction with both the working life and the alternative of tramping. At the same time, it might be argued against this that rather than the tone of either despair or flippancy captured by the words ‘So What?’ encouraging readers to infer from the text that radicalisation is necessary in the form of some kind of programmatic and less destructive emancipation from work—there is a real danger of the narrator’s mood simply being mirrored in the reader’s response. This, it might be argued, is a hazard that comes with all implicitly radical works—and yet it is perhaps exaggerated in a work of life writing such as this: while a novel like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning can be seen to encourage the reader to imagine an alternative to the protagonist’s passivity, the memoir form of So What? A Young Man’s Odyssey is arguably more likely to produce identification with the narrator’s outlook as there is less of a sense that the protagonist’s apathy has been constructed to invite critical reflection. Thus, in short, while So What? A Young Man’s Odyssey is perhaps implicitly radical in the sense that it invites the reader to draw radical conclusions from the narrator’s sense of impasse—its either defeatist or flippant mood may be seen to run the risk of overriding this possibility. 4.5.3 Chris Massie (b. 1881) Unlike Landery, Chris Massie was an established author by the time he published his memoir. As Martha Vogeler has noted in her history of the English Review, Massie’s first success came when he contacted its editor, Austin Harrison, while living in a workhouse in Hackney in 1912—following which he had two stories published, in turn leading to a novel being commissioned by Sampson Low (2008, 174). By the time Massie published his memoirs in 1931, he had three novels out, and he would continue to produce them at a steady rate well into the 1950s. While Landery’s fiction does not deal with the subject of tramping, Massie’s does—and so will be considered in detail later in this study. For now, however, the focus is exclusively upon his 1931 memoir, The Confessions of a Vagabond—an account of his diverse experiences as a ‘partially disabled ex-service man’ who lived as ‘a tramp, a goldsmith, a sign writer, and a costermonger’ (1931, 8). Echoing Landery, we will see that as well as reflecting the conception of homelessness described throughout this study, Massie’s memoir presents (as is perhaps appropriate for a novelist) a psychologically complex vision of life as a tramp—full of seemingly contradictory statements betraying a concurrent sense of disillusionment and contentment with life on the road.

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From the outset, Massie is unequivocal about his refusal to romanticise the lifestyle of the tramp. He writes: I suppose that ghastly experiences like the seat on the Embankment and the moribund ward, if sufficiently well recorded, do take on themselves a romantic glamour […] But in the coldest of reality it is not nice to be a tramp […] Winter and summer, wind and rain, burning sun and biting frost, hunger, thirst, the lousy shirt, the threadbare coat, and always the everlasting Road; no, it is not nice to be a tramp. For the weary wayfarer there is no escape. (1931, 9–10)

In addition to this uncompromisingly negative description of life on the road—Massie also paints an unflattering picture of his fellow tramps: It is a very disappointing truth, but tramps, as a class, are not interesting people. By far the great majority of those who get on the road are people of no consequence or interest to anyone. (1931, 58)

Reading passages like this, it seems almost impossible to imagine Massie engaging in the kind of reverse discourse outlined in the introduction to this text: he seems convinced that life on the road has no attraction and that it destroys those subjected to it. And yet—Massie is quite willing to point out the exceptions. At one point he writes, for instance: Quite the best man I have met was the inmate of a London workhouse. One of the most honest friends I have ever had was a pickpocket I lived with in Hoxton. I have met better men “on the road” than I have met in City streets. (1931, 5)

Massie also explains elsewhere how, in spite of his belief that ‘it is not nice to be a tramp’ and that most tramps ‘are not interesting people’, he nonetheless remains cognisant of the allure of the road: describing it as a space in which it is possible to overcome the ‘moral obligation’ to bend one’s ‘neck to the yoke and become one of the million “somethings”’ (1931, 45–6). This sense in which life on the road frees tramps from the obligation to work in fact persists throughout the memoir—while also being accompanied by a series of broader reflections on the merits of not having to conform with existing values. For instance, Massie at one point encounters a tramp who tells him:

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This is life, my boy. I don’t know whether you have noticed it, but most of the things we seek desperately for in life are the wrong things, and we are punished by having them given to us. (1931, 66)

This seems to be a lesson that Massie personally takes on board, as he elsewhere writes: Always, when I leave the hard path, I can feel myself becoming sullied by civilization. I begin to forget those spiritual urgencies without which life is empty and vain. I believe that only the tramp on the road, the soldier in the trench, and the saint in his cell, have plumbed the ultimate depths of human experience. The city streets pain me with their crude and artificial activities. I see people every morning wrestling with one another for seats on the buses, and dashing into railway stations to catch trains. I wonder what for, I know that life ought not to be like that. Over the hills and far away, and in spite of motor cars, there are leisurely and lovely roads and the healing tranquillity of nature. I would sooner have a crust of bread in a country lane than sit sweating in a crowded restaurant. Of all possessions in life the greatest is self-possession, and it is impossible to live one’s life or even get to know one’s self in great cities. Workhouses are vile places; and as I have already written, it is not nice to be a tramp. But a tramp has freedom and fresh air, and if he is a philosopher, he can laugh at the pitiful suburban hutches that house the citizen, as a reward for catching trains regularly in the city. (1931, 30)

Massie here very clearly qualifies his earlier statement that life on the road is not what it is sometimes made out to be by suggesting that in spite of the hardship, it brings with it freedom from work, freedom from conformity, freedom to interact with nature and freedom to develop terms of greater intimacy with oneself. The point Massie appears to be making, like Landery, is that though the life of the tramp is extremely tough—it remains preferable to the option of remaining a part of twentieth-century mainstream society: a world depicted as laborious, monotonous and empty headed. Massie even goes so far as to reflect that though on balance his has been ‘an utterly miserable existence’: Success would have denied to me those rare treasures which only poverty and hardship reveal. It has been the revelation of things, and particularly the revelation of human nature, which has enriched me. I am like a man who has wandered through ice-fields and happened on gold. (1931, 172)

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Recognising this causes Massie to seemingly reverse his earlier claim that tramps ‘as a class, are not interesting people’ as he now declares, ‘I am never so happy as when I am with them’—explaining: ‘Had I been a success I should have had my motor car, my boat-house, and possibly my yacht, but then I should not have known Sally or Bert or Minnie or George. I should have talked a good deal in the grand manner about life, but I should not have been living’ (1931, 172, 175). As wildly contradictory as these statements may seem to be—there is still, arguably, a sense of coherence to Massie’s position. His suggestion that on the road the ‘utterly miserable’ coexists alongside ‘rare treasures’ offers a clear explanation for these extremities of feeling—suggesting that the tramp way of life, as presented here, is simultaneously deeply unenviable and considerably preferable to the alternative. Thus, like Landery, the ambivalent tone of Massie’s memoir can be seen to establish an unresolved conflict with radical potential, in the sense that it may be seen to prohibit the tramp lifestyle from functioning as a satisfactory solution to the problem of a work-oriented society—and in this way to challenge the reader to look for an alternative. At the same time it should be noted that, again echoing Landery, while this staging of a deadlock might be seen to contain radical potential in an implicit sense—Massie’s despondent tone may at the same time be seen to be likely to dissuade the reader from drawing such conclusions. In fact, in Massie’s text the sense that the reader is discouraged from making radical inferences is significantly greater than in the case of Landery, as Massie writes at one point that ‘the capitalist system’ is ‘an inevitable process in the evolution of society’ (1931, 46). Again, the fact that this text takes a memoir form might be seen to make it harder for the reader to determine that the protagonist’s strategy of refusal ‘calls for a radicalization’ as Alcalá suggests of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning—as they are perhaps more likely (given the ostensible alignment of the author and the narrator’s position) to identify with the narrator, rather than develop an against-­ the-­grain reading. In this sense, the examples of both Landery and Massie might be seen to serve as a warning concerning the hazardous nature of simultaneously exposing the shortcomings of a work-oriented culture and the tramp alternative, and how there is no guarantee that this should necessarily point to the need for societal transformation—although both authors do at the same time open up this possibility.

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4.6  Criminal Tramp Memoirs: James Milligan and John Worby This section looks at two authors whose writing is distinctive for the way in which it blurs the identity of the tramp and the criminal—and whose texts thus might be seen to belong to a wider subcategory of interwar tramp memoir: namely, the criminal tramp memoir. Before commencing with our analysis, we might note two things. First, that this trend parallels examples in the early modern rogue, picaresque and satirical traditions to be considered in the next chapter by conflating homelessness and criminality—in turn suggesting a continuation of an early modern tendency that otherwise may be seen to have diminished with the recasting of the masterless vagabond as an unproductive tramp. Second, that it marks a more immediate continuity with the phenomenon of the gangster narrative that was popularised during the interwar period. As this second point concerns a hitherto unacknowledged development, it is worth briefly dwelling upon. In an essay on the American gangster, Fred Gardaphe has noted that during the 1920s and 1930s in America ‘the exploits of Gangsters such as Al Capone, John Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson and “Pretty Boy” Floyd became national news’ and in turn ‘fuelled fictional accounts and captured the popular imagination’ as ‘blatant transgressors of the boundaries between good and evil’ (2010, 110). While in the 1920s depictions in film tended to portray these figures as ‘degenerate’, by the 1930s Gardaphe suggests they were ‘recast […] as men who wielded power through sexuality and guns’ (2010, 110–1). As this perhaps suggests, at the same time as the figure of the gangster may have signified subversion, Gardaphe also notes how it was in other regards conformist—in the sense that gangster culture grew to embrace the materialistic spirit of capitalism with its emphasis on ‘stylish dress and fancy cars’ (2010, 110). Gangsters, coming from ‘humble origins’ and subsequently defying ‘the boundaries separating social classes’ may in this sense be read as embodiments of a frustrated desire for social uplift during a period of unusually high unemployment (Ibid.). None of the criminal tramp memoirists to be considered in this section were quite gangsters in this mould. In fact, both James Milligan and John Worby distanced themselves from organised crime whenever they came into contact with it: Milligan, when he encounters a ‘fiercely ruthless and competitive’ criminal gang in New York, declares that though he is himself

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a ‘crook’ he has ‘never been fond of violence and murder’ (1936, 243)— while Worby similarly declines the opportunity of working for ‘a smash and grab gang of diamond thieves’ (1936, 180). And yet, all of the criminal tramp memoirs that will be taken into account here can be seen to reflect an awareness—calling to mind Gardaphe’s account of gangster culture—of the parallels between the subversiveness of criminality and the subversiveness of homelessness (again, echoing early modern trends to be explored in the next chapter). In the two authors that we will be focussing on, this will be seen to be coupled with a concurrent awareness of the conventionally aspirant dimension of crime in this period (again suggested by Gardaphe): with Milligan eschewing this aspect of criminal subculture by presenting the tramp way of life as a preferable alternative, and with Worby attempting to forge a new criminal identity less limited in this respect by synthesising the supposed values of both cultures. Before turning to Milligan and Worby in order to demonstrate how this is so, however, in what is to follow the works of two additional authors who may also be classified as criminal tramp memoirists will be briefly taken into account—in part to indicate how the genre as a whole can be seen to reflect these motifs, and in part to justify the decision not to offer a detailed analysis of their memoirs. 4.6.1

 verview of Other Criminal Tramp Memoirs: Charles Prior (fl. O 1937) and Hippo Neville (fl. 1935) Charles Prior’s 1937 So I Wrote It is a memoir chronicling his forays into crime—including house burglary, people trafficking, drug smuggling and armed robbery—alongside his experiences of incarceration in various military and civilian prisons in Spain, France, the United States and Britain. Throughout the memoir Prior describes having lived a precarious existence, often on the verge of homelessness—but it is towards the memoir’s end that this aspect of Prior’s life story becomes most clearly pronounced as he describes returning to London (after being forcibly removed from Spain and France) where he is forced to frequent London County Council ‘kip houses’ and Salvation Army shelters, before ‘going on the road’ in America (1937, 184, 262). The memoir ends with Prior describing how— ‘bitterly cold’ on a park bench in Green Park after having spent the night in a hostel—he discovers an article in a discarded newspaper containing a ‘stinging protest about an autobiography by a guy who had bummed around a bit’, prompting him to reflect that if it’s possible to get paid for writing ‘bums’ autobiographies’, he should write his own (1937, 287–8). In keeping with this account—So I Wrote It contains multiple passages

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that bear a clear resemblance to other texts in the tramp memoir tradition, most notably in the firm stance taken against work and home life. For instance, when early on in the memoir (having recently deserted from the army) Prior resolves to walk away from the prospect of a steady job and a new relationship in order to travel to Barcelona, it is on the grounds that ‘[o]nly saps and horses work and even horses turn their backs on it’ (1937, 69). Similarly, when he is later confronted with the possibility of employment by a romantic interest, he protests: ‘if there’s one thing thoroughly calculated to upset me it’s a job of honest work’ (1937, 160–1). Prior’s text can thus clearly be read as a reverse discourse celebrating the tramp’s symbolic refusal to work, and as a text that links this spirit of defiance to a life of crime. At the same time, So I Wrote It is less directly concerned with the tramp experience than Milligan or Worby’s texts, as its primary focus is upon Prior’s criminal activities—thus explaining my decision not to foreground it in the following analysis. Although also classifiable as a criminal tramp memoir, Hippo Neville’s 1935 Sneak Thief on The Road is a text of a quite different nature—reminiscent of Henry Miller’s 1934 Tropic of Cancer or of Tom Kromer’s 1935 Waiting for Nothing on the grounds of its novelistic rendering of a life of depravity and its modernist style. At the same time, it is distinct from Milligan, Worby and Prior’s texts for the reason that (like Digit’s memoir) it exists in a grey area between social exploration and the tramp memoir— with the text starting with a description of Neville voluntarily leaving behind a spacious family home with a ‘mummy-daddy room, two-brother room, my dummy room, and room for sisters three’, reinforcing the sense that its author is a class interloper (1935, 16). And yet, like Digit— Neville’s motives clearly do not align with those of the social explorer as he explains: I do not run away. I stride to grow. I go, to weave to my own ends during this time of depression. I am twenty-one, a would-be genius, a falling philosopher, and half-mad. I must go for a long stride to retain my sanity. (1935, 15)

Neville here does not sound like a social explorer attempting to learn about the poor in order to make a ‘contribution […] to social change’ (Keating 1978, 13)—but instead comes across as someone motivated by a personal interest in testing the limits of human experience. This sense is further reinforced when he later hints at the motive behind his forays into

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crime: ‘at the back of my mind was the remembrance that I must go on stealing till I was sent to prison’ (1935, 279). The resulting text is undoubtedly intriguing—not only reinforcing a sense of the shared subversive potential of criminality and homelessness reflected in other criminal tramp memoirs explored in this section, but also deserving recognition as a clear precursor (alongside texts by Miller and Kromer) to the beat tradition emblematised by Jack Kerouac in its fusion of the social exploration and tramp memoir traditions, and in its fixation on testing the limits of experience. At the same time, however, there is little sense in which this pursuit amounts to a radical invective in Neville’s text. While Sneak Thief on The Road is critical of a society in which ‘twenty-five million’ have been ‘shunted permanently off the line’—Neville is dismissive of the calls for world revolution that he finds written on the wall of a tramp casual ward (1935, 106, 136). Furthermore, while the decision to elect a life of homelessness obviously entails a refusal to work—there is no clear sense of this amounting to a concerted effort (either explicit or implicit) to question disciplinary pressures to be productive. Thus, while these two memoirists both characterise homelessness in accordance with the trends observed in this study (associating it with kip houses and dole queues rather than a life of masterlessness) as well as showing strong signs of interest in the interconnectedness between the tramp and the criminal ways of life as models of subversion—meaning that they are clearly classifiable as authors of reverse discourse tramp memoirs—it is also clear why I have chosen not to foreground their work: Prior, for the reason that his primary focus is upon chronicling a life of crime; Neville, for the lack of an overt anti-productivist agenda. As we now turn to Milligan and Worby, we will see that conversely the theme of homelessness as an embodiment of a refusal of work plays a more obviously central role. 4.6.2 James Milligan (fl. 1936) It seems reasonable to describe James Milligan as an elusive figure. The 1936 Sampson Low first edition of I Didn’t Stay Honest contains a ‘Note’ from the publishers: The author of this book was discovered in the Salvation Army Hostel in Great Peter Street, Westminster. At that time he was not yet an author, for he had not yet put his life-story on paper. It happened that a journalist spent a little time in the hostel in search of copy for a certain purpose, encountered “James Milligan” there, and heard his story. It was at the journalist’s earnest suggestion that “James Milligan” wrote down his strange and often dark

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memories; they have been edited only in the mildest possible degree, and here they are in his own words. (1936, vii)

An obvious reason for Milligan’s adoption of a pseudonym was his involvement with the notorious gangster Eddie Tasso and his gang: ‘one of the celebrities of the New America’—although we later discover that the leading figures in this gang had all perished by the time the memoir was published, so the threat here may have been somewhat diminished (1936, 219, 249). Whatever the case, Milligan’s true identity remains a mystery. There is, however, a considerable amount that can be learnt from his memoir—most obviously about the circumstances leading him into a life of criminality and homelessness. Milligan opens I Didn’t Stay Honest by describing how he was born and raised in Montana, in a home in which there was ‘never much more food in the house than would do for one’ (1936, 11). We learn that at the age of ten he witnessed his father being lynched for horse rustling—giving him a lasting ‘contempt for the Law’, as he reflects: ‘If he’d had a fair trial, I might have been a good citizen’ (1936, 32). Milligan then describes how after his mother died three years later, he went to live with his Aunt Martha in a ‘hick-town’ called Higgsville, on the plains between Lake Superior and Lake Winnipeg (1936, 33). We subsequently learn how during this time his aunt was ‘fixing up’ to send him ‘to Victoria College in Toronto to graduate’ so that he could become a member of the clergy. And yet Milligan writes: ‘With the nature I had, I couldn’t fool folks for very long that I was the sort of fellow who’d make a parson’ (1936, 40). Sure enough, Milligan soon finds himself in trouble after beating up an old man working on the farm of a wealthy landowner known as old Ramsay—following which he decides to steal his aunt’s money and take to the road. The rest of I Didn’t Stay Honest chronicles Milligan’s subsequent experiences tramping, gold prospecting, cow-punching and working as a deckhand—taking him to Montana, Yukon, Texas, Singapore, New Guinea, San Francisco, London and elsewhere. Although there is a hint of masterlessness in all this galavanting, the general characterisation of homelessness—as well will see— nonetheless  remains in line with the account of the  tramp tradition chronicled in this study, oriented as it is around a perceived inutility. Initially, Milligan’s memoir might be seen to mark a continuation of the repentance narrative tradition we saw earlier in Saxby, Burn, Colin, Cameron and Basset. This sense can be gleaned if we consider the wider meaning of a passage in which he attempts to entice old Ramsay’s daughter Minnie to run away with him:

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This town gives me the willies. I wanna get out and see the world. I don’t wanna stick around here all my life and turn into a poor hick like all the other deadheads around here. I got brains, and I got ambition. I’m gonna make lots of dough and wear swell clothes and travel—London, Paris, New York—I’m gonna see the lot! A punk hole like this ain’t a place for a guy like me to stick in. (1936, 47–8)

On the surface this might come across as Milligan idealising a vision of what he was to become by fusing a sense of the subversiveness of life on the road with a valorisation of a lifestyle evocative of Gardaphe’s description of gangster culture: and yet taking into consideration the swaggering tone of the passage combined with Milligan’s account of the actions that precede this speech—in which he describes leaving a man who is ‘about seventy’ with ‘his face all bloody’—it becomes clear that this passage is to some degree intended to indicate his formerly misguided ways (1936, 41–2). Such a reading is reinforced if we consider an introductory note to the text written by the publisher, which describes the author’s ‘refusal to whitewash himself’ in the context of his ‘most prodigal misspending of his life’ (1936, vii). It is further supported if we consider a later passage in the memoir in which Milligan suggests that the later experience of fighting in the First World War forced him to come to terms with this ‘misspending of his life’, as he reflects: ‘Hitherto I had admired “smart guys,” men who could successfully out-bluff and double-cross the other fellow; now I began to admire men for other reasons—for qualities such as courage, cheerfulness, comradeship, kindness, that I had always mocked’ (1936, 222). These remarks may be seen to indicate that by the time he had come to write his memoirs, Milligan had begun to regret his pursuit of a life of criminality and homelessness—reinforcing the suggestion that the passage above (in which he writes of his desire to escape the ‘deadheads’ in Higgsville) is intended to serve as evidence of a prereformed psychology: as if, rather than valuing courage, cheerfulness, comradeship and kindness—his decision to steal his aunt’s money and to pursue a life on the road serves as evidence of his formerly selfish and double-crossing nature. A later episode in I Didn’t Stay Honest would appear to both partly confirm and partly challenge this interpretation. After travelling across North America, the South Pacific and Asia—Milligan attempts to fulfil his prophecy of becoming a success story by returning to Higgsville in a flashy car and smart suit in an effort to win back Minnie (in reality a front, as he

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has been forced to withdraw ‘every cent standing to [his] account’ after an attempt to run a divorce bureau has turned sour) (1936, 192). Minnie is not impressed, however—suggesting that he has ‘missed something in life’ (1936, 198). Outwardly, Milligan protests—claiming that he has ‘seen oceans and cities and jungles, while the folks here were seeing nothing but the same fields they’ve been staring at since they were born’ (1936, 198). At the same time, as he drives out of Higgsville Milligan seems to accept Minnie’s assessment, finding himself unable to forget what she has said ‘about coming to show folks how much they’d missed in life, and things working out the wrong way round’—seemingly reinforcing the suggestion that as a tramp memoir Milligan’s text has strong crossovers with the repentance narratives considered earlier, reading like a morality tale concerning the perils of pursuing the life of a small-time criminal/tramp (1936, 203). And yet, against this reading—it is hard not to infer that there is some truth to what Milligan says as he talks of his experiences seeing ‘oceans and cities and jungles’. Indeed, the bulk of Milligan’s memoir is preoccupied with relaying precisely the experiences here alluded to, suggesting a degree of narrative complicity with the outlook expressed by Milligan when he defends his way of life as being superior to that of the people of Higgsville. Revealingly, we might note that soon after expressing remorse for the things he’s ‘missed’ by leaving—Milligan moves swiftly on to describing having a ‘pretty good time’ in Montreal; a passage that is shortly followed by a description of the ‘endless opportunities of going gay’ that he encounters in London (1936, 204). Reflecting back on the passage in which Milligan describes how the First World War transformed his mental outlook, and perhaps made him repent his former ways—it now seems significant to note how he qualifies this suggestion with the remark: Don’t imagine that I “saw the light,” or became “saved,” or anything like that […] I did not change my life in any marked degree on leaving the Army; but I was certainly a completer and more social human being. (1936, 222–3)

While the war may have caused Milligan to alter his belief that ‘“smart guys”’ who ‘out-bluff and double-cross the other fellow’ are superior to those who embody qualities such as ‘courage, cheerfulness, comradeship, kindness’—he is thus quite explicit that these revelations didn’t result in a complete transformation of his values, suggesting instead that they simply

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enabled him to understand ‘the social duties all men must have’ (1936, 222). Recalling Gardaphe’s suggestion that the criminal in this period may be seen to have embodied a materialistic outlook and the attempt to elevate oneself above one’s surroundings, it’s thus tempting to argue that Milligan’s remorse is related to the way in which he responded to the hardships of his youth (growing up in poverty and losing both parents) by succumbing to fantasies oriented around crime and wealth and thus abandoning his ‘social duties’, rather than that his remorse relates to his abandonment of the straitened ways of Higgsville by becoming a tramp. Reinforcing such a reading—we might return to Milligan’s initial account of his decision to take to the road and note that while much of his description of his early life is clearly intended to serve as evidence of an unreformed character, there are moments that feel tonally different: seeming to convey a sense of oppositionality that the partially reformed Milligan writing the memoirs is still happy to endorse. For instance, Milligan at one point describes how old Ramsay decided to make Minnie work in domestic service ‘because he thought it would be good for her soul and improve her housewifey virtues’ (1936, 35). Similarly he elsewhere describes how his aunt ‘thought everybody else ought to have the same sense of duty as herself’—as well as explaining how she drove him ‘nearly batty’ by forcing him to ‘talk “proper”’ and ‘wear celluloid collars’ (1936, 34). Rather than serving as evidence of Milligan’s former misguidedness, these accounts of the causes of his disillusionment—namely pressures exerted upon him and Minnie to be productive and presentable—feel valid. This would seem to confirm the suggestion that what is implicitly regretted in the descriptions offered of the younger Milligan’s decision to leave Higgsville is his criminality (or more accurately his lack of social responsibility), rather than his pursuit of a life on the road—meaning that I Didn’t Stay Honest can still be read as a repentance narrative, but not as we know it from Saxby, Burn, Colin, Cameron and Basset: what is repented is the repudiation of ‘social duties’ in Milligan’s youth by mistreating others and indulging in fantasies of personal advancement—not the decision to escape the conservative and productivist values of his aunt and his girlfriend’s father. Such a reading is solidified by a consideration of the closing remarks to I Didn’t Stay Honest—which suggest that though Milligan may have his regrets, there is much that he has come to saviour about his eventual fate. Reflecting that in his life there has been ‘no shape or pattern’, he writes:

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Must it be that the wanderer’s life is always a badly put-together thing of unsightly patchwork and loose ends? Must it be only the sedentary, the man of family, the man who has his roots in a thing, a person, or an idea, whose life can be progressive, and properly rounded off? But, after all, how many lives have this roundedness and design? Perhaps living is more important than life. Perhaps the sorrow or happiness of the fleeting moment are more important than the aim and drive of a lifetime. (1936, 255–6)

In proposing that ‘living’ and the ‘happiness of the fleeting moment’ might be more important than ‘the aim and drive of a lifetime’, Milligan here seems to revert to the suggestion that he knows more of ‘the true values of life’ than the likes of Minnie, Aunt Martha and old Ramsay, even if there are other ways in which this earlier statement reflects a sense of his former misguidedness. Certainly in this defence of a lifestyle opposed to ‘the aim and drive of a lifetime’, Milligan’s memoir can be seen to critique the disciplinary demand to be productive and can thus be read as a reverse discourse tramp memoir in an anti-productivist mould, in which the perceived inutility of the tramp is transformed into a virtue. As for the question of whether Milligan’s celebration of the tramp lifestyle thus transcends the limitations of the subversive and enters into radical territory—the impression is mixed. On the one hand, unlike in the non-radical anti-productivist texts considered in the introduction to this text, I Didn’t Stay Honest does little to prevent the narrator’s objections to conventionality from pointing to the possibility of an alternative set of social values that could be more widely implemented—and in fact might be seen to encourage this by emphasising the importance of social responsibility and thus implicitly advocating a more collectively minded way of life. On the other hand, as we saw in Davies’s writing, there is little sense of Milligan actively encouraging the reader to draw radical conclusions by presenting them with an unsatisfactory or unresolved set of issues in the manner of the implicitly radical anti-­ productivist narratives considered in the introduction to this text—as instead, by presenting tramping as a preferable alternative to a life of ‘roundedness and design’, Milligan seems content to depict homelessness as a harmonious alternative. Thus, though I Didn’t Stay Honest differs from non-radical anti-productivist texts by refusing to redirect readers away from drawing radical conclusions, the sense in which it can be seen to actively encourage them is perhaps limited—as while Milligan

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insinuates the need for a more collectively minded way of life, by ultimately presenting tramping as a happy alternative (while repenting certain aspects of his former existence) he arguably satiates any appetite for farther-­reaching change by remaining stuck on a level of an individual embodiment of resistance. 4.6.3 John Worby (fl. 1937–1939) As John Worby himself notes in his second memoir, after first publishing The Other Half in 1937 he was ‘hailed as a celebrity’ (1939, 222). Confirming this view, the historian Seth Koven has described how Worby’s two-part memoir ‘created a minor sensation’ upon publication, and how subsequently Worby ‘enjoyed celebrity as the man who spoke not for but as one of “the other half”’ (2004, 85). In its first year of publication The Other Half ran to five editions (Anon. 1937d, 11), and it was also published in the United States, where it was reprinted as late as 1946. The success of Worby’s memoir is perhaps partly attributable to a 1937 article in the London Daily Express written by James Douglas, a quote from which was printed in bold on the dust jackets of later editions: ‘This Must be Banned’ (Worby 1946). As David Bradshaw writes in an essay on Douglas: In a 1937 piece headed “This Book Must be Banned” [Douglas] informed his Daily Express readers that a recently published novel was nothing less than “poison gas” that had made him “choke and gasp for fresh air” […] But the authorities refused to be drawn, and the only result was that the next day thousands of orders of The Other Half by John Worby could not be met from stock. (2013, 108)

As Worby puts it in the follow-up autobiography, Spiv’s Progress, Douglas’s review ‘started a controversy which lasted for some time, and sent the sales up by edition after edition’ (1939, 221). The impact of this ‘controversy’ can be traced in the title variations that appeared in the course of the book’s publication history—suggesting that Worby’s publishers responded to the publicity by emphasising the author’s criminality in later editions. In a proof copy published by J.M.  Dent in 1936 the original title of the work was The Other Half; A Hobo’s Autobiography—subsequently amended in 1937 to The Other Half; John Worby’s Life, with the addition of an extended sub-heading (a common practice among publishers during this period) emphasising Worby’s criminal connections (1937a). In full it reads:

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The Other Half John Worby’s Life among: Gangsters and Mugs Tramps * Hoboes * Buskers Molls * Broads * Swag Women Spivs and Bums in short: The Other Half The Underworld of Britain and U.S.A.

(1937a)

In later editions Dent rendered the focus upon criminality even more explicit as the book was retitled The Other Half; The Autobiography of a Spiv (1937b). ‘Spiv’ stuck, and the word was also used in the title of Worby’s aforementioned sequel, Spiv’s Progress. Thus, Worby the hobo was transformed into Worby the crook—as his publishers apparently sought to cash in on the controversy generated by the Express review. This all of course clearly suggests a repeat of what we have already seen in Milligan: namely, a convergence of the tramp memoir with a sensationalised account of the life of the criminal. And yet at the same time— Douglas’s outrage and the publisher’s attempts to rebrand Worby as a self-professed spiv might be seen to suggest the possibility of a less apologetic outlook than was seen in I Didn’t Stay Honest. The Other Half begins with an account of Worby at the age of nine discovering that he is an orphan (1937b, 1). Although he claims to have been ‘happy’ with his foster parents, we learn that from an early age he was ‘always getting into trouble’—ultimately resulting in him being ‘taken to a Home […] in the north of England’: an experience he clearly found challenging as he relates how he was routinely unfairly punished without ever having the ‘difference between right and wrong’ explained to him (1937b, 2, 4–5, 8). Worby then suggests that ‘the happiest day’ of his life arrived when, at the age of thirteen, he was ‘put on board the Montrose at Liverpool’ and sent to Ontario in Canada ‘to work on a farm’ (1937b, 10). After arriving in Ontario, Worby suggests that he soon sought a greater degree of independence, writing: ‘after slaving away on different farm jobs that were arranged for me by the Home without my having any say in the matter, I decided after an argument with the boss to run away and venture out into the world on my own’ (1937b, 11). Worby subsequently describes working for six months on a different farm, before

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getting a new job ushering in a theatre—which he loses after ‘oversleeping one morning’—and then working for a spell as a dishwasher (1937b, 13). Though soon finding himself ‘without work’, he indicates that he was undaunted by this prospect: presenting himself—much like Milligan—as a young man with an appetite for wanderlust and a belief that he could earn a better living via other means: I put on my best clothes and left the house. I was penniless and homeless with nothing in view, but I was strong, healthy and seventeen years of age. I wandered about the city, not caring where I was going but living in hope that one day I should make my fortune. (1937b, 13)

The rest of the memoir chronicles Worby’s experiences on the road in North America and Britain, together with the various criminal exploits through which he attempts to make a living—many of which have a salacious tone. For instance, he describes an incident involving a man named Reg who he remarks talks and acts ‘much like a woman’—and whose caresses apparently produce a ‘sort of soothing, thrilling feeling’ in Worby—but who he ultimately robs of fifty dollars after his sexual advances develop to a level that Worby is uncomfortable with (1937b, 17, 24). As well as robbing people, Worby also describes exchanging sexual favours for money. For instance, he recounts meeting a sex worker in London called Ivy, who offers to take him home with her even though he is penniless, and who ends up giving him a pound note and the keys to her flat (1937b, 171–3). He also recalls an incident in London involving a man who—after learning that he has ‘no home and no money’—offers to pay him two pounds in exchange for Worby acting as his ‘master’ and tying him to a bedrail (1937b, 225–7). One of the most intriguing passages of The Other Half involves a description of how Worby spent several months living as the ‘companion’ of a ‘well-dressed young woman’ called Avril in Mayfair (1937b, 241, 249). Worby relates how he soon learnt that ‘it was a companion’s job to make love’—and appears to have committed to this role contentedly, remarking that he ‘didn’t wait to be driven’ (1937b, 253). Following this, Worby describes living a life of luxury with Avril for some time—as well as helping her to overcome a severe drug addiction—before eventually deciding to slip away and return to a life on the road after she proposes to him. As this brief account of Worby’s memoir suggests—his exploits were by-and-large opportunistic and haphazard, and (repeating the pattern we

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also saw in Milligan) in no way led to him making the ‘fortune’ that he dreamt of when he first took to the road. On the contrary, the descriptions of destitution in The Other Half are often vivid, especially those concerning Worby’s first experiences of homelessness—as he writes: ‘For the first time in my life I felt really alone. I was hungry, tired, dirty and lost in a big city with no money and no home’ (1937b, 38). Relatedly, like other authors we have considered, Worby can also sometimes prove judgemental of others within the homeless community—for instance, objecting to displays of immorality he witnesses in a hobo jungle in America as he describes ‘two bums and three dames dancing naked round the fire in their drunken way’ (1937b, 96). This occasional expression of disdain for fellow tramps is accompanied by sporadic moments of self-loathing in The Other Half as Worby recognises that he is one of them, for example following an incident in which he kisses the daughter of a devout Christian who has given him food and shelter, prompting him to reflect: ‘I cried in agony and shame as I thought of myself, a tramp from the road […] making love to a girl so pure and innocent as Doris’ (1937b, 200). In moments such as this, Worby clearly  internalises the disciplinary outlook on homelessness that has been described throughout this study, emphasising his worthlessness and pitiableness as a member of the homeless community. And yet ultimately, these moments of regret only ever feel temporary— as a greater emphasis is placed upon how Worby’s experiences on the road have caused him to take ownership of this identity by questioning the value of an ordinary working and home-dwelling life. Early on in the novel, for instance, Worby encounters a French Canadian called Jim in New York who is the first person to suggest to him that a life on the road might not be as bad as it first appears. Worby writes: ‘He told me that he didn’t want work as it was a mug’s game and only mugs and horses worked and even horses turned their backs on it’ (1937b, 28). It is not long before Worby himself appears to adopt this view—for instance, responding to an elderly lady who offers him work that he is ‘a born wanderer and liable to go back to the road any day’ (1937b, 130). Referring back to the incident with Doris—it is significant to note that Worby’s regret is soon alleviated as he returns to ‘tramping about the country and living by begging, singing in the streets, selling laces and lavender, sleeping under hedges and in kip-houses’—before spending the night on top of Sgurr nan Conbhairean in the Northwest Highlands in Scotland, where he is filled with ‘wonder and happiness’ and prompted to reflect that ‘nature’ and ‘peace of my mind’ are ‘worth more than all the gold in the world’ (1937b, 201–3).

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Relatedly, at the end of The Other Half—when Worby declines Avril’s offer of marriage and the prospect of a home in Mayfair in spite of having enjoyed ‘three months of happiness’ living with her—the decision is motivated by a desire to have his old life as a tramp back, and to be able to sleep ‘under the starry skies in the open country’ (1937b, 273–6). There is, then, a sense in which Worby’s narrative indirectly repudiates the longing to make a fortune expressed in the opening passages of the memoir—as he ultimately appears to value the freedom from work and the close relationship with nature he enjoys as a tramp above material wealth and comfort. And yet, if there is a sense that Worby abandons the materialistic outlook expressed early on in the memoir—which, as we have seen, may be linked to conceptions of criminality and gangster culture in this period— this is not to say that Worby repudiates the entire concept of criminality. Unlike Milligan—emphasising how the criminal’s attempts to ‘out-bluff and double-cross the other fellow’ belie the ‘social duties all men must have’—Worby appears relatively unapologetic about his criminal activities. For example—we might consider the following passage, in which he describes his response to a landowner who accuses him of trespassing by sleeping in his haystack: I rushed at him and butted him in the solar plexus with my head. He doubled up groaning and I told him as he lay there what I thought of him, his haystack and his police. I told him I had done no harm to man or beast and that it was God’s country and not his or anybody else’s. (1937b, 191)

There is little sense here that Worby is depicting an act of violence in order to demonstrate his former misguidedness, as we saw in Milligan’s memoir: instead this passage reads like a defence of Worby’s decision to physically assault a property owner in retaliation against his belief in private property. Noting Worby’s unapologetic tone—which clearly goes some way towards explaining why the memoir proved so controversial—might encourage us to conclude that though his memoir implicitly critiques the pursuit of wealth that (as Gardaphe notes) defined other popular criminal narratives in the period, it nonetheless retains an interest in the adversarial and indeed antisocial function of crime. We might even go further than this and suggest that unlike Milligan’s memoir—which may be seen to distinguish criminality apart from vagrancy, repudiating the former and celebrating the latter—Worby depicts the two as complementary. The act

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of headbutting a landowner might thus be read as emblematising how criminality and vagrancy are bound together as expressions of resentment against the logic of private ownership, or more generally against existing modes of social organisation. This reading is strongly supported by taking into consideration Worby’s follow-up memoir, Spiv’s Progress—which, though a weak addition to The Other Half in terms of its narrative content, is of interest for developing a more coherent and explicit philosophical outlook than the earlier memoir. Here, for instance, Worby reflects on his own expressed contention that he is unable to fit in: “Cannot fit in.” That phrase set me wondering why I could not fit in. Why was I always on the move? Why was life just one job after another? Why did I always tire of my job when I had one and take to the road again? Was it because I was like other tramps? And if so, what were the other tramps like? Why were they tramps? From what I had seen of them, they were not all rogues and vagabonds. The majority of them had courage, had strength, were willing to work, yet they, too, could not settle down. Their life, like mine, was a pillar-to-post existence, always on the move, hungry one day and feasting the next. And since I had heard these people described as a problem, how did the problem originate? (1939, 206)

Worby then reflects on the possible causes—before ultimately deciding to challenge the premise behind the question he has posed: Problem? I could see no problem. My own life was an example. If I’d worked all my life, would I have been any further ahead? I chuckled to myself as I thought what a mug I would have been. I began to look on these tramps and spivs in a different light. I began to see them as I now saw myself: rebels from everyday slavery. The others, respectable people, they were slaves to the clock, with nothing before them but a lifetime of slavery with nothing to brighten existence until they died. Most of them would die with a wage-­ packet in their hand. What was the use of working for mere existence and nothing more? (1939, 207)

Here Worby quite explicitly brings together his dual identity as a ‘tramp’ and as a ‘spiv’—suggesting that what unites the two is a rejection of the need to conform, in particular with the pressures of a working life and the mundaneness that this entails.

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This might prompt us to reflect that the controversy surrounding Worby’s first memoir may not have been related solely to its author’s refusal to appear repentant in recounting his criminal past—but that it may also have been a response to how the unapologetic tone of The Other Half represented a challenge to established norms. This is indeed reflected across the board in critical responses to Worby’s memoir—with critics generally emphasising the spirit of non-compliance, rather than focussing on the author’s openness about crimes he has committed. For instance, one reviewer wrote of Worby ‘preferring independence to organized life’ (Anon. 1939a, 8). Another complained: ‘The most disturbing thing about the book is the calm superiority of Hobo Worby, who seems to feel very much above the working men and women whose bounty he collects with such ease’ (Anon. 1937b, 9). Mark Benney in The Spectator similarly noted how the author’s wanderlust and criminal lifestyle represent a ‘flight from the complexities of civilisation’—although interestingly, rather than prompting indignation this observation produces ‘a pang of envy’ for this particular reviewer (1937, 28). Reflecting on how Worby seems to unite the tramp and criminal identities, seeing in both the possibility of rebelling ‘from everyday slavery’, while Milligan conversely appears to celebrate the tramp way of life while repenting his former criminality—we might speculate that the cause of this difference is that Worby doesn’t just turn his back on the aspirant dimension of criminal culture, but attempts to redefine the concept of criminality by casting himself as a spiv, rather than relying on the popular conception of gangster culture defined by Gardaphe, with its fetishisation of ‘stylish dress and fancy cars’. As the historian Jerry White notes—when Worby used the word ‘spiv’ to refer to someone who lives on their wits ‘usually on the right side of the law but sometimes on the wrong if the risks weren’t too great’—‘apparently “Nobody knew what it meant”, and it did not gain real currency until about 1947’ (2001, 244–5). In other words, Worby can be seen to have been at the forefront of an attempt to define a new criminal underclass: a type of criminal who, unlike the gangster figure popular in the 1930s—seeking to wield power ‘through sexuality and guns’—was characterised as having a marginal status, existing on the fringes of criminality and making a living in a haphazard way. While for Milligan criminality is represented by ‘“smart guys”’ who ‘out-bluff and double-cross the other fellow’—Worby’s memoirs may thus be seen to reflect the emergence of a different conception of criminality more compatible with perceived tramp values: one less about social uplift (although

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this may have been a motive for Worby originally) and more about defying societal conventions, in particular concerning the need to conform to a ‘lifetime of slavery’ in the form of steady employment. As for whether this amounts to a radical or a merely subversive move— the answer is mixed. Undoubtedly Worby’s invention of the tramp/spiv stereotype and his attempt to cast such characters as ‘rebels from everyday slavery’ demonstrates an interest in the tramp as a subversive figure. At the same time—in his attempts to distinguish himself apart from ‘respectable people’ who are ‘slaves to the clock’, Worby’s analysis might be seen to remain limited to a defence of his own lifestyle choices, with little indication of an explicit interest in exploring the wider ramifications of a refusal of work and associated norms. Equally, there is not much to suggest that Worby was deploying the tactics of implicitly radical anti-productivist narratives described in the introduction to this text in the sense of staging an impasse that the reader is encouraged to devise a radical solution to—as in ultimately resolving that he can ‘see no problem’ in terms of his own lifestyle choices, Worby demonstrates that he was content to present tramping as a viable (and indeed ideal) embodied alternative to a life of conformity (even if he does also acknowledge the hardships that come with it). As was argued of Milligan—this might be seen to partly satiate any appetite for farther-reaching change provoked by the text. And yet, we might also note that there is a difference in tone between Worby’s text and Milligan’s that may cause us to modify this claim. While the latter presents tramping as a preferable alternative in a relatively passive sense—defending ‘the sorrow or happiness of the fleeting moment’ as preferable to a life of ‘roundedness and design’—Worby’s defence of the tramp lifestyle feels altogether more robust as he engages in vituperative invectives against people who work ‘for mere existence and nothing more’ and unapologetically describes instances in which he confronts figures of authority. In this sense, although Worby’s protest is contained at the level of lifestyle choice and doesn’t actively point towards the need for envisaging radical alternatives in the manner described by Alcalá—the energetically adversarial tone of his memoirs may still be seen to nonetheless encourage radical interpretation in the sense that it perhaps discourages acquiescence. In short, then, Worby’s memoirs clearly do not fit neatly into any of the three models outlined in the introduction to this text: they are not overtly radical in their commitment to an anti-productivist position; they are not non-radical in the sense of providing an escape route from the radical implications of an anti-productivist outlook; and lastly, they are not

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implicitly radical in the sense of frustrating the reader to the point of being forced to draw radical conclusions. They are instead—like Davies and like Milligan’s memoirs—texts that seem to belong to a fourth as yet unaccounted for category: content to operate on a subversive level in a manner that permits radical anti-productivist readings but without actively encouraging them.4 And yet at the same time, it might be argued that the combative tone of Worby’s memoir nonetheless elevates it somewhat above this status: while writers like Davies and Milligan come across as passively subversive, Worby’s defence of his lifestyle feels more front-­footed, perhaps in turn inclining readers towards the radical interpretation that he stops short of explicitly embracing or implicitly encouraging through a strategy of frustration. 4.7  Peripatetic Tramp Memoirs: Matt Marshall and Jim Phelan The two authors to be considered in this section were both tramps whose memoirs place a strong emphasis on the act of walking from place to place, and on describing sights seen along the way. As such they may be seen to belong to a subcategory of homeless life writing that was perhaps the most popular during this period: namely, the peripatetic tramp memoir, in which the tramp memoir form converges with literature on the subject of walking. Before turning to these two authors however, this section will begin by briefly tracing the emergence of the peripatetic literature tradition in the Romantic period and describing its ties to vagrancy in order to give a clearer idea of what the peripatetic tramp memoir may be seen to have emerged out of. It will then offer an overview of some of the

4  As for the broader significance of this so-called fourth category of anti-productivist literature (permitting but not encouraging radical interpretation) in relation to the three models outlined in the introduction to this text: it seems likely that rather than this being a wholly distinct category it instead describes a grey area somewhere between the non-radical and the implicitly radical categories (which may incidentally also better describe select works of antiproductivist working-class fiction, bohemian literature or nature writing previously alluded to). Accordingly, while it might thus be of interest as a means of more accurately describing certain texts, its existence as a category is perhaps of relatively little theoretical import—signalling a mid-point between two previously described categories in terms of its effectiveness as a radical discourse rather than an entirely new position (a claim that is supported by the above analysis of the three identified authors whose texts fall within it).

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additional writers whose texts may be seen to belong to this subgenre of the interwar tramp memoir, before focussing on the two selected authors. 4.7.1

 eripatetic Literature and Vagrancy: From Romanticism to the P Peripatetic Tramp Memoir While of course there is a long tradition of literature on the subject of walking, studies exploring the relationship between walking and literature indicate that recreational walking first became a popular pastime for writers and for members of the British middle and upper classes (at least during the modern period) around the early nineteenth century, or just before. In her study of walking, literature and English culture, Anne Wallace for instance describes how ‘moving without bounds or permission or (necessarily) explicit purpose’ had since the Tudor Poor Laws come to be seen as a sign of criminality—until the nineteenth century, when ‘a taste for walking and respect for other pedestrians’ came to embody ‘the virtues Austen ascribes to the best of the English landed gentry and freeholders’ (1994, 29, 99). In a later study of Romantic walking and pedestrian travel, Robin Jarvis has suggested that walking became ‘gradually assimilated into mainstream culture’ somewhat earlier, ‘in the last quarter of the eighteenth century’—while at the same time confirming Wallace’s general hypothesis that around this time the ‘history of associating walking with indigence’ evolved, as it attained the status of a respectable activity (1997, 9, 23). One of the clearest instances that critics such as Wallace point to of this emerging interest in walking is its prominence within the genre of Romantic poetry—with William Wordsworth standing out as the most obvious example of this trend, given the significance attributed to walking in such texts as his 1799 The Prelude. However, although Wordsworth’s interest in walking may have to some degree reflected its emerging respectability during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this is not to say that he was in turn dismissive of its association with ‘indigence’. As we will see in the next chapter when his poetry on homelessness will be explored in greater detail, Wordsworth had a keen interest in the subject of homelessness: his earlier poetry is full of ‘vagrants, beggars, discharged soldiers, pedlars and paupers’ (Harrison 1994, 16), and in his preface to Lyrical Ballads he expresses a clear preoccupation with representing ‘[l]ow and rustic’ life (1802, vii). In a study of the theme of vagrancy in Wordsworth’s writing, Celeste Langan confirms that Wordsworth was

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relatedly interested in drawing parallels between vagrancy and walking by identifying the phenomenon of ‘“Romantic vagrancy”’ in his writing as an expression of an interest in ‘walking and talking’. However, Langan at the same time suggests that Wordsworth’s reasons for embracing the vagrant aspect of walking were perhaps more complex than they at first appear. In particular, she argues that what was really at stake behind Wordsworth’s defence of the supposedly vagrant activities of walking and talking was a wider ‘attempt to negotiate a series of differential determinations of freedom—political, economic, aesthetic’ (1995, 27). The implication is thus that though Wordsworth’s writing may indicate a link between peripatetic literature and vagrancy—homelessness can also be seen to have performed a largely symbolic function within this tendency, signifying a preoccupation with the theme of freedom during a period of economic and democratic liberalism. If we look beyond the Romantic period towards peripatetic literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, while this Romantic interest in walking as an expression of freedom may be seen to have remained, an interest in the ties between walking and vagrancy appears to have faded somewhat—paralleling Jarvis’s suggestion that the ‘aura of quixotry or unconventionality surrounding pedestrian touring’ dissolved ‘by the 1810s’ (1997, 13). Henry David Thoreau’s 1861 essay ‘Walking’ for instance continues the Romantic tradition of depicting walking as an expression of ‘absolute Freedom and Wildness’—while discontinuing the association with vagrancy as Thoreau makes a clear distinction between those who practise the true ‘art of Walking’ and other ‘mere idlers and vagabonds’ (2008, 162). Later authors of peripatetic literature in a similar mould—such as Hilaire Belloc—similarly dissociate the act of walking from homelessness, with Belloc expressing concern in his 1902 travelogue The Path to Rome about being seen to be ‘like a tramp’ and proposing that ‘the kind of man who boasts that he does not mind […] roughing it, is […] a man who cares nothing for all that civilization has built up’ (1902, 72–4, 295). This sense of a diminishing willingness on the part of authors of late nineteenth-century peripatetic literature to connect the freedom associated with walking to vagrancy is easy enough to explain given the general hypothesis of this study: the obvious causal factor being that as the figure of the late modern tramp overtook the early modern masterless vagrant (at least on a discursive level), the parallels between the liberated walker and this newly emergent jobless wanderer may have been less striking.

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As we move into the twentieth century, however, a sense of the crossover between walking and homelessness may be seen to have been resurrected in the form of the peripatetic tramp memoir—in which a novel, reverse conceptualisation of the tramp as a symbol of resistance against capitalist and disciplinary norms can be seen to have coalesced around earlier conceptions discernible in Romantic peripatetic literature of vagrancy as an embodiment of freedom. In the process of fusing these two discourses, we will soon see that the tendency for homelessness to play an abstract role was frequently diminished, as comparably idealised representations of homelessness (typically celebrating the tramp’s proximity to nature) became grounded by the introduction of a tramp life writing element. At the same time, in some of the examples of peripatetic tramp memoirs confined to the periphery of the following analysis, we will see that the tendency towards abstract idealisation remains dominant. Beginning with such an example, the following analysis will commence with an overview of the output of an author who perhaps did more than any other to reconnect peripatetic literature to the theme of homelessness, and to introduce the figure of the tramp into the equation—but who at the same time may be seen to have reflected the Romantic tendency towards abstraction to such a degree that he must nonetheless be consigned to the margins of this study. 4.7.2

 verview of Other Peripatetic Tramp Memoirs I: Stephen O Graham (1884–1975) Stephen Graham was a Scottish author and journalist who published travel books, novels, historical works and memoirs. Michael Hughes, in a recent biography, notes how Graham—in common with many of the authors considered in this study—has ‘suffered the indignity of becoming a forgotten person’ after having been ‘a “famous” or “celebrated” travel writer’ in his time, familiar enough to appear as ‘a caricature […] in literary magazines’ (2014, 9). Graham wrote numerous accounts of his experiences walking through Russia, North America and elsewhere, as well as several books outlining his philosophy on ‘tramping’—one of which prompted a reviewer to remark that ‘no living writer has done more tramping than our author or knows more about the business’ (Anon. 1927, 4). In 1928 he also edited a book entitled The Tramp’s Anthology, bringing together a collection of extracts from texts written by ‘tramp’ writers, defined loosely enough to include genuinely homeless authors like Davies and Kennedy alongside walkers and travel writers such as the Reverend A.N. Cooper

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and the poet Edward Thomas (Graham 1930). In addition to this, passages in Graham suggest that he can be compared to other reverse discourse tramp memoirists considered in this study by indicating his interest in the subversive possibilities suggested by life on the road. For instance, in his 1927 The Gentle Art of Tramping Graham emphasises the disalienating effects of living as a tramp in the context of a wider work and commodity obsessed culture, arguing that ‘[t]ramping brings one to reality’ by enabling an escape from ‘housekeeping’, ‘spending mania’ and ‘needing to earn a living’ (1927, 9, 33). Given his extensive writing on the subject of tramping and his clear interest in its subversive and anti-­productivist possibilities—it is plain to see how Graham can be depicted as having rejuvenated the link between peripatetic literature and homelessness, and how he may be credited with having introduced the figure of the tramp into the mix. And yet at the same time, as this account also perhaps suggests— Graham’s definition of tramping was quite distinct from the one presented in this study. In The Gentle Art of Tramping he explains: I suppose one should draw a distinction between professional tramping and just tramping, especially as this whole book is to be called THE GENTLE ART OF TRAMPING. I am not writing of the American hobo, nor of the British casual, nor of rail-roaders and beachcombers or of enemies of society—“won’t works” and parasites of the charitable. While among these there are many very strange and interesting exceptions, yet in general they are not highly estimable people, nor is their way of life beautiful or worthy of imitation. (1927, 11)

There are distinctive echoes of Thoreau and Belloc’s efforts to distinguish themselves apart from the homeless here—yet perhaps more compellingly, there is an indication of an effort to resurrect the Romantic tendency described by Langan of defining vagrancy in abstract terms as an expression of an interest in ‘walking and talking’ perhaps reflecting a broader preoccupation with freedom, although updated so that it is oriented around the figure of the tramp. The link with Romanticism is further reinforced by a sense that Graham’s interest in tramping at its core reflects his interest in nature, as he for instance writes: ‘I for my part hardly believe in tramping for tramping’s sake, but in living with Nature’ (1922, 11)—echoing the preoccupation with ‘the beauty or sublimity or healing power of nature’

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that is so characteristic of writers in the Romantic tradition (Ferber 2012, 97). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Graham’s interest in defining tramping in abstract terms as a ‘gentle art’ associated with walking and living in nature is accompanied by a diminished sense of the radical potential of homelessness in his writing, as he openly opposes the idea of tramping as ‘an act of rebellion’ and depicts the tramp as ‘a friend of society’ (1927, 11, 66). It will be clear from this account why I have chosen not to foreground Graham’s work: although he is a significant figure within the peripatetic genre who may be seen (perhaps more than any other author) to have resurrected the link between vagrancy and peripatetic literature, even while dissociating tramping from homelessness—he is on balance best defined as an author of peripatetic literature heavily influenced by the Romantic tradition, with a keen but abstract interest in the figure of the tramp. Thus though he has unquestionably made a contribution to anti-­ productivist discourse, and though I would still argue that he just about  qualifies for consideration as a reverse discourse tramp memoirist (on the grounds that his definition and subversion of tramping remains tied to a conception oriented around a defiance of disciplinary and work-­ related norms)—he is clearly far from being exemplary of the tramp literature tradition. In addition to this, the lack of a radical inclination perhaps provides further justification for confining him to the margins of this study. Nonetheless, as we will shortly see, Graham’s outlook on tramping reflects (and may be seen to have also directly influenced) a significant portion of literature produced on the subject of tramping during this period, especially in the peripatetic mould. In particular, Harry Foster, Harry Clouston, Jan and Cora Gordon, and Ryan MacMahon all published tramp memoirs during the interwar period that similarly abstract the figure of the tramp, and that exist on a kind of borderland between peripatetic travel writing and the tramp memoir. 4.7.3

 verview of Other Peripatetic Tramp Memoirs II: Harry Foster O (1894–1932), Harry Clouston (fl. 1937), Jan Gordon (1882–1944), Cora Gordon (1879–1950) and Ryan MacMahon (fl. 1948) The five additional authors to be considered briefly here before turning to the two authors who will form the focus of the following analysis were all memoirists who referred to themselves as either tramps or vagabonds, though their conceptions of vagrancy were generally (although, as we shall see, not entirely) in alignment with the hypothesis developed in this study. At the same time it will be noted  that their writing tends to

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concentrate not so much on the subject of homelessness as on their authors’ travels—mostly (although by no means exclusively) on foot. Harry Foster was an author who wrote multiple travel books, in several of which he refers to himself as a ‘vagabond’, a ‘beachcomber’ and a ‘tramp’—for example, his 1922 The Adventures of a Tropical Tramp, which describes his travels through South America as part of an ‘informal fraternity of tropical tramps’, picking up temporary jobs along the way in an Andean mining camp and as a special correspondent for a newspaper in Lima (1922, 24–5). Harry Clouston was an author from New Zealand whose 1937 The Happy Hobo recalls  ‘the most reckless wager man ever made’: with Clouston betting a friend that he could travel around the world ‘without any means at his disposal [...] without begging, borrowing or stealing’, following which an account is offered of his travels through North America, Australia, Europe and the Middle East—including episodes in which he almost starves in Seattle and works as a pavement artist in London (1937, 9, 108, 158). Jan and Cora Gordon were a bohemian couple who in their 1933 book The London Roundabout (which is incidentally dedicated to Graham) describe how ‘as art students’ they had ‘little money, but a great desire for strange adventures and foreign parts’— leading them to pursue a life of travel and to co-write multiple travel books in which they describe a range of experiences that often bring them into close contact with poverty as they are forced to sleep ‘on the floor, vermin-­ bitten, fishing our meals out of the olla podridas of the peasantry’ (1933, 23, 54–5). Lastly, Ryan MacMahon was a qualified doctor who nonetheless describes how he has ‘always […] been poor’, and who in his 1948 memoir Tramp Royal: An Autobiography relays his adventures travelling the world, picking up work as a ‘jackaroo, cowpuncher, trapper, soldier, doctor, trainer of race-horses, gold prospector, malariologist, globe-trotter etc.’ (1948, vii). Although the depictions of tramping and  vagabondage developed by these authors is thus clearly tied to a sense of hardship, precarity and the struggle to find work, it is perhaps still questionable whether they can be considered to fully align with the new conception of homelessness embodied by the figure of the tramp as it has been  described throughout this study. Foster’s view of tramping is typical of this subgenre of the tramp memoir—and is strongly reminiscent of Graham’s tendency towards Romantic abstraction—as he writes that a tramp ‘is called a tramp […] because his love of adventure keeps him from working long in one place’,

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and as he suggests that a tropical tramp can be anyone ‘from college graduate to illiterate, provided only that he possess the common failing of wanderlust’, indicating a perception of tramping as primarily being connected to the impulse to travel (1922, 25). Relatedly, there is a consistent sense throughout these texts of the authors in question distinguishing themselves apart from regular members of the homeless community and from poor people: for instance, the Gordons at one point write that as a consequence of only experiencing the ‘negative’ side of poverty, most poor people (unlike them) ‘do not know what poverty is’ (1933, 119); while Clouston presents homeless individuals he encounters in London as being clearly different from himself on the grounds that they have ‘no thoughts other than merely existing’ (1937, 94). And yet, as with the examples of Digit and Neville considered previously, it would be a mistake to categorise these authors as social explorers. Like these two tramp memoirists, Foster, Clouston, the Gordons and MacMahon appear not so much to have been interested in observing and reporting back on communities they encountered, but in experimenting with peripatetic and impoverished lifestyles in order to build up a wealth of personal experience—thus ultimately existing in a space somewhere between social exploration and tramp memoir writing. As with Digit and Neville, as a consequence of not appearing to have a clear reformist agenda these authors are also generally far more willing to write positively about their experiences of poverty than the average social explorer—and to reflect the subversive values described elsewhere in this study. For instance, the Gordons write of their experiences of impoverishment: ‘by this very poverty we find ourselves in a position to buy pleasures which we could not possibly enjoy from wealth’, indicating a Lefebvrian rediscovery of pleasure as a consequence of existing outside of a commodity-­oriented framework (1933, 20). Similarly, Clouston ends The Happy Hobo by reflecting: ‘The past five years have been full of adventure, and if my path has led through dark places, it has always come out into sunshine again’ (1937, 284); while MacMahon ends his memoir by suggesting that ‘in the most squalid, poverty stricken hovels one is liable to find learned and kindly persons who are upsides with the best one can meet elsewhere’ (1948, 313). And yet, the fact of the matter is that the memoirs of Foster, Clouston, the Gordons and MacMahon contain less in the way of a reflection upon the disciplinary pressure to be productive (or upon the possible wider meaning of this) than most of the other memoirs considered in this chapter, as these authors appear to have been primarily

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interested in expanding their horizons and seeing the world. In short, although there are moments in which these texts can be seen to celebrate tramping (or at least a form of tramping that bears a relation to homelessness at the same time as it is distinct from it) as an escape from the normative values associated with disciplinary society, suggesting that they do just about qualify as reverse discourse tramp memoirs—they are nonetheless limited in terms of their anti-productivist and/or radical credentials. The two authors that will form the focus of what remains of this section share certain similarities with Foster, Clouston, the Gordons and MacMahon, as well as Graham—in the sense that they place a strong emphasis on their identities as walkers and frequently write about the importance of nature. It is also the case that their status as tramps is a little more dubious than that of some of the other memoirists explored elsewhere in this chapter—as Matt Marshall was also a poet and a journalist, while Jim Phelan was an established author. And yet, though both Marshall and Phelan are situated, like others within the peripatetic tramp memoir subgenre, on a border between travel writing and tramp memoir writing, they have been selected for more detailed analysis on two grounds: first, because on the travel writing/tramp memoir spectrum, they are the closest to the tramp memoir end out of the authors gathered together in this section; and second, because their texts perhaps relatedly reflect a greater level of interest in the idea of the tramp as a figure defined in opposition to established productivist norms. 4.7.4 Matt Marshall (fl. 1932–1935) Matt Marshall was a poet and a journalist for the Glasgow Evening Times who wrote a collection of articles about his tramping experiences in the Scottish Highlands, published together in 1932 as The Travels of Tramp-­ Royal. Subsequently, his 1933 Tramp-Royal on the Toby chronicles his walks through Wales, England and Scotland, and his 1935 Tramp-Royal in Spain, Etc. describes his experiences walking through Spain. There is some evidence to suggest that he enjoyed a wide readership in Scotland— as reviewers often referred to his cultish credentials, for example writing: ‘Those who have not already made the acquaintance of Matt Marshall in his Tramp-Royal books don’t know what they have missed’ (Anon. 1935, 2). Marshall’s first book, The Travels of Tramp-Royal, is in many respects a conventional walking guide—as he instructs his readers in an opening

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passage: ‘get your map out, and keep it’ (1932, 5). A defining feature of the text, also typical of the genre of peripatetic tramp memoirs, is its lyricism—for example in the following (albeit somewhat tongue-in-cheek) description of the sea calling the author: Not brazenly, or with clarion tongue, but softly, winningly, wooingly; with a mingling of sweet sounds and soothing cadences: as the murmuring of sea-shells, the fitful breathing of Aeolian harp strings, the far-off winding of Elfland horns; calling, calling, ceaselessly calling. (1932, 139)

Accompanying Marshall’s lyricism is a persistent sense throughout his memoir of the contentment found when tramping as a result of finding oneself in close proximity to nature. For example, describing his journey to a moor near Loch Tulla in the Scottish Highlands, Marshall writes of discovering ‘a clearing among firs in the heart of the woodlands, with a stream purling within earshot’—prompting the reflection: Contentment and Health: gifts of the Magi. Contentment: found oftener under a tramp’s duds than under imperial purple. Health: found oftener dossing in a ditch-bottom than philandering in the court of kings. (1932, 193)

Elsewhere Marshall builds on this conception of tramping as a means of being closer to nature by suggesting that this goes hand-in-hand with an awareness of tramping as a way of life defined in opposition to city living and wage earning: For only about one man in a thousand ever does respond to the Call of the Wild, and the gods alone know whether he is to be envied most or pitied. It takes such a tremendous amount of cold-blooded pluck, you see, deliberately to pull up your anchors and beat it Wildwards for tall timber. Your town suffocated make-up strongly militates against any such atavistic backsliding. It sits back on its hunkers, so to speak, and proceeds to argue the toss. And except where that one man in a thousand is concerned, its logic convinces for the time being and you dutifully drop the kit-bag to resume wage earning. (1932, 141)

We see here a typically robust advocacy of the character-building benefits of exposure to the wild, together with an expressed contempt for the comforts of city living and a clear rejection of work—marking a convergence

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between the Romantic idealisation of nature we have found in earlier examples of peripatetic literature and the anti-productivist rhetoric we have seen in other reverse discourse tramp memoirs. In offering such a synthesis Marshall clearly resembles Graham—and yet there is a definite distinction between these two authors in terms of their conceptions of tramping and how they interact with and respond to the homeless community as a whole. To begin with, it is clear that unlike Graham and some of the  other peripatetic tramp memoirists previously considered, Marshall moved and lived among members of the homeless community—as he makes frequent reference to the ‘tramps, bums and no account cadgers I had ever travelled with on the Toby’ (1932, 99). Although Marshall may have been a journalist, in his later memoir Tramp-Royal on the Toby, it becomes clear that his experiences of homelessness were nonetheless genuine, or close to it— as he describes how having ‘tried to earn a living by writing verse’ he is no stranger to the pawn shop; as well as recounting an episode in which he spent over a year living in ‘the cheapest kip in London’ (1933, 141, 151). In the course of the text he also describes finding himself with ‘no work, no money, no food, no lodging’ (1933, 193)—and generally presents a picture of a life indistinguishable from many of the other tramp memoirists considered in this chapter, for instance writing: I have slept in barns, cowsheds, pig-holes, horse-mangers, corn-ricks, haystacks, ditches, and hedge-bottoms […] Once, at Euston Station, I dossed in a main hamper, at another time on the back doorstep of a cinema theatre, again in a wheelbarrow, at various other times on the Thames Embankment, in police cells, in tramp wards, in dosshouses, in padding kens, and in other queer and outlandish places too numerous to mention. (1933, 127)

Thus—though Marshall wrote in the travel writing tradition—his experience and in turn his perception of homelessness was clearly far closer to the conception of the tramp as an impoverished victim of unemployment described by Case, Kusmer, Depastino and others in the introduction to this study than to the conception discerned in other authors in the peripatetic tramp memoir tradition previously considered. As suggested, this corresponds with a sense throughout Marshall’s writing of a clearer determination to subvert this association by depicting the tramp as an emblem of anti-production than we find in authors like Graham, Foster, Clouston, the Gordons and MacMahon. For example, in

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Tramp-Royal on the Toby Marshall challenges popular misconceptions about the ‘soldiers of misfortune’ he encounters in London—proposing that they are ‘anything but forlorn’ and suggesting that those who disparagingly ‘dub them loafers, moochers, work-shirkers, and dole-addicts’ have a warped perspective, as he remarks: ‘Respectable existence has played the devil with your looking apparatus’ (1933, 145–6). Marshall then describes what he sees when he encounters the London homeless: Here, to me, the very air seems actually to be palpitate with romance and adventure. Surrounding every one of these shabby modelers I perceive (but maybe my looking apparatus, too, is defective) a visible aura, an iridescent nimbus, as it were, that so dazzles my sight and fires my imagination that I feel as though this dayroom were Valhalla and these loafers the God-chosen. Each is the flesh-and-blood hero of his own flesh-and-blood book. Each is bursting with a saga to tell, his own doubly amazing, because truthful, saga. For about none of these scarred veterans of misfortune is the dullness or nauseating uninterest of respectability. None of them is a mere convention-­ patterned automaton. (1933, 149–50)

Here there is a clear (albeit tongue-in-cheek) celebration of the subversive attributes of the tramp community, along with a definite attempt to subvert disciplinary objections to unproductiveness by transforming this into grounds for praise. At the same time we might note that in admitting that his ‘looking apparatus’ might be ‘defective’, Marshall appears to be admitting that this conception of homelessness may be somewhat exaggerated, or idealised: a point that is reinforced when he later acknowledges that not every homeless individual is ‘master of his fate’, as the homeless community also contains ‘society’s weaklings’ (1933, 166). Thus, Marshall’s sense of the  potential for tramping to facilitate a reversal of  disciplinary and productivist norms is clearly offset by a belief (reminiscent of Roberts and Kennedy) that this potential cannot be realised by everyone—indicating that homelessness is thus an ‘acid test of the stuff of a man’ (1933, 151). At the heart of this celebration of the tramp’s (albeit perhaps limited)  capacity to refuse to conform is a sense of the  possible freedoms gained through a life lived on the road, as Marshall writes elsewhere in the same text: Liberty, equality, fraternity—that is what the Toby offers. One and indivisible you find it on the Toby. For all mankind, who so free as the tramp? who so equal as paupers? who so brotherly as brotherless men? (1933, 122)

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This passage may be seen to represent a clear continuation of the Romantic motif identified by Langan of utilising vagrancy as an ‘attempt to negotiate a series of differential determinations of freedom’. And yet in the context of Marshall’s interest in the homeless community (albeit in select members of it who exemplify subversion)—these efforts at the same time feel less like an abstraction than they do in authors like Graham. Marshall himself can be seen to have exhibited an awareness of this in a passage in The Travels of Tramp-Royal in which he describes encountering a motorist who gives him a lift. After Marshall declines the offer of being driven all the way to Glasgow, he parodies the motorist’s response: He understood. He too loved the Open Road. He spent most of his time upon it. It was the only life, old man, eh? Oh, he understood all right. And did I know what Hazlitt had written about it? And Stevenson, that beloved vagabond? And Hilaire Belloc? And Stephen Graham? Ah, yes, the Open Road was the only life, old man; the Open Road, ah yes. He understood. (1932, 118)

The inference is plainly that this individual has only a superficial understanding of life on the road compared to Marshall. By association, this passage may also be seen to indicate the limited insights of authors of peripatetic literature like Belloc and Graham whose writing about walking and tramping inclines towards the abstract. In Marshall’s writing, then, there is a clear sense both of his (admittedly partial) allegiance to the homeless community and of him embracing its subversive potential as he presents the tramp lifestyle as an alternative to the ‘nauseating uninterest of respectability’, rather than as a mere jaunt. As for the question of whether this amounts to a radical perspective: on the one hand, it might be argued that Marshall’s preoccupation with the qualities of ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ made possible by a life on the road has a distinctive political aspect—hinting at the common values that might be established were the tramp’s rejection of ‘wage earning’ and ‘convention’ to be more widely emulated. And yet on the other hand, Marshall’s emphasis on the personal benefits to be gained from abandoning the city and living in close proximity to nature—such as ‘Contentment and Health’—is suggestive of a narrow focus on the individual advantages of tramping as a way of life, rather than on the wider ramifications of a rejection of work and associated norms. Reinforcing the view that Marshall’s radical credentials are in this way limited, his depiction of tramping as a form of ‘atavistic backsliding’ in one of the passages quoted above may

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also be seen to indicate a conservative bent that is reminiscent of the example of the nature writing of Jefferies, Hudson, Thomas, Massingham and others considered in the introduction to this text—which (it will be recalled) was criticised for retreating into a nostalgic vision of the past rather than developing a forward-thinking model for societal transformation. On balance then, the impression left by Marshall’s writing is mixed: in some ways the robustness of his defence of the tramp lifestyle may be seen to carry the potential of inclining the reader towards drawing radical conclusions in the manner of Worby; in other regards, he seems closer to the model of non-radical anti-productivist radical literature represented by early twentieth-century nature writing in his focus upon embodying subversion on an individual level and in his atavism. 4.7.5 Jim Phelan (1895–1966) Jim Phelan was an Irish born novelist, convict, chess player and tramp. As Paul Lester has noted in his essay Tales of a Lifer: The Writings of Jim Phelan, he had a prolific and successful few years following his release from a long stretch in prison in 1937—publishing three novels in 1938 and receiving ‘praise from reviewers’ (2011, 3). However, as Lester also notes: ‘Phelan’s fame was […] to be short-lived and all of his novels are now out of print’ (2011, 3). Phelan wrote several memoirs describing his life as a prison inmate and as a tramp: the two most noteworthy in the context of this study being his 1948 The Name’s Phelan and his 1949 We Follow the Roads. In We Follow the Roads Phelan suggests that tramping is something that runs in his family, writing: ‘my father had tramped the world before I was born’, and describing how ‘his father too had owned the same farm, and he had also chosen to be a tramp’ (1949, 11). The account offered in The Name’s Phelan adds that while Phelan’s father was ‘trapped by a job and a home, a wife and a family, by his duty in life’—he remained a ‘vagrant at heart’ (1993, 5). This is undoubtedly telling of Phelan’s definition of tramping—and of how he sees it more as a state of mind than as a fixed set of behavioural patterns. Accordingly, he writes of himself in this same text: I have never looked like a tramp except on the few occasions when I was not one. Yet anyone who had ever conversed in understanding with a vagrant, and knew of me, should have seen through the superficialities of culture, professional industry, and occasional wealth, to the drifter beneath. (1993, 1)

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Phelan’s failure to fully comply with the tramp stereotype has prompted Lester to remark: ‘How much credence should go to Jim Phelan as a tramp by vocation, despite his compulsion and affinity to the calling, might be considered open to some debate, given his lifeline to a literary culture’ (2011, 20). And yet—the account of Phelan’s early life offered in his multiple memoirs suggests that, like Marshall, he did spend a considerable amount of time on the road. His life story is worth summarising in some detail—partly because it confirms this, but more importantly because it goes some way towards explaining his abstract conception of what it means to be a ‘drifter’, which though somewhat idiosyncratic still enables him to be categorised as a tramp memoirist. After spending some time describing his childhood in a suburb of Dublin, The Name’s Phelan offers an account of ten years of Phelan’s life, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, during which he alternated between episodes of tramping and employment. Aged eighteen, we learn that Phelan wandered from Texas to New Orleans as ‘a drifter’ who could easily have been branded an ‘unmitigated work-dodger’—though he protests he worked ‘very hard, collecting a million impressions of the river and city’ (1993, 141). He then describes returning to Dublin and spending a period ‘making nothing’, ‘doing nothing’ and being ‘very content with life’—before joining the Irish Citizen Army in Dublin and then spending some time working for a travelling circus and a theatrical troupe as a ‘lumper’ and a baggage man, ‘strolling quietly from town to town’ between jobs (1993, 225–8). After describing moving to Dorset to work as a blacksmith and dropping ‘into a narrow groove, a circumscribed repetitive drift more erosive than any padding-blankness’ (1993, 260)—Phelan recollects his return to Ireland, where he experienced something of a revelation. Spending the night in a ‘paddincan’ (or lodging house) in Kinnegad, he recalls how he found himself reflecting on his multiple and conflicting desires in life—to have wealth, female companionship, notoriety, and at the same time to be able to continue walking ‘along the roads’—and how these ambitions were ultimately ‘contradictory, cancelling one another out’, leading him to conclude that he’d be better off accepting how he was always ‘going to be nothing’ and ‘just a drifter’ (1993, 266). Far from this being a negative realisation—accepting the impossibility of realising these aspirations instils a profound sense of calm in Phelan as he tells the reader: A great peace came to me, that evening in Kinnegad. The self-assessment, and self-searching, had been long overdue […] Now I knew that because I could not have my half-crown I did not want life’s florin. I wanted nothing. (1993, 266)

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Following this, perhaps surprisingly, Phelan’s lifestyle does not alter too drastically—and still consists of him alternating between periods of homelessness and employment. For instance, he describes a period in Liverpool when he lived with his partner Dora and took a job in an ironworks—during which time he was outwardly ‘a citizen and a husband, a person with a home and an income’, although he was ‘often absent’ from work (1993, 276–8). A separate episode in The Name’s Phelan indicates how it is that Phelan could have maintained ‘a home and a steady job’ even after the apparent revelation that he is ‘just a drifter’—in the process shedding some light on his unusual conceptualisation of the tramping spirit. This passage concerns his relationship with the tramp and novelist Liam O’Flaherty (whose memoirs will be considered later in this chapter)—who was at the time making efforts to replicate the model of Coxey’s Army that he had witnessed in America by creating an ‘unemployed army’, or a ‘beggar’s legion’ in Ireland (1993, 274–5). Although Phelan does spend some time with O’Flaherty—following his ‘army’ to Cork—he ultimately declines O’Flaherty’s request to accompany him to America in order to continue ‘the fight’ (1993, 278). In his defence, Phelan suggests that he ‘felt nothing and hoped nothing’ at the time: explaining how he had ‘no loyalties’ and ‘no convictions’—and how, expecting nothing from life, he ‘would take nothing’ (1993, 279). The implication appears to be that rather than solidifying his allegiance to the tramp community, Phelan’s moment of revelation in Kinnegad has provided him with a justification for refusing to join a ‘beggar’s legion’—as though this amounts to too strong a commitment to the material world. The inference is intriguing, suggesting that Phelan’s outlook as a ‘drifter’ is so bound up with a concept of extreme negation that it paradoxically results in compliance—as he chooses to drift into a job that he only remains semi-committed to, rather than join O’Flaherty in embracing the political potential of tramp subculture. It is true that this is a position that with hindsight Phelan appears to regret, as he reflects in the same passage that during this period he ‘forgot to analyse or brood’—while also suggesting that his decision not to follow O’Flaherty was linked to his awareness that he was ‘being watched’ by authorities aware of his Republican loyalties (Ibid.). However, if we now turn to Phelan’s later text We Follow the Roads—a memoir that condenses his experiences on the road into a tramp philosophy—we find that this conception of tramping as a form of disengagement was one that persisted throughout his writing.

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At the core of We Follow the Roads is a definition of tramping that is linked to the activity of walking. For instance, Phelan writes of the tramp ‘padding it effortlessly’ for ten miles a day, ‘his thoughts divorced from all the thousand urges or urban life’ as ‘his total mind-energy expends itself on the mere act of being a man’ (1949, 132). There is a clear resemblance to Graham here, as Phelan emphasises how tramping facilitates greater proximity with nature. The parallel continues when Phelan suggests that this enables the tramp to discover a sense of peace: ‘We walk along to seek peace, and that is all’ (1949, 219). And yet, Phelan significantly qualifies this remark, writing: ‘Sometimes we find it. But mainly we seek. We follow the roads’ (Ibid.). Here the implication seems to be that the value of tramping is not so much to be found in the attainment of peace—but in the pursuit of some unnamed entity through the act of walking. In other words, tramping is conceptualised as an objective in itself, rather than as a means to separate ends. In this sense, this passage marks a clear continuation of the theme established in The Name’s Phelan of tramping as a route to acceptance, and indeed to wanting ‘nothing’—with Phelan here seemingly projecting these values onto the tramp community as a whole. Elsewhere in the same text this pattern continues as he writes: ‘decent people are apt to waste pity—or anger which is only the other side of the coin—on vagrant and vagabond, thinking of them as outcast citizens who through misfortune or laziness lost their places in the social order’ (1949, 13). Instead, he contends that the ‘true tramp’ is not an out of work, but ‘a person who regards the complex life of the towns as a mistake. He […] goes his way and ignores the swarming of the last few thousand years, is content to be merely a man’ (1949, 13). By escaping civilisation and city life, it is thus argued that the tramp is filled with an ‘overflowing of calm and peace’ (1949, 9). Again, there is a distinct sense here in which Phelan is allowing his own experience of being overwhelmed by a ‘great peace’ after recognising that he ‘wanted nothing’ in the paddincan in Kinnegad to explain the outlook of all tramps—as he presents a vision of the tramp community as an embodiment of the condition of detachment that he himself claims to have discovered. Though We Follow the Roads was published after The Name’s Phelan—the sense of regret in the earlier text that Phelan did not follow O’Flaherty to America, and that he had thus forgotten ‘to analyse or brood’, is in this sense hardly compensated for in the later work as he continues to present tramping as a means of resisting the pressures of modern life through a strategy of disengagement. In terms of what all this says about Phelan’s status as a tramp memoirist: to begin with, he can certainly be seen to have presented an idealised

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version of the figure of the tramp that, as we saw in Marshall, reflects themes found in peripatetic literature concerning the liberating effects of walking and the importance of reconnecting with nature—and yet there is also a sense that this idealisation is rooted in Phelan’s own personal experiences on the road, ensuring definite parallels with contemporaneous conceptualisations of the tramp. In particular, there is a distinct anti-productivist dimension to Phelan’s writing, as he presents himself as an ‘unmitigated work-dodger’ and describes his ambition to be ‘just a drifter’—even if his conception of what it means to be a drifter does not preclude the possibility of having ‘a home and a steady job’. And yet, while Phelan thus might be seen to fall into the anti-productivist reverse discourse camp (albeit in an idiosyncratic fashion), it also seems clear that though he appears to have flirted with the radical possibilities suggested by O’Flaherty of developing a political organisation centred around the figure of the tramp—in the text in which he most clearly lays out his philosophy of tramping, a spirit of detachment remains the defining attribute, raising questions about the radical credentials of Phelan’s memoir writing as a whole. Furthermore, unlike the examples of Landery and Massie—in which a comparable mood of disengagement can be read as frustrating the reader into drawing radical conclusions—here, the overt impression that Phelan is satisfied with his own detachment can be seen to suggest that his memoirs belong in the nonradical category described in the introduction to this text, in the sense that they actively discourage readers from drawing radical conclusions (even if there are traces of regret regarding the decision to retreat from politics). On a final note, it is worth mentioning another aspect of Phelan’s memoirs on tramping that may be seen to connect him to other authors considered in this chapter: namely, the fact that in 1923 he was involved in an armed robbery and subsequently sentenced to death. In The Name’s Phelan an account of these circumstances is offered as Phelan describes being involved in a ‘raid on a post office’ together with an IRA gunman called John McAteer—an incident which he insists had ‘no connection with Irish politics’ (1993, 281). During the raid a man was shot and killed—not by Phelan, although he did fire a gun. Phelan explains: ‘in English law, I was guilty, nevertheless. Because I had been in close proximity, had participated in the raid, was armed, was demonstrably willing to use firearms, in English law I was guilty’ (1993, 281). Having initially been sentenced to death—Phelan ended up serving thirteen years in prison. With this in mind, it is clearly tempting to link Phelan to other reverse discourse memoirists like Milligan and Worby—whose memoirs, as we have seen, draw parallels between being a tramp and being a criminal.

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And yet, Phelan’s attitude towards his criminal past seems quite different to these two authors, as he neither sensationalises nor repents it—although this is less true of his earlier fiction writing, which (as we will see in the next chapter) may be seen to celebrate the figure of the criminal tramp as an emblem of radical resistance. As for why Phelan was willing to link the themes of criminality and vagrancy together in his fiction but not his memoir writing, we can only speculate—but it may have been connected to his unwillingness to identify himself personally as a criminal, given that he clearly considered his sentence to have been an injustice. 4.8  Political Tramp Memoirs: John Brown, W.A. Gape and Liam O’Flaherty The introduction to this study has already described how as unemployment figures rose to just under three million in the early 1930s new political movements emerged responding to this issue, such as the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. What has not yet been described in any detail is the extent to which these movements may be seen to have reflected the anti-productivist outlook explored in this study. The next few pages will briefly examine this possibility by way of an introduction to three interwar tramp memoirists who were, in quite different ways, actively engaged in politics during this period. It will suggest that both the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement and the organisation it was based upon—the Tramp Trust Unlimited—can be seen to have raised the profile of the figure of the tramp, and to have embodied an outlook related to the themes explored in this study. In this sense these two organisations may be seen to have served as a model for how an anti-productivist discourse oriented around the figure of the tramp could be seen to translate into an overt political agenda—although, as we shall see, this was a model that not all three of the tramp memoirists to be considered can be seen to have conformed with. The National Unemployed Workers’ Movement—which as I have suggested previously was a sizeable organisation with a membership of 50,000 during this period—was modelled (at least in part) on a political movement established by John Maclean in 1919 called the Tramp Trust Unlimited (Eadon and Renton 2002, 40). The Tramp Trust Unlimited itself was a modest operation described by founding member Harry McShane as being comprised of ‘five propagandists’ who defined themselves as tramps on account of the fact that they ‘toured the whole of

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Scotland’ with their campaign (1978, 115). Although the members of the Tramp Trust Unlimited were thus not ‘tramps’ in the conventional sense of the word—their agenda reflects a clear preoccupation with defending the interests of the unemployed and may be seen to reflect some of the values associated with reverse discourse tramp literature in this study, suggesting that the allusion to homelessness may not have been entirely accidental. For example, Maclean described the organisation as ‘a propaganda group fighting for a minimum wage, a six-hour day, full wages for the unemployed, Irish Home Rule, etc.’ (1986, 4). Clearly there is some indication here—with the emphasis on reduced working hours and extensive welfare provision for the unemployed—that the Tramp Trust Unlimited might be read as an attempt to promote what Adorno and Horkheimer referred to as the ‘idea of freedom from labour’, as opposed to working-­ class ‘self-determination’. In other words, this description seems to indicate that the Tramp Trust Unlimited—as the final word in the organisation’s name suggests—might be seen to have transcended the objectives of contemporary labour movements by presenting work as an obstacle rather than as a solution. The movement that the Tramp Trust Unlimited spawned—although it was also undoubtedly inspired by the American examples of Coxey’s Army and the Industrial Workers of the World—can be considered to be similar in this regard. To begin with, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (or NUWM) maintained the symbolic affiliation with the homeless community established by the Tramp Trust Unlimited. In his 1977 Unemployment Struggles, for instance, the NUWM’s founder Wal Hannington gives a detailed and vivid account of how the marching members of the NUWM toured the country in the manner of tramps—enduring ‘severe hardships’, sleeping in casual wards and tramping through heavy snowstorms—as well as referring to them as a ‘great army of ragged, half-starved, unarmed men’ (1977, 81, 85, 94, 184). Perhaps more importantly, the NUWM’s political objectives—like those of the Tramp Trust Unlimited—may also be seen to have placed an emphasis on the ‘idea of freedom from labour’ by highlighting the need to reduce working hours. For example, one explanatory leaflet accompanying the publication of the NUWM’s Unemployed Worker’s Charter in 1924 states: ‘THE HOURS OF LABOUR SHOULD BE REGULATED ACCORDING TO THE TIME NEEDED TO PRODUCE THE COMMODITIES THE COMMUNITY REQUIRES’ (Hannington 1977, 126). While this suggests that the NUWM challenged the privileged position of work as a

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solution to the difficulties faced by the unemployed, it is important to clarify that the NUWM was not an outright anti-work institution—as, for instance, another leaflet declares: ‘WORK IS MORE SATISFACTORY THAN MAINTANENCE’ (Hannington 1977, 125). The historians John Stevenson and Chris Cook sum up the NUWM’s position neatly when they describe the organisation’s objectives as ‘the abolition of the means test, higher unemployment relief and the provision of large scale public works’ (1994, 165). In short, it seems that within the NUWM an emphasis on providing work coexisted alongside a questioning of whether the unemployed should be penalised on the basis of their levels of contribution and a commitment to reducing unnecessary labour time. While it is clear that neither Maclean’s Tramp Trust Unlimited nor Hannington’s NUWM represent a perfect embodiment of the reverse discourse surrounding the figure of the tramp suggested in this study, given their only indirect links to homelessness—and while I am not claiming that these two organisations had a direct influence upon the authors we are about to consider (although, as we shall see, an awareness of their existence is exhibited in several of the texts we will be looking at)—it is still plainly evident that these two movements indicate both the possibility of developing an anti-productivist stance into a wider political agenda during the interwar period (at a time when, as we saw in the introduction to this text, there were few such instances) and the potential of presenting the tramp as a figurehead for such an agenda. In this sense these two organisations may be seen to have established a precedent and indeed a model (albeit imperfect) for the involvement of homeless individuals in British politics—while also suggesting the possibility of articulating in an overtly political context (even if they were both marginal political movements) the kind of (albeit conditionally) anti-productivist positions that we have seen evidence of in select examples of tramp memoir writing throughout this chapter. The object of this, the final section of the present chapter, is to determine how exactly the three chosen tramp memoirists may be seen to have responded to these possibilities (either directly or indirectly). In other words, it is to ask: among the handful of tramp memoirs that are undoubtedly explicitly political, is the anti-productivist model presented by such organisations as the Tramp Trust Unlimited and the NUWM pursued? The decision to focus on three rather than two authors—unlike previous sections—reflects the added significance of this question in relation to the primary focus of this study: namely, to try to seek out works indicative of a radical contingent within the phenomenon of tramp literature. By stating this I do not mean to undermine the significance of less overtly radical

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works—or to propose that the following works are likely to be more radical because they are openly political: rather, I am simply proposing that such examples are worthy of a degree more attention because they speak openly and directly on the issue we are most concerned with—in turn suggesting that they are likely to be revealing as regards the range of political perspectives within the genre, and as regards the prevalence of radical anti-­ productivist inclinations among openly political works. Accordingly, in what is to follow, we will see that the three chosen authors politicise the figure of the tramp in quite different ways: sometimes aligning themselves with the objectives of organisations like the Tramp Trust Unlimited and the NUWM, and at other times distinguishing themselves apart from them. 4.8.1 John Brown (b. 1907) John Brown was a tramp and an active campaigner for the Labour Party, who after publishing his memoir I Was a Tramp in 1934 would go on to become a journalist, a novelist and a travel writer, publishing extensively on the subject of socialism. Of his later publications, the texts that perhaps give the clearest insight into the political outlook he was to develop after writing his memoirs are the several books he wrote in the late 1930s chronicling his personal experiences of both fascist and communist regimes. For instance, I Saw for Myself, published in 1937, describes Brown’s encounters in Russia, Europe, the Middle East and North America searching for ‘the truth which lies behind the propaganda masks’—and consists of him presenting himself as ‘a Socialist who hates Communism’ and who believes that ‘Britain must find a Third Way […] between Fascism and Communism’ (1937, 9). Brown’s memoir I Was a Tramp may in many ways be read as an account of the circumstances that led him to becoming a committed but sceptical socialist in this mould. In what is to follow it will be seen that, as such, it bears a complex relationship to Brown’s identity as a self-professed tramp. I Was a Tramp begins with an account of the author’s upbringing in South Shields—during the course of which Brown describes how his father ‘was only able to secure work at odd times’ and how he ‘was not eligible for unemployment benefit’—so that ‘he soon found himself in debt’, leading to Brown and his family experiencing ‘the icy cold hand of poverty’ (1934, 33). Brown then relates his own struggles to find work and to obtain unemployment benefits—exacerbated by both the General Strike of 1926 and the Great Depression of 1929—and how he was forced to

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take to the road, travelling first to Newcastle, then York, Reading, Southampton, Dover, Shrewsbury, Manchester, Dumfries and eventually London in search of employment, while staying in lodging houses and casual wards along the way. I Was a Tramp then chronicles two years of living on unemployment benefits—during which time Brown describes becoming a ‘frequent visitor to the Library’ where he read ‘Marx and Engels’ and ‘other Socialist writers’ and began to see that there was ‘an immense amount of immediate practical work waiting to be done in the movement by people like myself’ (1934, 201, 215). Following this, Brown describes becoming involved ‘in the official activities of the Labour and Trade Union movements’, and some time after winning a TUC General Council scholarship enabling him to attend a course at Oxford University, where he became a committee member of the University Labour Club (1934, 219,  272). The memoir ends with Brown embarking upon his career as a journalist—contemplating the possibility of going to Russia to see ‘what had been done since the Revolution’ (1934, 281). Beyond the clear sense in which Brown’s narrative is in line with a wider perception in this era of homelessness as a byproduct of unemployment, two things stand out from this brief summary of his memoir—both indicating how it differs slightly from other texts considered in this chapter. The first is that I Was a Tramp evidently has much in common with working-­class memoirs of the period—following Burnett’s description of a pattern common within this genre of chronicling ‘a rise from humble origins to a position of honour and respectability through hard work, self-­ education, thrift and a concern for the betterment of mankind’—with even the title of Brown’s memoir seeming to indicate the author’s advancement. The second, related observation to make is that I Was a Tramp is clearly very much a memoir defined by the pursuit of work. In his account of his life, Brown never tramps without aim—but is constantly searching for employment: for example, upon arriving in London he spends ‘ten days’ answering advertisements for vacancies ‘in half a dozen different trades’ (1934, 163). While it is hardly unique for tramps in this period to search for work, in Brown’s case the urgency of the search feels especially pronounced—a fact that is perhaps related to his family’s dependence upon him. These two defining characteristics, combined with the fact of Brown’s allegiance to the Labour Party, may be seen to suggest that though I Was a Tramp remains distinct from the memoirs of authors like William Brown, Thorne, Pugh, Tillett, Bower and Patterson which (as has previously been argued) are best defined as working-class memoirs that feature episodes of

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tramping—it nonetheless exists on the border between the working-class and the tramp memoir. By scrutinising Brown’s expressed attitudes towards homelessness and his account of his political activities in his memoir—we will see that the text itself can be seen to reflect this split identity. In terms of Brown’s articulated outlook on the subject of homelessness—the impression given in I Was a Tramp is best described as mixed. On the one hand, Brown is keen to disabuse the reader of the belief ‘that there is anything romantic about life “on the road”’—suggesting that anyone who believes this ‘should try crossing the country in mid-December’ (1934, 147). Elsewhere Brown similarly challenges the idea of ‘[t]he “romance of the road”’ by again emphasising the hardships that come with it—suggesting, this time, that it is ‘a sordid tragedy of bread, work tea, blankets, washing and baked clothes’ (1934, 50). As well as questioning the idea that life on the road is in any way romantic—Brown also writes disparagingly of some of the homeless characters he encounters: for instance, an individual called Whitey, whom he notes ‘ridiculed the idea of holding down to a steady job, and said there were always sufficient fools in the world to keep him in idleness’ (1934, 124). After spending an afternoon watching Whitey go from door to door trying to sell tiepins and claiming to be ‘out of work’, Brown protests: ‘It was easy to see that he would be able to make a fair living out of exploiting people in this way, but I had still sufficient ideals left to be unwilling to help him’ (1934, 124). And yet at the same time as Brown writes disdainfully of homeless characters’ perceived idleness and deceitfulness—suggesting that he perhaps does not fall into the anti-productivist camp—there are also moments in which he appears to celebrate the community values he encounters among the homeless, indicating that he can nonetheless be categorised as a reverse discourse tramp memoirist. For instance, writing of an episode in which he and two other tramps are given food by their fellow lodgers after finding themselves unable to afford breakfast—he commends the ‘spirit of comradeship permeating many of the men on the road’ (1934, 125). In considering Brown’s engagement in political activism we find that a comparable ambivalence is again discernible—while also challenging the assumptions drawn above. On the one hand, Brown offers an account of how he led a ‘huge demonstration’ against a reduction in unemployment benefit, and also describes how those working alongside him within the Jarrow Labour movement spent their time ‘fighting for shorter hours’— both of which suggest that his political activities were aligned with that of the Tramp Trust Unlimited and the National Unemployed Workers’

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Movement, in turn indicating that there is an anti-productivist strain within his writing (1934, 220–8). On the other hand, this supposition is challenged when in the course of I Was a Tramp Brown dismisses the NUWM as being among the ‘numerous ancillaries’ of his local Communist Party, whose members he derides for being ‘very obviously not the self-­ sacrificing martyr type so largely responsible for the creation of the Labour Party’—further noting how he was ‘not impressed’ after listening to an NUWM representative at a meeting in South Shields offering ‘gestures and promises’ and demanding the ‘heads of the “bourgeoisie”’ (1934, 225–6). Brown’s dismissal of the NUWM (and in turn of the Communist Party of Great Britain) is perhaps all the more surprising given his close connections with Jarrow—a town that was to become the epicentre of NUWM activities, as well as being a testing ground for the ‘Popular Front’ policy of uniting centrists and leftists. And yet, as the historian James Vernon notes, this was a later development: as at the time when Brown was writing his memoirs, ‘the NUWM was […] ignored and reviled by the labor movement’—only becoming ‘respectable’ in 1936 ‘when Ellen Wilkinson, Labour M.P. for Jarrow, famously led a march to London to protest the scale of unemployment in the town’ (2007, 239). Brown’s criticisms of the NUWM can thus be put down to the factional rivalries that were prevalent during the early 1930s: and yet, this doesn’t fully explain why Brown, a self-proclaimed tramp who campaigned for anti-­ productivist measures, should have decided to side with the Jarrow Labour movement against this organisation. In seeking to understand this contradiction—and in more generally seeking to understand the coexistence of both productivist and anti-productivist tendencies in his memoir—two lines of interpretation may be seen to present themselves. First, we might argue that Brown’s decision to side with Labour against the NUWM reflects an intransigent fixation on industriousness (in line with what we know of him as someone who always sought work when on the road, and as someone whose memoir chronicles his professional achievements in accordance with working-class life writing traditions)—suggesting that while he may have explored the idea of freedom from labour in his activism, and have had an interest in the tramp community’s ‘spirit of comradeship’, he nonetheless remained under the influence of a work ethic that prohibited him from taking tramps like Whitey and organisations like the NUWM seriously. Such a reading is reinforced by a passage towards the end of I Was a Tramp in which Brown returns home and observes how his ‘old friends at the Labour exchange had gone to seed’— prompting him to remark: ‘Never before had the immense importance of

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good food, warm clothes, and regular work as factors influencing a man’s social behaviour been driven home to me with such force’ (1934, 275). Interpreting Brown’s position as essentially assimilationist and conformist in this regard (however justifiably)  might also help to explain how one reviewer was able to remark that in spite of his commitment to ‘the struggle’ Brown’s memoir can be read as ‘an account of his existence at that time which is entirely straightforward and without bitterness or futile rage against top-hatted capitalists’ (Anon. 1934). A second, alternative reading of Brown’s dismissal of Whitey’s ‘idleness’ and of the NUWM’s ‘gestures and promises’ is that it could be seen to draw attention to the potentially legitimate limitations of a model of resistance against capitalist and disciplinary society oriented around the figure of the tramp, or around a political programme that foregrounds freedom from labour. Previous analysis in this chapter has already pointed towards the possible validity of such a complaint—as we have noted a number of examples of tramp literature in which capitalist and disciplinary society are critiqued, but without this translating into a radical agenda (either implicitly or explicitly) as the authors instead elect to merely embody subversion. Possibly, then, Brown’s critique of Whitey’s ‘idleness’ and the NUWM’s failure to draw the ‘self-sacrificing martyr type’ into its organisation—even though he is ostensibly sympathetic towards its objective of ‘fighting for shorter hours’—credibly exposes either the limitations of subversion or perhaps more precisely how a political philosophy founded upon an objection to productivist values runs the risk of itself failing to be productive. Though we are in no position to confirm the validity of these specific allegations in relation to either Whitey or the NUWM, we might in other words still infer that the spirit of objection has reasonable grounds on the evidence of approximate cases. I would suggest that both readings of Brown’s text are valid. On the one hand, it seems credible to suggest that Brown’s critique of tramp culture and of the NUWM exposes a productivist and an assimilationist undercurrent in his writing—reflected in his suggestion that his old Labour Exchange friends might be fixed by a bit of ‘regular work’ and by the way in which his memoir extols the virtue of industriousness. On the other hand, it seems equally reasonable to argue that in highlighting the inefficacy of models of resistance that revel in their own subversiveness and lack of productiveness, Brown was developing a potentially valid line of critique (while allowing that this may still be an unfair characterisation of Whitey and the NUWM). As for the question of how we might therefore situate Brown’s text in terms of whether or not it can be seen to have a

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radical anti-productivist agenda, the above analysis would appear to be inconclusive: on the one hand, Brown’s reliance on existing productivist models—as he repeatedly extols the spirit of industriousness and the remedial power of work—can be seen to compromise his commitment to the idea of ‘freedom from labour’; on the other, he is the only author we have so far considered to have actively campaigned for a reduction in working hours, while his critique of the efficacy of certain manifestations of an anti-­ productivist outlook can also be seen to be potentially legitimate. 4.8.2 W.A. Gape (fl. 1936) W.A. Gape was a self-described tramp who spent twenty-two years on the road—mostly in Britain, but also in the Americas (1936, 325). Throughout the 1930s Gape took a leading role in an organisation dedicated to promoting the interests and protecting the legal rights of the homeless, earning himself the moniker ‘the tramp’s K.C.’ (Anon. 1939b, 4). As we will shortly see, while mirroring Brown in exemplifying the altered conception of homelessness described throughout this study, in developing an active interest in politics oriented around the figure of the tramp Gape can be seen to have adopted a decidedly different approach to Brown: similarly attempting to develop a radical angle in protesting against the conditions that the poor are subjected to, but doing so in significantly closer alignment with the perceived values and interests of the homeless community. Gape’s 1936 memoir Half a Million Tramps begins by describing the author’s ‘very unhappy’ childhood in Wembley—the third youngest of eight children, and son to a father described as a ‘brute and a hypocrite’ whose ‘patriotism and pig-headed theology dominated what passed for our home life’ (1936, 1–2). Aged fourteen, after an episode in which Gape describes having been severely beaten by his father, we learn of his resolve to ‘break away from home’ and to fight his ‘own battle with life’ (1936, 2). Following this, a lengthy description of Gape’s first few months on the road in London is offered—taking up approximately the first half of his memoir. This section describes how Gape briefly lived with a street singer called Kate, endured a short period sleeping on the streets and spent several weeks living in charitable shelters before eventually deciding to leave London in order to take ‘the Great North Road’ (1936, 124). Gape’s memoir then jumps forward to when he would have been twenty-two years old, with a description of him encountering a female tramp called Alice who asks him: ‘Shall we travel together for a bit and see if we get on with each other?’ (1936, 157). The next few chapters chronicle the

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evolution of an intimate relationship that appears to have lasted for several years—before Gape describes how ‘Alice was taken from me as suddenly as she had come into my life’, leaving him in a state of ‘loneliness and despair’ (1936, 219). Following this, Gape’s memoir is loosely structured around a series of anecdotes and reflections concerning his subsequent experiences of homelessness—tramping through a snowstorm in Wales, spending two years tramping through Canada and travelling across the United States and South America. Gape’s involvement in politics is first hinted at when, upon arriving in Canada, he describes being given a book to read which later turns out to be the Industrial Workers of the World’s 1909 Little Red Songbook, of which he remarks: I enjoyed reading the songs, for they expressed in verse the same feelings that moved me. Every line of these songs shouted revolt against tyranny and oppression. (1936, 306)

He later learns more of the ‘aims and objects’ of the Industrial Workers of the World and becomes ‘perfectly convinced that, as a migratory worker or hobo, my place was within it’—following which he pays two dollars to become a member (1936, 316). Gape’s encounters with the IWW clearly had an influence upon him, as he later describes how after returning to London in 1930 he ‘tested the feeling’ of individuals he encountered ‘with a view to seeing if they would respond to a call to organize’ (1936, 323). Gape describes subsequently setting up ‘a meeting of hoboes’ in Hyde Park ‘to discuss the best way of forming an organization strong enough to press the authorities to do something about the distressing poverty on the roads’ (1936, 324). We learn that he was then elected ‘Organizer’—before becoming ‘the Secretary, Treasurer, speaker, and, in fact, head cook and bottle washer’ of the newly established Hoboes’ Union (1936, 324). Given the nature of Gape’s political activism, it is perhaps unsurprising to learn that much of Half a Million Tramps is severely critical of the handling of homelessness in Britain. Mirroring Brown’s memoir, this results in an ambivalence in terms of how Gape represents the experience of tramping—as he is torn between emphasising its negative aspects and celebrating the tramp community as a point of refuge. Concerning this first point, Gape frequently complies with the common late modern tendency of presenting the tramp as a downtrodden figure—like Brown, indirectly challenging narratives of the kind we find in Marshall, Phelan and others in which the figure of the tramp is idealised. For example, when Gape

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arrives in London, he cannot help but notice ‘the tired slouch which seems to be the hallmark of London’s “down and outs”’ (1936, 56). Gape also describes being given a lesson on the history of homelessness by a casual ward inhabitant who insists that the vagrant is someone who ‘is compelled to seek his livelihood day by day’—and who objects to ‘gaffers’ who cannot ‘get it into their thick heads’ that individuals ‘forced on the roads’ do not choose such a life (1936, 67–8). This is a point of view that Gape seems to accept, as evidenced by his repetition of the same basic sentiment towards the very end of his memoir: So long as the people of Britain feel that the half-million vagrants like the “life on the road”, and that they in fact choose such a life rather than seek work, so long will conditions remain as they are. (1936, 351)

Gape’s view that tramping is a byproduct of systemic inequality rather than an active choice also appears to have been central to his approach as a political activist—as evidenced by a letter that he had published in the Western Daily Press in 1937, in which he writes: ‘To abolish begging and tramping it is first necessary to realise that both are but expressions of the larger problem of unemployment’ (Anon. 1937c, 6). And yet while Gape is keen to insist that homelessness is rarely a choice—this does not lead to him disowning the identity of the tramp, as on the contrary he routinely indicates his sense that such an existence is preferable to the alternative. For instance, he writes that after ‘[t]wenty-­ two years “Life on the Road”’ he has come to the conclusion that ‘the experience was worth it’ for giving him ‘an understanding of human nature which I could hardly have obtained had I lived an “orthodox life”, with all its hypocrisies and make-believes, petty snobbery and arrogant conceit’ (1936, 348). Here the suggestion that life on the road has enabled Gape to avoid the superficialities of ‘orthodox life’—in particular, a perceived removed-ness and self-involvement—is perhaps indicative of a circumnavigation of the ‘ideas, aspirations, and objectives’ that Marcuse suggests typify modern consumerist and industrial society, as if living as a tramp has rescued Gape from some of the estranging effects of capitalism. Beyond expressing gratefulness for his own partial disalienation, Gape also actively extols the apparent virtues of the tramp way of life in relation to the theme of community values. In the first half of Half a Million Tramps, this is most strongly apparent in Gape’s persistent emphasis on the kindness of tramps he encounters: for example, a homeless boy in Edgware who takes an ‘active interest’ in his welfare; the street singer Kate’s ‘good

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feeling and kindness’ in taking him in; the ‘friendship and help’ offered by ‘three good comrades’ he meets in a casual ward; and lastly, his encounter with a homeless youth called Tiger—a ‘cheerful chap’ who helps him to find a shelter (1936, 17, 50, 86, 95). In addition to extolling the disalienating effects of life on the road and celebrating the supposedly advanced community values among tramps, Gape also writes in positive terms of the tramp’s attitudes towards gender and sexuality—most explicitly when recalling his relationship with Alice. Gape presents Alice as a kind of Diotima figure—describing her as ‘more than a friend’ and as his ‘teacher in matters of good living’ as she helps him to recognise the pitfalls of conventional morality (1936, 177). For instance, Alice dismisses Gape’s initial concerns about having sexual relations outside of marriage—challenging his suggestion that she might thus be prostituting herself by arguing: ‘the chances are that those people who criticise us would themselves allow their bodies to be used in return for some adventure. A woman who allows a man to use her body as the price of a job or a home is very little different from the girl who trades her body on the streets’ (1936, 167). Later we learn that Alice’s objections to the hypocrisies that surround moral convention are indicative of a broader philosophy—formulated as a defence of radical autonomy as she writes that ‘[i]f every man, woman, and child could be free to follow his or her conscience, then I believe all evil would be finished with’ (1936, 183). It thus seems clear that Gape was interested in the subversive potential of tramp subculture—in particular in relation to its disalienating potential and to its advanced values within the domains of community, gender and sexuality. The question then remains whether this translated into an anti-­ productivist or a radical agenda—an answer to which can be ascertained by considering Gape’s political activism in more detail. Writing of the Hoboes’ Union that he both set up and ran, Gape explains: The work of the League had to be divided into two sections. One dealt with the development of the idea of “Fellowship on the road”; and the other dealt with appeals to the public to take notice of the frauds and exploitation going on around them. (1936, 325)

Most evidence of the Hoboes’ Union’s work generally concerns efforts to counter mistreatment of members of the tramp community—in line with this description of the second component of its activities: for example, a 1936 newspaper report suggests that Gape was involved in an inquiry following a ‘tragedy at Romford Institution’ in 1936 (Anon. 1936, 3); and a

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separate report in 1939 indicates Gape’s involvement following the alleged stabbing of a homeless person (Anon. 1939b, 4). In Half a Million Tramps, however, Gape also offers an account of his wider philosophy and political aims in relation to the subject of tramping—perhaps giving an indication of what the Union’s interest in creating a ‘Fellowship on the road’ may have amounted to: Until we recognise it to be our duty to obey the moral law, “Love ye one another,” we shall continue to have with us the vile results of evil living. As a start in the right direction I suggest that we work towards the goal of putting all destitute persons on a standard of living comparable with what satisfies the average man. You may shudder at the thought of the cost, but what does that matter? If these men are your brothers, then they are entitled to brotherly treatment. Even if they find it difficult to fit in again with the customs of society, and so do not pull as much weight as you in the productive field, do not put the entire blame upon them, for their condition arises from a life which was forced upon them because society did not do its duty in the first place. (1936, 352)

In putting forth such proposals it might be argued that Gape has taken the message of moral autonomy and compassion learnt from Alice and other tramps he has encountered and translated it into a plea for acceptance that demands a parity of living standards between tramps and the rest of society. Whether it is true or not that Gape’s political vision is thus an attempt to emulate the values of the homeless community—and regardless of whether the above statement reflects the outlook of the Hoboes’ Union— it remains clear that by proposing that the homeless should be assisted even if they remain unproductive, Gape’s status as a tramp memoirist in the anti-productivist tradition is clearly secured. Gape’s position may in this sense be viewed as a more consistent attempt to both embody and communicate a mode of resistance defined in opposition to work-oriented culture than Brown’s. And yet at the same time, it might be argued that next to Brown’s engagement in efforts to maintain unemployment benefits and to reduce the working hours of labourers, alongside his critique of the limitations of subversive and less industrious forms of political activism—Gape’s political agenda and activism appears to have had relatively limited radical credentials (in the Badiouian sense of pertaining to the social totality). This is on the grounds that Gape’s narrow preoccupation with responding to crimes committed against the

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homeless and his attempts to justify the need for wider societal reform on the basis that the homeless require more ‘brotherly treatment’ clearly indicate that he was primarily motivated by an interest in defending the interests of the homeless community. Against this, however, it might be argued that even if Gape’s expressed motive may have been narrowly identity-­ oriented in this sense, his proposal that ‘all destitute persons’ be placed ‘on a standard of living comparable with what satisfies the average man’ nonetheless amounts to a reconfiguration of societal values on a totalising scale. On balance, I would suggest that this second consideration outweighs the former and that Gape, therefore, should be seen to qualify as a contributor to a wider radical anti-productivist discourse—although his radical credentials may at the same time be seen to be limited by his failure to more fully embrace his evident but understated preoccupation with the possibility of transforming society as a whole. 4.8.3 Liam O’Flaherty (1896–1984) Liam O’Flaherty was born in Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands on the west coast of Ireland. After going to school in County Tipperary and Dublin, he went to University College Dublin before in 1916 enlisting in the Irish Guards and joining the Western Front. O’Flaherty subsequently spent three years roaming the world as a self-proclaimed  tramp, before returning to Ireland where he became involved in the Irish Free State as an agitator. It was here—as we have already seen—that he set up an ‘unemployed army’ and encountered the fellow tramp memoirist Jim Phelan. As O’Flaherty puts it in his 1934 memoir Shame the Devil, describing his revolutionary activities during this period: ‘In the early part of 1922 I seized the Rotunda in Dublin with a small army of unemployed men. We hoisted the red flag over the building and held it for some days’ (1981, 22). Following this period of revolutionary activity, O’Flaherty travelled to London where he attracted the attention of the editor Edward Garnett with a short story he had written—thus beginning a literary career that would result in the publication of over fourteen novels, as well as a number of short story collections and non-fiction works. O’Flaherty had a considerable degree of success as a writer—reaching the peak of his fame in the mid-1930s when his novel The Informer sold 200,000 copies, following which it was made into a film by his cousin John Ford (Anon 1996, 305). He thus could easily be categorised alongside Landery and Massie as a literary tramp memoirist—but has instead been placed here on account of his activism and the content of his memoirs.

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In what is to follow the primary focus will be O’Flaherty’s 1930 tramp memoir Two Years—in which he describes the period immediately following the war, during which he lived as a sailor and a tramp. As James O’Brien has written in his study of O’Flaherty, in Two Years ‘O’Flaherty looks back on his wander years, actually the three years from August, 1918, to 1921’ (1973, 19). As such, the memoir documents a varied period in O’Flaherty’s life when, besides ‘serving as a fireman and a deckhand on freighters’, he was ‘an assistant foreman in a brewery, a hotel porter both in London and New York, a farmhand for a French-Canadian family, a lumberjack, a carpenter, a Western Union messenger, a pastry maker, a ditch digger, and a hand in a condensed-milk factory and in a tire factory’ (Ibid.). In terms of the outlook on homelessness offered in Two Years, as well as conforming with a productivity-oriented conception of homelessness  O’Flaherty’s memoir may be seen to have much in common with other reverse discourse texts considered in this chapter—most obviously in its defiance against work culture and associated norms. O’Flaherty’s view of working and working-class culture is in some ways ambivalent: for instance, he writes that the life of the proletariat ‘is a mixture of pride and shame’—as the worker is trapped between a feeling of ‘inevitable slavery’ and a sense of ‘peace in comradeship which makes wage slavery endurable’ (1933, 163–4). And yet on balance, O’Flaherty proves to be decidedly against working—as he at one point states: ‘if I were given a choice of spending my life as a wage-worker or in jail, I would choose the latter sentence’ (1933, 164). In common with other reverse discourse tramp memoirists, O’Flaherty is not unconditionally opposed to the idea of work—even claiming that ‘there are few things in life that can compare with labour in the sun with a crowd of men, handling tools, using young strength, testing strong sinews, telling bawdy stories, and laughing foolishly’ (1933, 246). Instead he is explicitly opposed to the conditions of labour ‘in the present arrangement of society’, within which ‘labourers are slaves, without education or sense of proper social values’ (1933, 247). Corresponding with this strong objection to work-oriented culture, Two Years also expresses O’Flaherty’s opposition to norms associated with this way of life—as he for instance objects to the ‘ambition’ of ‘other men’, insisting that he is not interested in being ‘enclosed within walls, with wives, children, social position, wealth of all kinds’ (1933, 14). In opposing conventions connected with a domestic life, O’Flaherty’s invectives often become vituperative—for instance, when he declares:

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I know people who never cleaned their teeth or took a bath and were yet more interesting and fundamentally moral than the cleanest city clerk, who cleans his teeth after each meal and takes a bath twice a day. I loathe uniformity, and I loathe people who are satisfied with their lot in life. All good comes from unrest and dissatisfaction. (1933, 67)

An indication of how O’Flaherty’s opposition to conformism and workbased culture may have translated into a wider political agenda is first given when he describes how he became a communist—a cause that he recalls taking to ‘like a girl realising that she is in love’ (1933, 72). It is, however, when O’Flaherty (like Gape and other tramp memoirists considered in this chapter) encounters the Industrial Workers of the World in North America that a clear sense of his political allegiances is first fully developed. O’Flaherty’s interest in the IWW runs in tandem with a friendship he develops with a fellow wanderer called John Joseph Peterson—to whom he attributes his ‘enthusiasm’ for this union and political movement (1933, 272). O’Flaherty describes Peterson as an IWW ‘agitator’ who has been ‘put in jail’ for ‘taking part in the activities of this romantic organisation as in a holy war’ (1933, 253). At the heart of Peterson’s world view, as O’Flaherty describes it, is a belief in ‘social revolution’—and in particular ‘the liberation of the working-class form wage slavery’ (1933, 259). In the following analysis we will see how O’Flaherty came to share Peterson’s interest in liberating the working-classes from work—while simultaneously diverging away from him in developing his own distinct vision of a work-free future oriented around the machine. There are moments in which O’Flaherty attempts to present Peterson as someone interested in the possibility of liberation inaugurated by automation—for instance, when he describes him as ‘the type of a new aristocracy that was to spring from the machine’ and suggests that he was preoccupied with ‘the conversion of man to a belief in the machine age’ (1933, 254, 259). And yet ultimately, O’Flaherty concedes that Peterson did not in fact ‘look at it in that way’—arguing that he did not see ‘the struggle […] in its true perspective’ (1933, 259). The vision of ‘a new aristocracy’ emerging ‘from the machine’ thus appears to belong to O’Flaherty, although he does indicate elsewhere that the idea may have originated from his reading of Marx (1933, 241). O’Flaherty’s conviction that the machine might play a central role in humanity’s development is rendered explicit in the following passage—in which he writes:

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The marvels of machinery are still objects of terror to us men who use them. When we drop our old gods and worship the machine willingly, without reservation, it will free us from bondage to the earth, and from making bond slaves of the majority of our fellows. (1933, 247)

Repeatedly in the course of Two Years, O’Flaherty accordingly describes himself as ‘a worshipper of the machine god’—further suggesting that this interest in harnessing the power of automation was central to his political outlook (1933, 241). It is thus plain to see that O’Flaherty was not only interested in translating the tramp’s symbolic refusal of work into a wider and overt radical anti-productivist agenda—but that in doing so, he also directly preconfigured the postcapitalist theories considered in the introduction to this text by extolling the possible virtues of technology. In addition to this—there is also evidence in Two Years of this interest in freedom from work and the possibilities of a machine age translating into an explicit objection to the narrowness of left wing ideology, anticipating the objections of critics like Adorno and Horkheimer in the mid-twentieth century. For instance, O’Flaherty at one point writes of what he terms the ‘Bolshevik’ perspective that it is guilty of ‘merely’ attempting ‘to do for the working class what capitalism has done for the bourgeoisie’ by presenting a vision within which ‘everybody would be civilised, everybody a cog in a machine, with his or her own toothbrush, bath-tub, telephone, and with precisely the same code of morality’ (1933, 67–8). Here, O’Flaherty explicitly objects to the assimilationist vision of the left—in turn implying its inferiority besides his own emancipatory vision of a cessation of ‘wage slavery’. In this sense, Two Years is clearly a tramp memoir of significant interest—not only for embodying the reverse discourse position outlined in the introduction to this text by serving as a clear example of the subversive tendency of celebrating the tramp’s liberation from work and associated norms, but also for demonstrating how this subversive tendency might be translated into a more widespread emancipatory agenda: concerned not just with the isolated example of tramps who enjoy the benefits of not working, but with realising this vision on a wider scale—a vision reinforced by O’Flaherty’s belief in the power of machines to render undesirable forms of labour obsolete. And yet—before we herald O’Flaherty as being an exemplary model demonstrating how a reverse discourse on tramps might be translated into a farther-reaching political agenda—some significant limitations to Two Years should be noted.

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The first thing to observe is that in spite of his valorisation of the tramp’s figurative opposition to societal norms—O’Flaherty routinely expresses his disdain for homeless individuals he encounters who do not match his idealised vision of tramping. For instance, in one episode he writes of his desire to meet ‘beings of my kind’ on the Thames Embankment—where he instead discovers a homeless woman for whom he feels ‘nothing […] but repugnance’, to such an extreme extent that he expresses his desire to ‘bash out her feeble brains, and throw her carcass in the river’ (1933, 50–1). Relatedly, towards the end of the memoir, O’Flaherty writes of his ultimate disillusionment with the tramp way of living—describing how he eventually grew ‘tired of the barbarism of this wandering life’ and of ‘the desolate philosophy of these hoboes, who had no further ambition than satisfying their daily wants, and never thought of the approach of their old age’ (1933, 273). In attempting to understand the seeming contradiction that O’Flaherty can write disdainfully of those within mainstream society who are driven by ‘ambition’ and a desire for ‘social position’, while at the same time expressing his ‘repugnance’ for the living examples of homeless people he meets who lack ‘ambition’—the explanation I would propose is that O’Flaherty has what might be described as  a Nietzschean outlook consisting of a fusion of disdain for convention combined with a belief in human perfectibility. We might for instance note that O’Flaherty routinely writes of his distrust ‘in the efficacy of Christian morality’ and of his disdain for ‘uniformity, and […] people who are satisfied with their lot in life’—while at the same time claiming to be ‘convinced that the divinity in man’s destiny is his struggle towards the perfection of his species to a state of godliness, and that the most perfect types of manhood are always in revolt against the limitations of man’s nature’ (1933, 60, 67, 216). On this basis it might be argued that while O’Flaherty does seem to have been interested in the figure of the tramp as an embodiment of a defiance of convention, this appears to have come with the condition that this defiance point towards his own understanding of what might help improve the species (apparently excluding the example of the homeless female on the Embankment, whom he evidently found to be ambitionless in the wrong kind of way). Returning to the theoretical framework developed in the introduction to this text: O’Flaherty appears to have been committed to championing the importance of ‘freedom from labour’—but he also seems to have been prone to a belief in what Žižek has described as the ‘utopian-­ideological’ notion of total disalienation. It is on this basis, we might argue—that is, on the basis

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of his belief that humanity can be fully disalienated—that he is able to question the vision of progress promoted by the left (casting it as materialistic and narrowly work-oriented) while simultaneously proposing that it be substituted by an alternative Nietzschean vision of human perfectibility requiring compliance with his own preferred vision of unconventionality (oriented around an idealised conception of the tramp). It is perhaps little surprise given O’Flaherty’s commitment to the idea of a ‘perfection of his species’ to find that Two Years also contains passages that (resembling O’Flaherty’s violent outburst against the Thames Embankment homeless woman) indicate a toxic intolerance of individuals who do not comply with his vision of the human ideal. For instance, in one passage O’Flaherty writes of encountering ‘a black crew’ when working on a ship—leading him to remark that ‘[o]f course’ he ‘did not mix with them’ (1933, 158). This leads to the reflection: ‘I can never understand the point of view of those who make a fetish of insisting that all men are equal’— which O’Flaherty suggests is ‘sheer nonsense’ on the grounds that it is natural to consider oneself to be ‘infinitely superior to most and equal to the best of the human race’ (1933, 158–9). In another passage, O’Flaherty relates an encounter with a ‘Frenchman’ he describes as ‘by nature extremely feminine’ and who makes ‘advances’ upon him—leading O’Flaherty to almost drown him after pushing him off a pier (1933, 206). The overt racism and homophobia in passages such as these are clearly indicative of the obverse of O’Flaherty’s vision of human perfectibility, and serve as a stark reminder of the potential hazards of any liberatory vision (including one oriented around the possibility of freedom from labour) that envisages a subsequent transformation of the species, or indulges in utopian speculation—which history teaches us all too often opens the door for eugenic fantasies—rather than proposing material gains concerned only with minimising harm and maximising welfare for as many people as possible. 4.8.4 Summary In this section we have thus seen three very different approaches to developing a political programme in response to the lived experience of being a self-declared  tramp—some of which emulating, others challenging the radical anti-productivist model represented by such political organisations as the Tramp Trust Unlimited and the NUWM. To begin with, Brown— though attracted to tramp subculture, and able to recognise the way in which it can be seen to cast the rest of society in a negative light—may be seen to have partially succumbed to the productivist logic that he

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elsewhere campaigned against, while at the same time perhaps exposing the limitations of subversion together with the paradox that without a work ethic it is difficult to implement a political agenda of reform. Meanwhile Gape appears to have both extolled the virtues of a life on the road and demanded that these virtues be emulated within society as a whole—although in a manner that might still be seen to have remained limited in the sense that it prioritised the interests of fellow tramps. Lastly, O’Flaherty can be seen to have in many ways gone further than any of the writers considered in this chapter by openly investigating the radical possibility that the freedom from work embodied by his idealised image of the tramp might be translated into a widespread political agenda by harnessing the power of automation—and yet at the same time, we have seen that in simultaneously succumbing to a Nietzschean idea of human perfectibility his proposed vision for societal transformation has proven to be troublingly exclusionary. Thus, in short, these three authors may be seen to indicate that among the handful of examples of tramp memoirs that adopt an explicitly political outlook—which of course should not be seen to be representative of political outlooks within the tramp memoir genre as a whole, or for that matter within the homeless community—the tendency is on the whole towards an explicitly radical anti-productivist outlook, albeit in markedly different ways.

5   Conclusion In the introduction to this text it was suggested that in approaching works definable as tramp literature (on account of their tendency to relate homelessness to the question of productivity) three objectives might be pursued: first, to establish whether given works can be seen to function as a reverse discourse by celebrating the figure of the tramp for signifying an alternative set of values in the realm of work, gender and sexuality, and community, or for signalling the possibility of partial avoidance of the estranging effects of disciplinary and capitalist society; second, to establish whether in the process there is a totalising dimension in given works elevating this celebration of the tramp’s imagined subversiveness to the status of radical literature (either in an explicit or in an implicit mould); and third, to establish whether we can identify any broader limitations within the genre as a whole. We might therefore conclude this chapter by asking what the analysis above can be seen to have suggested in response to these three lines of inquiry.

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5.1   Tramp Memoirs as a Reverse Discourse This chapter has so far offered a detailed overview of seventeen tramp memoirists, alongside brief accounts of an additional fifteen. Of the detailed accounts offered, it has been suggested that the first five (Saxby, Burn, Colin, Cameron and Basset) all exhibit signs of subversion in their writing but should perhaps not be considered to fully qualify as examples of a reverse discourse trend, or of an overtly anti-productivist trend. However, all twelve of the late Victorian, Edwardian and interwar authors subjected to detailed analysis (namely Roberts, Kennedy, Davies, Landery, Massie, Milligan, Worby, Phelan, Marshall, Brown, Gape and O’Flaherty) were seen to show strong signs of celebrating the subversive qualities of the figure of the tramp, although not all instances of subversion were found to translate into an anti-productivist agenda—with Roberts, for instance, exhibiting an overtly pro-work outlook, while Brown may be seen to have exhibited both productivist and anti-productivist tendencies. Of the fifteen additional tramp memoirists whose work has been described, if we were to insist on categorising them for the sake of analytical clarity— while of course acknowledging the reductiveness of suggesting that they fall neatly into assigned descriptive categories—we might come to the conclusion that three were shown not to be classifiable as reverse discourse tramp memoirists (Stamper, Horn and Garrett); ten were found to show traces of a subversive reverse discourse tendency but either with no clear sign of this translating into an anti-productivist outlook or with expressions of disciplinary sentiment offsetting such instances (Brine, Horsley, Stuart, Neville, Digit, Foster, Clouston, the Gordons and MacMahon)— although we did also note that of these, Foster, Clouston, the Gordons and MacMahon all have dubious statuses as tramp memoirists; while the remaining two were shown to be more straightforwardly classifiable as authors of anti-productivist reverse discourse tramp fiction (Prior and Graham)—although Graham was also seen to have an ambiguous status as a tramp memoirist. Thus the overwhelming majority of the vagrant and tramp memoirists whose work I have been able to identify (twenty-four out of thirty-two, if we are to insist on putting a number on it) have been found to be classifiable as contributors to a wider reverse discourse celebrating the figure of the tramp, albeit to varying degrees—with exactly half of these (twelve out of twenty-four) exhibiting distinctive anti-­ productivist tendencies. This, it might be added, is also reflected in the way in which these texts have been seen to frequently counter the nineteenth-­century life writing tradition of chronicling professional success with biographical precision as they instead employ a novelistic

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form—not only by relaying life stories in an anecdotal manner, but also by fusing fiction and memoir writing, offering psychologically complex renderings of the tramp experience and exhibiting the influence of other literary genres such as the gangster narrative and forms of peripatetic literature, thus embodying the reverse discourse mode on a formal level as well as in terms of their content. 5.2  Tramp Memoirs as Radical Anti-productivist Literature However, as was established in the introduction to this text, a general tendency towards subversion is insufficient if we are to characterise select works in the tramp literature tradition as a contribution to radical discourse. This leads us to ask the second question established in the introduction to this text: namely, can any of these texts be seen to have contributed to a wider radical anti-productivist discourse alongside examples found within explicitly radical works of utopian, anarchist, Frankfurt School, Autonomist Marxist, twenty-first-century communist and postcapitalist literature, as well as the example of implicitly radical post-war working-class fiction? Alternatively, do we have to admit that the anti-­ productivist examples from among these texts are better situated alongside the example of non-radical identity-oriented anti-productivist texts represented by bohemian literature and nature writing—and thus of limited relevance as works that we can neither claim to be representative of the given community whose experiences they chronicle, nor to be especially efficacious in terms of how they promote the values that they embody? The answer to this line of questioning is somewhat more varied. Again, in analysing these works we have found a progression over time among the texts singled out for detailed analysis. In the Regency era and early Victorian examples of Saxby, Burn, Colin, Cameron and Basset, for instance, we found little suggestion of a radical dimension—with Burn and Colin’s texts expressing an interest in politics but ultimately either succumbing to proindustry rhetoric or envisaging resistance in a localised and minimal sense. Among the late Victorian, Edwardian and interwar memoirists singled out for detailed analysis, if we were to insist on categorising these authors we might come to the conclusion that three can be seen to have fallen into the explicitly radical anti-productivist category (Brown, Gape and O’Flaherty)— although with varying degrees of commitment to the anti-productivist cause; three on the other end of the spectrum can be seen to have fallen— although only just—into the non-radical category (Roberts, Kennedy and Phelan); two can be seen to belong in the implicitly radical anti-productivist

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category in the sense that they stage a deadlock with radical implications (Landery and Massie)—although the tone of both of these authors perhaps discourages this; three can be seen to belong in a hitherto unidentified fourth category in which radical anti-­productivist readings are permitted without being actively encouraged (Davies, Milligan and Worby)—although Worby’s combativeness perhaps offsets this; and lastly one was seen to fall somewhere between this fourth category and the non-radical category (Marshall). Thus, were we to insist on putting an exact figure on the number of radical anti-productivist tramp memoirists identified: at a push, nine out of the seventeen authors analysed in detail can be seen to have shown some signs of either permitting, encouraging or demanding radical antiproductivist interpretation. None of the remaining fifteen additional memoirists accounted for in this chapter were seen to show strong signs of being classifiable as contributors to a wider radical anti-productivist discourse (although a closer reading of Stamper, Prior and Garrett might reveal radical inclinations in other regards). Thus of the thirty-two authors accounted for, nine (or just over a quarter) have been found to demonstrate having radical anti-­productivist credentials on some level—indicating that this is a minority trend, although of course not insignificant. 5.3  Broader Limitations If we are on these grounds to herald select examples within the tramp memoir tradition as an (albeit varied and minority) contribution to a wider radical anti-productivist discourse—we need to at the same time acknowledge the genre’s wider limitations. Broadly speaking, I would suggest that two significant shortcomings have been identified in the course of this chapter in analysing the tramp memoir tradition as a whole. The first is that in spite of several of these texts exhibiting a clear interest in the subversive and radical potential of the figure of the tramp, many of their authors have nonetheless been found to succumb to a disciplinary outlook—for instance, by castigating members of the homeless community for being unproductive. This is especially true of early tramp memoirists, but we have also found evidence of this in later authors in the reverse discourse and even radical domains (such as Roberts and Brown)—as they similarly depict members of the homeless community as uneducated or in need of work. The second limitation concerns the exclusionary tendency within the genre as a whole. This manifests itself on two levels. The first concerns expressed outlooks within many of the memoirs. The second concerns how the tramp memoir genre as a whole might be considered exclusionary in terms of the authors it is comprised of.

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As regards the first issue: it should perhaps be noted that the more general trend we have identified has been that of tramp memoirists questioning societal prejudices, or celebrating their defeat—for instance with Kennedy expressing shame at ‘men of my own race’ when comparing the altruism of other nations to British imperialism; Marshall extolling the apparent virtues of ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ within the tramp community; or Gape describing how his partner Alice has been his ‘teacher in matters of good living’ by educating him about the limitations of existing prejudices relating to gender. Nonetheless, we have also found moments in which these authors (again, including authors in the subversive and radical domains) have proven themselves to be capable of the opposite tendency—the most obvious example being O’Flaherty, with his blatant racism and homophobia. As regards the second issue concerning the composition of the authors who have contributed to the tramp memoir tradition: here we have a more consistent problem—particularly within the domains of gender, ethnicity, race, nationality and sexuality. Before exploring these issues, I should address a possible concern. It was proposed in the introduction to this text when explaining the criteria for defining the texts in this study as British that I did not want to lay too strong an emphasis on the nationality of their authors—justified on the basis of a desire to shift the focus away from questions concerning identity difference, in line with my general interest in reorienting the critical focus around questions pertaining to the social totality (which, it was suggested, benefits minorities more than a condescending and politically ineffective fixation on the question of  minority status). Before any conclusions are drawn from these remarks in relation to the subject at hand: it should be stressed that it does not follow from this that because I object to reducing authorial identity to a consideration of existing identity markers (such as nationality—but also in turn gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, or any other such consideration) I cannot also object to the exclusion or absence of authors from marginalised or underrepresented social groups. In fact, it would on the contrary seem that this is entirely consistent, as in both cases what is being objected to is an identity-oriented consideration (such as the gender, ethnicity, race, nationality or sexuality of an author) being afforded too dominating a status to the point of becoming detrimental—either by functioning as the determining factor behind the inclusion of authors, or by functioning as the determining factor behind the exclusion of authors. Thus while I may not wish to define these authors in terms of their identity statuses—I can still

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absolutely object (and in fact am obliged to) if it appears that their noninclusion is related to the question of identity. To begin with the question of gender, therefore: we might observe that of the thirty-two tramp memoirists we have looked at in this chapter so far—only two were female, and one of these was heavily edited by a male while the other co-authored her memoirs with her husband. This is not because homeless women didn’t exist during the period in question—as Rose has noted, ‘women accounted for between a quarter and a third of all known tramps’ in the mid-nineteenth century (1998, 121). Instead we might conclude—as Kusmer has of American tramp culture—that this was ‘an overwhelmingly masculine realm’ in which women were undoubtedly present but marginalised and that this is reflected in these cultural works on a fundamental level in terms of the near absence of female writers.  Alternatively we might blame the reading public,  the publishing industry, or a broader systemic sexism for this failure to nurture or permit an interest in reading female authors on subjects such as this. As for the question of ethnicity, race and nationality: while we have encountered authors of Canadian, American, Irish,  Antipodean and Belgian descent (in addition, of course, to Scottish, Welsh and English), there has also been a clear absence of non-white authors or authors from ethnic groups or nationalities that were (shall we say) less openly welcome in Britain during the period in question. It might be argued that to be Irish in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to fall into the latter category, and that works produced by Irish authors might thus be seen to reflect the individual outlooks of writers from a minority ethnicity or nationality—a consideration that is perhaps worthy of further investigation. Nonetheless, the general picture presented by the authors of these texts is one that is in other regards relatively homogeneous in terms of race, ethnicity and nationality. As with the question of gender, this is not because homeless individuals outside of these bounds didn’t exist. To give three examples: newspaper reports concerning an 1855 court case involving a common lodging house in Shadwell describe ‘Chinamen’, ‘Lascars’, ‘an Irishwoman’ and ‘an Asiatic seaman’ all under one roof—many of whom were likely homeless (Salter 1873, 35); in an 1874 illustrated account of homelessness in London John Thomas Smith wrote of ‘a Lascar, who lately sold halfpenny ballads’ and of a black beggar called Toby ‘well known in this metropolis’ (1874, 25–6); and lastly, in 1933 Orwell described visiting a common lodging house in London frequented by homeless individuals of ‘all races, even black and white’ (1997a, 170). Thus, we must again conclude that the failure to represent these perspectives exposes the blatantly exclusionary nature of the

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genre—which, again, might be attributed to the culture itself, to the reading public, to the publishing industry, or to a wider systemic racism. As for the question of sexuality: it would perhaps be misleading to compare the absence of authors with a declared non-heterosexual orientation among the memoirists identified in this chapter with the omissions noted above—the fact being that the idea of openly acknowledged non-­ heterosexual orientation did not fully emerge until the second half of the twentieth century (at least within the domains of published memoir and fiction writing). Whereas women and minority racial or ethnic groups could and did openly identify themselves as such in life writing texts (even if not in any way proportionately)—individuals identifying themselves as having a non-heterosexual orientation were instead generally forced to write about their identities in ways that were significantly more codified and discrete during the period in question. We can of course still object to the absence of authors with a declared non-heterosexual orientation: but we also therefore have to accept that this absence is to a greater degree to be expected. Instead what we might more justifiably object to is the shortage of instances in which non-heterosexual orientation is discretely written into or codified within the texts studied in this chapter: although, as previously indicated, we might also note that the existence of exceptions (with Worby’s memoir being an obvious example) remains significant given the general and lamentable rarity of such instances. Within the domain of sexuality, then, the same exclusionary traces are again detectable, but in a manner that is more complex and perhaps less consistent—and can again be attributed to the same causes. 5.4  Summary In summary, then, we have in this chapter unearthed a significant number of tramp memoirs, the majority of which can be read as a contribution to a wider reverse discourse that celebrates the subversive potential of the figure of the tramp—with half of these then being classifiable as distinctly antiproductivist. Furthermore, it has been seen that this refusal frequently translates into a radical agenda—sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit and sometimes in a manner that is permitted but not actively encouraged. While select reverse discourse tramp memoir texts might on this basis be read as significant contributions to a wider radical anti-productivist discourse—it has however also been noted that the genre does come with several worrying limitations, the most pressing of which being its generally exclusionary nature.

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Nonetheless, while it may be the case that barring the limitations of the genre a significant number of these texts can be heralded as contributions to a wider radical anti-productivist discourse—we should at the same time not downplay the significance of the texts that do not fit this mould. One remaining memoirist who has not so far been subjected to analysis in this chapter is worth mentioning here to signal the importance of this point: namely, John A. Bentley, author of a 1933 memoir entitled The Submerged Tenth; The Story of a Down-and-Out. The dust jacket of Bentley’s text describes an account of ‘complete penury’—which turns out to be a fairly accurate description, as Bentley’s narrative reads as a relentlessly negative account focussing on the author’s endless search for work and the ‘gnawing hunger’ he suffers as a consequence of not finding any (1933, 24). The closest Bentley ever comes to celebrating anything is when he gets a job sledgehammering a wall, and declares: ‘It was great to be alive’ (1933, 81). It is plain to see why I have not chosen to foreground Bentley in the above analysis—as his account of life on the road offers little in the way of subversive or radical possibility. To be clear: I am not suggesting that this text thus delegitimises the claims made in this chapter. I have argued throughout against reading works that celebrate the subversive/radical component of tramp subculture as being representative of the homeless community or of the tramp memoir/fiction genres, and thus the fact that a contrary perspective can be found should not be seen to present a threat to the general thesis. However, the presence of a text like this should serve as a warning concerning the need to reinforce precisely this point: demanding that in characterising select tramp memoirs as a contribution to a wider reverse discourse celebrating the figure of the tramp, often in a way that can be depicted as radical—we have to be clear that it is only a specific strand of this body of work that can be represented in this way, and that this strand should not be considered to be representative of the general outlook of the homeless or of homeless authors during the period in question, even if the reverse discourse trend has been found to be the dominant trend  among published works. Instead, all that this dominance should be seen to prove is the validity of Foucault’s contention that adverse disciplinary conditions frequently can produce resistant identities and that in the case of the tramp memoir this tendency is accompanied by notable radical inclinations within a significant number of the identified texts— although in ways that are often flawed.

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Works Cited Amigoni, David. 2006. ‘Introduction: Victorian Life Writing: Genres, Print, Constituencies.’ In In Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni. Aldershot: Ashgate: 1-19. Anon. 1779. The Malefactor’s Register; Or, the Newgate and Tyburn Calendar (New Newgate and Tyburn Calendar). London: Alexander Hogg. ———. 1806. ‘Art. XVIII, Memoirs of a Female Vagrant; Written by Herself.’ The Eclectic Review, 1. ———. 1887. ‘Travellers’ Tales’. Pall Mall Gazette. June 30. ———. 1900. ‘A Man Adrift’. The Graphic. April 14. ———. 1908a. The Athenaeum. Issue 4207. June 13. ———. 1908b. ‘The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp.’ The Academy, Issue 1882. ———. 1908c. ‘A Doss-House Author: Autobiography of a Parasite’. Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Adviser. May 5. ———. 1908d. ‘New Books’. Aberdeen Journal. June 24. ———. 1925. ‘An Amateur Hobo’. The Sydney Morning Herald. February 21. ———. 1927. ‘Short Notices.’ The Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer. May 25. ———. 1930. ‘Mr Bart Kennedy: “Tramp Novelist” Who Was Born in Leeds.’ The Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer. December 10. ———. 1931a. ‘Epic of an Out of Work’. Nottingham Evening Post. January 15. ———. 1931b. ‘In Search of Work.’ Aberdeen Journal. May 23. ———. 1933. ‘Forthcoming Books’. The Manchester Guardian. June 29. ———. 1934. The Bookman. Issue 517, October. ———. 1935. ‘Open Road in Spain’. Aberdeen Journal. April 24. ———. 1936. ‘The Institution of Tragedy.’ Chelmsford Chronicle, March 13. ———. 1937a. ‘Amazing Vagabond’. Derby Daily Telegraph. July 23. ———. 1937b. ‘Hobo Life’. Washington Post. June 2. ———. 1937c. ‘Our Reader’s Views: Vagrancy’. Western Daily Press. July 17. ———. 1937d. ‘This Man’s Life in the Raw Was Never Mild’. The Saturday Times. March 14. ———. 1939a. ‘Cabbies and Cards.’ The Observer. June 4. ———. 1939b. ‘No Jam For Supper: Report On Dorchester Casual Ward Complaints’. Western Morning News. May 23. ———. 1996. ‘Renegade of Aran: Liam O’Flaherty.’ Books Ireland 199: 305–306. ———. 2020. ‘Ordinary’s Account 6th August 1740’. Old Bailey Online. Accessed March 30, 2020. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?name= OA17400806 Atkinson, David, and Steve Roud. 2017. ‘Preface’ to Street Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century: Producers, Sellers, Consumers, ed. David Atkinson and Steve Roud. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: xiv-xvii. Basset, Josiah. [1850] 1852. The Life of a Vagrant, or the Testimony of an Outcast. New York: Robert Carter and Brothers.

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Beavan, Iain. 2017. ‘The Decline and Fall of the Scottish Chapbook.’ In Street Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century: Producers, Sellers, Consumers, ed. David Atkinson and Steve Roud. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 154-192. Belloc, Hilaire. 1902. The Path to Rome. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Benney, Mark. 1937. ‘Love Among the Lice.’ The Spectator, January 15. Bentley, John A. 1933. The Submerged Tenth: The Story of a Down-and-Out. London: Constable. Booth, Alison. 2006. ‘Men and Women of the Time: Victorian Prosopographies’. In Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni. Aldershot: Ashgate: 41-66. ———. 2010. ‘Life Writing.’ In The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830–1914, ed. Joanne Shattock. London: Cambridge University Press: 50-70. Bower, Fred. [1936] 2015. Rolling Stonemason: An Autobiography. Wales: The Merlin Press. Bradshaw, David. 2013. ‘James Douglas: The Sanitary Inspector of Literature.’ In Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscentiy in England, 1850 to the Present Day, ed. David Bradshaw and Rachel Potter. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 90-110. Brine, George Atkins. 1883. The King of the Beggars: The Life and Adventures of George Atkins Brine. London: Ward, Lock and Co. Brown, William. 1829. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of William Brown, Now Schoolmaster at Middleham, Yorkshire. York: T. Weightman. Brown, John. 1934. I Was a Tramp. London: Selwyn and Blount Ltd. ———. 1937. The Road to Power. London: Selwyn and Blount Ltd. Burn, James Dawson. 1978 [1856]. The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy, ed. David Vincent. London: Europa Publications. Burnett, John. 1994. Idle Hands: The Experience of Unemployment, 1790–1990. London: Routledge. ———. 2013. Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s. London: Routledge. C., M. 1938. ‘A Wanderer.’ The Manchester Guardian. July 5. Cahill, Tim. 2002. ‘New Introduction.’ In Trader Horn: A Young Man’s Astounding Adventures in 19th Century Equatorial Africa. San Francisco: Traveller’s Tales. Cameron, William. 1888. Hawkie: The Autobiography of a Gangrel. Glasgow: David Robertson & Company. Clouston, Harry. 1937. The Happy Hobo. London: Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd. ‘Colin’. 1864. The Life and Adventures of Colin: An Autobiography. London: W. Tweedie. Crick, Bernard. 1980. George Orwell: A Life. London: Penguin. Cutler, Ian. 2020. The Lives and Extraordinary Adventures of Fifteen Tramp Writers from the Golden Age of Vagabondage. Washington: Feral House.

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D., M.L. 1930. ‘Our London Correspondent.’ Western Morning News. December 11. Davies, W.H. [1909] 1912a. Beggars. London: Duckworth & Co. ———. 1912b. The True Traveller. London: Duckworth & Co. ———. [1908] 2011. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. London: Melville House. ‘Digit’. 1924. The Confessions of a Twentieth Century Hobo. London: Herbert Jenkins. Dimolianis, Spiro. 2011. Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders. North Carolina: McFarland & Company. Eadon, James, and David Renton. 2002. The British Communist Party of Great Britain Since 1920. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ferber, Michel. 2012. The Cambridge Introduction to British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foster, Harry. 1922. The Adventures of a Tropical Tramp. London: John Lane. Gape, W.A. 1936. Half a Million Tramps. London: Routledge. Gardaphe, Fred. 2010. ‘Mafia Stories and the American Gangster.’ In The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, ed. Catherine Ross Nickerson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 110–20. Garrett, George. 1999. The Collected George Garrett. Nottingham: Trent Editions. Gibson, Ashley. 1910. ‘The Bookman Gallery: Mr Morley Roberts.’ The Bookman 37 (219): 122–3. Gordon, Jan, and Cora. 1933. The London Roundabout. London: G.G. Harrap. Graham, Douglas. 1785. The History of John Cheap the Chapman. Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. Graham, Stephen. 1922. Tramping With a Poet in the Rockies, with Thirty-Eight Emblems by Vernon Hill. New York: D. Appleton And Co. ———. 1927. The Gentle Art of Tramping. London: Ernst Benn Ltd. ——— (ed.). [1928] 1930. The Tramp’s Anthology. London: Peter Davies. Gray, Frank. 1931. The Tramp: His Meaning and Being. London: J.M. Dent. Greene, Robert. [1592] 1964. The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene, Volume 10. London: Russell & Russell. Hannington, Wal. 1977. Unemployment Struggles, 1919–1936: My Life and Struggles Amongst the Unemployed. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Harman, Thomas. [1568] 1814. A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds. London: T. Bensley. Harrison, Gary Lee. 1994. Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty and Power. Michigan: Wayne State University Press. Hitchcock, Tim. [2004] 2017. Down and Out in Eighteenth Century London. London: Continuum. Horn, Trader. 1928. Harold the Webbed: Or, The Young Vykings. London: Simon and Schuster.

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———. [1929] 1932. Trader Horn in Madagascar: The Waters of Africa. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. [1927] 2002. Trader Horn: A Young Man’s Astounding Adventures in 19th Century Equatorial Africa. San Francisco: Traveller’s Tales. Horsley, Terrence. 1931. The Odyssey of an Out of Work. London: John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd. Horsley, Terence. 1932. Round England in an Eight Pound Car. London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson Ltd. Hughes, Michael. 2014. Beyond Holy Russia; The Life and Times of Stephen Graham. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. Hyland, Dominic. 1984. ‘Introduction’ to Edward Thomas, Selected Poems: Notes. London: Longman. Jameson, Storm. 1961. Morley Roberts: The Last Eminent Victorian. London: The Unicorn Press. Jarvis, Robin. 1997. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. Hampshire and London: Macmillan. Jennings, Frank. 1926. In London’s Shadows. London: Heath Cranton Publishers. ———. 1947. The Gospel on Skid Row. Fleming H. Revell. ———. 1958. Men of the Lanes. London: Oldbourne Books. Keating, Peter. 1978. Into Unknown England: Selections from the Social Explorers. Glasgow: Fontana. Kennedy, Bart. 1899. A Man Adrift; Being Leaves from a Nomad’s Portfolio. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone & Company. ———. 1904. A Tramp in Spain: From Andalusia to Andorra. London: Frederick Warne. ———. 1905. Slavery: Pictures from the Depths. London: Treherne. ———. 1908. A Tramp’s Philosophy. London: John Long. Klaus, Gustav H. 2017. ‘Bart Kennedy: Hater of Slavery, Tramp and Professor of Walking.’ English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 60 (2): 167–184. Koven, Seth. 2004. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Landery, Charles. 1938. So What? A Young Man’s Odyssey. London: J.M.  Dent and Sons Ltd. ———. 1940. Hollywood is the Place! London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Langan, Celeste. 1995. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lester, Paul. 2011. Tales of a Lifer: The Writings of Jim Phelan. Birmingham: Protean. Loftus, Donna. 2006. ‘The Self in Society; Middle-Class Men and Autobiography.’ In Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. David Amigoni. Aldershot: Ashgate: 67-86. M., E. 1938. ‘Books of Today.’ Western Morning News. June 23. Maclean, John. [1918] 1986. Accuser of Capitalism. London: New Park Publications.

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MacMahon, Ryan. 1948. Tramp Royal: An Autobiography. London: John Langdon Limited. Marshall, Matt. 1932. Travels of a Tramp-Royal. London: W.M.  Blackwood & Sons Ltd. ———. 1933. Tramp-Royal on the Toby. Edinburgh and London: W.M. Blackwood & Sons Ltd. Massie, Chris. 1931. The Confessions of a Vagabond. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co. Ltd. McShane, Harry. 1978. No Mean Fighter. London: Pluto Press. Milligan, James. 1936. I Didn’t Stay Honest. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co. Ltd. Murphy, Michael. 1999. ‘Introduction’ to The Collected George Garrett. Nottingham: Trent Editions: vii–xxix. Neville, Hippo. 1935. Sneak Thief on the Road. London: Jonathan Cape. O’Brien, James. 1973. Liam O’Flaherty. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. O’Flaherty, Liam. [1930] 1933. Two Years. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. [1934] 1981. Shame the Devil. Dublin: Wolfhound Press. Orwell, George. [1933] 1997a. The Complete Works of George Orwell: Down and Out in London and Paris, ed. Peter Davison. London: Secker and Warburg. ———. [1940] 1997b. ‘“The Proletarian Writer,” Draft Introduction.’ In The Complete Works of George Orwell: A Patriot After All, 1940–1941, ed. Peter Davison. London: Secker and Warburg: 282–284. Patterson, J.E. 1911. My Vagabondage. London: William Heinemann. Phelan, Jim. [1948] 1993. The Name’s Phelan. Belfast: The Blackstaff Press. ———. 1940. Jail Journey. London: Secker and Warburg. ———. 1949. We Follow the Roads. London: Phoenix House. Prior, Charles. 1937. So I Wrote It: An Autobiography. London: Jonathan Cape. Ransome, Arthur. [1907] 1984. Bohemia in London. New  York: Oxford University Press. Rendall, Jane. 1997. ‘“A Short Account of My Unprofitable Life”: Autobiogrpahies of working class women in Britain c.1775–1845.’ In Women’s Lives/Women’s Times: New Essays on Auto/Biography, ed. Trev Lynn Broughton and Linda Anderson. New York: SUNY Press: 31–50. Roberts, Morley. 1904. A Tramp’s Notebook. London: F.V. White & Co. Ltd. ———. 1912. The Private Life of Henry Maitland. London: E. Nash. ———. [1887] 1924. The Western Avernus. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Rose, Lionel. 1998. Rogues and Vagabonds: Vagrant Underworld in Britain 1815–1985. London: Routledge. Rose, Jonathan. 2008. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Yale University Press. Salman, Jeroen. 2013. Pedlars and the Popular Press: Itinerant Distribution Networks in England and the Netherlands 1600–1850. Boston: Brill Press.

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Salter, Joseph. 1873. The Asiatic in England: Sketches of Sixteen Years’ Work Among Orientals. London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday. Saunders, Max. 2010. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saxby, Mary. 1806. Memoirs of a Female Vagrant, Written by Herself. With Illustrations. London: J. Burditt. Sherren, Wilkinson. 1915. ‘Morley Roberts.’ The Bookman 48 (288): 157–9. Smith, John Thomas. 1874. Vagabondiania, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers Through the Streets of London. London: Chatto and Windus. Stamper, Joseph. [1931] 1966. Less Than Dust. London: Hutchinson and Co. Stevenson, John, and Chris, Cook. [1977] 1994. The Slump: Britain in the Great Depression. London and New York: Routledge. Stuart, F.S. 1937. Vagabond. London: Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd. ———. 1954. ‘About the Author.’ In A Seal’s World: An Account of the First Three Years in the Life of a Harp Seal. London: McGraw-Hill. Thoreau, Henry David. 2008. The Selected Essays of Henry David Thoreau. Virginia: Wilder Publications. Vernon, James. 2007. Hunger: A Modern History. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Vincent, David. 1978. ‘Introduction’ to James Dawson Burn, The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy. London: Europa Publications: 1–33. Vogeler, Martha. 2008. Austin Harrison and the English Review. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Wallace, Anne D. 1994. Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century. London: Clarendon Press. Waters, Brian. 1953. ‘Introduction’ to The Essential W. H. Davies. London: Cape. White, Jerry. 2001. London in the 20th Century. London: Vintage. Worby, John. 1936. The Other Half: A Hobo’s Autobiography. London: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd. ———. 1937a. The Other Half: John Worby’s Life. London: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd. ———. 1937b. The Other Half: The Autobiography of a Spiv. London: J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd. ———. 1939. Spiv’s Progress. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. ———. 1946. The Other Half: A Hobo’s Autobiography. New  York: Wiley Book Company. Wordsworth, William. 1802. ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads: With Pastoral and Other Poems, in Two Volumes, Volume 1. London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees. Worthington, Heather. 2010. ‘From The Newgate Calendar to Sherlock Holmes.’ In A Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Sussex: John Wiley & Sons: 13-27.

CHAPTER 3

Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction

Unlike the reverse discourse tramp memoirs explored in the previous chapter, which emerged out of the relatively isolated phenomenon of homeless life writing—reverse discourse tramp fiction exists within a much broader discursive context of fiction writing on homelessness. Given this, in order to achieve the objective of communicating a clear sense of the discursive conditions that led to its emergence—and thus to establish an idea of its historical specificity and its defining attributes, as we did with the reverse discourse tramp memoir—we are required here to widen the lens and to offer a significantly broader preliminary overview of fiction writing on homelessness. The sheer volume of fiction writing on homelessness also means that it is not possible to chronologically pass through each of the works that fall into this category, determining whether they are classifiable as works of tramp literature, or as reverse discourse texts (as we were able to do when investigating the  tramp memoir phenomenon)—and so instead, the approach adopted here has been to separate reverse discourse tramp fiction from nonreverse discourse fictional treatments of homelessness. What this all means in practice is that the following will begin by offering a summary overview of literary works on homelessness from the beginning of the early modern period to the end of the late modern period, before then presenting a selection of examples in the reverse discourse tramp fiction mode. There are, however, two additional reasons for in this chapter offering a broader overview of British fictional representations of homelessness in the modern period before focussing on specific examples of reverse © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Lewin Davies, The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73432-9_3

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discourse tramp fiction. The first of these is that such an overview doesn’t currently exist. As John Allen writes in his study Homelessness in American Literature: given the range and frequency of treatments of homelessness in literature, ‘it is surprising to note how little critical commentary exists which examines homelessness per se’ (2004, 1)—the implication being that the majority of secondary literature on the subject treats it in the context of a separate line of inquiry. This chapter thus attempts to compensate for the shortage—we might even say absence—of detailed critical commentaries examining the phenomenon of homelessness in British fiction writing in and of itself. A second reason for presenting a more thorough account of the literature leading up to and coexisting alongside reverse discourse tramp fiction is to offer a corrective against assumptions that are often made in the criticism that does exist. In particular, within existing criticism Allen notes a common theme in efforts to distinguish between two different ways of representing the homeless in fiction—with the literary critic Kingsley Widmer, for instance, drawing a distinction between romantic and realist modes of representation (2004, 1). In his study Allen accepts the basis of this theoretical distinction, while at the same time exposing its limitations—noting that ‘while the division between romantic and realist approaches to homelessness is relevant, it also limits analysis’ on the grounds that it both excludes texts and authors, and ‘elides the ambiguity and contradictions imbedded in texts’ that often reveal ‘conflicted attitudes’ (2004, 2). This chapter aims to build on Allen’s criticism by proposing that while drawing distinctions between romantic and realistic depictions of homelessness can be useful in helping us to determine different narrative strategies, it not only elides ambiguities but also distracts us away from the more pressing questions concerning how the homeless are represented in relation to existing societal perceptions. By applying a critical approach in which efforts are made to interpret representations of homelessness as either affirming, resisting or appropriating negative conceptions of the homeless—either as masterless or as unproductive—to key examples of early and late modern texts (while in the process demonstrating how the ‘realist’ and ‘romantic’ appellations do not correspond in a consistent way with these tendencies), the aim is to demonstrate how the analytical framework developed in this study offers a clear alternative to the critical formulae that Allen identifies as both abundant and restrictive.

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In short, then, this chapter will present a detailed exploration of fictional representations of homelessness in the modern period before then identifying key works of reverse discourse tramp literature—in part to compensate for the absence of a critical overview of British representations of homelessness, and in part to demonstrate how we might apply the interpretative framework developed in this study to key literary works on homelessness, but primarily in order to communicate a sense of the discursive conditions that led to the phenomenon of reverse discourse tramp fiction.

1   Chapter Outline The first half of this chapter will begin by looking at early modern representations of homelessness mentioned in existing critical accounts of rogue literature, the picaresque tradition and satire—in particular by exploring the fiction of Robert Greene, Richard Head, Francis Kirkham, Bampfylde Moore Carew, Robert Goadby and John Gay. Broadly speaking, this analysis will point to the conclusion that early modern representations idealised the figure of the vagrant and used representations of this kind to support a critique of sovereign power—but that, accordingly, they should be seen both to conceive of the figure of the vagrant as a symbol of masterlessness (rather than inutility) and to express only an abstract interest in homelessness, indicating key differences between these texts and works in the reverse discourse tramp literature mode. Having explored early modern representations of vagrancy, the first half of this chapter will then move on to offer a survey of representations of homelessness in the late modern period as identified within existing criticism—focussing on authors including George Crabbe, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Arthur Morrison and Margaret Harkness. Broadly speaking, this section will conclude that late modern representations (some typically characterised as romantic and others as realist) tend to conform with a disciplinary agenda by recasting the figure of the vagrant as a victim—with a handful of exceptions in which the vagrant or  tramp’s symbolic rejection of disciplinary values can be seen to have been celebrated in a manner that foreshadows the reverse discourse trend, though to a limited degree. Against this, in the second half of this chapter (by some way the bigger half), the genre of reverse discourse tramp fiction will be explored as an example of a body of work that more consistently challenges disciplinary

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attitudes towards the homeless—in a sense, synthesising early modern idealisation with a late modern conception of the tramp as a victim of capitalism by valorising the tramp as a figure of inutility. This possibility will be explored by looking at the work of seven late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors—all from working-class backgrounds or themselves at some point homeless: namely, Bart Kennedy, W.H.  Davies, Walter Brierley, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, James Hanley, Jim Phelan and Chris Massie. In addition to these seven authors an additional eleven authors of reverse discourse tramp fiction—some from working-class backgrounds, some homeless and some neither of these things—will also be accounted for, alongside explanations as to why they have been deemed less deserving of detailed analysis: namely, Felicia Skene, James Hunter Crawford, Harold Brighouse, George Gissing, Arthur Calder-Marshall, Leslie Halward, George Garrett, Patrick MacGill, Liam O’Flaherty, R.M.  Fox and Jack Hilton. As previously—three lines of inquiry will be developed in exploring the works of these authors, in addition to demonstrating their status as fiction writers who embody a new understanding of homelessness oriented around the figure of the tramp: first, the following analysis will seek to determine how effectively the texts in question can be seen to represent a reverse discourse on homelessness, transforming disciplinary attempts to denigrate the tramp’s refusal of societal norms into grounds for praise—while at the same time determining whether this produces an anti-productivist outlook; second, it will consider whether in the process they can be seen to have contributed to a radical anti-productivist discourse by setting their sights on more widespread societal transformation; and third, it will attempt to ascertain whether the chosen texts are marred by any noteworthy limitations. As should be apparent from this chapter overview, not all of the authors identified as having contributed to the genre of reverse discourse tramp fiction were themselves homeless. It is perhaps worth clarifying why this is the case. While in the previous chapter we had no choice but to focus on homeless authors owing to the nature of the genre—here, there is obviously no such need. Not only this, but given my expressed desire in the introduction to this text to avoid reading tramp literature as an expression of a minority group experience—both on the grounds that these texts cannot be seen to be representative of the homeless community and for the reason that such a reading would suggest a narrow preoccupation with identity politics in lieu of more widespread societal change—it would clearly be inconsistent to narrow the focus onto homeless authors. This

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said, it will also be clear from the account offered above that a significant portion of the identified contributors to the reverse discourse tramp fiction genre were in fact either homeless or working-class. Of course, in spite of asserting that reverse discourse tramp fiction should not be seen to be representative of the homeless experience, a strong presence of homeless authors within the genre is still to be expected given the account of the conditions that likely led to its emergence offered in the introduction to this text, in which the formation of reverse discourse trends was hypothesised to be a result of the contested experience of marginalisation. The balancing act that we are thus forced to perform is to accept the prevalence of homeless writers among authors of reverse discourse tramp fiction as proof of the validity of the reverse discourse hypothesis while refusing to allow that a mere preponderance along these lines should be seen to indicate that reverse discourse tramp fiction is therefore representative of the homeless community, or that its value lies in its status as an expression of an identity-oriented experience—explaining my requirement that we focus instead upon the texts’ anti-productivist and radical credentials.

2   Homelessness in Fiction: Origins of Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction As just indicated, the first half of this chapter deals with early and late modern representations of homelessness identified in existing critical studies. The choice of texts surveyed is thus very much determined by the available secondary material (sometimes directly dealing with the question of homelessness—though often not), while it is at the same time necessarily selective. Authors excluded from the following account of early modern depictions of homelessness in British fiction, for instance, include Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Francis Coventry and Jane Barker—all of whom wrote significant works on the subject. As David Hitchcock has noted, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries alone, there was a ‘rich seam of cultural interpretation and representation’ dealing with the subject of vagrancy (2016, 3)—meaning of course that it is not possible to offer anything like a comprehensive survey. Instead, by focussing on fictional representations of homelessness within a select sample of authors identified within existing criticism—the aim is to provide a sense of the range of such examples within the modern period and of the key trends.

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2.1  Early Modern Representations of Homelessness: Rogue Literature, the Picaresque Tradition and Satire In focussing on early modern fictional representations of homelessness to begin with—the following analysis divides into three categories: texts in the rogue literature tradition, texts in the picaresque tradition and texts in the satire tradition—although in reality these groupings frequently intersect. In terms of the primary objectives in exploring these texts—there are two: first, to determine ways in which they may be seen to have foreshadowed but also differed from texts within the reverse discourse tramp literature tradition as described throughout this study; second, to indicate ways in which as pre-disciplinary representations they might be seen to have foreshadowed but also differed from late modern disciplinary representations of homelessness against which reverse discourse tramp fiction was arguably defined. At the same time as achieving these objectives, as indicated the aim is also to compensate for the shortage of critical overviews of representations of homelessness in fiction and to indicate how key works might be analysed using the interpretative framework developed in this study. The general pattern that will be noted is a gradually developed tendency to appropriate and defend the symbolic masterlessness of the figure of the vagabond in the early modern period in a way that can be seen to foreshadow the later reverse discourse tramp fiction trend, except in a manner that is frequently  abstracted from the lived experience of being homeless and that tends to be oriented around the objective of critiquing sovereign power and early modern capitalism (as opposed to disciplinary power and late modern capitalism). In this sense these early examples of fictional representations of homelessness can be seen to have simultaneously differed from and foreshadowed reverse discourse tramp fiction, while at the same time laying the foundations for a reversal of the tendency to idealise within disciplinary representations of homelessness that dominated the late modern period (and against which reverse discourse tramp fiction may be seen to have been defined). 2.1.1

 volution of Rogue Literature: Robert Greene (1558–1592) E and Poverty Ballads (1550–1700) The introduction to this text has already described ways in which sixteenth-­ century rogue literature has been interpreted (by Dionne and Mentz among others) as a discourse responsible for ‘manufacturing an imaginary

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criminal underworld’ linked to the figure of the vagrant. After exploring existing criticism of this body of work in relation to Thomas Harman’s 1568 A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, it was argued that while this particular text may be seen to have generated fear around the perceived ‘masterlessness’ and ‘mutalibility’ of the vagrant in an era in which ‘those in power longed for stability’—its jocular tone at the same time suggests that it differs significantly from later responses to the apparent threat of homelessness by indicating that it was taken less seriously. As we move into the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the suggestion from critics of rogue literature is that this tendency of presenting the vagrant as a source of amusement became increasingly prominent. Writing of the rogue literature of Robert Greene ‘and his successors’, the critic Arthur Kinney has for instance argued that in these later contributions to the genre ‘cleverness’, ‘wit’, ‘robust language’, ‘[i]rony, satire and punning’ can be seen to ‘replace the directness of the earlier works’ as Greene struggles to be ‘totally serious about the terror instilled by criminals’ (1990, 54–5). Arguably more significant, however, than the suggestion that Greene’s lack of seriousness surpasses previous examples (admittedly made prior to Woodbridge’s analysis of Harman’s comic tendency) are Kinney’s subsequent remarks concerning the ambivalence that this irreverence produces. While Woodbridge is still able to acknowledge that alongside Harman’s flippancy is a persistent ‘moral outrage at vagrants’ wicked lives’, Kinney concludes of Greene that ‘we do not often know which side to be on’ (1990, 55). As he puts it: in Greene’s writing ‘rogues are admired for their cleverness’ while conies (a term used to describe the victims of their crimes) can often be persuaded ‘to be cony-catchers themselves and so prey on others’ (1990, 55, 159). Kinney is here referring to an episode in Greene’s 1591 A Notable Discovery of Coosnage in which a cony, deceived by the cony-catchers into believing that he has learnt a trick for deceiving players in a game of cards, mirrors their ‘greediness’ as he remarks: ‘Wel, Ile carrie this home with me into the cuntrie, and win many a pot of ale with it’ (1923, 24–5). According to Kinney’s analysis, this passage suggests that Greene not only diminished the seriousness of the threat of the rogue, but also pushed beyond Harman by blurring the boundaries between rogue and victim. Kinney goes on to propose that in generating textual ambiguities of this nature ‘we are witnessing nothing less momentous than the birth of the novel in England’ (1990, 159).

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Building on Kinney’s analysis, we might further suggest that Greene’s transition towards a more novelistic approach that is sympathetic towards the position of the rogue and questioning of the rogue’s antagonists is symptomatic of a broader tendency within literature on homelessness during this period—in particular by taking into consideration critical accounts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poverty ballads, which although perhaps not rogue literature in a formal sense may be seen to cross over with the genre. In an essay on ‘ballads on poverty’ contained within the ‘printed, broadside black-letter ballad’ popular in London between 1550 and 1700, historian Richard Harvey has indeed observed a similar trajectory to the one identified by Kinney (1984, 539–41). He argues that in early Tudor versions these ballads—a genre of literature, it should be noted, ‘not written by the poor themselves but by the lower middle-class interpreters of the experience of the poor’—impoverished subjects tend to be depicted as ‘anonymous and abstract’ (1984, 555, 543). However, by the early seventeenth century Harvey suggests that depictions of impoverished and homeless characters not only become more lifelike, but are also conveyed more sympathetically: Remarkably, in the following, early Stuart phase of the ballad history of the poor, c. 1600–1660, the poor become flesh and blood figures in a real world of deprivation complete with self-perceptions and attitudes toward their betters. (1984, 544)

For example, the early Stuart ballad ‘The Begger-boy of the North’ presents a first-hand account of a beggar, describing how he makes a ‘living by begging’ (Anon 1875, 324). At the same time as the protagonist of ‘The Begger-boy of the North’ can be seen to resemble the rogues of Harman as he describes how he ‘can counterfeit a lame arme or a legge’, there is— as Harvey points out—a clear sense in which the character is viewed from a more understanding viewpoint, as well as a sense in which he functions as a vehicle through which to critique early modern capitalism, as he declares wryly of his adversaries: ‘I wrong not the country by greedy inclosing’ (Anon 1875, 324–6). Clearly, then, the emergence of more sympathetic ‘flesh and blood’ portraits of homelessness within rogue pamphlets and poverty ballads can be seen to have represented a challenge to contemporary perceptions of the homeless as described by Beier when he suggests that vagrants were generally feared as ‘a problem of disorder’ during this period. There are

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two clear ways of interpreting this apparent trend: on the one hand, we might propose that the ease with which conceptions of the menacing, masterless vagabond were challenged within these two examples of mainstream discourse on homelessness (as opposed to reverse discourse tramp fiction, which as we will see was very much a marginal development defined in opposition against more dominant modes of representation) is indicative of this being a pre-disciplinary era in which, though the poor were frequently abused, the demand that they be denigrated was less developed (in line with Slack’s suggestion—considered in the introduction to this study—that while seventeenth-century legislation reflected a desire ‘to control’ the poor, it was also marked by a preoccupation with their welfare); alternatively, we might stress that this is nonetheless an instance of representations of homelessness being used to contest existing power structures—for instance, by highlighting existing moral hypocrisies or objecting to enclosure laws—in this sense preconfiguring the social critique element of reverse discourse tramp literature. If we are to take this second route we should however insist that there is little sense here either of the charge of masterlessness being appropriated and defended (in the manner of a reverse discourse) or of a preoccupation with the question of productivity. 2.1.2

I nfluence of Picaresque Tradition: Richard Head (1637–1686), Francis Kirkham (b. 1632), Bampfylde Moore Carew (1690–1758) and Robert Goadby (1721–1778) As we move into the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries we find that this apparent tendency towards more sympathetic portraits of the homeless appears to increase, along with the habit of using representations of this kind as vehicles through which to critique early modern sovereign power and capitalism—while at the same time, representations in this period may also be seen to advance beyond previously considered works by actively appropriating the charge of masterlessness (in this sense resembling later reverse discourse texts but in a pre-disciplinary context). Again, this might be interpreted in two ways: on the one hand, recalling that as well as being a pre-disciplinary period (in which attitudes towards the homeless were simultaneously more brutal and more relaxed), this was an era characterised by an expansion of poor relief (as we saw in the introduction to this text)—the tendency within mainstream discourse towards sympathetic characterisations in which the charge of masterlessness is appropriated might be seen to reflect how the perceived threat of homelessness was more

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easily challenged or made light of within a climate of relative beneficence; on the other, recalling that this was also a period characterised by the gradual advancement of capitalism, the increased tendency of using representations of homelessness as a vehicle for social critique can be seen to reflect a heightened imperative to explore possible modes of resistance. A more immediate causal factor for the increased tendencies towards both more sympathetic and more caustic representations of homelessness, however— which may itself have been related to both of these factors—can be found in the influence of the Spanish picaresque literary tradition, described by the critic Frank Chandler as a genre of ‘comic biography (or more often autobiography)’ in which an anti-hero ‘makes his way in the world through the service of masters, satirizing their personal faults, as well as their trades and professions’ (1907, 5)—exemplified by the anonymously published 1554 anti-clerical novella La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades [or The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities]  with its pícaro (or rogue) protagonist Lázaro. Closely connected to this is the influence of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (or Don Quixote), published in the early seventeenth century—which although perhaps more accurately described as a ‘comic romance’ (Morgan 2010, 43) has clear crossovers with the picaresque tradition and, according to Tim Hitchcock, influenced authors such as Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett and Daniel Defoe (2017, 216). Accordingly, this section will consider representations of homelessness in two key works widely considered to have been influenced by the picaresque and related traditions. One of the earliest examples of the influence of the picaresque tradition frequently cited by literary critics is Richard Head and Francis Kirkham’s 1665 The English Rogue—a four-volume text dubiously posing as a work of life writing, with the first volume generally considered to have been written by Head, and the final three ‘by, or at the direction of’ Kirkham (Winton 1994, 81–2). The English Rogue is widely seen to be the first significant attempt, following the proto-picaresque narratives of authors like Greene and Thomas Nashe, to develop a British picaresque tradition ‘to vie with the foreign variety’ (Chandler 1907, 207). The text itself tells the story of Meriton Latroon, a descendent of a family of farmers unable to ‘distinguish one letter from another’ who follows his father’s example of ‘wicked practices, and detestable behaviour’ by adopting the lifestyle of a wandering rogue (2013, 3–5). Head/Kirkham’s narrative establishes two recurring

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themes within vagrant narratives of this period by introducing both gypsy characters and a mood of hedonism—in fact intertwined, as Latroon’s first encounter with the wandering lifestyle is facilitated by a band of gypsies who introduce him a life of ‘drinking, eating or whoring’ and ‘deceitful “Maundering” (Begging)’ (2013, 23, 28). This relatively novel emphasis on the rogue protagonist’s hedonistic lifestyle was pronounced enough that it got the book banned on the grounds of indecency (Joseph 2014, 180). Latroon’s hedonism is also indicative of an additional emerging trend within picaresque narratives: namely, that of highlighting the aristocratic qualities of the vagabond rogue. The literary critic Calhoun Winton has for instance argued that though Latroon ‘is certainly a rogue’, he also ‘fancies himself an aristocratic rogue’—with Winton drawing a comparison with the roguish ‘predatory heroes of Restoration comedies’ such as Horner in William Wycherley’s 1675 The Country Wife and Dorimant in George Etherege’s 1676 The Man of Mode (1994, 83). With this in mind, there are two distinct options in terms of how we interpret The English Rogue as regards its attitudes towards vagrancy. On the one hand, the text can be read as a warning against the deceitful and extravagant lifestyle of the wandering rogue/vagabond. For instance, as C.W.R.D. Moseley has suggested, when we meet characters who have been ‘ruined by Latroon’ in Part III of the text, this ‘could be seen as an illustration of the consequences of unconsidered acts in Part I’ (1971, 103). Latroon himself openly regrets having ‘lived so notoriously and loosely’—suggesting at the end of Part I that he has only told his life story in order to ‘frighten others from the commission of the like’ (2013, 264). On the other hand, the text can be seen to celebrate its narrator’s lifestyle. As Moseley puts it, having suggested how  The English Rogue might be read as a warning against vice: ‘we need not take this moral purpose too seriously’—suggesting that ‘the telling of the tale shows that it is not organic to the book’ (1971, 103). In other words, any sense that The English Rogue marks a continuation of Harman’s effort to warn against the vices of vagrancy and crime might be seen to be undermined by the extent to which our reading pleasure is dependent upon amusement induced by Latroon’s antics. Critics of Head/Kirkham’s text have tended to lean towards this second interpretation, while also identifying ways in which the sympathetic portrait of Latroon is suggestive of an underlying or implicit social critique. For instance, Betty Joseph has isolated instances in which Latroon brags of his profligacy—suggesting that these moments amount to a questioning of ‘virtuous frugality’, in turn presenting an

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‘ironic counter to mercantilist ideologies’ that were common in the period (2014, 182). Thus she argues that as a ‘masterless’ embodiment of ‘a new possessive individualism’, Latroon helps to facilitate an ‘abstract discussion of “rogue economics”’ (2014, 175–6)—clearly suggesting a political dimension to the text, although the preoccupation with ‘possessive individualism’ may be seen to clash against a Badiouian definition of radicalism as pertaining to the social totality. Thus, in short, unlike the examples of Greene and ‘The Begger-boy of the North’, there is a definite sense here in which the ostensible masterlessness of the vagrant may be seen to have been appropriated (in a manner resembling the reverse discourse tramp memoir), in the process facilitating a social critique that verges on being radical—although we might at the same time note that the depiction of Latroon as an ‘aristocratic rogue’ is suggestive of how this idealisation may have been removed from the lived reality of homelessness, while there is also no clear preoccupation with the theme of productivity in Head/Kirkham’s text, further signalling how this depiction of homelessness remains distinct from the reverse discourse tramp literature tradition as it has so far been represented. In addition to this we might confirm that the ease with which the vagabond is cast as a sympathetic figure in this text is indicative of an inherently more relaxed (although in other ways more brutal) pre-­ disciplinary culture; while the apparent critique of ‘mercantilist ideologies’ in The English Rogue simultaneously confirms the existence of a heightened imperative to address the advancement of early modern capitalism. A second, significantly later work worth considering—identified by critics as having its ‘roots […] in Elizabethan rogue pamphlets’ (Bannet 2011, 93) while also showing signs of the picaresque influence (Hitchcock 2017, 217)—is The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew: a text first published in 1745, and then republished in a heavily edited version as An Apology for the Life of Bampfylde-Moore Carew in 1749, before subsequently being published under the same title in several modified versions. Carew is a text that (like The English Rogue) presents itself as a work of life writing—although in all likelihood it was either ‘exaggerated or entirely fictional’ (Hitchcock 2016, 3). In An Apology for the Life of Bampfylde-­ Moore Carew—a later version of Bampfylde Moore Carew’s text often assumed to have been heavily edited by its publisher Robert Goadby—we find several of the tendencies identified in The English Rogue repeated. To begin with, the inclusion of gypsies and the suggestion of a hedonistic culture that we find in Head/Kirkham’s text are reinforced as we learn

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how the eponymous hero was, like Latroon, introduced to a life of vagrancy after ‘accidentally’ falling ‘into Company with a Society of Gypsies’ who offer him to a life of ‘Freedom, Mirth, and Pleasure’ as they dine upon ‘Fowls, Ducks, and other dainty Dishes, the flowing cups of October Cyder, &c.’ (Anon 1750, 7). Next, we find that the detachment of the rogue archetype from a fixed class association that is detectable in The English Rogue is taken even further here: while Latroon is someone from humble origins who aspires to become an ‘aristocratic rogue’— Carew is declared to be from a distinctly privileged background: ‘descended from the antient Family of the Carews, Son of the Rev. Mr. Theodore Carew, of the Parish of Bickley, near Tiverton, in the County of Devon’ (1750, 2). Lastly and most importantly, An Apology for the Life of Bampfylde-Moore Carew echoes The English Rogue in its celebration of its protagonist’s masterlessness and in how it uses this as a route through which to critique eighteenth-century society. An example of this can be found in the following passage, taken from the 1750 edition: O Liberty, thou Enlivener of Life, thou Solace of our Toils, thou Patron of Arts, thou Encourager of Industry […] by thy sacred Protection the poorest peasant lies secure under the shadow of his defenceless Cot, whilst oppression at a Distance gnashes with her teeth, but dares not shew her Iron Rod […] But where thou art not, how chang’d the Scene! how tasteless Life! how irksome Labour! (1750, 76)

Here vagrancy is quite clearly celebrated as the essence of freedom and masterlessness—defined in opposition against the oppressiveness of society in general. The attempt to present vagrancy as an embodiment of ‘Liberty’ in the context of an account of an individual from a privileged background who chooses to live among vagrant gypsies, and whose life on the road is presented as one of indulgence and luxuriousness, has unsurprisingly prompted critics—such as David Hitchcock—to argue that the text represents ‘a profound misrepresentation of what vagrancy was like for most contemporaries who experienced it’ (2016, 3). On the other hand, some critics have emphasised how the text nonetheless performs a subversive function. John Barrell has for instance suggested that as well as emblematising ‘individual liberty’, the gypsy community in An Apology for the Life of Bampfylde-Moore Carew may be seen to symbolise ‘a political utopia founded as much on a modern critique of modernity as on the vision of an imaginary and ideal past’—as Carew/Goadby describe how

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according to established customs within the gypsy community ‘the crown is elective, not hereditary’ and ‘[s]uffrage is universal’, as well as noting that within this world ‘economic transactions are represented as, primarily, social transactions, in which the opposed interests of each party are dissolved in their mutual enjoyment of Carew’s knavish tricks’ (1999, 234–6). Thus, this text can be seen to mark a consolidation of the trend already noted in Head/Kirkham of using this complex amalgam of the rogue/gypsy/vagrant as a symbol of masterlessness through which a critique can be launched against the increasingly mercenary nature of social relations within early modern capitalism (as well as, in this example, the monarchical system). At the same time, the emphasis on ‘individual liberty’ indicates that as in The English Rogue the vision of freedom that is offered is individualistic and thus perhaps not radical in the Badiouian sense of pertaining to society as a whole. Furthermore, while An Apology for the Life of Bampfylde-Moore Carew may be seen to foreshadow the reverse discourse tramp literature genre in its appropriation of a widely denigrated aspect of the homeless lifestyle in order to mount a social critique—it clearly proves distinct in its disregard for the social reality of homelessness as it envisages its vagrant protagonist as an ‘aristocratic rogue’. In addition to this, the ease with which this mainstream and popular depiction of homelessness defends the vagrant archetype may be seen to confirm that it is a byproduct of a pre-­disciplinary era, while the inclination towards a ‘critique of modernity’ may be seen to simultaneously signal the heightened imperative to address the advancement of early modern capitalism. 2.1.3 Satire: John Gay (1685–1732) The final author to be considered in this survey of early modern fictional representations of vagrancy is John Gay. Chandler has suggested that Gay should be grouped together with Fielding as an example of an author following the rogue literature tradition who also had close ties to eighteenth-­ century British satire—arguing that though the Spanish and French picaresque traditions were frequently satirical in nature, ‘the English romance of roguery’ before Fielding was ‘peculiarly devoid of it’ (1907, 78). Accordingly, Gay’s depiction of homelessness in this text may be seen to reinforce many of the themes identified in Head/Kirkham and Carew/ Goadby, while also marking a significant divergence—as the figure of the

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vagrant functions as a mirror image of society’s wrongdoings rather than as an imagined antidote to them. To deal with the similarities first: like Latroon and Carew the central protagonist of Gay’s 1728 The Beggar’s Opera, Macheath, is a roguish character who lives a hedonistic lifestyle—declaring openly that he ‘must have women’ (1729, 22). Again like Latroon and Carew, his status as a vagrant is also questionable: although he makes his living on ‘the road’ by begging and stealing, he clearly resembles an ‘aristocratic rogue’—hinted at when his nemesis the thief-catcher Peachum at one point describes how he ‘looks upon himself in the military capacity, as a gentleman by his profession’ (1729, 44,  9). Lastly, Gay’s text also resembles Head/Kirkham and Carew/Goadby’s in its celebration of the masterlessness of its roguish characters, with Macheath’s gang of vagabond thieves offering a robust defence of their way of life defined in opposition against symbols of sovereign power and early modern capitalism: boasting that they are superior to any ‘gang of Courtiers’ on account of their loyalty to one another, declaring their distaste for ‘avarice or injustice’ when distributing their ‘booty’ and targeting ‘money-lenders’ when thieving (1729, 20–1, 45). And yet, Gay also diverges from the picaresque-influenced tradition observed in Head/Kirkham and Carew/Goadby by simultaneously undermining his idealisation of Macheath’s gang of rogues as Jemmy Twitcher ultimately betrays Macheath—prompting him to reflect: ‘’Tis a plain proof that the world is all alike, and that even our Gang can no more trust one another than other people’ (1729, 58). Macheath’s remark here sets the tone for the ending of The Beggar’s Opera, as its purported author—the ‘Beggar’ of the opera’s title—reiterates the sentiment when reflecting on his initial intention to leave the audience believing that Macheath has been either hanged or transported: Through the whole piece you may observe such a similitude of manners in high and low life, that it is difficult to determine whether (in fashionable vices) the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen. Had the Play remain’d, as I first intended, it would have carried a most excellent moral. ’Twould have shown that the lower sort of people have their vices in a degree as well as the rich: And that they are punish’d for them. (1729, 60)

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Whereas Head/Kirkham’s text presents Latroon’s masterlessness as being at odds with mercantilist frugality and Carew/Goadby’s text defines Carew’s liberty in opposition to ‘oppression’ and the ‘Iron Rod’, Gay thus suggests that the masterlessness of Macheath’s gang represents a mirror image of the unshackled behaviour of ‘fine gentlemen’, with both being similarly given over to vice—although there is a clear sense of imbalance in terms of who is seen to suffer the consequences. Gay’s suggestion that the figure of the rogue thus resembles ‘fine gentlemen’ may in this sense (as well as functioning as a satire of civil society) be seen to reflect and critique the embourgeoisement of the rogue archetype together with the emerging ties to hedonism and profligacy that we have seen evidence of in Head/Kirkham and Carew/Goadby (even if the latter was published at a later date)—in turn indicating the limitations of the rogue literature and picaresque traditions by implying that the model of masterlessness valorised within them mimics (instead of confronting) sovereign power. In terms of its relation to the genre of reverse discourse tramp literature, The Beggar’s Opera may in this way be seen to be of interest for foreshadowing implicitly radical reverse discourse works by highlighting the unsatisfactoriness of defending homelessness as a mode of oppositionality—albeit in a quite distinct context, as what is here questioned is an attempt to appropriate and defend the early modern charge of masterlessness. 2.1.4 Summary In this brief overview of representations of homelessness within the rogue, picaresque and satirical traditions—several distinctive patterns have emerged: first, we have noticed a general trend towards richer and more sympathetic portraits over time; second, we have seen evidence of a complex fusion of the rogue/gypsy/vagrant archetypes, accompanied by an increasingly abstract preoccupation with the ‘aristocratic rogue’; third, we have identified a tendency to emphasise the hedonistic qualities of this complex amalgam; fourth, we have noted how the emerging rogue/ gypsy/vagrant figure has at the same time provided a vehicle for subversive and at times radical critiques of early modern capitalism and sovereign power—although with varying degrees of commitment to this agenda, and often in a manner that indicates a non-radical preoccupation with individualism; and fifth, we have observed a counter-trend in the satire of Gay exposing the limitations of the genre’s critical function by highlighting the shortcomings suggested by the second and third points as the appropriated model of masterlessness is seen to imitate rather than to seriously threaten existing power structures.

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The overarching tendency, ignoring minor differences, has thus been towards sympathetic portraits of an increasingly abstract roguish archetype through which subversive and sometimes radical critiques of sovereign and early modern capitalist society are frequently mounted—although in a manner that is perhaps undermined by both the tendency towards individualism and relatedly the inclination to mimic the excesses of power, as is highlighted by Gay. In terms of the relationship between this body of work and examples of reverse discourse tramp literature that we are familiar with, there is thus a clear sense in which early modern representations anticipate this later development by (especially in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature) appropriating and celebrating the vagrant’s subversive qualities, sometimes even in order to mount radical invectives—and yet at the same time, the tendency towards abstraction, together with the interest in hedonism and individualism, and most importantly the general preoccupation with the vagrant’s masterlessness as opposed to their inutility clearly signal how this discourse may be seen to differ from later anti-productivist reverse discourse representations oriented around the figure of the tramp. 2.2  Late Modern Representations of Homelessness: Realism, Romanticism, the Social Problem Novel, New Realism and the Socialist Novel This section will look at how fictional representations of homelessness may be seen to have evolved as we transition from the early modern to the late modern period—and as industrialisation and the emergence of disciplinary society herald the arrival of a new age in which (as we have seen) those without a fixed abode came to be viewed ‘less as eruptions of the diabolical energy of the masterless than as further evidence of the general “uselessness” of the homeless and the jobless’. It will do so by looking at examples within various genres of literature including realism, Romanticism, the social problem novel, new realism and the socialist novel—each of which will be seen to mark a significant development in terms of literary representations of homeless characters as vagrant protagonists come to be depicted less as symbols of masterlessness and more as symbols of victimhood and unproductiveness (although, as we will see, whether these texts can all be considered to be works of tramp literature is questionable—as the transition towards this new conception of homelessness was staggered and uneven). In the process of describing the general shift away from the idealisation of the vagrant that characterised the early modern representations considered

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above towards a tendency to cast the homeless as victims, we will note that this inclination traverses distinctions between ‘realist’ and ‘romantic’ writers—as both realist and romantic authors (to the extent that the authors can be classified as such) appear inclined to  reinforce a disciplinary agenda, most commonly by devaluing the experience of being homeless and extolling the virtue of contributing to the supposed welfare and wealth of the general population. At the same time as generally emphasising the differences between these texts and other representations of homelessness in the early modern and reverse discourse tramp fiction traditions, however, this section will also seek to identify the continuities: noting how several of the authors to be considered (from both sides of the apparent realist/romantic divide) can be seen in various ways to have resisted against newly emergent disciplinary attempts to subjugate the poor—although it will be suggested that they do so in a manner that remains circumscribed. In short, then, in analysing these texts there are two primary objectives: first, to indicate ways in which as predominantly disciplinary representations the texts gathered together in this section might be seen to have differed from but also in some ways to have resembled early modern representations of homelessness; second, to determine ways in which they may be seen to have differed from but also in some ways to have foreshadowed texts within the reverse discourse tramp literature tradition as described throughout this study. 2.2.1 Realism: George Crabbe (1754–1832) The literary critic Gary Lee Harrison has identified George Crabbe as ‘a self-described “realist”’ who presents his project ‘as an attempt to “paint the cot, / As truth will paint it, and as bards will not”’ (1994, 86). Some critics have contested this point—with F.L. Lucas for instance emphasising how Crabbe’s poetry can be defined as ‘realistic, yet romantic’ (Pollard 2003, 2)—reinforcing Allen’s sense that a strict delineation between these two characteristics ‘elides the ambiguity and contradictions imbedded in texts’. Nonetheless, assuming that Crabbe can still be categorised as having realist inclinations even if his writing also shows signs of him having been something of a ‘romantic’—the key question to ask is how this translates in terms of expressed attitudes towards impoverished and homeless subjects. In his analysis of Crabbe’s poetry Harrison notes that while Crabbe, as ‘a self-described “realist”’, draws attention to ‘the demoralising and dehumanizing conditions’ under which the poor were forced to live in the process of identifying ‘the possible causes of poverty’, he also maintains ‘the binary categories of industry and idleness’: undermining the attempt to arouse ‘the reader’s sympathy […] by raising his or her contempt’ (1994,

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92, 86). For example, Harrison identifies the tone of underlying intolerance in Crabbe’s 1807 The Parish Register as he attempts to draw attention to the suffering of the urban poor by describing how ‘offence / Invades all eyes and strikes every sense’—while making unflattering distinctions between the ‘industrious Swain’ and ‘the Sot, the Cheat, the Shrew’ (1994, 90). Crabbe’s poem ‘The Hall of Justice’ from his 1807 collection Poems—a two-part dialogue between a magistrate and a female vagrant accused of stealing food for her sick grandchild—might be seen to provide a clear example of how this translates into attitudes towards vagrancy. While the poem clearly represents an attempt to induce pity for the vagrant character as we are presented with a description of the ‘woes’ she has experienced on the road (being raped, being forced into marriage and having a child taken from her), it also ultimately underlines her complicity in her crimes, as she confesses that her ‘deeds were ill’ and suggests that she grew ‘base and guilty’ after spending time with a ‘vagrant crew’ (1829, 46–7). Thus, in this depiction of homelessness Crabbe can be seen to utilise his ostensibly realist inclinations to present a characterisation that clearly marks a decisive shift towards the figure of the tramp described in this study, even if the term itself  is not used—both emphasising the suffering of his female vagrant protagonist and reinforcing a disciplinary agenda by underlining the undesirability of her lifestyle and drawing attention to her responsibility for her situation. At the same time, Crabbe exhibits no clear sign of an interest in celebrating the vagrant as a figure of subversion or in projecting an anti-productivist or radical outlook. 2.2.2 Romanticism: William Wordsworth (1770–1850) William Wordsworth is of course a writer strongly associated with the Romantic movement—although the idea that as such his depictions of homelessness can be straightforwardly characterised as ‘romantic’ rather than ‘realist’ is questionable. Like Crabbe, he was in many ways a self-­ professed realist: famously writing in the Preface to his 1798  Lyrical Ballads of his interest in depicting ‘subjects from common life’ and in using ‘the real language of men’ (2008, 184)—as is reflected in poems such as ‘Michael’ and ‘The Brothers’, which critics have argued exhibit realist inclinations (Goldsmith 2015, 211). Given this, it is perhaps little surprise to find Tim Hitchcock suggesting that rather than being diametrically opposed, representations of homelessness in Wordsworth and Crabbe follow the same pattern of recasting the figure of the vagrant ‘as an increasingly pathetic sufferer’—a pattern that he suggests can also be found in the

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writing of authors including Oliver Goldsmith, Robert Southey and William Blake (2017, 228). A clear example of the similarity in this respect between Wordsworth and Crabbe can be found by looking at Wordsworth’s ‘The Female Vagrant’ from his Lyrical Ballads—a first-person narrative in which a female vagrant tells ‘her artless story’, describing how she came to be on the road (2008, 218). Wordsworth’s poem might be seen to echo Crabbe in two ways: first, by offering a grounded appraisal of ‘the possible causes of poverty’ as Wordsworth underlines how his narrator’s vagrancy is the product of an avaricious landowner and inadequate poor relief; and second, by at the same time emphasising the ‘demoralising and dehumanizing’ nature of poverty in a way that might be seen to promote disciplinary norms, as Wordsworth’s narrator suggests that by foregoing ‘the home delight of constant truth’ his vagrant protagonist has her ‘inner self abused’ (2008, 220–1, 226). In thus both defining homelessness as a byproduct of external factors and in emphasising its tragic aspect in line with a broader disciplinary agenda  Wordsworth, like Crabbe, clearly preconfigures the conception of the tramp described throughout this study. However, while Wordsworth’s attempts to recast the impoverished as victim can be seen to reinforce a wider disciplinary agenda, Harrison has also argued that his writing marks a departure from the ‘moral instructional aim’ of authors like Crabbe (1994, 80). For instance, we might note that while emphasising how his protagonist has her ‘inner self abused’ Wordsworth refrains from presenting her as the contemptible byproduct of the systemic failures that she has fallen prey to—as Crabbe does when painting portraits of idleness and immorality. On the contrary, moments in Wordsworth’s poem even seem to explore the possible virtues of the vagrant way of life. For example, the narrator describes encountering a ‘wild brood’ sitting around a campfire  (2008, 225)—identified by Harrison as a ‘band of gypsies’ (1994, 102)—of whom she remarks: My heart is touched to think that men like these, The rude earth’s tenants, were my first relief: How kindly did they paint their vagrant ease! And their long holiday that feared not grief, For all belonged to all, and each was chief. No plough their sinews strained; on grating road No wain they drove, and yet, the yellow sheaf In every vale for their delight was stowed: For them, in nature’s meads, the milky udder flowed. (2008, 225)

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Writing of this idealised representation of the vagrant gypsy community, Harrison argues that the ‘warmhearted charity’ of the vagrant brood ‘offers a foil to the calculating niggardliness of the mainstream community’ (1994, 103)—suggesting that a clear opposition is set up between society’s failure to provide the narrator of the poem with adequate relief and the kindness of the gypsy community. As Harrison puts it: ‘In a poem so critical of the pervasions of charity and government, the community of these “rude earth’s tenants” opens a horizon of radical utopianism’ (1994, 102). We might thus argue that ‘The Female Vagrant’ marks both a departure from and a continuation of earlier trends: on the one hand, clearly resembling Crabbe in depicting its vagrant protagonist as a victim and in suggesting that the deviation from disciplinary norms oriented around the home is a loss for her; on the other, signifying an extension of the idealisation of vagrancy found in earlier authors like Head/Kirkham and Carew/Goadby. This might be seen to suggest that as well as echoing Crabbe in the attempt to recast the vagrant as a ‘pathetic sufferer’—in Wordsworth’s poetry we at the same time catch a glimpse of the reverse discourse tendencies described throughout this study. And yet, against this claim—we might  make two observations.  First, that while Wordsworth expresses an interest in the vagrant’s symbolic inutility—as he for instance emphasises how the gypsies drive no ‘plough’ or ‘wain’—there is still a sense in which this idealisation remains tied to a conception of homelessness oriented around the idea of masterlessness, as he also underlines how ‘each was chief’ within this vagrant community, and as the symbolic association with gypsies (so evocative of earlier rogue and picaresque narratives) remains prominent. Second, we might note that though Wordsworth entertains the possibility of celebrating the example of the idle gypsy vagrant in ‘The Female Vagrant’, he ultimately appears unprepared to fully commit to this idea. Having praised the ‘wild brood’— Wordsworth’s protagonist almost immediately distances herself from them: explaining how it ‘ill suited’ her to join them in their plans of ‘midnight theft’—as she declares such antics ‘not for me’, especially given that she is ‘brooding still’ on her recent bereavement (2008, 226). As Harrison notes: in the end, Wordsworth could not accept ‘an absolute rejection of all structures […] subsumed under the totality of the State […] that the gypsy life signifies’ (1994, 104). This sense of ambivalence or non-­ commitment is reinforced by Celeste Langan’s analysis of the poem, in which it is implied that Wordsworth is more interested in the ‘vagrant attitude’ of his narrator than the ‘historical moment (war and its

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aftermath)’ and the ‘economic condition (unemployment and destitution)’ that define her homelessness—suggesting that vagrancy first and foremost functions as an ‘enabling ground’ for a reflection on ‘legal and economic rights’, in line with her general hypothesis about Wordsworth’s writing (1995, 77, 81). This might lead us to conclude that not only does Wordsworth’s narrator turn her back on the subversive, anti-productivist and radical potential of the ‘wild brood’, but that the whole critique of the causes of poverty might in turn be seen to be in the service of a more general and abstract deliberation on the subject of freedom, within which Wordsworth’s refusal to accept a ‘rejection of all structures […] subsumed under the totality of the State’ signals a decidedly non-radical position. In short, in ‘The Female Vagrant’ we find a complex amalgam of what might be termed ‘realist’ and ‘romantic’ impulses as Wordsworth simultaneously echoes Crabbe’s attempts to ‘paint the cot, / As truth will paint it’ by presenting the vagrant as a pitiable byproduct of external forces, and resembles earlier pre-disciplinary authors by celebrating the vagrant as an embodiment of  masterlessness—indicating that we are perhaps  dealing with a forerunner to the tramp literature genre here rather than an actual example. At the same time, it seems clear that Wordsworth was unable to fully embrace the subversive, anti-productivist or radical potential of the figure of the vagrant: though his realist critique of society’s mistreatment of the poor perhaps contains a radical element in that it points to the structural causes of his protagonist’s suffering, and though Wordsworth indulges in a romantic idealisation of the ‘wild brood’ and their refusal of work—there is a final unwillingness to commit to either the subversive or the radical implications of these two positions as the narrator declares the subversiveness of the gypsy lifestyle ‘not for me’ and as the depiction of the structural causes of the vagrant’s suffering appears to function as an enabling ground for a more abstract reflection on ‘legal and economic rights’ pointing towards non-radical conclusions. Thus, though Wordsworth’s poem might be read as a prototype for the reverse discourse tramp fiction to be explored later in this chapter—it may be seen to ultimately prove too reticent to be classifiable as such. 2.2.3 The Social Problem Novel: Charles Dickens (1812–1870) Moving further into the nineteenth century the development perhaps most relevant to a consideration of literary representations of homelessness is the emergence of the ‘social problem novel’ or the ‘condition of England novel’ between 1830 and 1850, chronicled by a range of critics including Louis Cazamian, Arnold Kettle, Raymond Williams and

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Josephine Guy. This body of work—including the novels of Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens—was originally defined by Cazamian in the context of ‘the birth of a New England’ reflected by the Reform Act of 1832 (1973, 1), and has since been viewed more generally as a response to ‘specific social problems raised during the process of industrialization’ (Bodenheimer 1988, 4). Attempts to understand the outlook on homelessness in these authors typically evolve around recognition of these considerations—for instance with Carolyn Lambert suggesting that in Gaskell’s fiction ‘the concepts of “homes” and “homelessness” […] acquire a psychological, emotional and spiritual dimension rooted in the difficult transition between the agrarian, romantic age of the eighteenth century, and the industrialised, urban centred dynamic of the nineteenth century’ (2013, 113–4). From among this group of writers the author who has most commonly been the subject of inquiries into late Regency era and early Victorian representations of homelessness is, however, Charles Dickens—with, for instance, Steven Marcus claiming him as ‘[t]he great English writer to deal with such matters’ as ‘poverty, poor relief, pauperism [and] homelessness’ in Victorian Britain (1991, 93). Like Crabbe, Dickens was ostensibly a realist: a label that he himself appears to have indirectly welcomed in his 1841 introduction to the third edition of Oliver Twist in which he speaks of his desire ‘to dim the false glitter’ of representations of poverty by ‘exposing the unattractive and repulsive truth’ (1842, v). At the same time, as with both Crabbe and Wordsworth, critics have questioned whether such a characterisation is overly simplistic: with Donald Fanger for instance pointing out the ‘picturesqueness’ of novels like Oliver Twist, in his attempt to label Dickens a ‘romantic realist’ (1998, 76). Again echoing these two authors, we also find that this ambivalence is mirrored by textual ambiguities if we consider Dickens’s representations of homelessness in more detail in his social problem novels and beyond. Marcus’s analysis of Dickens’s fictional representations of homelessness—which he finds in The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Our Mutual Friend, The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Bleak House—suggests that, like Crabbe and Wordsworth, Dickens was interested in recasting the vagrant as an ‘increasingly pathetic sufferer’, as Marcus argues that throughout Dickens’s fiction ‘the injuries of homelessness and destitution are never very distant’ (1991, 95). As we will shortly see, Dickens’s representations of homelessness in turn come very close to being classifiable as works of tramp literature, although there is a degree of uncertainty on this point

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as  some texts mirror  Wordsworth’s  continuing preoccupation with the question of masterlessness. Perhaps the clearest example of Dickens being preoccupied with ‘the injuries of homelessness’ can be found in Oliver Twist, serialised between 1837 and 1839, in which Oliver’s descent into homelessness is presented in a distinctly pitiable light—as he is described as ‘cold and hungry, and more alone than he had ever felt before’ when first on the road (1838, 118). At the same time, echoing Crabbe, Dickens’s general compassion for the figure of the ‘homeless starving wretch’ might be seen to be compromised by his disciplinary inclinations—as throughout the novel distinctions are drawn between a deserving and an undeserving poor, with numerous invectives against the latter: for instance, in passages concerning the ‘offensive sights and smells’ of Jacob’s Island with its ‘unemployed labourers of the lowest class’, who are presented as ‘the very raff and refuse of the river’ (1838, 48, 239). Clearly this combination of an emphasis on the pitiable nature of homelessness alongside reflections on the offensiveness of a lack of industriousness is reminiscent of disciplinary discourse on the subject of the tramp described throughout this study. It should however be conceded that given the clear parallels between Fagin’s gang and the  masterless vagabonds of  the  rogue literature tradition,  and given Oliver’s anomalous orphan status, it remains questionable whether Oliver Twist can be classified as a work of tramp literature. While Oliver Twist may (in spite of not fully qualifying as a work of tramp literature) be seen to generally accord with a disciplinary model of representing the homeless—other novels written by Dickens can be seen to mirror Wordsworth by idealising the vagrant’s outsider status. For instance, The Old Curiosity Shop, serialised between 1840 and 1841, conveys a quite different picture of the vagrant lifestyle as Nell Trent and her grandfather are forced onto the road having been evicted by Daniel Quilp. Throughout the novel a stark contrast is set up between Nell and her grandfather’s time spent on the road—during which period we are told that the sky sheds ‘its placid smile on everything beneath’ so that ‘every object’ appears to be ‘bright and fresh’—and ‘the monotony and constraint’ that they have left behind (1841, 156). Although Nell’s sense that their lives have been improved is very much tied to the specific circumstance of having escaped Quilp, her suggestion towards the end of the novel that they have been ‘much better and happier without a home to shelter us’ does seem to go beyond this (1841, 267). At the same time we might note that the idealisation of the vagrant lifestyle—with Nell alluding to ‘peaceful days and quiet nights’ along with the ‘beautiful things’ that

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they have seen on the road (Ibid.)—feels less like evidence of a reverse discourse celebrating the subversiveness or the unproductiveness of the late modern tramp and more like a sentimental vision of escaping into nature, in line with Monika Fludernik’s remarks concerning the emphasis ‘on pastoral nostalgia’ in this and other Dickens novels (2008, 76). Given its distinctly historically removed feel it is thus questionable whether The Old Curiosity Shop can be classified as either a work of tramp literature, or as a text that can be seen to fully fit the reverse discourse or anti-­productivist moulds—although it does show signs of celebrating homelessness as a removal from the pressures of city life in a manner that resembles previously considered non-radical anti-productivist texts. Of all Dickens’s novels  Our Mutual Friend, serialised between 1864 and 1865, is perhaps the closest to having a character who decidedly fits the tramp conception of homelessness. In the novel,  the former child-­ minder Betty Higden explains her decision to take to the road as a pedlar of knitted good by suggesting that ‘[t]rudging round the country’ is preferable both to doing piecework at home (‘folding and folding by the fire’) and to becoming ‘like the poor old people’ locked up in the workhouse (1867, 226). This passage may be seen to suggest  the possibility of a reverse discourse tendency, and yet—while Dickens is happy to indicate that homelessness might be the best available option for Higden—the depiction of it in Our Mutual Friend is far from resembling a celebration of the subversiveness or the unproductiveness of the figure of the tramp. A sense in which Higden is not intended to come across as a symbol of subversion is rendered explicit in an 1865 Postscript to the novel in which Dickens depicts her as a member of the ‘deserving Poor’, explaining his perverse attempts to present her as the embodiment of an industrious spirit throughout the novel: describing how she has a ‘bright fire’ in her eyes that makes her ‘so unlike […] vagrant hiders in general’ in her strength to endure—and underlining how she has ‘always been a active body’ [sic], able to ‘walk twenty mile if […] put to it’ (1867, 478, 299, 226). Thus, while Dickens appears to be happy to present Higden in a manner that enables a critique of certain aspects of disciplinary society (for instance by suggesting that her homelessness is preferable to the alternatives of arduous labour and penury)—his need to sublimate these claims by emphasising both her deservingness and her industriousness ultimately reinforces disciplinary values. In summary, in Dickens’s writing we find a conception of homelessness that sporadically teeters over into the tramp literature category, although there is an attachment to the figure of the masterless vagrant that

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sometimes prevents this. As with Wordsworth, we also find a co-presence of realist and romantic impulses corresponding with representations of homelessness that alternately victimise and idealise vagrant characters, and yet with the detectable instances of valorisation generally failing to read like a reverse discourse celebrating the tramp’s inutility (in either a subversive or a radical sense)—as the depictions of homelessness in which the lifestyle is defended either feel historically removed or they emphasise the deservingness and productiveness of the celebrated homeless figure in a manner that simultaneously reinforces disciplinary values. Thus, in short, while Dickens’s writing may show traces of continuity with early modern representations, and may in turn foreshadow aspects of reverse discourse tramp fiction, it ultimately functions best as an example of the disciplinary tendencies against which the latter was defined. 2.2.4 New Realism: Arthur Morrison (1863–1945) Turning to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century representations of homelessness, the next domain within which vagrant characters are perhaps most commonly found is a genre that some critics have presented as a consolidation and reform of the ostensibly ‘realist’ approach represented by authors such as Crabbe and Dickens. In his survey of working-class literature, Ian Haywood, for instance, has argued that late nineteenth-­ century British novelists—among them Arthur Morrison, George Gissing, George Moore, Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling—reflect the apparent influence of the ‘continental naturalism’ of Émile Zola, applying ‘a new objectivity and particularity to “low” subjects’ and developing ‘new standards of unpatronizing realistic detail’ (1997, 12). At the core of this ‘new realism’, Haywood suggests, is an emphasis upon the ‘brutal and brutalizing aspects of working-class life’—typically resulting in a ‘shedding of Dickensian sentimentalism and melodrama’ (1997, 12–3). An author who is perhaps exemplary of this is Arthur Morrison—with the critics Daniel Bivona and Roger Henkle confirming the view that ‘Morrison rejects the sentimental and the melodramatic for a laconic, unmodulated prose that rarely rises to a dramatic climax’ (2006, 104). This is a view that Morrison has perhaps himself encouraged: responding in the Preface to his 1869 novel A Child of the Jago to critics who have accused him ‘of a lack of “sympathy”’ in his portraits of the poor by replying that he has ‘learned better than to thrust myself and my emotions’ between his characters and his readers—effectively admitting to the accuracy of the observation (2012, 6). At the same time, the suggestion that this necessarily makes Morrison a realist is one that he himself questioned—as he rejects the label of ‘realist’

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and presents himself instead as an author who depicts ‘life as he sees it’ (2012, 3, 179). Thus, acknowledging that the appellation of realist might be questionable, but also recognising that there is a clear disregard for sentiment in Morrison’s writing suggestive of his focus on ‘realistic detail’, we might ask how this manifests itself in his depictions of homelessness. The first observation to make is that while in Crabbe, Dickens and Wordsworth we are in a grey area between earlier literature on homelessness and tramp literature, here we are firmly in the realm of the tramp.  Morrison’s short story ‘Without Visible Means’, from his 1894 collection Tales of Mean Streets, describes a fallout following ‘the autumn of the Great Strikes’—a reference to the London dock strikes of 1889—by telling the story of two men who lose their jobs after this industrial action and subsequently become homeless (1894, 68). In keeping with a conception of homelessness as a pitiable byproduct of unemployment, Morrison’s tale ends on a tragic note as one of the tramps, Joey—whose health we have watched gradually deteriorate over the course of the story—ends up propped up in a small tavern with a message chalked on the table in front of him: ‘for god sake take him to the work House’ (1894, 81). The attempt to convey the ‘brutal and brutalizing aspects’ of poverty is thus plain to see (while it might also be argued that such an ending is, in spite of how Morrison is often characterised, not without a strain of sentiment or melodrama). Equally apparent in ‘Without Visible Means’ are the disciplinary tendencies that accompany this effort to convey the grim reality of impoverishment. For instance, Morrison’s story features a character called Newman who the two tramps Joey and Dave encounter on the road: an individual who is both proudly indolent—declaring that ‘[t]he less a worker does the more ‘as to be imployed’—and avowedly anti-capitalist, as he openly speaks of his desire to bring the ‘bloated capitalists to their knees’ (1894, 69–70). At the same time, Newman is the villain of the piece: selfishly taking ‘the snuggest corner’ of the barn they sleep in and contributing to his companions’ near-starvation by stealing their tools and money (1894, 72). In this blatant demonisation of a work-shy and radically minded tramp, Morrison’s story clearly reinforces rather than contests disciplinary attempts to denigrate the idle poor. As Haywood writes: ‘new realism did not automatically steer class consciousness in a progressive direction’—tending to involve portrayals of the poor as an ‘anthropological Other world’ whose ‘primitivist freedoms from moral restraint’ often make them objects to be feared (1997, 13). In the example of Morrison’s writing we thus see a continuation of the trend of casting the

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figure of the vagrant or tramp as a ‘pathetic sufferer’—with an added emphasis on the brutalising aspects of a life of poverty in a manner that further reinforces the underlying disciplinary agenda and that shows no signs of a tendency towards subversion (while actively opposing the possibility of radical interpretation). 2.2.5 Socialist Fiction: Margaret Harkness (1854–1923) Running alongside the emergence of new realism in the late nineteenth century, the genre of socialist fiction may be seen to have similarly sought to offer a societal critique by exposing the lived reality of being poor— while conversely demonstrating a decided commitment to radical thinking. In an essay on the emergence of the socialist novel in the 1880s, the literary critic John Goode identifies precursors in the writing of George Bernard Shaw and William Morris before suggesting that the novelist Margaret Harkness (who wrote under the pseudonym of John Law) was the first to develop the ‘combative realism’ genre into a mode of writing that was ‘specifically Socialist’ (2018, 60). Goode in particular identifies Harkness’s 1888 novel Out of Work as embodying this trait—a novel that tells the story of a carpenter who dies after a year of homelessness and job seeking in London, and that (like ‘Without Visible Means’) is exemplary of the tramp conception of homelessness. Goode presents this novel as being typical of Harkness’s socialist style of writing fiction in part because it illustrates the suggestion that ‘misery is caused by the Age of Competition’, and in part because it escapes the ‘personalisation of social experience’ that is according to Goode characteristic of ‘bourgeois’ fiction, as Harkness instead deploys various narrative strategies in order to present her protagonist’s story as the ‘story of the unemployed’ (2018, 60–1). This account is one that others have confirmed: for instance with the critic Kevin Swafford suggesting that Harkness’s novel represents a ‘shift in emphasis from an exclusive account of the wretchedness of poverty, which was a relatively common narrative approach and theme in the late 1880s, to one which maps socioeconomic and cultural grounds of poverty’ (2007, 46). An example of Harkness’s fiction both depersonalising representations of poverty and placing a clear emphasis on its structural causes can be found in a passage in Out of Work in which she takes a detour from the narrative focal point to describe two old women found outside a public house with ‘bony hands’ clasping their ‘tattered petticoats’: ‘There they sit day and night, those sphinxes. And there they will stay until Laissez-faire and his army lose the day, until his banners are seized by the enemy’ (1888,

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136). Clearly in this instance Harkness both explicitly politicises her subject matter and attempts a ‘shift in emphasis from an exclusive account of the wretchedness of poverty’ by underlining how her protagonist’s story is just one among many. And yet while Harkness can thus be seen to move beyond authors like Wordsworth in translating her objection to capitalist and disciplinary society into ‘ideological commitment’—there is little sense here of her celebrating tramp subculture for heralding either subversive or anti-productivist possibilities. The lack of a subversive dimension has already been clearly indicated by the account of Harkness emphasising the ‘wretchedness of poverty’. The lack of an anti-productivist dimension is in addition to this plain to see as Out of Work—perhaps predictably for a work of late nineteenth-century socialist fiction—extols the redemptive power of labour, with its homeless central character Joseph Coney at one point proclaiming: ‘I only want work. If God Almighty will give me a job, I’ll ask no more of him’ (1888, 90). Thus, socialist fiction—of which Harkness is considered by several critics to be a strong representative—can be characterised as embodying radical commitment but crucially without the accompanying interest in celebrating the subversive or anti-­productivist possibilities of tramp culture that might be seen to characterise select works of reverse discourse tramp fiction. 2.2.6 Summary As well as hopefully having demonstrated the limited value of the ‘realist’ and ‘romantic’ appellations in distinguishing apart representations of homelessness—and, in lieu of this, offering an alternative interpretative model that asks instead whether given texts can be seen to affirm, resist or appropriate existing conceptions of the homeless—this section has I hope provided a clearer indication of the discursive conditions that let to the emergence of the reverse discourse tramp fiction phenomenon by describing the predominantly disciplinary mode of representation against which it may be seen to have been defined. At the same time, we have also noted various ways in which late modern representations of homelessness generally speaking classifiable as disciplinary can be seen to have both continued early modern trends and foreshowed reverse discourse tramp  fiction. Examples of this tendency can be found in Wordsworth exploring the subversive and radical possibilities of a work-free gypsy lifestyle in ‘The Female Vagrant’, and in Dickens flirting with the idea of celebrating vagrant freedoms in The Old Curiosity Shop. And yet both of these  texts have been proven to be distinct from the reverse discourse tramp fiction mode—as Wordsworth both partly succumbs to an early modern vision of

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homelessness and refuses to embrace the subversive or radical possibilities of homelessness, and as Dickens alternately celebrates an antiquated notion of masterlessness and subscribes to a disciplinary conception of homelessness. Conversely, in both Morrison and Harkness we have found indications of a clear commitment to the tramp conception of homelessness—in the example of Harkness accompanied by evidence of a radical outlook—but again followed in each case by a refusal to commit to the subversive or antiproductivist possibilities that might be seen to characterise reverse discourse tramp literature. Thus, while several of these texts can be seen to have preconfigured the reverse discourse tramp fiction mode—they have been found to more generally depict homelessness in a manner that conforms with an overarching disciplinary agenda, reflecting a preoccupation with the need to contribute to the welfare and wealth of the general population (typically manifesting itself either in a refusal to accept homelessness as being of value for deviating from related norms or in straightforward attempts to denigrate the homeless on these same grounds).

3   Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction Turning to the genre of reverse discourse tramp fiction produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we might now attempt to characterise these works as synthesising elements of both early and late modern representations of homelessness: bringing together the attempt to realise the subversive possibilities of vagrant subculture found in early modern authors such as Head/Kirkham and Carew/Goadby with the attempts of late modern authors such as Crabbe, Wordsworth and Harkness to acknowledge the adverse conditions to which the late modern vagrant, or the tramp, was subjected. In simultaneously idealising homelessness and recasting the figure of the tramp as a victim, these authors can be seen to have in turn  emulated Wordsworth, and to a lesser extent Dickens—although, it will be argued, simultaneously  surpassing these authors in their commitment to the subversive, anti-productivist and radical possibilities that this entails. At the same time as attempting to determine the extent to which reverse discourse tramp fiction can be distinguished from earlier representations of homelessness in this way, the analysis in what remains of this chapter will also be asking the same questions as it did of reverse discourse tramp memoir texts: seeking to determine whether given examples of reverse discourse tramp fiction can be seen to amount to a contribution to anti-productivist or radical anti-­ productivist discourse (either of an implicit or an explicit nature), or

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conversely whether they perform a more narrowly subversive function. While performing this task, the following analysis will also attempt to identify any additional limitations to the genre as a whole. The suggestion that a body of work was produced in this era that may be seen to have celebrated the figure of the tramp is one that has already been made by the critic H. Gustav Klaus. In a series of essays concerning the fiction output of authors including W.H. Davies, Bart Kennedy, Jim Phelan, Liam O’Flaherty, James Hanley, Patrick MacGill, R.M. Fox, Alfred Holdsworth and Jack London, Klaus has come closer than any other critic to identifying the existence of a unique body of fiction written about the figure of the tramp—while also acknowledging a number of striking characteristics of works in this tradition that may be seen to indicate their status as examples of a reverse discourse. To begin with, he notes that unlike other representations of homelessness, the tramps in the short stories and novels of these authors are homeless ‘as often from choice as from necessity’, and that the figure of the tramp as it is represented within them is ‘by no means an abject or sullen figure but a person capable of enjoying life to the full’ (1993, 3). Relatedly, he also characterises the tramp characters in these fictional works as being driven by ‘a wish to be released from social constraints’, ‘a spirit of adventure’ and a delight ‘in male bonding and comradeship’ (2017, 300). In the analysis that is to follow, the intention is to confirm the general validity of Klaus’s observations—while at the same time to build on his findings and to challenge some of his core assumptions. The primary objective in terms of building on Klaus’s findings is to add to the list of authors and texts identified by him as belonging to this trend. In terms of challenging Klaus’s core assumptions—the following section aims to do this in two ways: first, by questioning his characterisation of representations of homelessness in fiction works written by these and other authors as ‘by no means an abject or sullen figure’; and second, by questioning his characterisation of these texts as a subcategory of working-class fiction. Regarding this first point: while the following analysis will in many ways confirm Klaus’s suggestion that works in this vein resist efforts to cast the tramp as a ‘sullen figure’—it will at the same time be proposed that the picture is somewhat more nuanced than this indicates, as a strong tendency to valorise the experience of homelessness is often offset by attempts to underline the hardships, especially in fiction works in the implicitly radical mould. In terms of this second point: while Klaus, as a historian of working-class literature, is inclined to see these works of fiction (in spite of his observations regarding their uniqueness as a body of work) as ‘a different,

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if minor strand of working-class narratives “based not on place and continuity but on dislocation and transience”’ (1993, 4–5)—by recasting select texts as reverse discourse tramp fiction, the analysis to follow firstly challenges the assumption that they can be considered to be representative of a given community, and secondly explores in greater detail the distinctness of these texts from other so-called working-class narratives by considering whether their emphasis on ‘dislocation and transience’ is indicative of an anti-productivist (or indeed a radical anti-productivist) bent. In the process, the following analysis in turn hopes to offer a definition of the phenomenon that Klaus in his pioneering work first identified that hopefully carries a degree more precision than he ever insisted upon. On a final note before turning to the texts in question, it is worth once again addressing the fact that in spite of insisting that one does not have to have been homeless in order to be an author of reverse discourse tramp fiction, most of the authors about to be considered were nonetheless either from working-class backgrounds or self-professed tramps. As indicated previously: writers with direct experiences of homelessness or unemployment—or, we might add, writers who had alternatively been subjected to the extreme hardships of a life of work under capitalist and disciplinary society—were undoubtedly in a better position to grasp the possible benefits of escaping this paradigm (such being the nature of a reverse discourse). However, at the risk of repeating myself—it would be wrong to suggest that these texts should thus be seen to be representative of the homeless experience, or that they imply the necessity of having experienced poverty or homelessness in order to recognise the subversive or radical potential of the homeless experience: it is just that they  indicate that the experience of having been homeless, working-class or poor renders these possibilities more likely. To illustrate the point that one does not have to have been homeless or working-class to have written reverse discourse tramp fiction—our analysis of the reverse discourse tramp fiction genre will begin with an overview of five authors who did not have homeless or working-class backgrounds, but who did write fictional accounts of the lives of tramps that may be classified as works of reverse discourse tramp fiction (distinguishing them apart from the authors considered in the previous two sections). These five authors have, it is true, been relegated to the margins of this study on the basis that their work is not quite exemplary of the reverse discourse tramp fiction trend to be explored in this chapter—and yet in the following analysis we will see that two of them can nonetheless be seen to have offered significant contributions that may even be classified as radical.

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3.1  Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction by Non-working-class or Homeless Authors: Felicia Skene (1821–1899), James Hunter Crawford (1840–1916), Harold Brighouse (1882–1958), George Gissing (1857–1903) and Arthur Calder-­Marshall (1908–1992) The first three authors to be considered in this section are those who were just described as having made less valuable contributions to the reverse discourse tramp fiction genre, and can therefore be dealt with relatively swiftly. Felicia Skene was a novelist, poet, philanthropist and prison reformer whose 1893 ‘The Autobiography of a Tramp’ is a third-person narrative relaying an interview with a tramp named Dick Arch (very likely inspired by Skene’s work in prisons). Skene’s text is full of subversive and anti-­ productivist possibilities as Arch boasts that he has never done ‘a day’s work’ in his life ‘and never wants to’—preferring the ‘free road and the open air’ with ‘no man good or bad to be the master’ over him (1893, 172). At the same time, this subversive mood is offset by the voice of an interviewer who interjects with remarks such as: ‘I think it would have been much better for you, Dick, if you had taken regular work and lived in a settled home’ (1893, 172). I would suggest that ‘The Autobiography of a Tramp’ is ultimately worthy of inclusion as an example of reverse discourse tramp literature for the reason that these two outlooks are sufficiently evenly weighted, and yet it is clear that the interviewer’s interventions compromise its status as a work of anti-productivist literature, while we also might note that ‘The Autobiography of a Tramp’ displays no evidence of a radical inclination. James Hunter Crawford was a Unitarian minister, novelist and author of a number of nature books whose 1900 novel, also coincidentally entitled The Autobiography of a Tramp, is a first person coming of age story about (again, seemingly coincidentally) another tramp called Dick. The Autobiography of a Tramp similarly presents tramping as a refuge from productivity-oriented societal norms, as when Dick’s father (also homeless) decides to settle down and start a job  and this prompts Dick to remark: ‘I thought the old life was a sight better than what he was like to have now’ (1900, 214). Crawford’s text also contains traces of radical possibility as, prior to abandoning life on the road, Dick’s father is described as a tramp socialist committed to the belief that ‘things want turning over’ (1900, 93). At the same time, however, we might note a general tendency towards Wordsworthian abstraction in The Autobiography of a Tramp, for instance in Dick’s account of tramping with a gypsy called Kelpie, in which

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he describes how they used to walk ‘along like […] school children’ and ‘sit and talk’ all night—a depiction that in its heavily romanticised remoteness from disciplinary realities arguably diminishes the text’s anti-­ productivist reverse discourse credentials (1900, 324–5). Lastly, Harold Brighouse was a playwright and novelist whose 1922 ‘Once a Hero’ tells the story of a tramp called Tim Martlow who has become the ‘chief glory’ of the town of Calderside for his heroism in the First World War, having once been dismissed as ‘a drunken fellow’ and ‘an awful blackguard’ (1922, 96, 89). As well as highlighting the moral hypocrisies of Calderside’s residents, ‘Once a Hero’ also celebrates Martlow as an emblem of subversion and anti-production who has an attitude of ‘compassionate cynicism’ towards the employees of an engineering company in the town (1922, 56). At the same time, this is undermined somewhat by the story’s ending—as there is a hint of Martlow’s imminent reform when he is made aware of his ‘trampish squalor’ having attracted the attention of a woman called Dolly (1922, 102). All three of the above examples as well as clearly falling into the tramp literature category can thus be seen to exhibit signs of both reverse discourse and anti-productivist tendencies—and yet none of them are especially exemplary in this regard, with Skene simultaneously projecting disciplinary ideology; with Crawford succumbing to abstract idealisation; and with Brighouse caving into a narrative of reform—while there are also few signs of a radical outlook in any of these authors (although at a push they may all be seen the permit the possibility of radical interpretation, in the sense that they do not actively discourage it). In the two remaining fiction writers to be considered in this section, we will conversely see a significant degree more commitment to the subversive possibilities represented by the figure of the tramp—along with distinct traces of an interest in the social totality, suggestive of a radical dimension. George Gissing is perhaps the most well known of all the writers identified in this chapter as having made contributions to the reverse discourse tramp fiction genre. Gissing has of course already been referred to as an example of the genre of ‘new realism’, distinguished by Haywood for its emphasis on the ‘brutal and brutalizing aspects of working-class life’ and its ‘shedding of Dickensian sentimentalism and melodrama’: an account that to some extent accords with his own expressed views on literature in his 1895 essay ‘The Place of Realism in Fiction’, in which he writes of his objection to crude forms of writing preoccupied with ‘vulgar, base, or disgusting subjects’ and proposes an alternative model defined by a more sober commitment to ‘disagreeable facts’ (1895, 14). And yet at the same

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time, in developing a form of realism shorn of melodrama—we might also note that Gissing differed significantly from other authors placed in this category by Haywood, such as Morrison. While Gissing did not shy away from depicting the destructive effects of poverty in line with others in the new realism genre—for instance, in his 1889 novel The Nether World writing in vivid detail of vagabonds fighting ‘for crusts flung forth by casual hands’ (2008, 248–9)—his fiction can also be seen to express a keen interest in impoverished characters who respond to their brutal treatment by rejecting the culture that is responsible. This interest in a spirit of defiance is hinted at in Fredric Jameson’s reading of the ‘refusal of commodity desire’ in Gissing’s fiction (2002, 192): a resistance that is perhaps best embodied by the character of the writer Harold Biffen in New Grub Street, whose refusal to ‘make concessions’ makes him ‘wholly unfitted for the rough and tumble of the world’s labour-market’ (2012, 7, 478). In his 1895 short story ‘Transplanted’, we find perhaps the clearest example within Gissing’s fiction writing of how this spirit of non-compliance may be seen to have translated into representations of homelessness. In this story the central character William is introduced as a ‘mendicant’ found outside Victoria station who chases a cab to its destination in the hope that he can ‘earn a few pence’ by helping to offload the luggage (1901, 245). As in The Nether World William is described in terms that underline his physical suffering: he is ‘excessively slender’, wearing a ‘filthy coat always turned up, to shield the scraggy, collarless neck’ and with eyes ‘as those of a hungry animal’ (1901, 244). As well as being referred to directly as a tramp, the combination of William’s pursuit of employment and his pitiable aspect clearly aligns with the tramp conception of homelessness described throughout this study (1901, 250). And yet, far from being satisfied with presenting William  in a disciplinary fashion as a ‘pathetic sufferer’ who is the architect of his own demise, ‘Transplanted’ shifts the reader’s attention towards the exacerbation of his hardships and the subsequent spirit of resistance produced by the attention of a ‘well-­ meaning lady’—who provides him with work and employment in her country home (1901, 249). Having been relocated, fed and housed by the ‘lady’ in question, we learn that ‘William’s constitution’ breaks down ‘in consequence of the great and sudden change’ (1901, 248). Longing for ‘the streets, the noises, the smells, for his old companions, for the lurking places of his homeless nights’ (1901, 249)—William then destroys the well-meaning lady’s garden as an act of revenge and attempts to run away, but dies before making it to London.

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In addition to offering a biting critique of the upper/middle-class saviour’s indifference to the specific needs of those they seek to rescue, ‘Transplanted’ thus clearly presents the tramp as a figure of resistance against the disciplinary demand to be productive and to comply with related norms (such as having a home)—in this sense decisively qualifying as an example of anti-productivist reverse discourse tramp fiction, as well as indicating the spirit of refusal identified by Jameson as characteristic of Gissing’s fiction. Having argued this, however, we may also note Jameson’s suggestion that this quality of refusal in Gissing’s prose more generally signifies ‘a divisiveness beyond ideological commitment’ (2012, 192–3). Following this lead, it might be argued that while William symbolises resistance against late nineteenth-century pressures to work and conform, his is nonetheless an impotent form of protest, consisting merely of sabotaging his benefactor’s garden. And yet, rather than this suggesting that Gissing’s short story thus cannot be considered radical, this sense of the unsatisfactoriness of William’s mode of protest might lead us to conclude instead that ‘Transplanted’ is (like examples considered in the previous chapter) implicitly radical, in the sense that it presents the reader with an impasse—in particular concerning the futility of resistance or escape for a tramp like William—that may be seen to frustrate them into envisaging alternative more effective modes of resisting the pressure to conform and be productive. In this sense, Gissing may be seen to have made a clear contribution to the reverse discourse tramp fiction genre with a work in the implicitly radical mould. At the same time, it should perhaps be stressed that this remains a minor work within Gissing’s oeuvre—and that, compared to other authors to be considered later in this chapter, Gissing did not express a recurring interest in the figure of the tramp, thus explaining the decision to assign a marginal status to his writing. The final work of reverse discourse tramp fiction written by a non-­ working-­class or homeless author to be considered in this section is Arthur Calder-Marshall’s 1937 Pie in the Sky. Arthur Calder-Marshall was a novelist, essayist, playwright and critic, as well as a one-time member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. His novel Pie in the Sky is an experimental text, described by the critic Andy Croft as a piece of fiction that ‘pursues the fortunes of over a dozen apparently unrelated characters […] whose paths cross by the chances of geography, class, love and politics’ (1990, 262). Primarily the novel tells the story of two families based in the fictional northern town of Burnsley: the Yorkes and the Boltons—in particular focussing upon the repercussions of the factory owner Carder Yorke being responsible for his childhood friend Henry Bolton’s unemployment.

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Early on in the novel, an unemployed Bolton—who has ‘never spent an idle day of me own will’—decides to take to the road in search of work, writing a letter to his wife declaring that he is ‘no good to no one’ (1937, 31, 91). At the centre of his decision to leave is an unwillingness to receive relief from the Public Assistance Committee, who he fears will confiscate his savings—although his wife attributes his reluctance to ‘fool’s pride’ (1937, 92). After failing to procure employment, Bolton’s biggest fear when tramping across the country is that he will grow despondent, learning ‘to accept the standard of the road, making shift from day to day till there were no more days’ (1937, 248). Clearly this depiction of homelessness is in alignment with a wider conception of the figure of the tramp as a pitiable embodiment of inutility. And yet far from Bolton’s fears about consequently sliding into despondency being confirmed, his experiences struggling to find work together with his objections to ‘the all-accepting indifference’ of other tramps can be seen to have the opposite effect on him, as over the course of the novel he develops an appetite for revolutionary change—exhibited in episodes in which he extols the virtues of a general strike to his fellow casual ward inmates, and objects to them complaining about Mussolini and Henry Ford with the words: ‘That’s all talk. Why don’t you do somethen?’ (1937, 341, 345). Pie in the Sky is thus clearly a work with overt radical dimensions, as well as being a work in the reverse discourse tramp fiction tradition. At the same time, however, it is unclear whether its position is distinctly anti-­ productivist—although there are some indications that it can be read in this way. One such example can be found in the novel’s epigraph (from which it also takes its title), which quotes from an American IWW song parodying the work of religious organisations that encourage those ‘on the bum’ to ‘[w]ork and pray’ and ‘[l]ive on hay’ with the promise of ‘pie in the sky, when you die’—clearly satirising the empty promises of spiritual recompense for those who endure a life of labour and hardship. Further hints towards an anti-productivist streak can be found in Bolton’s eventual fate, as after refusing help from his old friend Carder he is forced to accept a job offer ‘diggin’ that bastard’s garden’—underlining the humiliation of having no choice but to work for one’s oppressors (1937, 468). And yet, though these moments may be seen to criticise the dynamics of capitalist work culture—there is no clear commitment here to the idea that the disciplinary demand to be productive is itself a problem: it is more the empty promises of reward and the unfairness of societal hierarchies that are objected to. Relatedly, though Bolton is radicalised, there is little sense of his radicalisation consisting of a refusal of the demand to be

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productive—as his disillusionment is instead oriented around the shortage of work, and the structural inequalities he is faced with. Thus though Pie in the Sky is undoubtedly both a work of reverse discourse tramp fiction and a work in the radical tradition, it is questionable whether it is radically anti-productivist, or even anti-productivist at all—explaining why it has been consigned to the margins of this study. From this brief overview it should be clear that each of these five authors pushes beyond anything we have seen in Crabbe, Wordsworth, Dickens, Morrison and Harkness in terms of embracing the reverse discourse possibilities of tramp fiction. While they generally remain tied to the idea of the tramp as fundamentally a victim, Skene, Crawford, Brighouse, Gissing and Calder-Marshall’s representations of tramp characters at the same time each suggest a spirit of defiance that surpasses what we have seen in the authors previously considered, as the tramp configures in almost all of these texts  as a welcomed symbol of the inversion of existing societal norms. At the same time, we have noted that in Skene, Crawford and Brighouse’s case, the tendency towards anti-productivist subversion has its limits, while in Gissing and Calder-Marshall we have seen a stronger degree of commitment to both the subversive aspect of the figure of the tramp and the prospect of radical intervention, but in Gissing’s case in the form of what is ultimately a minor work, and in Calder-Marshall’s case without a clear accompanying commitment to an anti-productivist outlook. Thus, while it seems entirely reasonable to define Skene, Crawford, Brighouse, Gissing and Calder-Marshall as authors at the forefront of the development of a brave new discourse challenging and subverting existing stereotypes and prejudices, I would suggest that none of these authors are ideal specimens of the reverse discourse trend described in the introduction to this study, or of its radical credentials—and that for a closer approximation to this we need to turn to the authors who will occupy our attention for what remains of this chapter. 3.2  Early Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction: Bart Kennedy and W.H. Davies Given my suggestion that reverse discourse tramp fiction has parallels with the reverse discourse tramp memoir genre—it is perhaps unsurprising to find that among the earliest to develop the tradition were two of the same authors who helped pioneer the reverse discourse tramp memoir form: namely, Bart Kennedy and W.H. Davies. In the conclusion to my analysis of these two authors in the previous chapter, it was argued that as well as

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clearly embodying a tramp conception of homelessness  their invectives against the working world and the norms of disciplinary society—and their willingness to recast negative stereotyping of the tramp’s idleness as grounds for praise—can be read as signalling a decisive shift towards the kind of reverse discourse described in the introduction to this text. At the same time it was suggested that in the memoirs of these two authors, this does not translate into a fully developed radical agenda: with Kennedy appearing interested in the idea of more widespread societal transformation, but refusing to imagine tramps as agents of social change; while in Davies we found invectives against civilisation in its current form but a contentedness for tramping to configure as an unthreatening alternative— indicating that both authors were perhaps more restrained in exploring the radical potential of tramp subculture than some later twentieth-­century memoirists. In turning to the novels and short stories of these two authors the obvious question to ask is whether these same patterns are reflected here. The short answer is that the fiction form may be seen to have enabled a slight shift towards the radical end of the spectrum, and in particular towards the implicitly radical end. This is in the sense that as well as both Roberts and Davies’s fiction following the pattern established in their memoirs of representing a compelling defence of the tramp way of life—in this way marking a significant development from earlier and contemporary representations of homelessness in the fiction of authors such as Crabbe, Wordsworth, Dickens, Morrison and Harkness—the dramatic rendering of a tension between a somewhat heightened sense of its advantages (especially in the case of Kennedy) alongside a more pronounced sense of its concurrent undesirability as a way of life may be seen to produce an implicitly radical outcome. At the same time, it will be argued that in Davies’s case in particular there are limitations in terms of how effectively his texts can be seen to function in this way. 3.2.1 Explanation for Non-inclusion: Morley Roberts (1857–1942) Before turning to these two authors it is worth briefly considering the writing of their contemporary and fellow tramp memoirist Morley Roberts in order to explain why he has been excluded from consideration in this section, given that he also wrote fiction—publishing six novels and six volumes of short stories in his lifetime (Jameson 1961, 15). The primary reason for not identifying Roberts as an author of reverse discourse tramp fiction is that, perhaps surprisingly, the figure of the tramp appears fairly infrequently in his novels and short stories—and because when it does appear, the characterisation is fairly unflattering, and shows few signs of a

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reverse discourse tendency. As an example, we might consider Roberts’s 1892 short story ‘Red Jim of the S.P.’—a revenge narrative set in the Tehachapi Pass along the Southern Pacific Railroad about a train conductor notorious for slinging unwanted tramps ‘on to the track just for stealing a ride’ and a mysterious protagonist who seeks retribution for the murder to his brother (2015, 43). The short story features two homeless characters: the younger of the two, Hub, a ‘confirmed tramp’ viewed ‘half contemptuously’ by the story’s protagonist for continually trying to procure tobacco from him with a ‘doglike look of humble pleading’; the older tramp, Jack, a coward unwilling to stand up to the train conductor— declaring ‘I ain’t no fancy to fight when it means getting killed or hanged’ (2015, 42–8). Given how throughout Roberts’s fiction—as critic Markus Neacey writes—the ‘heroic archetype’ is ‘the masculine ideal’ (Roberts 2015, 7, 17), Hub’s pleading defencelessness and Jack’s cowardice may be read as indicators of an intent to highlight the emasculating effects of the tramp lifestyle. A passing comment made by the narrator about Hub in the course of the narrative renders this possibility explicit, as he remarks: ‘for whatever spirit he might have had once was entirely gone, destroyed by a tramp’s life’ (2015, 49). Thus the tendency we noted in Roberts’s memoirs of presenting the company of fellow tramps as ‘intolerable’ and of distinguishing himself from tramps of ‘the truly idle kind’ here appears to manifest itself in clearly denigratory accounts of tramp characters. Elsewhere in Roberts’s writing we can trace instances of a contrary impulse: for instance, his 1912 account of the life of George Gissing The Private Life of Henry Maitland, in which he suggests that he had the ‘greatest time’ of his life when he and Gissing were living together in London, ‘practically starving’ but still able to have ‘fun together’ and even to rejoice in their poverty (1912, 76, 51, 83). And yet, when it comes to Robert’s fiction writing—it seems to have been the case that this tendency towards embracing the subversive aspect of a life of poverty failed to materialise into the form of celebratory accounts of the tramp lifestyle, as he instead resembles Dickens in letting his disciplinary impulses subsume any such inclination. Thus, just as the writing of Skene, Crawford, Brighouse, Gissing and Calder-Marshall demonstrates that one does not necessarily have to have been homeless or working-class in order to write reverse discourse tramp fiction, so the fiction of Roberts indicates that having been homeless does not guarantee a fiction output in line with this trend.

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3.2.2 Bart Kennedy (1861–1930) Conversely, in Bart Kennedy’s fiction the impulse to celebrate the figure of the tramp also present in his memoirs may be seen to find a much clearer expression. Like Roberts, Kennedy was a prolific author—publishing over twenty texts in his lifetime, among them many novels. His fiction often draws on the theme of travel, and makes frequent use of the figure of the outcast. For example, his 1898 The Wandering Romanoff opens with a group of ‘nomads, adventurers—last drops from the human ocean’ before moving on to tell the story of Anton, the bastard son of Alexander II, and his efforts to unite those ‘pushed from out civilisation’ (1898, 2, 34). In addition to this, Kennedy wrote a number of texts featuring impoverished and tramp-like characters—justifying the literary critic John Sutherland’s passing comment that he was ‘one of the early advocates of “tramping”, as the source for literary inspiration’ (1989, 359). This section will examine the clearest example of a work of reverse discourse tramp fiction written by Kennedy: namely, his 1902 novel A Sailor Tramp. In analysing this text we will explore ways in which Kennedy’s fiction writing extols the virtues of the tramp’s  apparent freedom from work—while also suggesting that it contains a degree of reticence that mirrors aspects of Kennedy’s memoir writing. Rather than proposing that this disqualifies A Sailor Tramp from consideration as a work of radically anti-productivist tramp fiction, however, it will be argued that the effectiveness with which this is conveyed is indicative of its status as a work in the implicitly radical mould. A Sailor Tramp offers an account of the adventures of a young male originally from England, tramping across America and resorting to various activities in order to survive—from begging, to working, to gambling, to theft. In the course of his travels, Kennedy’s protagonist endures a series of hardships—among other things being forced on the run, arrested for vagrancy and abandoned in a desert. Central to the narrative are the sailor tramp’s forays into crime—in particular, an incident in which he violently robs a man of 146 dollars and a gun (1913, 26). Clearly, the emphasis on hardship and unemployment  indicates a tramp conception of homelessness, while the association with criminality simultaneously has echoes of the masterless tradition, and of the criminal tramp memoir. In a Preface to the text, Kennedy relatedly suggests that ‘this sailor of mine ought to have been put away’ (1913, 1). And yet, far from his misdemeanours discrediting the sailor tramp in his creator’s eyes—they cause Kennedy to reflect in a manner that echoes Worby’s celebration of the subversive aspect of

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criminality: ‘He was the type of bold, hard man who went forth into the unknown and made England great’ (1913, 1). As well as in this way valorising his protagonist’s criminal activities, Kennedy can also be seen to have underlined the subversive potential of the sailor tramp’s avoidance of work. A hint of the desirability of not working is communicated early on in the text when we are told that ‘labouring work was almost impossible to get, and even when it was got the conditions attending to it were so grinding and degrading that beggary was almost preferable’ (1913, 10). Later in the course of the novel it is rendered explicit in a passage in which the sailor tramp and his tramping companion Cockney enjoy a spell of leisure time: “Work,” said Cockney one day as he was lying on a pile of timber taking long, luxurious puffs from his pipe, “I suppose it is a noble game. But give me rest, plenty of tobacco, and a sun like this to lie in”. (1913, 86)

Kennedy tells us that the sailor tramp does not ‘catch the words of the Cockney’s homily’ as he is himself ‘lying on his back’—but we are informed that ‘he felt and enjoyed the spirit of it’ as he continues to ‘lie and loaf and laze in the sun’ (1913, 87). The protagonist and his companion Cockney are not the only characters in A Sailor Tramp to signify the advantages of a refusal of work in this way. Later in the course of the novel, the pair encounter a hobo who initially accuses them of not being ‘regler tramps’ on the grounds that they appear to be temporarily seeking employment (1913, 217). The hobo then proceeds to praise the work-free lifestyle in the following terms: a hobo’s life is the only life goin’. No one to bother you. No one to say where you’ll go or where you won’t go. You’re out in the good air all the time and your chuck’s on the nail if you know the game. (1913, 220)

Elsewhere Kennedy’s endorsement of this outlook is strongly hinted at as his narrator reflects: Some say that work is the thing that will in the end lead man upwards to a higher and nobler life. But who can really tell? […] Who knows but that the men the world casts out may not be after all the best men? Who is to say that their philosophy has not potency? May they not be wise with a wisdom that is neither of the schools nor the law? It does not follow because wisdom does not possess the arrogance of the accepted standard that it is not ­wisdom. The crucible of time has invariably proved the minority to be right. (1913, 106)

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The emphasis on the perceived nobility of not working clearly confirms the anti-productivist credentials of Kennedy’s text. And yet at the same time, Kennedy’s reference to the ‘wisdom’ of the tramp’s ‘philosophy’ is also reminiscent of his remarks in A Tramp’s Philosophy considered in the previous chapter, in which he expressly states that the tramp ‘is too much of a philosopher to be a revolutionist’. The speculative mood established by the repeated use of rhetorical questions might in turn be seen to reinforce the sense that tramping configures here as a theoretical proposition—rather than as a mode of attack. In spite of the robustness of the protagonist and other characters’ rejection of work culture in A Sailor Tramp, the general sense communicated in this passage is that tramps are ‘wise’ and ‘right’ to refuse work, rather than that they are a revolutionary vanguard. However, there are other ways in which A Sailor Tramp can be seen to hint at radical possibilities that transcend the merely subversive suggestion that its characters embody an alternative outlook on life. In particular, this potential emerges if we reflect on Kennedy’s protagonist’s ambivalence about the tramp experience—and how the dramatic rendering of this uncertainty makes it more pronounced than it is in Kennedy’s memoirs. A Sailor Tramp can in various ways be seen to underline the hardships that come with life on the road—as we learn that tramps are killed by railway company employees as if it ‘was nothing’ and as we learn of the protagonist’s ‘horrible hunger’ (1913, 7, 13). It is however in the sailor tramp’s recognition of the things that he misses out on as a consequence of being on the road that a sense of the undesirability of being homeless is most emphatically stated. For instance, he at one point reflects that while other people have ‘everything they could desire—a home, children, respect, and a woman to love them’—he has ‘nothing’ for the reason that he is never able to ‘stop in a place long enough to accomplish or do anything’ (1913, 175). Of these factors, not being able to form relationships is the downside that is most heavily underlined throughout the novel as the narrator writes: ‘Being a tramp was sometimes well enough, but the great drawback about the life was the fact that man was closed out altogether from knowing women’ (1913, 175). While this passage might be read as an endorsement of normative values relating to heterosexual relationships and the home, it can just as easily be interpreted as a legitimate exposure of a limitation associable  with  this form of lifestyle: namely,  that while the avoidance of work that comes with being homeless may in some ways make it a preferable option, the transience (together with the social stigmas, perhaps) can also serve as an obstacle preventing the formation of meaningful relationships. The crucial point is that unlike Kennedy’s memoirs—in

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which he acknowledges that as a tramp he is a ‘pariah’, but chooses to instead emphasise his heightened capacity to experience ‘the joy of life’— here the sense of ambivalence is a defining feature of the protagonist’s psychology, as the narrator remarks towards the novel’s end: ‘Sometimes he thought the life of a tramp and a vagrant was the best life in the whole world. At other times he hated it, and was sick of it’ (1913, 246). This ambivalence could be seen to be reminiscent of what we have seen in Wordsworth and Dickens—suggesting an ultimate refusal to embrace the subversive and/or radical possibilities that the tramp way of life might be seen to entail—and yet the exuberance of Kennedy’s defence of the tramp lifestyle elsewhere (as he, for instance, hypothesises that tramps might be viewed as the ‘best men’) conversely seems to suggest that this uncertainty is indicative of an alignment with the implicitly radical reverse discourse tramp fiction of authors like Gissing, highlighting a sense of deadlock between the clear  preferability of the tramp lifestyle and the hardships that it  nonetheless entails, rather than embodying an uncommittedness that is ultimately evasive. Thus while Kennedy’s non-fiction ultimately directs readers away from drawing radical conclusions by presenting tramps as philosophers (in a sense resembling Wordsworth and Dickens, although with a greater degree of willingness to accept the subversive potential of the figure of the tramp), A Sailor Tramp offsets this lingering tendency through a concurrently exaggerated emphasis on the advantages and the disadvantages of life on the road in a manner that establishes a more blatantly unsatisfactory scenario, in turn elevating the novel’s radical status by demanding that the reader consider possible alternative ways of reaping the benefits of avoiding work that don’t involve being marginalised and thus unable to form relationships (or in other words demanding that they contemplate more efficacious models of anti-­ productivist resistance than that suggested by the figure of the tramp—in turn opening up a plethora of radical possibilities). 3.2.3 W.H. Davies (1871–1940) In addition to the several memoirs considered previously, W.H.  Davies wrote a large quantity of poems and three novels.1 Two of his novels—A 1  As well as A Weak Woman, Dancing Mad and Davies’ posthumously published Young Emma, The True Traveller and The Adventures of Johnny Walker, Tramp are sometimes described as novels, but are perhaps more accurately thought of as autobiographical works in the guise of fiction.

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Weak Woman, published in 1911, and Dancing Mad, published in 1927— explicitly  deal with the subject of tramping. Given the brevity and the elliptical nature of the  poetry form,  the signs in poems such as ‘The Sleepers’, ‘Facts’, ‘Saints and Lodgers’ and ‘The Bed-sitting Room’ that we are dealing with a form of tramp literature are not always explicit—and yet, read in the context of Davies’s writing as a whole we are perhaps justified in inferring that they are intended as reflections on the tramp way of life. In the previous chapter it was argued that while Davies’s memoirs do not make concerted efforts to reroute the celebration of the tramp lifestyle away from its possible radical implications (as Kennedy’s memoirs do), they nonetheless fail to present an impasse in a manner that might be seen to actively encourage readers to draw radical conclusions—preferring instead to present the tramp way of life as a subversive and harmonious alternative. Here it will be argued that Davies’s poetry and fiction writing simultaneously come closer to the implicitly radical model while at the same time reflecting these same tendencies. In the case of the poetry it will be suggested that the poems often exhibit implicitly radical tendencies but that, like Davies’s memoir writing, they also undermine this in depicting tramping as a subcultural refuge. In the case of Davies’s fiction, it will be argued that A Weak Woman functions more effectively in highlighting an impasse, but that the narrow thematic focus upon how poverty stifles creativity in envisaging this also somewhat diminishes the sense that it might therefore be considered radical. To begin with the poetry: Davies’s poems on the subject of homelessness are quite plainly characterised by an ambivalence as he moves between indicating the subversive charms of the lifestyle and highlighting the privations suffered by the poor. Davies’s 1911 ‘The Sleepers’ may be seen to reflect this tendency, as it compares a group of homeless Embankment sleepers to their labouring adversaries: As I walked down the waterside This silent morning, wet and dark; Before the cocks in farmyards crowed, Huddled in rags and sleeping there: These people have no work, thought I, And long before their time they die. That moment, on the waterside, A lighted car came at a bound;

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I looked inside, and saw a score Of pale and weary men that frowned; Each man sat in a huddled heap, Carried to work while fast asleep. Ten cars rushed down the waterside, Like lighted coffins in the dark; With twenty dead men in each car, That must be brought alive by work: These people work too hard, thought I, And long before their time they die. (1951, 164)

The poem clearly establishes and then inverts a pitying tone in connection with the Embankment sleepers, huddled in rags—as it transpires that the ‘pale and weary men’ on their way to work in the city are even less fortunate. The opposition between the ‘stiff’ and the tramp in Davies’s memoir Beggars is thus evoked—and yet significantly the mood here is more blatantly pessimistic, with Davies openly acknowledging that the Embankment sleepers, too, will die ‘before their time’. ‘The Sleepers’ in this sense might be seen to resemble the outlook expressed in Kennedy’s fiction: suggesting that the homeless way of life is preferable to the alternative, while at the same time underlining the hardships that come with it—thus (assuming that we can classify it as a work of tramp literature) falling into the implicitly radical territory as the need to envisage a better alternative to the tramp’s lifeendangering avoidance of labour is actively encouraged. Other poems similarly underline the hardships of life on the road while also drawing attention to its advantages—although at the same time differing tonally from ‘The Sleepers’ by placing a greater emphasis on the virtues associated with a life of homelessness. For instance, Davies’s 1907 poem ‘Facts’ tells the story of two homeless men called Jim and Mike. The poem describes how Mike offers to ‘walk the streets’ so that his friend can afford the cost of a bed—and as a consequence ends up either ‘sick, or in some prison bound’ while Jim is forced to break stones in a workhouse before ending up as a corpse ‘at the infirmary porch’ (1951, 158). ‘Facts’ closes with a stanza that is deeply critical of the decision to force people like Jim into arduous labour—with Davies objecting to the perceived Christian defence behind such actions: Since Jesus came with mercy and love, ’Tis nineteen hundred years and five: They made that dying man break stones, In faith that Christ is still alive. (Ibid.)

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‘Facts’, as its title suggests, offers a corrective—as Mike, sacrificing himself so that Jim might have a bed, appears more Christ-like than those who use Christian doctrine to defend the decision to subject homeless individuals like Jim to work. Here, the concurrent depiction of the supposedly superior community values among individuals who appear to fit the tramp stereotype alongside a critique of disciplinary efforts to force the homeless to work reinforces a sense of the implicitly radical nature of Davies’s poetry— exposing the simultaneously preferable and arduous nature of the homeless lifestyle in a manner that again points to the need for a better alternative. At the same time, while ‘The Sleepers’ and ‘Facts’ might be seen to indirectly point to the need for more efficacious models of resistance against productivist norms—it should be noted that elsewhere Davies’s poetry conversely reinforces the sense established in the memoirs of the tramp lifestyle as a harmonious alternative to life within capitalist and disciplinary society, rather than as a pathway to change. This is most apparent when Davies’s depictions of homelessness enter into a spirit that might be described as carnivalesque. For instance, Davies’s 1905 poem ‘Saints and Lodgers’ presents a romanticised view of the homeless community in a common lodging house: setting up an opposition between a group of Christian missionaries and the lodgers they are attempting to convert, with Davies seemingly delighting in the bad behaviour of the latter—from the likes of Jack, ‘so mean he begs from beggars’, to ‘“Brummy” Tom […] Who proudly throws his weight in drink’ (1951, 156–7). This spirit of revelry can also be found in Davies’s 1911 ‘The Bed-Sitting Room’—a poem in which a narrator describes being shown a room by a landlady and objecting to the portraits of ‘Plain men and women with plain histories’ on the shelves, prompting the reflection that the walls would be better adorned with ‘pictures of a richer kind: / Scenes in low taverns, with their beggar rogues / Singing and drinking ale’ (1951, 164). Such nostalgic allusions to the hedonistic dimension of the rogue tradition are clearly indicative of Davies steering his characterisations of the homeless community away from a preoccupation with the disciplinary pressure to be productive and towards a celebration of an embodied masterlessness. In these instances, the spirit of nostalgia for an outmoded form of vagabondage might be seen to introduce an atavistic dimension that detracts from the possibility of radical interpretation—and that in its remoteness from disciplinary realities suggests an idealisation of homelessness that is in line with the way in which Davies’s memoirs permit tramping to configure as a harmonious alternative rather than as an active threat to disciplinary norms.

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Turning to Davies’s novels, the initial impression one might have is that Davies’s fiction offers a wholly different outlook on the subject of tramping. Dancing Mad is, for instance, a misogynistic novel about the consequences of female negligence—telling the story of Norman Beresford, a painter who decides to set fire to his life’s work and take to the road in response to his wife’s ‘neglect of home and her extravagance’, exemplified by her love of dancing (1927, 58). Although the circumstances that lead Beresford onto the road are atypical of the experiences of the average fictional tramp—the depiction of his life of homelessness is very much in line with the disciplinary conception described throughout this study, in turn explaining  the suggested  deviation from the reverse discourse tendency that characterises Davies’s memoirs and poetry. In particular, the tramp experience in Dancing Mad is presented as hollow and lonesome—with the narrator suggesting that since Norman ‘parted from his dog and left home, that was the end of all his romance and ambition; and since that hour no serious emotion had ever twitched a muscle of his face, not even in pity for himself, as he went through a rough world, friendless and alone’ (1927, 137). This dismal portrait of life on the road offers no opportunity to portray Dancing Mad as a work of anti-productivist fiction—and yet it remains worthy of consideration for demonstrating a broader theme within Davies’s novel writing. Towards the end of Dancing Mad Norman returns from his tramping experiences in America, refuses to rekindle his relationship with his wife Mildred (who subsequently dies of grief) and then enlists to fight in the First World War, in which we learn that he is killed. In a coda to the novel a new character is introduced: a ‘well-known artist’ from whom we learn that before leaving to fight, Norman—working as a pavement artist—had produced work ‘of undoubted genius’, with the suggestion that ‘modern masters […] had nothing to teach this man for strength and beauty’ (1927, 224). Here the theme of creative genius being stifled or ignored owing to the marginal status that comes with life on the road is unmistakable, and becomes the novel’s parting message. While this does little to enable us to claim Dancing Mad as a work of reverse discourse tramp fiction, it does go some way towards helping us to develop our understanding of Davies’s earlier novel, A Weak Woman—a contemplation of which might in turn help us to offer a clearer explanation as to why Dancing Mad backtracks on the reverse discourse tendency exhibited so abundantly elsewhere in Davies’s writing. A Weak Woman is a first-person narrative about a young man with aspirations towards becoming a painter who leaves home and moves to

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London, determined not to waste his time ‘on common trade’ but to instead follow his own ‘pleasant inclinations’ (1911, 3). The title perhaps suggests that the storyline should be oriented around the ordeals of the narrator’s sister—who we learn ‘could not drink without bringing ruin on herself and others’ (1911, 11)—and yet the bulk of the narrative concentrates instead on the narrator’s experiences in London and the various relationships that he forms attempting to get by, indicating a lack of narrative focus that perhaps explains why Davies dismissed the novel as ‘a pest to be exterminated at sight’ (Moult 1934, 85). At the centre of the narrator’s account of his experiences in London is his relationship with a pedlar and writer called Henry Soaring, who lives in the same rented accommodation, and who ultimately marries another sister of the narrator. It is through the character of Soaring—a homeless poet who both clearly fits the tramp mould and who bears a strong resemblance to Davies—that the subject of tramping is mediated. Soaring’s attitudes towards homelessness are complex. On the one hand, he is capable of praising the non-conformity of the tramp population, and of fantasising about the possibility of a total cessation of the obligation to work—for instance, when he reflects: If I were a great millionaire I would rent a large house in the busiest thoroughfare, and after getting together about two hundred homeless wretches—old men and women made feeble minded by hunger, cold, and sleepless nights—have them bedded, boarded, and clothed […] These men and women should have no work to do for the remainder of their lives. All I would like them to do would be to sit in the windows all day, jeering and making faces at people in the street who used to pass them by with indifference. I would like to give them a chance to do this for their own sweet enjoyment, after having suffered so cruelly in the past; and it would please me very much to watch and listen to them. (1911, 95)

And yet on the other hand—against this celebration of the subversive possibility of a refusal of work, Soaring’s account of his experiences as a tramp early on in the novel underlines his sense of personal dissatisfaction in what he has achieved, as he remarks: ‘My life […] has been one of failure throughout—I have fallen short of my ambition’ (1911, 85). Soaring’s chagrin is reflected in the attitude of the narrator—who even after Soaring achieves literary fame continues to be ‘much annoyed that such a good man should have been forced to live in a common lodging house and carry a pedlar’s pack for so many years’—as well as reflecting that in spite of being

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‘one of the best living poets’, without financial assistance (provided by the narrator himself) Soaring ‘would have died unknown’ (1911, 228, 199). In identifying these moments of apparent resentment and regret, we might note that the tone and content of A Weak Woman is strikingly similar to that of Dancing Mad—with Soaring’s despondent mood clearly reflecting a narrative emphasis upon how life on the road has impeded recognition of his creative abilities. This suggests two points of interest. First, identifying this common trend offers a clearer explanation as to why in Dancing Mad Davies’s preoccupation with exploring the subversive possibilities of homelessness is abandoned—as the prevalence of the theme of non-recognition of creative talent indicates its clear importance to Davies, and in turn how this could have subsumed his interest in developing a reverse discourse celebrating the tramp as a figure of resistance (as the task of emphasising Norman’s failures evidently became paramount). Second and relatedly, we might note that whereas in Dancing Mad this theme totally overrides any subversive suggestion—in A Weak Woman the co-presence of this concern alongside reflections on the subversive possibilities of life on the road (as Soaring adopts an anti-productivist position in fantasising about helping his homeless friends to never work again) results in the formation of an impasse that is comparable to the one we found in Kennedy and that affirms the novel’s status as an implicitly radical work in the anti-productivist discourse tradition as we are challenged to contemplate ways of retaining the fantasy of not having to work while dealing with the impediment of homelessness being a prohibiting experience for the creatively gifted. This is something that Davies’s memoirs can be seen to also do to a limited extent—with The Autobiography of a Super-­ Tramp in particular underlining the conflict between Davies’s sense of disappointment at having been ‘unnoted’ most of his life and his clear interest in the subversive possibilities of the tramp lifestyle—and yet this sense of conflict is significantly more pronounced in A Weak Woman, suggesting that it perhaps functions more effectively as an example of radical anti-productivist literature. At the same time, however, it might be argued that the fixation on the question of society’s failure to acknowledge the creative talent of the impoverished (however legitimate a concern) narrows the thematic focus somewhat—restricting the wider radical potential of A Weak Woman in the sense that this is perhaps a less relatable limitation of the homeless lifestyle than those highlighted in other works of implicitly radical reverse discourse tramp fiction. In turn, the effectiveness with which Davies’s novel can be seen to expose the shortcomings of the

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tramp way of life as a mode of anti-productivist resistance may be seen to again be limited. In short, whereas in Davies’s memoirs there is a clear focus upon the subversive possibilities of the tramp lifestyle, but envisaged as a harmonious alternative rather than as a basis for societal transformation—in Davies’s poetry and fiction there is a clearer sense of the radical implications of the tramp lifestyle, although one that is simultaneously undermined in several ways. In Davies’s poetry a concurrent sense of the preferability and the hardships of life on the road echoes other implicitly radical works we have considered—and yet this is counteracted by a recurring tendency to present tramping as a kind of escapist refuge, suggesting that Davies’s poems are to some extent aligned with his memoirs in permitting but not actively encouraging radical readings. In Davies’s novel A Weak Woman there is also a sense of the subversive possibilities of a refusal of work offset against a sense of the limitations of life on the road in a manner that might be interpreted as implicitly radical—and yet, the narrow thematic focus when demonstrating this upon the difficulty of achieving recognition as a creatively gifted homeless individual may be seen to limit the likelihood of readers being frustrated into envisaging alternative models of anti-productivist resistance. In short, then, Davies’s poetry and fiction writing perhaps encourage radical interpretation more readily than his memoirs—and yet the same impediments (namely, a tendency to retreat into a vision of tramping as a harmonious alternative) alongside newly pronounced impediments (namely, a narrow fixation on the theme of thwarted creative genius) might simultaneously be seen to limit the effectiveness of these works as examples of anti-productivist radical discourse. 3.3  Interwar Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction by Working-­Class Authors: Walter Brierley, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth and James Hanley In a 1940 interview, George Orwell attempted to date the emergence of ‘literature in which the viewpoint of the working class […] gets a hearing’ to 1914—suggesting that ‘possibly the first book that did this was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ (1998, 295). Critics have since challenged this claim—with Haywood for instance pointing to the example of Chartist fiction in the early nineteenth century as a clear precursor (1997, 11). At the same time, the contention that the early twentieth century marked a period of increased activity and interest in the genre of so-called

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working-class fiction has generally been maintained. More specifically, Haywood claims: ‘There are two periods when working-class fiction achieves a cult status and popular mystique in British culture: the time of rising affluence in the 1950s and 1960s […] and the 1930s’ (1997, 36). This section explores the writing of a collection of fiction writers from working-class backgrounds who may be seen to have belonged to this first wave of interest—although of course focussing upon their representations of tramps. It was in fact common within the genre of interwar fiction classified by critics as working-class for authors to write about the lives of the unemployed and the homeless rather than working men and women, as might be expected. As Croft writes in his study of 1930s’ fiction, the novels produced in the late 1920s and early 1930s by working-class writers were ‘almost all by and about unemployed men’, making it perhaps unsurprising that for many such authors ‘[g]oing “on the tramp” in search of work provided the story-line’—with Croft offering as examples texts including Jack Hilton’s Champion and Jim Phelan’s Ten-A-Penny People (1990, 97, 174). While many of the depictions of homelessness that feature in novels by working-class writers are similar in approach to the ‘new realism’ and ‘combative realism’ of authors considered previously in this chapter—in which the figure of the tramp (or the individual temporarily tramping in search of work) is depicted as a victim, with little sense of them representing a tramp subculture conceived of in an anti-productivist mould—this section hopes to prove that a significant proportion of fiction writing by working-class authors produced in this period conversely fits the description offered by Klaus of fiction in which the figure of the tramp is presented as ‘a person capable of enjoying life to the full’, even if this also often simultaneously involves acknowledgement of associated hardships. It will do so by identifying the works of nine working-class authors of reverse discourse tramp fiction—while offering a detailed analysis of three of these. It is perhaps of interest to note that in his analysis of novels dealing with the theme of unemployment, Croft claims that ‘very few of their unemployed characters showed any interest in “politics”’—supporting his general hypothesis that within literature as a whole during this period ‘political claims were modest’, with ‘few mentions of the word “revolution”’ (1990, 111, 29). In asserting this, Croft isn’t claiming that literature in the interwar period wasn’t in its own way committed—as he instead argues that by addressing ‘immediate’ concerns rather than engaging directly in politics works written in the thirties were ‘all the more […] revolutionary’ (Ibid.)—and yet this assertion concerning the lack of interest in

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discernible political avenues in literature dealing with unemployment is nonetheless worth attending to. In what is to follow, this claim will be challenged on two grounds: first, by suggesting that in the example of interwar reverse discourse tramp fiction there are several instances of unemployed characters with an overt interest in politics; second, by arguing that where there is a lack of interest in existing avenues of dissent we should be wary of interpreting this as a sign of political disengagement, or of the presence of a ‘modest’ agenda—instead exploring the possibility that this is a result of the author or their characters straining towards alternative ideological models (in particular, in an anti-productivist mould). To support this second claim, we might note that when Croft discusses representations of tramps in his analysis of working-class novels about unemployment, he often demonstrates an unwillingness to consider the ramifications of their refusal to conform. For example, he writes of Walter Brierley’s The Sandwichman, in which the protagonist decides to become a tramp, that this is indicative of a ‘sense of defeat’ (1990, 114). He likewise interprets James Hanley’s Drift, in which the protagonist also ends up on the road, as being uncomplicatedly negative—noting of its ending: ‘the bad weather embodies the bad luck, the vulnerability of those who have lost the security of work and home’ (1990, 115). In what is to follow, readings of both of these texts will be offered that challenge Croft’s assumptions: first, by highlighting how there is in fact an overtly positive dimension to the representations of homelessness in both examples, in particular concerning the advantages of defying existing societal norms; and second, by suggesting that where there is the co-presence of a negative outlook, this may be seen to have radical implications in the sense that it simultaneously underlines the desirability and the imperfectness of tramping as an alternative way of life, thus demanding of the reader that they envisage more viable modes of resistance. 3.3.1

 verview of Other Authors in the Genre: Leslie Halward O (1905–1976), George Garrett (1896–1966), Patrick MacGill (1889–1963), Liam O’Flaherty (1896–1984), R.M. Fox (1891–1969) and Jack Hilton (1900–1983) As indicated, before turning to the three authors to be analysed in detail in this section, an overview will be offered here of some of the reverse discourse tramp fiction written by authors labelled as working-class that I have not had space to cover in detail: namely, works produced by Leslie Halward, George Garrett, Patrick MacGill, Liam O’Flaherty, R.M.  Fox

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and Jack Hilton. It is perhaps worth noting that four of these six writers (Garrett, MacGill, O’Flaherty and Fox) were either Irish or had Irish roots (in common with Kennedy, Hanley and Phelan)—supporting Klaus’s claim that the tramp fiction genre has strong connections with Ireland (2017, 301). This is unfortunately an aspect of the texts that I do not have space to explore in serious detail—but it is undoubtedly a characteristic of the reverse discourse tramp fiction tradition worthy of critical attention. The first two of these authors can be dealt with swiftly—as their fictional treatments of homelessness are both short. Leslie Halward’s short story ‘On the Road’, published in 1937, concerns a self-described tramp who is filled with rage at the sympathy of a young woman who has ‘everything that money can buy’ (1937, 57). George Garrett’s posthumously published short story ‘The Pianist’, meanwhile, tells the story of a man who after becoming unemployed and appearing to lose his sanity speculates on the possibility that he might be able to ‘destroy mankind’ (1999, 184). Though both of these stories as well as strongly hinting at a tramp conception of homelessness show strong signs of subversion in challenging wealth inequality and in channelling a spirit of combativeness, and thus warrant consideration as examples of reverse discourse tramp fiction, their brevity may at the same time be seen to limit their significance in terms of our line of inquiry, and there is also no clear sign of an anti-­ productivist strain. Representing a more decisive contribution, Patrick MacGill was an Irish poet, novelist and journalist whose 1914 Children of the Dead End; The Autobiography of a Navvy is one of the earliest supposedly ‘working-­ class’ novels in the reverse discourse tramp fiction tradition. MacGill’s semi-autobiographical text tells the story of Dermod Flynn, a ‘navvy’ who struggles to ‘obtain constant employment’ and so finds himself on ‘the eternal, soul-killing road’ (1985, 114)—clearly signalling a perception of homelessness as both pitiable and employment-oriented. As Haywood puts it, Flynn chooses the ‘life of the tramp’ having recognised ‘the total impossibility of achieving any “respectable” goals in life’ (1997, 34). Yet although this suggests a negative outlook, Flynn’s attitude to the experience of homelessness is in fact ambivalent: when he is on the road he regrets having ‘no fire, no home, no friends’, but as soon as he settles down—for instance, when he gets a job in Fleet Street—he longs to return to the life of a tramp: ‘the spell of the old roving days come over me […] The office choked me, smothered me; it felt like a prison’ (1985, 93, 282). Flynn at one point sums this dilemma up neatly: ‘Once out of work I long

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for a job, once having a job my mind dwells on the glories of the free-­ footed again’ (1985, 134). This sense of an impasse might be seen to be reminiscent of Gissing, Kennedy and moments in Davies: emphasising the pleasures of not working alongside the loneliness of life on the road in a manner that suggests the need for a more realistic alternative. There are moments in Children of the Dead End when this implicit call for societal transformation comes close to becoming explicit—for instance when Flynn rails against ‘Progress and Profit’, suggesting that they produce ‘slavery and starvation’ (1985, 140). At other points, however, the deadlock between not wanting to conform and struggling with the consequences of this results in Flynn succumbing to dull apathy, as he suggests that he has become ‘almost careless of life, indifferent towards fortune, and the dreams of youth’ (1985, 251)—a despondency that might just as easily prove infectious as it may a means of provoking reflection on the needfulness of some kind of radical solution. As we saw in the previous chapter, Liam O’Flaherty was a prolific short story writer and novelist, as well as a political activist who sought to emulate the work of the Industrial Workers of the World in Ireland. He was also of course homeless at various points in his life, as well as having been a published tramp memoirist: and yet, as a fiction writer he is generally categorised as a working-class author, reflecting the fact that his fiction is typically preoccupied with the lives of working-class characters—in turn explaining my decision to situate his fiction output in this section. In the previous chapter we saw how in his memoir writing O’Flaherty was explicit both in celebrating the tramp as a figure of idleness and in forecasting a future in which machine labour could potentially limit the necessity of work, indicating an overt and radical anti-productivist strain. At the same time, we saw evidence of O’Flaherty succumbing to a Nietzschean interest in cultivating ‘the most perfect types of manhood’ that (as well as going some way towards explaining his racism and homophobia) may be seen to have manifested itself in disillusionment with the homeless community on the grounds of its perceived lack of ambition. In O’Flaherty’s short story ‘The Tramp’, first published in 1924 as part of his Spring Sowing collection, traces of both of these impulses can be discerned. ‘The Tramp’ tells the story of two workhouse inmates who encounter a man described as a tramp in the convalescent yard of the workhouse hospital. O’Flaherty writes of how the two inmates are initially both ‘envious’ of and ‘mournfully vexed’ by the tramp—noting how his ‘wandering life’ is ‘so different to their own jaded, terror-stricken lives’: a sense that is

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heightened as the tramp describes how since being on the road he hasn’t done ‘a day’s work’ and has been able to simply ‘sleep and eat and enjoy the sun and the earth and the sea and the rain’ (1993, 16, 23). The narrative thrust of ‘The Tramp’ concerns the tramp protagonist’s attempt to convince one of the workhouse inmates to join him, suggesting that he’s a ‘fool’ for eating his heart out ‘with hunger and misery instead of taking to the roads’ (1993, 18). It is an attempt that ultimately fails, as in spite of the ‘gleam in his eyes’ we are told that the inmate ‘had never in all his life been able to come to a decision on an important matter’ (1993, 24). O’Flaherty’s ‘The Tramp’ thus straightforwardly valorises the life of the tramp—romanticising it and emphasising the tramp protagonist’s avoidance of work and close relationship with nature in a manner that is evocative of both the tramp and masterless conceptions of homelessness (though with a greater emphasis on the former), while simultaneously defining this lifestyle in opposition to the spirit of acquiescence embodied by the two workhouse inmates. At the same time, a hint of O’Flaherty’s wider interest in an insidious masculine ideal is also detectable in this short story—as the tramp character is presented as an embodiment of virility with his ‘huge black beard’, ‘throat muscles’ and ‘hair on his chest’: a quality that is accompanied by a blatant chauvinism as he at one point laughs at the thought of having abandoned the mother of his child for having ‘lost her looks’ (1993, 16, 23). Thus ‘The Tramp’ might be seen to reflect both the idealisation of the tramp’s refusal of work and the promotion of less edifying qualities noted elsewhere in O’Flaherty’s memoir writing. At the same time, however, there is little indication in ‘The Tramp’ of the tramp protagonist’s way of life signalling a path towards societal transformation: though the protagonist appears to be interested in converting workhouse inmates to the tramp cause, there is no sense of this translating into an overt broader political objective—perhaps surprisingly, given what we know of O’Flaherty’s involvement in politics and the views expressed in his memoirs. Concurrently, there is little indication of ‘The Tramp’ being implicitly radical in the sense of presenting an impasse that encourages readers to draw radical conclusions. Thus, O’Flaherty’s short story is perhaps best classified alongside Davies, Milligan and Worby’s memoirs considered in the previous chapter as a text that is neither decidedly non-radical (as in the examples of bohemian literature and nature writing), nor explicitly or implicitly radical (in accordance with the models outlined in the introduction to this text)—suggesting that it should instead be viewed as

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a piece of writing that permits radical anti-productivist readings without actively encouraging them. Another so-called working-class author with links to Ireland, R.M. Fox was a working-class historian and journalist who also wrote a collection of short stories entitled Factory Echoes and Other Sketches, published in 1919. Within this collection, ‘Casuals of the City’ tells the story of Jack Smith— described as a ‘rootless vagabond’ who would ‘enjoy tramping in the summer’ (1993, 25). Fox makes it clear that ‘[n]ecessity often drove [Smith] on the road’ as he was ‘usually penniless’—indicating an alignment with the characterisation of homelessness described throughout this study (Ibid.). At the same time, Fox stresses that Smith was ‘a tramp from choice as well’, who would often abandon ‘a good job […] at a moment’s notice’ in order to spend time on the road, signalling a reverse discourse tendency (Ibid). When asked by his foreman why he wanted to leave a ‘good job’— Smith replies: ‘It’s too good! […] Three meals a day and a bed every night. I can’t stand it!’ (Ibid.) ‘Casuals of the City’ subsequently describes Smith’s travels with another tramp called Clement Bonham, and how the pair use their oratory skills to beg in villages they pass through—with Bonham delivering speeches ‘against old age’ and extolling the virtues of alcohol, while Smith’s public performances are ‘ruder and cruder’ as he mocks passers-by by attempting to sell them ‘pieces of rag’ to wear as ties (1993, 26–8). Smith and Bonham are thus presented as a pair of provocateurs who run roughshod over any and every established convention. At the heart of Smith’s defiance in particular is a refusal to set store by material wealth—already indicated by his rejection of ‘[t]hree meals a day and a bed’, and further reinforced in a closing episode in which he recklessly spends his last four pence on lemonade, declaring ‘[f]ellowship is life; lack of fellowship is death’ (1993, 28), as if the simple possession of a few pennies defies an invented tramp code that to him is everything. As with O’Flaherty’s short story there is a distinct sense of the subversive and anti-­ productivist possibilities of life on the road here, combined with a clearly combative tone (reminiscent of the memoirs of Milligan, Worby and Marshall)—and yet there is at the same time little indication of this translating into an overt radical agenda, suggesting that ‘Casuals of the City’ might also be seen to belong in the category of works that permit but do not actively encourage radical interpretation. The final author to be considered before turning to the three authors who will form the primary focus of this section is Jack Hilton: a novelist and a travel writer as well as an active member of the National Unemployed

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Workers’ Movement. Of all the working-class authors not included for detailed consideration in this section—Hilton is perhaps the most deserving of our attention, in particular for his 1937 novel Champion. Champion tells the story of two working-class men from the north of England: the champion boxer Jimmy Watkins, and his brother’s childhood friend Charlie Smith. Hilton’s novel begins by describing the very different trajectories of these two men, as after suffering a period of unemployment Jimmy gains wealth and fame through a successful boxing career, while Charlie (following a three-month spell in prison) abandons his activities as an activist campaigning on behalf of the unemployed in order to take to the road. After a chance encounter when Charlie goes to see Jimmy fighting in a boxing match, a friendship is developed, leading to the two men using Jimmy’s fortune to establish a small communal farm for the disadvantaged and the unwell—following which Jimmy decides to help fund Charlie to fight a parliamentary election campaign, which he ultimately wins. As with other examples of reverse discourse tramp fiction previously considered, the hardships that come with life on the road are far from being concealed in Champion  as Hilton describes how Charlie leads ‘a horrible low standard of a life […] ill-fed, ill-clothed, and seldom housed’ in a manner that clearly conforms with the tramp conception of homelessness (1937, 193–4). At the same time, there is a definite sense that the existence is preferable to a working life, as life on the road is presented as being ‘much more cheerful’ than the gloom of life in an industrial town— and as Hilton describes Charlie having ‘more freedom’ as a tramp ‘than ever was possible as a worker’ (1937, 193–5). Elsewhere Hilton indicates that this is also true for the rest of the homeless community in general: as, for instance, when he describes a group of tramps in Epsom who being ‘dissociated from money, and power, and respect’ are perceived to lack the ‘look of subordination’ that marks others (1937, 223). As well as simultaneously highlighting the hardships and the advantages of life on the road—Champion can also be seen to underline the impasse that arises from such a situation in a manner that is strongly suggestive of the implicitly radical trend described throughout this study. For example, Hilton frequently underlines the impossibility of Charlie’s situation—as on the one hand he describes Charlie’s gratefulness that he is not ‘lifeless and nerve-sapped’ like those who have to work, while on the other hand he describes Charlie’s longing ‘to get back to the comfort of warm clothing and cleanliness’ (1937, 197). The sense of the inadequacy of tramping as

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a form of resistance is further reinforced when Hilton describes how Charlie ‘had fits of regret’ for pursuing tramping as a form of ‘purposeless escape’ (1937, 196). Here, there is little danger (as we have seen previously) of a potentially implicitly radical discourse being too effective in conveying a sense of despair—as the hopelessness of escapism is explicitly alluded to in a manner that demands of the reader that they imagine an alternative. The political dimension of this is rendered even more explicit elsewhere as Hilton describes how the decision to take to the road was motivated by a desire on Charlie’s part to ‘throw off his revolutionary harness’ after the traumatic experience of incarceration has left him unwilling to continue his political activism—as a result of which we learn that he has ‘lost his purpose’ and has become ‘shipwrecked, stranded, confused and lost’ (1937, 187). Interestingly, this sense of Hilton dwelling on the unsatisfactoriness and political inefficacy of his protagonist Charlie’s position remains even after he has ceased to be a tramp, and has started running a charitable organisation—as Hilton informs us that ‘his sweet of doing good was marred by the sours of his conviction that the only correct line was revolutionary action, and that he was too soft to fit in’ (1937, 305). This sense of dissatisfaction is not relieved until the novel’s end, when Charlie appears to succeed in channelling his sense of frustration into a political career. In thus telling the story of a tramp who recognises the subversive potential of an avoidance of work but also the political inefficacy of tramping (as well as charity work) as an embodied but non-­ revolutionary mode of resistance—and in then dramatising the successful transposition of this same tramp character into the sphere of politics, Hilton’s narrative clearly situates itself at the radical anti-productivist end of the reverse discourse tramp fiction spectrum, and may be seen to unite elements of the implicitly and explicitly radical models that we have considered throughout this study. From this brief survey of reverse discourse tramp fiction written by authors of working-class origins who I have not had space to cover in detail, it is clear already that interwar reverse discourse tramp fiction may be seen to mark a development from the tradition previously established by Kennedy and Davies, as we have seen definite evidence of an increased willingness to harness the subversive potential of the figure of the tramp— with nearly all of these authors developing the combative aspect of their depictions of homeless characters. I have three reasons for not exploring the works of authors like Halward, Garrett, MacGill, O’Flaherty, Fox and

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Hilton in greater detail, and instead dedicating more space to Walter Brierley, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth and James Hanley. The first is that (perhaps with the exceptions of MacGill and Hilton) the figure of the tramp features more frequently in the fiction of the latter three authors— both suggesting the thematic significance of the tramp for them as writers, and providing the opportunity for a more in-depth analysis. The second reason is that Brierley, Carnie Holdsworth and Hanley may be seen to represent the widest possible range of approaches within fiction written by working-­ class authors—with Brierley’s fiction being in a social realist mould; Carnie Holdsworth’s being more closely aligned to the socialist tradition; and Hanley’s existing on the experimental end of the spectrum—meaning that a clearer sense of the diversity of reverse discourse tramp fiction written by working-class authors can be established by focussing on their writing. The third reason is that in the fiction of Brierley, Carnie Holdsworth and Hanley (although we might also add MacGill and Hilton to this list), there is a stronger inclination towards the radical as opposed to the subversive—suggesting that they are perhaps more exemplary of the qualities that this study is interested in identifying. 3.3.2 Walter Brierley (1900–1972) Walter Brierley was born in Derbyshire, where he worked on and off as a miner until 1931 (Croft 1990, 164). Croft has suggested that Brierley’s career as an author was enabled by the fact that he lost his job around this time, as he claims that ‘Brierley took the opportunity of four years without work to pursue his literary ambitions’ (1990, 98). Brierley’s first literary success came with a contribution to Hugh Beales and Richard Lambert’s 1934 Memoirs of the Unemployed—a publication that grew out of the BBC magazine The Listener in 1933 and that sought to ‘represent the authentic voice of the unemployed authors’ (1934, 13)—providing him with his first ‘big break’ (Croft 2011, x). Indeed, it was off the back of this that Methuen published Brierley’s first novel, Means-Test Man—an account of seven days in the life of its unemployed protagonist. The book was a big success, with 6000 copies sold in the first year and with the Labour MP Oliver Baldwin (son of the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin) demanding that ‘every MP should read’ it (Croft 1990, 109, 71). As we will see, while Means-Test Man is of interest as a novel that highlights the suffering endured by the unemployed during the interwar years, it is in Brierley’s lesser known 1937 novel The Sandwichman that we find a contribution to the genre of reverse discourse tramp fiction—in the process indirectly answering criticisms levelled against the earlier novel concerning its lack of fighting spirit.

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As Haywood has noted, the main character in Means-Test Man ‘is based partly on Brierley himself’ and his experiences of life on the dole (1997, 66). The novel contains some of the strongest invectives against the means test (a system for distributing unemployment relief) in fiction writing produced in Britain during this period. For instance, the narrator writes: there was something soulless in this, callous. Means Test. It was something else besides a Means Test, it tested one’s soul, one’s being, and the soul and the being were poorer every time. (2011, 263)

Yet just as this passage can be seen to expose the disciplinary machinations at play behind the existing system for providing unemployment benefits, in other ways Means-Test Man can be seen to reflect these same disciplinary values. For instance, we learn how the protagonist Jack Cook ‘burned with some kind of shame’ at the thought of being unemployed, and feels as if the ‘point in life has been blunted’ as he has ‘too little work and too much time to “think about things”’ (2011, 28, 242, 7). In emphasising the shame of dependency and the emptiness of an unemployed existence, Means-Test Man thus clearly communicates a sense that work is the clearest path to fulfilment. As one reviewer puts it, acknowledging the bind that Brierley found himself caught in: ‘from his grim experience of unemployment he has looked back upon years of arduous labour as happiness’ (Anon. 1935, 7). At the same time as Means-Test Man may be seen to conform with disciplinary values, it was also criticised by reviewers for its lack of revolutionary spirit—with Ernie Wooley suggesting in The Daily Worker that a novel bringing out the ‘fighting spirit of the unemployed would have been of much greater use to the working class’ (Croft 1990, 62). In many ways, Brierley’s second novel The Sandwichman can be read as a response to the suggestion that Cook’s lack of ‘fighting spirit’ renders Means-Test Man of no ‘use’. In particular, it may be seen to serve this purpose by translating Cook’s sense that the ‘point in life has been blunted’ into a form of protest—as instead of accepting his fate, the protagonist of The Sandwichman decides to embrace it, ultimately leading to him taking to the road. In the process, as we shall see—Brierley’s novel refrains from fully celebrating the life of the tramp: and yet in insinuating that this option remains preferable to the alternative, and in continuing his invective against the conditions to which the unemployed are subjected, Brierley can be seen to use the figure of the tramp as a vehicle through which to

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mount a caustic critique against not just capitalist and disciplinary society, but also those who allow themselves to be defeated by it. The Sandwichman  centres on the story of Arthur Gardner—a miner who loses his job, largely owing to prejudices he encounters after attempting to balance pit work with academic study (1937, 97). The novel dramatises the ordeal of being unemployed—as, like Cook, Arthur becomes ‘conscious of all the irrelevances of living’ when observing other men at an unemployment centre, and develops feelings of ‘repugnance to uselessness in men’ (1937, 133, 137). And yet, while Means-Test Man gives us only seven days in the life of its unemployed protagonist, The Sandwichman gives us several weeks—so that, accordingly, we get a development beyond the initial response of despair. The following passage comes after the revelation that Arthur has failed his Logic exam—his one remaining hope having lost his job in the pit: If he had still been on the thin line of living—at his lonely job in the pit, coming home and pinning himself to books—this might have broken his world into atoms, undoubtedly would have done. But he had grown, broadened in these last six weeks. He saw quite plainly where he was in the stream of existence. He understood himself as a system, knew that the adjustment of the one onto the other depended in no great degree on things and forces outside himself. His weaknesses had brought him down as far as superficialities were concerned; his strength kept him steady, even content, in essence. (1937, 184)

Here Arthur is presented as having developed a resilience to external circumstances having acknowledged his helplessness amidst the ‘stream of existence’—even to the point of being in a state of contentment. Following this, Arthur resolves no longer to ‘groan and sink into utter inanition under the painful pressing of unemployment’—like others who ‘sat at home and stared and rubbed their thumbs nervously over their fingers’ (1937, 184–5). In the process, as well as eschewing the idea of passive acquiescence, Arthur also develops a cynical attitude towards the opportunities that the unemployment centre offers to people in his situation—as the narrator offers an insight into his thoughts: Pipes—upholstery—rug-making. Oh, all the lot of stuff he had tried his hand at in this place! What was it worth? What was the use of it? It had been a waste of time, waste of life. The whole three weeks had been just a black-­ out of the things vitally near him in the real world. (1937, 185)

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While Cook in Means-Test Man complains of having ‘too little work’, Arthur—having ‘grown’ and ‘broadened in these last six weeks’—here ridicules activities designed to make future employment possible as a ‘waste of life’. With the conviction that life in the unemployment centre is the equivalent of being in ‘prison with no chance of changing his present mode of life and circumstance’ (1937, 200), he thus decides to leave his hometown of Pirley and take to the road. As already indicated, in no way is Arthur’s decision to take to the road romanticised by Brierley. It is presented as the result of the death of his mother, his aforementioned failure to pass an exam, and his inability to find employment—all in line with the general  tendency during  this  era of  representing homelessness as a  pitiable byproduct  of unemployment. Underlining the undesirability of his position—early on in the novel, when Arthur suggests to his mother that he leave in search of work she is prompted to reply: ‘Don’t talk silly […] where would you go? Tramping round and living on the wind. You’d soon be dead. And I should die if you did’ (1937, 103). Accordingly, when Arthur does eventually decide to take to the road—Brierley makes no attempt to conceal the hardships he is likely to encounter: describing how he meets another homeless man who very much conforms with the tramp stereotype and who we learn ‘seemed in agony with every step he took, hobbling along on the outside edges of his boots’ (1937, 280). And yet at the same time, there is the definite suggestion that life on the road is preferable to the dreariness of the unemployment centre, as Arthur explains to his mother prior to making the decision: I s’ll clear out and go on tramp if something doesn’t turn up soon. It wouldn’t be so bad if those you lived with acted decently. It’s as bad as if you’ve done a crime to be out of work. (1937, 201)

In fact, when he does take to the road—Arthur finds that the hobbling tramp alluded to above both has a positive outlook and is far more capable of treating him with decency than others he has had to put up with (such as his abusive stepfather, Albert). The narrator observes of the tramp that his ‘tone was bright’ and his face ‘easy and strong after he had looked Arthur up and down and found that he had nothing to fear or hope for’ (1937, 281). Brierley conveys a sense that Arthur, too, acquires a spirit of confidence and self-possession after deciding to become a tramp himself— for instance, when he declines his love interest Nancy’s offer of money and we learn of the ‘cynical strength’ in his expression (1937, 281).

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As already suggested, critics have tended to read the ending of The Sandwichman as a bleak descent into hopelessness. In his analysis of the text, Haywood remarks of Arthur’s decision to turn tramp: ‘It is difficult to reconcile Arthur’s sentiments that “he was free” […] with his snowbound disappearance into a workhouse’ (1997, 70)—while Croft similarly emphasises how Arthur is ‘thrust into a cold and loveless world’, before adding speculatively that he is ‘saying goodbye to his childhood, to his youth and to his educational ambitions’ (1990, 115). And yet, it is clear that neither of these readings can account for Arthur’s ‘cynical strength’, the sense that he has ‘broadened’, his suggestion that life as a tramp ‘wouldn’t be so bad’ compared to the humiliation he has been subjected to at the unemployment centre, or his refusal to ‘sink into utter inanition’—leading to the inevitable conclusion that Croft and Haywood have placed too strong an emphasis on the negative attributes of homelessness identified by Brierley, in the process overlooking the positives (although Haywood appears more cognisant of this tension). In attempting to develop a reading of The Sandwichman that acknowledges how it does (albeit to a limited degree) cast homelessness in a positive light, it is worth recalling the objections put forward by Brierley’s critics that his first novel presents ‘arduous labour as happiness’ and lacks a ‘fighting spirit’. Bearing this in mind, it might be argued that The Sandwichman attempts to overcome these limitations by demonstrating how the initial shock of unemployment can evolve over time into a determination to embrace one’s fate—in Arthur’s case by settling for a life of homelessness as an arduous but still preferable alternative to the prospect of struggling and failing to find work. Thus we might argue that while in Means-Test Man Cook responds to his unemployment with an instinctive sense of shame and a desire to find work—The Sandwichman challenges this response by suggesting the more subversive possibility that strength and contentment are more likely to be found by abandoning the desire for work and settling for the lesser evil of a life of homelessness. At the same time, it is also clear that while critics like Haywood and Croft perhaps miss this aspect of the novel—they are not wrong in claiming that Arthur’s fate has a grim side to it, given his mother’s suggestion that he might die on the road, combined with the account of his tramping companion’s ‘agony’. However, rather than interpreting the willingness to underline the hardships of homelessness as contradicting the subversive aspect of The Sandwichman, we might instead argue that this has the net effect of presenting the tramp lifestyle as simultaneously preferable and far

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from ideal—thus creating an impasse that points to the need for more viable alternatives to the misery and stigma surrounding unemployment. This in turn might be seen to present a challenge to Croft’s general assertion that the ‘political claims were modest’ within novels produced in this period—as it indicates the presence of an implicitly radical anti-­productivist strain within Brierley’s text that critics have tended to overlook. At the same time, however, it might also be argued that the description of Arthur’s ‘cynical strength’ as a tramp has the potential to divert the possibility of radical interpretation by side-tracking the reader away from drawing radical conclusions concerning the impasse that they are presented with, as it is suggested that Arthur himself has no interest in imagining a better alternative to the productivist paradigm than taking to the road. Thus, though The Sandwichman  might be rescued from Croft’s claim that it presents tramping in an uncomplicatedly negative light, and from the charge that it reflects ‘modest’ political aims in terms of the nature of its critique—it is also open to the charge of on some level encouraging disengagement, as while exhibiting signs of an implicitly radical anti-­ productivist strain it also mirrors the memoirs of Massie and Landery in the sense that its mood of despondency has the capacity to influence the reader to the point of counteracting these possibilities. 3.3.3 Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886–1962) Ethel Carnie Holdsworth was born in Lancashire to parents who were both cotton-weavers, and herself started her working life as a ‘mill girl’ before going on to become a poet, a political activist and a novelist (Anon. 1909, 553; Anon. 1913, 2; Klaus 2018, 97). Like Brierley, Carnie Holdsworth was committed to representing the lives of the less well off in her fiction—declaring in 1914 that ‘literature up till now has been lop-­ sided […] dealing with life only from the standpoint of one class’ (Anon. 1914, 31). Critics have tended to focus on the role of gender in Carnie Holdsworth’s work—unsurprisingly given that, as Pamela Fox writes, she was ‘one of the few working-class women novelists in Britain to sustain an actual writing career’ (1994, 153). In what is to follow I hope to demonstrate that Carnie Holdsworth’s writing is also significant for representing a unique contribution to the genre of reverse discourse tramp fiction—and for in the process challenging the limitations of established models of capitalist resistance. Two novels stand out in this regard: the first being her 1913 Miss Nobody, and the second being her 1925 This Slavery—with the former hinting at the radical possibilities suggested by the figure of the

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tramp, and the second consolidating and strengthening this theme while simultaneously pointing to its shortcomings. Carnie Holdsworth’s first novel, Miss Nobody, tells the story of Carrie—a scullery maid from Manchester who runs an oyster shop in Ardwick. After describing how Carrie endures an unsuccessful marriage followed by a period working in a flax mill, Miss Nobody offers an account of how she comes into a fortune and how it is subsequently squandered in legal fees following a tragedy she is indirectly involved in. Homeless characters feature prominently throughout the telling of these events, and at one point Carrie even  contemplates the advantages of taking to the road herself. Initially, the impression one gets of the homeless community in Miss Nobody is pretty bleak: for instance, when visiting her brother, Charlie, Carrie finds him in ‘a low lodging-house in Ancoats’  (lodging houses being common stopping points for people with no fixed abode during this period) where she encounters characters including a disgraced doctor and a wanderer who, since his wife died, has been ‘trying to find rest, and never finding it’ (2013, 4–45). Later in the novel we learn of Carrie’s fear of ending up homeless: ‘The darkness and silence of the streets, echoing only to her lonely footsteps, sometimes made her feel that she could scream—not at the darkness, nor yet at the silence, but for fear of something that seemed to loom there for such as she’ (2013, 136). Later, when she is forced to walk all the way to her sister’s house after finding herself out of work, the narrator reflects of passers-by: ‘They looked at her almost as if she were a tramp! The thought stirred her chill blood’ (2013, 147). Clearly the conception of homelessness here aligns with a prevailing disciplinary emphasis on privation. And yet, following a pattern that we have already seen elsewhere in reverse discourse tramp literature of the period, Carrie’s attitude is modified when she is caused to compare the tramp lifestyle to that of the working-classes: She wondered whether it wasn’t better to be a tramp than a flax-mill girl, struggling along on a wretched ten shillings per week, with the monotony only broken by an occasional strike, full of hunger, fierce emotions, dogged sufferings. A tramp would always have the wide, clear sky over his head, the earth beneath his feet, and no eye, mean and watchful […] upon him. There would be hunger and thirst and chances to run, but moments of joy and cheer such as were never felt in those cage-like streets. (2013, 147)

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This opinion is soon confirmed by an encounter that Carrie has with a selfprofessed tramp described as ‘a rolling stone’—‘forty, fat, jovial, his face dyed a rich red-brown with wind, rain, and the sunshine of many years’ (2013, 148). The stranger declares: ‘“’Tain’t a bad life, on the whole. I’ve tried the other sort, but—nevermore!”’ (2013, 148). In a passage in which the tramp describes the death of his partner—he clearly acknowledges that life on the road is one of hardship, but refuses to let this count against it: ‘Last week my second old woman died. Pneumonia. It’s always that with us, or rheumatics; but you’ve got to die with something if you rent a ’ouse, so that’s no argument against tramping’ (2013, 148). The stranger invites Carrie to join him on the road—an offer she refuses, although we later learn that she did so hesitantly as the narrator writes: ‘She remembered the tramp on the white road, and the invitation that had tempted whilst she laughed at it’ (2013, 175). The sense that Miss Nobody sets out to defend the figure of the social outcast is reinforced if we consider Carnie Holdsworth’s depiction of Carrie’s brother, Charlie—who, as we have seen, lived in common lodging houses among homeless individuals. Charlie is a thief who claims that there is no difference ‘between snatching a gent’s watch from his pocket and snatching bread from the mouths of hundreds because they ask for a rise in starvation wages’ (2013, 46). Although Carnie Holdsworth does not attempt to fully exonerate Charlie—as he himself confesses that his lifestyle ‘ain’t right’ (2013, 47)—the narrative generally confirms the view that his criminality is no worse than the crimes against the poor that society elsewhere permits. For instance, after Charlie is mortally wounded having intervened in a case of domestic abuse—the narrator of Miss Nobody suggests that his attitude to life is something to be commended: What a splendid dare-devil he had been! Instead of being content to scrape and save so that he could eat meat twice or thrice a week, and live in a smutty street with a number to his door, he had joined the outcast class that lives on chances. This was the spirit that had discovered countries, founded colonies, and refused to be satisfied with little things and stay-at-home ways. (2013, 173)

The suggestions in Miss Nobody that the lifestyle of the ‘dare-devil’ who lives an existence ‘of joy and cheer’ by rejecting ‘stay-at-home ways’ might be preferable to the ‘monotony’ and ‘dogged sufferings’ of millwork, or to being forced ‘to scrape and save’, are clearly indicative of a reverse

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discourse tendency as the subversive potential of such a marginal impoverished existence is plainly celebrated. Elsewhere in Carnie Holdsworth’s novel there is also some indication of this translating into an overtly radical perspective—as Miss Nobody offers a critique of attempts to reform the lives of the working-classes, in particular by exposing the limitations of efforts that fail to recognise the need for change of a more transformative nature. This theme is rendered most explicitly in an episode that arises when Carrie is working in a flax mill. During her time here, the narrator explains how while she ‘loved the girls’, she pitied them for the emptiness of their working lives—describing their appetite for ‘cheap books’, and suggesting that there ‘was more tragedy in any one of their drab lives’ than in the stories of tragic romantic heroines that they devoured (2013, 125, 128). This prompts the reflection: ‘The tragedy in the lives of the people is in what does not happen, rather than in what does happen’ (2013, 128)— suggesting that the real loss incurred by factory life is not so much the suffering caused by poverty as the opportunities missed out on by losing so much time to work. Carrie subsequently encourages her fellow workers to join a union (2013, 130)—and yet there is a distinct sense that the approach taken by the union, involving ameliorative measures designed to marginally improve the employees’ lives rather than to transform them, are insufficient for her. For instance, the narrator informs us that upon learning that someone from the union had ‘opened a soup kitchen’ Carrie ‘threw back her head and laughed a trifle hysterically, saying, “Isn’t it good of ‘em? They’ll go to heaven when they die, won’t they Julia?”’ (2013, 132) The implication is clearly that what is needed is not just moderate efforts to prevent the poor from going hungry, but a broader transformation to help bring about ‘what does not happen’ in their lives. Casting our minds back to the tramp who invites Carrie to join her on the road—it’s worth now noting that she observes of him how ‘he had crammed more than many a well-respected man does in a lifetime’ into his few idle years on the road (2013, 149). This, we might infer, goes some way towards suggesting what exactly it is that Carnie Holdsworth is implying that the flax mill workers are missing out on, and that soup handouts fail to adequately compensate for: not just the right to survival, but the freedom to live as one chooses. At the same time, while Miss Nobody both suggests that the tramp way of life might be preferable to a working life and critiques the limitations of attempts to improve the lives of the working-­classes—it is true that the two themes never directly meet, and

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that the inference that they are connected has to be drawn by the reader (which they are not necessarily encouraged to do, given that these episodes exist in isolation). Thus, though Miss Nobody might be seen to be an explicitly radical anti-productivist novel in the sense that it exposes the ‘tragedy’ of lives lost to endless labour while also questioning the limitations of ameliorative measures for reform, and though it might also be classified as a work of reverse discourse tramp fiction in the sense that it celebrates the subversive potential of the figure of the tramp—the two components function separately, although it is of course possible for the reader to connect them. This in no way diminishes the status of Miss Nobody as a work of radical anti-productivist fiction—but it does somewhat limit the sense in which it can be read as such in light of its depiction of homelessness. In Carnie Holdsworth’s later novel The Slavery,  however, the same two motifs can again be found—as the novel both signals the importance of freedom from work and reflects on the advantages of the tramp way of life—except that here the two themes are closely connected in a manner that similarly opens up a radical anti-productivist vista, but this time directly via the means of meditations on the figure of the tramp. This Slavery focusses upon the lives of two sisters—Rachel and Hester Martin—and their role in an industrial action dispute that takes place in a Lancashire textiles mill. The novel pays special attention to the sacrifices these two women make: Rachel as a strike leader, and Hester as the wife of a mill owner who jeopardises her relationship in order to support the workers. As in Miss Nobody, there is a sense throughout This Slavery of the need for a more comprehensive emancipation of the working-classes than is foreseeable. This is, for example, hinted at in an episode in which Hester imagines that she hears ‘the voice of fettered humanity’ asking her ‘[w]hen shall I be free?’—and is elsewhere rendered explicit in a passage in which her sister Rachel remarks that there are times when she gets ‘sick of the working-class’ with their willingness to ‘work till they drop’ and to ‘rot without even smashing a window’ (2011, 36, 33). As we shall soon see, of all the characters in the novel it is Bob Stiner—a mill worker and socialist agitator who gets the sack and subsequently becomes homeless—who is most vividly representative of this search for a more absolute form of freedom, in particular through the way in which he advocates a transformation of the lives of textile mill workers beyond the pursuit of better pay and improved working conditions.

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Stiner is a character who becomes homeless shortly after he is arrested on a false charge of assault, and realises that ‘no other mill-door in the town would let him through after this’ (2011, 25). His fate instantaneously becomes clear to him as the narrator reflects: ‘It meant—trampdom. It meant—lodgings. It meant—respectable poverty no more’—in a passage that is clearly evocative of the altered perception of homelessness described throughout this study (Ibid.). And yet though recognition of his fate unsettles Stiner, there is an immediate recognition of its potential value as the narrator continues: ‘He saw the fences where he would inscribe sentences on Capitalism. He saw the half-open doors of poor cottages where children would stand and stare at him with the wonder in the eyes that would soon pass when they went out to labour’ (2011, 26). There is here both a suggestion of the radical possibility of becoming a tramp who protests against capitalism and an insinuation that as someone who doesn’t work he will become an object of envy for children who have not yet been tainted by a spirit of conformism. Reflecting this sense of the potential unleashed within Stiner as he is forced onto the road, when Rachel learns of his arrest through his wife—and how it is likely a consequence of his activism—we are informed that she ‘suddenly realised that she had a deep liking’ for him: Ambitionless, poverty stricken, fighting the gods that be for the whole of his class, of them, with them, for them. She wondered how many Bob Stiners it would take to be a leaven to the whole. Drinking a bit, now and then—but, drunk or sober, carrying the good torch. (2011, 43)

There is, thus, a hint of the now nearly homeless Stiner answering Rachel’s aforementioned frustration at the perceived compliance of other members of the working-class community both in his political commitment and in his rejection of productivist norms. In keeping with Rachel’s sense of Stiner’s political commitment, and with his own prophecies about what life on the road might lead to—we soon learn that as a tramp, Stiner’s convictions are strengthened as he is brought into contact with a group of dissidents who he argues represent a more consistent model of oppositionality than any he has found elsewhere: I’ve found comrades. Comrades. Low comrades maybe. Still comrades. Better, or shall we say different, from the washed slaves who ape their betters. (2011, 76)

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The implicit sense in Miss Nobody of the tramp lifestyle representing radical possibilities—as Carrie reflects that more needs to be done to revitalise the lives of the women who work in the flax mill, while the tramp character she meets concurrently serves as an example of such a revitalisation—here becomes explicit, as Stiner presents the homeless community as a group of ‘comrades’ who have discovered a way of life that is superior to that of workers, disparagingly conveyed as ‘washed slaves’ who ‘ape their betters’. Hester’s complaint that ‘fettered humanity’ is far from being liberated and Rachel’s frustration at the willingness of the working-class to ‘work till they drop […] without even smashing a window’ are each here clearly answered with a distinct embodiment of an alternative route. And yet, at the same time as Stiner thus suggests a realisation of the radical possibilities inherent in elements of the tramp lifestyle—Carnie Holdsworth’s novel can also be seen to indicate the limitations of his position. In Fox’s analysis of This Slavery, she similarly concentrates on Carnie Holdsworth’s characterisation of Stiner—suggesting that both his failed ‘efforts to romance his estranged wife’ and his death ‘in a scuffle between a policeman and a striker’ towards the end of the novel are indicative of ‘the parameters that confine working-class practices’, as the ‘norms of working class experience’ do not permit him either to behave romantically or to involve himself in industrial action (1994, 168–9). Building on this analysis, we might suggest that Carnie Holdsworth’s depiction of Stiner also signifies ‘the parameters that confine’ the tramp experience in the same sense that he is not permitted to behave as he might wish. This point could be illustrated by pointing to the same passages identified by Fox, but it is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by a passage in which, following Stiner’s murder, the police attempt to downplay his role as an activist in order to diminish its significance by, as Rachel puts it, trying ‘to make him out as a vagabond’ (2011, 206)—the implication being that as a tramp Stiner is disqualified even from martyrdom, in turn clearly indicating ‘the parameters that confine’ him as a homeless person. Thus, while in Stiner we find a character whose depiction brings together the two themes noted in Miss Nobody—suggesting both that the tramp way of life may be preferable and how the working-classes might similarly be freed from constraints—in This Slavery  Carnie Holdsworth at the same time draws attention to the difficulty of successfully embodying an alternative mode of resistance to that of the ‘washed slaves who ape their betters’ by living as a tramp, as the revolutionary status of Stiner is refused on the basis of his homelessness. In a novel about the desire for freedom, Stiner thus

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features as something of a mirage—an emblem of what might be possible for ‘fettered humanity’ who is brutally killed and then refused the status of a martyr. By thus signalling the radical potential of the figure of the tramp, while at the same time pointing to the relative powerlessness of the homeless given their low social status—Carnie Holdsworth’s novel can be seen to synthesise explicitly and implicitly radical approaches, simultaneously openly identifying the radical potential of the figure of the tramp and underlining its limitations in a manner that asks of the reader that they envision an alternative. 3.3.4 James Hanley (1897–1985) James Hanley was born in Liverpool, and worked as a clerk and as a seaman before in the early 1930s becoming a novelist. He subsequently published over twenty novels, as well as several short story collections and plays. Haywood has described Hanley’s fiction as expressionistic in style, suggesting that it ‘explores those areas of profound social and psychological dislocation and fragmentation more often associated with modernism’ (1997, 73–4)—a view that is supported by John Fordham in his study James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class  (2002).  As Klaus has remarked of Hanley, he was also an author who saw ‘no unbridgeable moral and social gap between the lumpen and the proletariat proper’ (1993, 4). Hanley’s interest in so-called lumpenproletariat elements was something that his contemporaries also recognised in his writing—with one reviewer commenting that the ‘voice of Mr. James Hanley is the voice of countless people who are always on the border-line of starvation and misery’ (Moult 1938, 7). There are two texts that may be singled out in exploring Hanley’s attitude towards the very poor and specifically the homeless: the first being his debut 1930 novel, Drift, and the second being a short story entitled ‘Rubbish’, published as part of his 1931 collection Men in Darkness. In both we will see that Hanley explores the possibility of homelessness signifying a form of escape—while in the later work we will find evidence of him conveying a sense of the limitations of such a proposal in a manner that may again be interpreted as implicitly radical. The introduction to this section alluded to Croft’s assertion that Drift is a novel that ends with a sense of defeat as its protagonist takes to the road—teaching the reader a lesson relating to ‘the vulnerability of those who have lost the security of work and home’. On one level, this reading

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is legitimate enough: Drift is a novel about the disillusionment of a young man called Joe Rourke—in particular his despair at his Catholic parents, who object both to his interest in profane literature (Zola and Joyce are mentioned) and to his relationship with a Protestant sex worker. Early on in the novel Hanley gives us an insight into the depths of Joe’s desperation as the narration slips into his private thoughts: ‘What use to live? What had he to live for?’ (1944, 48). In this sense, Joe’s decision to take to the road can be seen to have been borne out of despair—suggesting a variation of the disciplinary casting of homelessness as a slide towards hopeless inutility, as here the identified aimlessness is primarily a byproduct of spiritual and generational dislocation. At the same time, echoing our analysis of Brierley’s novel The Sandwichman, to focus on Joe’s despair might be to miss the sense that out of his disenchantment comes hope—indicating that an initially negative identity is subverted. The moment in the novel in which Joe decides to take to the road is accompanied by the following passage: The river of life is broad and swift-running. It sweeps on its way through the abyss. Let it take me too. I will go wheresoever it shall go. I will be with it always. I will rise no more. (1944, 249)

It is easy to see how this passage might be interpreted as indicative of a sense of defeat if read in isolation—given the apparent suggestion that Joe intends to descend into the abyss—and yet in the wider context of the novel, such a reading becomes unsustainable. While the concept of the abyss is initially presented to us in a negative light—with the narrator depicting it as a space in which one is forced ‘to suffer isolation’ and describing how Joe longs to ‘escape the abyss’ by wishing ‘for death’ (1944, 112)—as the novel progresses, Joe’s attitude towards it dramatically evolves. In particular, as his relationship with Jane (the sex worker mentioned previously) develops, we learn that instead of resisting it he has elected to embrace it: And he was one of the abyss. He could feel in his very bones the beating of its great heart. He could feel the strength of its soul in his blood. And he felt in that moment a pride in that he belonged to it. It was the heart from which all life was fed and sustained […] What were a few artists or scientists compared with these noble souls who faced life fearlessly? What were these people who were incapable of contacts with life? (1944, 121)

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With this passage in mind, Joe’s decision to take to the road and to be swept down into the abyss at the end of the novel seems less like a final act of defeat and more like the realisation of his desire to more fully integrate himself into its ‘beating […] heart’—facing life ‘fearlessly’ so that he is ‘fed and sustained’. This point is rendered explicit when Joe later declares, upon deciding to become homeless: ‘At last I am free’—suggesting that he will now ‘walk for ever’, never tiring, ‘unto the end of the world’ (1944, 249). There is thus a clear sense that by extricating himself from mainstream society, Joe hopes to find peace in a manner that problematises Croft’s suggestion that Drift is a novel that ends with an emphasis on its protagonist’ ‘bad luck’ and ‘sense of defeat’ (1990, 114–5). At the same time, however, though Croft’s assertion that the ending of Drift is defeatist in tone perhaps fails to acknowledge its sanguine aspects—there is nonetheless some merit in the suggestion that the final mood is not an entirely happy one. Hanley for instance underlines how Joe’s desire to ‘walk on and on without ceasing’ is driven by the belief that to do so ‘helps a man to forget’—perhaps referring to (among other things) his feeling that he has been betrayed by the Catholic church and deceived by Jane (1944, 250). It is also true that Joe remains conflicted even after he has taken to the road—still haunted by visions of the ‘wrath of God’ even as he claims to have delivered himself from his past (1944, 251). And yet, again, we might stress that the important thing to note is how this admission that homelessness is an imperfect form of deliverance (both in the sense that it is a form of escapism, and in the sense that it doesn’t function especially well as such—as the past continues to assert its presence) does not totally disqualify the efforts to convey a sense of its advantages (such as that homelessness enables one to have ‘contacts with life’ and to face it ‘fearlessly’), but rather challenges us to imagine ways of achieving these benefits without the downsides. In other words, Drift implicitly encourages us to question whether there is a better way of obtaining closer ‘contact with life’ than by taking to the road (which is presented as undesirable in Joe’s case because it consists of trying and failing to leave the past behind). However, at the same time as this suggests that Drift perhaps functions as a work of reverse discourse tramp fiction that celebrates the possible advantages of the homeless lifestyle while demanding that the reader recognise its limitations—it should be noted that there is not an especially strong anti-productivist dimension to all of this, as what is celebrated is Joe’s apparent capacity to have closer contact with life rather than his

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avoidance of work. Although a heightened capacity to experience ‘contact with life’ is arguably related to a circumnavigation of productivist norms in the sense that it is indicative of a Lefebvrian partial reintegration into the every day as a consequence of avoiding the alienating effects of capitalism—still, Drift nonetheless remains indirectly anti-productivist in this regard. At the same time, we might note that (as with Davies’s fiction) the downsides of homelessness as a mode of subversion underlined by Hanley are perhaps not widely relatable—as the idea that it is a flawed mode of escape is quite specific to Joe’s circumstances, and to how he views homelessness as a way of breaking free from his past. Hanley’s short story ‘Rubbish’, published one year later, plays on similar themes, while at the same time arguably going further in critiquing the idea that by taking to the road it is possible to escape whatever one might be running from—in the process arguably elevating its radical status. ‘Rubbish’ tells the story of a workhouse inhabitant called Mr Scully who decides to return to Liverpool in search of his sister. When he is asked by a policeman why he has chosen to leave the workhouse, he replies: ‘At times people like myself get fed up; we long for freedom if only temporary. I just felt that urge in my blood’ (1931, 262). As well as Scully conforming more straightforwardly with the tramp stereotype than Joe (being, as a former workhouse inmate, a more obvious victim of unemployment) the depiction here of life on the road as a preferable alternative to the rigid confines of a life of institutionalised penury is clearly suggestive of a tramp-­ oriented  reverse discourse tendency (although not perhaps in a directly anti-productivist sense). However, as the narrative progresses, it also becomes clear that Hanley is primarily interested in how this quest for freedom ultimately leads to self-obliteration. Wandering the streets in search of his sister’s home, Scully is disconcerted to find himself the object of other people’s disgust—discovering that his ‘rottenness […] upset everybody’ and ‘spread like fire’ (1931, 262). Disturbed by the hostile reactions he provokes, he stops a ‘well-dressed’ young man and asks him why people are staring at him (1931, 272). The young man replies: ‘What they are staring at […] is not at what you are, but at what they might become’—suggesting that ‘if there is one thing civilization hates, it is to see the results of its experiments’ (1931, 276). Having surmised this much, the young man advises Scully that he will always be viewed ‘contemptuously’—and that the best thing for him to do is to ‘hide, get away; anywhere; back into those fastnesses of dark and chaos’, never to return (1931, 276). ‘Rubbish’ ultimately ends with Scully following this advice:

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escaping a hostile crowd by locking himself in a shed full of rubbish and setting it alight until he perishes inside. The story thus explicitly underlines the impossibility of Scully’s search for ‘freedom’ in a society that resents and fears him—with the final act of self-immolation suggesting that under these circumstances self-annihilation is the only viable means of escape. The suggestion that the retreat represented by alternative lifestyles might be impossible owing to the inescapable nature of societal prejudice is also traceable in Hanley’s banned 1931 novel Boy, in which life on the sea represents a comparable attempt at escape. Boy tells the story of Arthur Fearon, a young boy who becomes a stowaway because he can no longer endure ‘the hard living at home, the continual poverty, the disinterestedness of his parents in his welfare’ (2007, 86). Hanley writes: ‘Reviewing these things, he realised there was not another thing he could have done’— so that running away ‘was his only way of escape from a monotonous existence’ (Ibid.). And yet this vision of escape proves flawed—as Arthur soon discovers that even as a sailor he continues to be preyed upon and generally victimised, and as the novel ends with him being suffocated by a pitying captain after he has contracted syphilis. In both ‘Rubbish’ and Boy, then, Hanley appears to have been invested in building on the motif in Drift that it is less easy to escape society (or oneself) by for instance becoming homeless than might be imagined, as Hanley here proposes that the search for freedom from the hardships that society produces (be this by leaving the workhouse or by becoming a stowaway) is fraught with difficulties owing to the seeming inescapability of prejudice and hardship if one chooses to occupy a marginal position in this way. In this sense, while Hanley’s Drift can be seen to address the tension between the idea that homelessness enables more ‘contacts with life’ with an emphasis on its downsides in Joe’s case as a flawed attempt at escape—‘Rubbish’ can be seen to establish a similar tension while at the same time redefining the motif of the impossibility of escape in a way that makes it more relatable, as what is at stake is the inescapability of societal prejudice. On the one hand, this can be seen to suggest that ‘Rubbish’ has stronger credentials as a work of implicitly radical tramp literature in the sense that  (as well as conforming more directly with a tramp-oriented conception of homelessness) it more intently and relatably underlines the impossibility of a homeless individual finding ‘freedom’ (in turn doing more to frustrate the reader to imagine alternative means of liberation). On the other hand the implication of the impossibility of circumnavigating oppression might be

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seen to be non-radical in the sense that it indicates the futility of resistance. At the same time, it is also plain that whether we thus interpret ‘Rubbish’ as a work of tramp fiction in an implicitly radical or in a non-radical vein— there are again few clear signs of an anti-productivist dimension, as (echoing Drift) what is sought in taking to the road is an escape from privation (by leaving the workhouse behind) rather than an avoidance of work— although again we might argue that by seeking to avoid the workhouse system, there is an indirectly anti-productivist dimension at play. Thus, in short, Hanley’s fiction can generally be seen to fall into the implicitly radical reverse discourse category—although with signs of tipping over into the non-radical camp, and with few overt indications of a clearly anti-­ productivist outlook. 3.4  Interwar Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction by Homeless Authors: Jim Phelan and Chris Massie This section will focus on two interwar reverse discourse tramp fiction writers who also happened to be homeless, and who were also both tramp memoirists: namely, Jim Phelan and Chris Massie. Of the interwar reverse discourse tramp memoirists considered in the previous chapter, several wrote fiction—including Garrett, O’Flaherty, Stephen Graham, Trader Horn, Charles Landery and Joseph Stamper. Of these six additional interwar homeless authors: the fiction writing of Garrett and O’Flaherty has already been covered; Graham, Horn and Landery did not feature tramp characters frequently in their fiction, if at all; and lastly, Stamper did feature tramp characters but not in a manner that might be seen to suggest that his fiction belongs in the reverse discourse tramp fiction genre—thus explaining my decision to focus on Phelan and Massie. Before turning to these two authors, however, a brief account of Stamper’s fiction will be offered in order to offer a fuller explanation for his non-inclusion. 3.4.1 Explanation for Non-inclusion: Joseph Stamper (1886–1974) Joseph Stamper’s memoirs were described briefly in the previous chapter, with the conclusion being drawn that his writing generally affirms negative stereotypes of the tramp community by describing its members as ‘hopeless, apathetic, visionless and self-helpless’—although at the same time demanding ‘sympathy’ for the poor and drawing attention to the structural causes of their suffering and apparent degradation. Stamper’s fiction broadly speaking reflects these themes. His 1934 novel Slum tells the story

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of a young slum dweller called Florrie Harden, who after becoming homeless is made ‘so sick at heart that she yearned to crawl up some back alley, out of sight, and weep and weep till her weary life passed from her through the pools of her streaming eyes’ (1934, 90). Florrie’s former love interest, Johnnie—who also becomes homeless after losing his partner and his job—likewise becomes ‘a degraded caricature’ of himself, and induces feelings of ‘piteous shame’ (1934, 277). Again, the portrait is sympathetic—as Florrie reflects that she does ‘not blame him’ for having ‘allowed himself to degenerate’ (1934, 281)—but there is little sense here of the homeless way of life being celebrated as a form of resistance. In other ways, Stamper’s fiction can be seen to celebrate the spirit of defiance among the poor: for instance, Slum describes the ‘communal gregariousness’ and ‘close-knit fraternal companionship’ among slum dwellers—and suggests that in spite of its squalor, the slum brings ‘joy’ to Florrie (1934, 57, 169). Perhaps more striking as an example of defiance in Stamper’s fiction is the recurring theme of violent resistance. A clear instance of this can be found in a short story entitled ‘Mud’ published as part of his memoir, in which Stamper describes the actions of a foundry worker called Bob Sturgess who after having starved himself and his family by going on strike is transformed into a ‘live, human bomb’—visiting his employer’s home, where he smashes a door, assaults the serving staff and attempts to strangle his boss (1966, 49–52). In moments such as these, Stamper’s fiction envisages bold acts of defiance against the ‘pressures and circumstances’ that are perhaps responsible for his sense that he has led ‘a miserable life’. And yet, again, while there is a clear overlapping with motifs found elsewhere in the reverse discourse tramp fiction oeuvre—there is scant evidence in Stamper’s writing of these values ever being embodied in the figure of the tramp, as he instead resembles other authors in the realist, new realist and socialist fiction traditions in emphasising the victimhood of the homeless: something that cannot be said of the tramp fiction of Phelan and Massie. 3.4.2 Jim Phelan (1895–1966) After being released from prison in the mid-thirties, Jim Phelan began his writing career by producing three novels in very little time—as Paul Lester notes, ‘writing for twelve or fourteen hours a day from a bolthole of a working-man’s lodging house in Edmonton, north London’ (2011, 8). An account of this period is offered in the closing chapter of Phelan’s 1954 prison memoir Tramp at Anchor, in which he describes how he was

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assisted by ‘[s]everal people in the literary world’ who were made familiar (by the prison memoirist Wilfred Macartney and others) of his story as the person who had been sentenced to ‘life-imprisonment for not having shot a man’—among them ‘Compton Mackenzie, H.G. Wells, John Lehmann, Godfrey Winn, Michael Sadlier, G.B. Shaw’ (1954, 229–30). The first of Phelan’s three novels written during this period, Museum (subsequently reissued as Lifer), is a prison novel; the second, Green Volcano, is a novel about Irish nationalist politics; while the third, Ten-A-Penny People, is about an industrial action and features multiple tramp characters. Of these, Ten-A-Penny People, published in 1938—and as Lester notes ‘the recommended first choice as “novel of the week” in the TLS’ (2011, 10)—is the most exemplary work of reverse discourse tramp fiction produced by Phelan, and will thus be at the forefront of the following analysis. In the previous chapter it was noted that while Phelan’s characterisation of life on the road generally celebrates the refusal to work and to conform—there is at the same time a tension in his memoirs: with Phelan on the one hand admiring the fighting spirit of O’Flaherty’s unemployed army, while on the other characterising the tramp community as a group of individuals who ‘seek peace’ and nothing more—with the latter view generally winning out, to the point that we ultimately had to conclude that his memoirs are best classified as works of non-radical anti-­productivist discourse. In Ten-A-Penny People—a text written some time earlier—we are presented with a narrative that conversely inclines towards a tendency to celebrate the tramp’s radical potential. Echoing Carnie Holdsworth’s two works of reverse discourse tramp fiction, Ten-A-Penny People describes the events surrounding an industrial dispute in Manchester. At the same time, the form of the text might be seen to echo Hanley in its bold innovativeness, as it contains fragmented vignettes and transcribed accounts of conversations and meetings. At the heart of Phelan’s narrative exist two homeless characters: Joe Jarrow, a ship-worker turned self-professed tramp, and Dick Rogan, who having returned from a five-year spell in prison also appears to have no fixed abode. As we will see, both characters conform with a conception of homelessness oriented around a refusal to work and both characters play a combative role when subverting this into a positive attribute: challenging the assumptions of the other working-­ class characters in the novel, while in the process targeting the narrowness of their conception of class struggle. At the same time, it will also be argued that though generally aligned these characters signify two quite

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different forms of rebuke: one combative but detached, and the other violently committed. In pitching these alternatives against one another, it will be suggested that Ten-A-Penny People is more explicit than any fictional work we have so far considered in exploring and interrogating the radical possibilities suggested by a celebration of the tramp lifestyle. From the very beginning, Ten-A-Penny People is set up as a novel about the damaging effects of a working life and the need to find alternatives. It opens with an account of a dispute between Joe Jarrow (whose name clearly references the town made famous by a 1936 hunger march) and his father six years prior to the main events described in the novel, in which Joe suggests that a lifetime of labour has ‘warped’ his father and ‘made a baste’ of him—insisting: ‘I ain’t gonna be that’, as he instead plans ‘to stay a man’ (1938, 10–1). The suggestion that a life of work is emasculating is reinforced when Joe’s love interest, Kitty, proposes that if he gives in to his father’s demand that he get a job then he ‘ain’t a man at all’—pointing out that men like that are ‘ten a penny’, in the passage from which the novel derives its title (1938, 17). After defying Kitty by accepting a position on a ship, Joe is presented with a copy of Jack London’s short story ‘The Apostate’, about a boy who decides to abandon a life of work for the road. Joe is convinced and spends the intervening years tramping across America before returning to the United Kingdom—his anti-work beliefs now stronger than ever. Upon his return, Joe not only refuses to work—objecting to the idea of being ‘a galley slave chained to an oar’—but also refuses to join the Communist Party, as he instead describes himself as a ‘tramp and revolutionary’ and proposes that he’d ‘join a tramp’s union if there was one’ (1938,  124, 126). As Lester puts it, ‘Jarrow has rejected life based on the work ethic altogether’ (2011, 12). This is not to say that he does not support the industrial action—as in a clash between a group of strikers and the police he sides with the latter (1938, 206). And yet even here, he explicitly states his disillusionment with those he is defending— rebuking the strikers for fighting ‘nice and legally’ in a manner that reinforces a sense of his partial detachment (Ibid.). In his reading of the novel, Lester argues that ‘Phelan’s own position is […] akin to that of Joe Jarrow’—supporting his suggestion elsewhere that Phelan’s outlook ‘is certainly not any conventional Communist Party one’ (2011, 17, 12). Indeed, there are instances in which Joe’s cynicism about the limitations of a syndicalist agenda are embodied on a more general level in the novel: for instance, at the heading of a chapter that sets out to communicate the content of a trade union meeting, Phelan writes in

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italics: ‘May be skipped. Dry prosaic stuff—all about an ordinary union meeting’—clearly mirroring Joe’s scorn for aspects of the labour movement (1938, 114). The sense that Phelan is aligned to Joe’s outlook is further reinforced by the novel’s ending, in which a lorry driver called Ted Langley—who had formerly refused to join in a song sung by Joe criticising the working-classes for the manner in which they ‘bend suppliant knee’ (1938, 152)—appears to have been converted to Joe’s way of thinking as he sings: We look to the day when oppression must go, When toilers are freed from their want and their woe When toilers are freed from the usurer’s code We’ll sing he-de-doh-diddle along the North Road. (1938, 285)

Phelan here clearly privileges Joe’s position by enabling him to transform the outlook of at least one union member who now acknowledges the need to agitate for freedom from work and not just better working conditions. In ending the novel on this note, and in titling it after Kitty’s derogatory remark that men who live to work are ‘ten a penny’—it would appear that the suggestion that Joe and Phelan’s outlooks are aligned has some merit, indicating that Ten-A-Penny People can be read as a novel that explicitly lends its support to radical anti-productivist sentiment rather than simply as a novel with a character who embodies such a viewpoint. At the same time, Ten-A-Penny People also confronts the reader with an alternative approach to Jarrow’s—to which I would argue Phelan appears to be equally sympathetic. Though it is never made explicit that Dick Rogan—a former convict and the brother of a leading activist in the industrial dispute—is someone who might be described as a tramp, the suggestion that ‘he had an expression of great calm, of unusual peace, of self-confidence’ is very much in accordance with Phelan’s description of the tramp demeanour in his memoirs (1938, 84). In short staccato sentences Dick also reveals that, like Joe, he refuses to work in an office or a factory: ‘Office. Factory. Study. Don’t suit. Next century—I’m normal. This—I’m wrong. Work, no’ (1938, 72). While it is clear that Joe and Dick thus have much in common—it also becomes apparent that they diverge when we consider their respective approaches to the industrial dispute at the heart of the novel. While Joe berates the strikers for their compliance and refuses to join the Communist Party—Dick’s response is instead to dramatically escalate the dispute as much as he is able. Halfway

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through the novel we learn that a shipping magnate called Richard Fletton, who has reduced the pay of 4000 employees and sacked those most likely to play leading roles in the dispute, has been murdered—his skull crushed ‘by a blow from a bar or hammer’—we later learn by Dick (1938, 143). Thus, while Joe’s disillusionment with the manner in which those within the labour movement are seen to bend a ‘suppliant knee’ leads to his detachment, Dick conversely engages in direct and violent action against those opposed to the workers’ cause. Significantly, this behaviour is subjected to praise rather than condemnation in the course of the novel—as when it is revealed that Dick is responsible for murdering Fletton the action is unapologetically supported by Dick’s brother, Tom, who is also a prominent strike leader: ‘There’s no-one else, no-one else in the world like my brother Dick’ (1938, 281). Returning to Lester’s claim that ‘Phelan’s own position is […] akin to that of Joe Jarrow’—we might thus challenge this by suggesting that while Joe’s anti-productivist stance is affirmed in the course of narrative, a degree of ambivalence is at the same time generated around his spirit of detachment as the possibility of violent commitment is also sympathetically explored through the character of Dick. Clearly here we are a world away from the suggestion in Phelan’s later memoirs that tramps ‘walk along to seek peace’, as both Dick and Joe embody a hyper masculine and combative vision of the revolutionary tramp. Relatedly, this earlier text seems to take a decidedly different stance to the memoirs in subjecting the spirit of detachment that Phelan would later condone to a greater level of scrutiny. Thus, while Phelan’s memoirs were seen to be limited in terms of their radical credentials (to the point of being classifiable as non-radical) as a spirit of detachment is upheld— Phelan’s fiction appears to be both explicitly radical and interrogatory in terms of its exploration of different models of combativeness, in the process exceeding anything we have yet seen (even in Worby) in terms of its willingness to openly explore the possible links between the figure of the  tramp, criminality and the prospect of societal transformation. As Lester notes, Phelan was ‘far from isolated in seeing the tramp as a healthy, assertive character unencumbered by the disciplines and conformities of the system, rather than as some abject casualty of the social system’ (2011, 18)—providing as examples the writing of O’Flaherty, Fox, Hanley and Halward. And yet in Phelan’s fiction writing, the revolutionary potential of this non-conformity is perhaps made more explicit than it is in any of these authors—as he emphasises the complicity of many on the left with an

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oppressive productivist ideology, while simultaneously exploring the respective merits of alternative forms of resistance. 3.4.3 Chris Massie (b.1881) Chris Massie was a prolific novelist who wrote on a broad range of themes—from his 1937 novel about a suffragette, Esther Vanner, to his 1936 novel about a circus performer, A Modern Calvus: Being the Life Story of Karl Frank, Midget, and Man of Genius. A number of his books were turned into films—for instance his 1944 Pity My Simplicity, which was adapted by Ayn Rand into the 1945 film Love Letters, and his 1941 novel Corridor of Mirrors, adapted into a 1948 film of the same name. This section focusses on a selection of Massie’s writing in which the subject of homelessness features most prominently: namely, two early short stories—‘The Soul in a Blind Alley’, published in 1912, and ‘Willie Pink’, published in 1913—alongside his 1939 novel Penny Whipp. As we saw in the previous chapter, in his memoir The Confessions of a Vagabond Massie simultaneously emphasises hardships endured on the road alongside claims that he has been personally ‘enriched’ by these experiences, indicating that the memoir might be read as implicitly radical in the sense that it encourages readers to envisage alternative methods of refusing work and associated norms. At the same time, we also noted that Massie’s memoir can be seen to sidetrack readers away from drawing such conclusions as he suggests that capitalism is ‘an inevitable process in the evolution of society’. Mirroring the pattern we just saw in Phelan: in Massie’s fiction writing, we similarly find that the limitations of the memoirs are to some degree overcome, as the texts to be analysed again fall into the implicitly radical category but without notable instances of Massie attempting to prevent radical conclusions from being drawn. Massie’s 1912 ‘The Soul in a Blind Alley’ tells the story of a young man called Johnny who from an early age, we learn, has had an innate dislike of work, having witnessed his mother ‘always doing work’ and taking ‘little notice of him’ (1967a, 399). Though he spends his childhood enjoying the ‘relentless beauty in nature’, as Johnny grows up he is forced ‘into touch with reality’, so that by the age of twelve we are told that ‘a suffocating sense of the dreadful earnestness of this world fell like a pall over his imagination’ (1967a, 400–3). Johnny soon finds himself in ‘a unit in the commercial life of the world’s greatest city’, bearing witness to ‘the ceaseless stream of preoccupied individuals who passed him by’ and who make

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him feel ‘lonely and distant from humanity’ (1967a, 404). He finds that working as a clerk his existence becomes ‘mean and trivial’ as he has ‘no time for life’—so that he appears to contemplate taking to the road in ‘a fugitive glimpse of the nobler possibilities of life—a vision of lost possessions’ (1967a, 405–6). And yet, he is unable to go through with it as Massie explains, ‘within him was the tireless torture of morbid egoism’— so that he ultimately resolves not ‘to make a mess of life’, determining instead to ‘accept the conditions, and work out his own salvation’ (1967a, 406). The story ends with Johnny coming to the bitter realisation that his conception of what it means to ‘make a mess of life’ had been misguided— as, looking at his position, his comfort and his career, he is forced to admit: ‘It’s been a muck up’ (1967a, 409). While ‘The Soul in a Blind Alley’ presents a character who toys with, but cannot commit to a life on the road, ‘Willie Pink’—published a year later—tells the story of another young male who conversely does commit and who suffers the consequences. The eponymous protagonist of ‘Willie Pink’ is ‘a middle-class grammar school’ boy whose ‘great ambition was to be a carpenter’—although his parents are instead ‘bent on making him a gentleman’ (1967b, 442). After being found a job in ‘the office of Brock, Willis and Company’, Willie complains that he has ‘nothing to look back on, nothing to look forward to’ and proves ‘a distinct and uncompromising failure’ (1967b, 443–5). Following a failed attempt to run away and become a sailor—after which his parents refuse to take him back—he reflects: ‘His people were impossible people, and he was impossible—the world was impossible, and all he could do in it was to meander about’ (1967b, 447). Willie takes to the road, but is unable to fend for himself— and is discovered half-starving by a tramp who takes him to a nearby casual ward, where he is refused adequate assistance. Following his death the tramp bemoans the ‘culpable negligence’ of the workhouse, and laments the demise of the ‘poor softy’ (1967b, 452–3). While the picture of life on the road presented here is a bleak one—the focus is quite clearly on the indifference of both Willie’s parents and the workhouse tramp major, cumulatively seen to be responsible for Willie’s death. ‘Willie Pink’ and ‘The Soul in a Blind Alley’ thus present two different but related outlooks on the subject of homelessness: on the one hand demonstrating the tribulations suffered by those without the courage to take to the road; on the other demonstrating the hardships for those who conversely do make this decision. Viewed together, these two stories clearly suggest that while homelessness may be preferable to a life of conformity and work, it is still

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tied to suffering and hardship—creating an impasse that clearly mirrors what we discerned in Massie’s memoirs and which may be seen to be indicative of an implicitly radical leaning. Turning to Massie’s 1939 novel Penny Whipp, we see this same pattern repeated—but without having to play two works off one another in order to draw this conclusion. Like the fiction of Hanley and Phelan, Penny Whipp is experimental in form—combining surreal subject matter with an expressionistic prose style. Massie explains in a preface to the novel: ‘I make no attempt at what is called reality. The truth about anything is not in documentation, facts, data, surface values and appearances, but in its presentation as a whole to the imagination; and that applies very particularly to all artistic work’ (1939, 12). In telling the story of two homeless individuals—Daniel Bond and Penelope Whipp—Massie’s novel describes a brilliantly strange series of events, often veering off into the supernatural. The narrative begins in medias res: a workhouse on the fringes of a London slum called Marsh Town—before Massie transports us back in time to when Daniel and Penny first met, while both swimming in a river near the fictional town of Long Kepton in Norfolk. A connection is developed, but the pair separate—until Daniel rediscovers Penny ‘destitute’ and ‘on the road’ (1939, 42). The pair then spend the rest of the summer and the beginning of autumn together, amusing themselves ‘in woods, under hayricks, and in ditches’ (1939, 35). Things soon turn sour, however, as Penny becomes ill with a septic foot and the pair run out of money—forcing them to resort to the workhouse. Inside the workhouse they are separated and have encounters with a benevolent clergyman called Arthur Goast and a procuress called Mercy Kibble, who attempts to turn Penny to sex work. The bulk of the novel concentrates on Penny and Daniel’s relationships with these two characters: on the one hand, chronicling Goast’s efforts to help Daniel and Penny (along with the other inhabitants of the workhouse) without ‘pretence of holiness’, leading to the conclusion that he ‘does more harm than good’, and on the other describing Mercy’s ‘lust for possession’ of Penny and how this develops into feelings of love before her untimely death (1939, 69, 248, 100). Central to the narrative is the fact that Penny suffers from catalepsy: a condition that apparently causes her to have visitations from a ‘Red Imp’, but that she is able to delay by ‘surrendering herself to someone else’—leading Penny to effectively enslave herself to Daniel, Goast and Mercy at different points in the novel (1939, 110–1). The novel ends with Penny and Daniel being reunited, and with Penny declaring that she doesn’t ‘want the world to come any nearer than

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it is’—following which the two go swimming and Penny seemingly attempts to drown them both, with Daniel succumbing after it becomes evident that she is dead (1939, 332–5). As this summary suggests Penny Whipp does not shy away from indicating (often in an abstract way) the hardships associated with life on the road as Penny and Daniel suffer physically, are preyed upon by others and ultimately appear to elect death over life on the road—clearly pointing towards a late modern conception of homelessness oriented around destitution. And yet at the same time, the novel is full of moments that suggest the subversive possibilities that come with such an existence. At the start of Penny Whipp, for instance, a vivid contrast is set up between the workhouse—where Penny and Daniel are confined to ‘one hopeless spot’—and the vagrant lifestyle, where they are free from ‘insidious respectabilities’ (1939, 18, 50). Relatedly there is a sense that Penny and Daniel are free to live in the present when on the road, as Massie writes: He never talked about her past or her future, and she never talked about his. The secret of happiness is to live in the present without any dragging retrospect or prospect. The animals were like that, and they were tramps and nearest to the beasts. (1939, 57)

The anti-productivist dimension to this defence of life on the road is rendered explicit when Goast sets out to civilise Daniel by providing him with a job writing book reviews and a room in his mother’s house, and Daniel— while appreciative of the gesture—baulks at the reality of what it entails: realising that as a tramp ‘he had cut himself adrift from the irksome responsibilities of home, family, social purpose and ambition’, and that since settling and accepting a job he now runs the risk of being ‘cheated, balked, and driven into circumscribed boundaries and compounds of civilisation’ (1939, 208). Shortly following this, Daniel’s frustration at his sense of ‘lost liberty’ is significant enough that the narrator remarks: ‘Anyone entering the room to watch his movements would have been convinced he was in the presence of a madman’, as he gnashes his teeth and whines like a dog (1939, 214–5). As Penny suggests to Goast when reflecting on why Daniel has rejected his charity and run away: ‘He’s wilful and independent, and not at all inclined to settle down and be respectable’ (1939, 220). Another sense in which the subversive possibilities of life on the road are articulated in Penny Whipp is through the bizarre circumstances

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surrounding Penny’s illness. As suggested above—a central plot device in the novel concerns Penny’s ‘passion for surrender’ as a strategy that she develops to delay the either supernatural or hallucinatory effects of her catalepsy (1939, 111). The interesting thing to note here is Penny’s insistence that though her resultant submissiveness might give the impression of servitude, this is in fact a foil—as she instead admits that ‘by completely surrendering herself to someone else’ she is able to ‘pass the devil on’ (1939, 111). Thus, Penny’s acts of submission are in effect acts of revenge: something that is later rendered explicit as the narrator informs us that a ‘tyrant who had raped her was soon after run over by a lorry across the thick part of his thighs’ and that an ‘old woman who had beaten her had fallen down stairs and broken her neck’ (1939, 118). Mercy’s death, although Penny regrets it, would thus appear to be a kind of punishment for her attempts to push Penny into sex work. This theme of supernatural retribution (albeit masquerading as submission) is, it might be argued, suggestive of a sense of poetic justice in the face of the wrongs committed against the homeless, in this sense clearly channelling a spirit of subversion and vengeance. And yet, ultimately, though Penny Whipp may be seen in various ways to indicate the subversive potential of homelessness—it also underlines how as an alternative model of existence life on the road is not sustainable, implying that societal pressures have rendered one of the few possible alternatives to a life of work and compliance unfeasible as it ultimately suggests that homelessness leads either to the workhouse or to death. As Penny declares shortly before killing both herself and Daniel—indicating both how far they have strayed from mainstream society, and how powerless they have become: ‘I don’t understand people and people don’t understand me’ (1939, 332). Thus, while Phelan’s fiction may be seen to come into the explicitly radical category as he appears unperturbed by a sense of the limitations of the tramp lifestyle, and as he instead seems to be preoccupied with the issue of how to escalate the tramp’s refusal into a wider agenda—Massie’s fiction simultaneously celebrates the tramp lifestyle and draws attention to its untenability in a manner that perhaps encourages readers to draw their own radical conclusions about the need for a clearer alternative. Of course, we know from Massie’s memoir writing that he was sceptical about anti-capitalist politics—and yet, the absence of such reflections in his tramp fiction (even if they can admittedly be found in other fictional works, such as his 1929 novel Peccavi), together with the fact that this does not necessarily preclude the possibility of

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Massie adopting a radically anti-productivist position, enables us to draw the conclusion that Penny Whipp can be read as a work of reverse discourse tramp fiction in an implicitly radical anti-productivist vein.

4   Conclusion In this chapter reverse discourse tramp fiction has been defined as a genre of literature distinct from but intimately connected to other fiction works featuring homeless characters—bringing together the laudatory aspect of early modern representations found in Head/Kirkham, Carew/Goadby and Gay with an attempt to emphasise the suffering and unproductiveness of the homeless that we find in late modern representations in Crabbe, Dickens, Morrison and Harkness by finding a basis for praise in the tramp’s perceived unproductiveness rather than its perceived masterlessness, echoing moments in authors like Wordsworth while also surpassing them in their commitment to this idea. As previously, in exploring these works three lines of inquiry have been developed: first, we have considered the effectiveness with which the texts in question can be seen to have functioned as a reverse discourse, and the extent to which they can be classified as anti-productivist; second, we have considered whether in the process there is a totalising dimension elevating this celebration of the tramp’s imagined subversiveness to the status of radical literature; and third, we have sought to identify any broader limitations within the genre as a whole. As previously, this chapter concludes by asking what the analysis above can be seen to have proven in response to these three lines of inquiry. 4.1   Tramp Fiction as a Reverse Discourse Unlike the previous chapter—in which an overview of the tramp memoir genre as a whole was offered, from which it was possible to determine roughly the proportion of life writing texts that could be seen to qualify as belonging in the reverse discourse category—this chapter has taken a different approach in offering a select overview of fiction on homelessness before isolating reverse discourse tramp fiction  examples. Though it is therefore not possible to provide a ratio of identified reverse discourse tramp fiction to identified non-reverse discourse tramp fiction texts, we may still confidently claim that the overwhelming majority of the fictional representations of homelessness produced during this era (a fraction of which have been covered) did not fall into the category of reverse discourse tramp fiction. Nonetheless, in identifying eighteen authors whose writing did, we have demonstrated that this was a significant counter-trend.

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In terms of the proportion of reverse discourse tramp fiction authors identified who have been found to demonstrate anti-productivist inclinations, if we are to insist on categorising these authors for the sake of analytical clarity (while acknowledging that in reality they do not fall so neatly into assigned categories): of the seven writers considered in detail (namely Kennedy, Davies, Brierley, Carnie Holdsworth, Hanley, Phelan and Massie), only one (Hanley) was seen not to exhibit strong signs of an anti-productivist tendency; while of the eleven additional authors of reverse discourse tramp fiction considered  (Skene, Crawford, Brighouse, Gissing, Calder-Marshall, Halward, Garrett, MacGill, O’Flaherty, Fox and Hilton), three were shown to exhibit no clear sign of an anti-productivist streak (Calder-Marshall,  Halward  and Garrett). Thus the overwhelming majority of the reverse discourse tramp fiction authors whose work I have been able to identify (fourteen out of eighteen, if we are to insist on putting a number on it) have been found to exhibit distinctive anti-productivist leanings—although, as already indicated, the suggestion that authors like Wordsworth foreshadowed some of these tendencies and the fact that this chapter does not claim to offer a comprehensive overview of the reverse discourse tramp fiction genre indicates the hazardousness of placing too much faith in these deductions. 4.2  Reverse Discourse Tramp Fiction as Radical Anti-productivist Literature In terms of how effectively chosen examples of reverse discourse tramp fiction may be seen to function as instances of radical anti-productivist discourse—the picture varies quite significantly from the one presented in the previous chapter. Whereas in the previous chapter nine out of the twenty-four writers identified as authors of reverse discourse tramp memoirs were seen to qualify as in any way radical—here the majority have been seen to fall into this category. If we are to again insist on classifying these authors, we might conclude that of the seven authors considered in detail, every single one was seen to be classifiable as to some extent radical—with one falling into the explicitly radical anti-productivist category (Phelan), one uniting elements of both implicitly and explicitly radical anti-productivist discourse (Carnie Holdsworth), two falling straightforwardly into the implicitly radical anti-productivist category (Kennedy and Massie), two on the verge of being classifiable as non-radical but ultimately also falling into the implicitly radical anti-productivist category (Davies and Brierley), and one exhibiting implicitly radical inclinations but not in an anti-productivist spirit (Hanley). Of the eleven authors of reverse discourse tramp fiction considered in less detail in this chapter, one was

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shown to unite implicitly and explicitly radical anti-productivist elements (Hilton), two showed signs of implicitly radical anti-productivist tendencies (Gissing and MacGill), five were shown to permit but not actively encourage radical anti-productivist readings (Skene, Crawford, Brighouse, O’Flaherty and Fox), one was shown to exhibit radical tendencies but not in an anti-productivist spirit (Calder-Marshall), and two can be classified as permitting but not encouraging radical interpretation but again not in an anti-productivist spirit (Halward and Garrett). Thus, in short, if forced to categorise the eighteen authors of reverse discourse tramp fiction identified in this chapter, fourteen were seen to permit, encourage or demand radical anti-productivist interpretation. While again acknowledging  that this is not a comprehensive survey—the trend nonetheless appears to be that fiction seems to have provided a clearer avenue for radical discourse than memoir writing. 4.3  Broader Limitations In terms of the broader limitations—in the previous chapter, two were identified: the first being moments in which the texts express disciplinary sentiments in spite of their reverse discourse statuses; the second being the exclusionary tendencies within the genre as a whole, both in terms of expressed outlooks within the texts and in terms of the backgrounds of the authors that the genre is comprised of—with this latter point being presented as the single most devastating criticism that can be levelled against the tramp memoir genre. In the survey of reverse discourse tramp fiction offered in this chapter we have perhaps seen fewer examples of disciplinary sentiments or exclusionary tendencies in terms of expressed outlook. Although more such instances could undoubtedly have been identified had we been relentless in our pursuit of them, it seems adequate enough for the purposes of this study to note that there are relatively few overt leanings in this direction. The perhaps obvious reason for this is that works of fiction do not encourage explicit expressions of belief (and in turn prejudice) in the same way that the life writing format does—so that the form is possibly a little more forgiving (or alternatively, concealing). As for the question of the exclusionary tendencies on the level of authorial representation—the impression conveyed has been pretty much equivalent to that in the previous chapter. Of the eighteen authors of reverse discourse tramp fiction identified in the preceding analysis, two were female. In terms of the question of ethnicity, race and nationality, the picture conveyed has

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been even less diverse than in the previous chapter—with all of the authors of reverse discourse tramp fiction that have been analysed being white and of either  British or Irish  descent. Again, although an Irish nationality could be seen to constitute a minority ethnicity or nationality in a British setting—and although this is perhaps an area worthy of more detailed consideration—the general impression has been that the British reverse discourse tramp fiction genre (defined as British on the basis of place of publication as opposed to author nationality) lacks diversity in terms of race, ethnicity and nationality. As for the subject of sexuality: it is perhaps worth noting that Hilton’s Champion and Hanley’s Boy both have distinctly homoerotic passages—but, again, there remains an absence of authors with a declared non-heterosexual orientation, and fewer instances in which non-heterosexual orientation is written into the texts than might be wished for. 4.4  Summary In summary, then, we have in this chapter unearthed a significant number of texts that might be classified as belonging to the anti-productivist reverse discourse tramp fiction tradition. Of these works we have found that the tendency to either encourage or explicitly state a radical anti-­ productivist agenda is proportionately greater than among examples of reverse discourse memoir writing. At the same time, we have also seen how on a representational level this body of work may be seen to be just as flawed as the example of reverse discourse tramp memoir writing considered in the previous chapter.

Works Cited Allen, John. 2004. Homelessness in American Literature: Romanticism, Realism and Testimony. New York: Routledge. Anon. 1750. An Apology for the Life of Mr. Bampfylde-Moore Carew: Commonly Called the King of the Beggars. London: R. Goadby. ———. 1875. ‘The Begger-boy of the North.’ In The Roxburghe Ballads, Volume 3. Hertford: Stephen Austin and Sons. ———. 1909. ‘A Factory-Girl Poet.’ The Review of Reviews. December. ———. 1913. ‘Mill Girl Becomes Novelist.’ The Christian Science Monitor, June 21.

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———. 1914. ‘Rebel Pen Club of Working Women.’ The Christian Science Monitor, January 10. ———. 1935. ‘Books of the Day.’ The Manchester Guardian. April 12. Bannet, Eve Tavor. 2011. Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810: Migrant Fictions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barrell, John. 1999. ‘Afterword: Moving Stories, Still Lives.’ In The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, ed. Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry and Joseph Ward. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beales, H.L., and R.S.  Lambert. 1934. Memoirs of the Unemployed. London: Gollancz. Bivona, Daniel, and Roger B. Henkle. 2006. The Imagination of Class: Masculinity and the Victorian Urban Poor. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. 1988. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Brierley, Walter. [1933] 2011. Means Test Man. Nottingham: Spokesman Books. ———. 1937. The Sandwichman. London: Methuen. Brighouse, Harold. 1922. ‘Once a Hero.’ In The Best British Short Stories of 1922, ed. Edward Joseph O’Brien and John Cournos. London: Houghton Mifflin Company: 56–102. Calder-Marshall, Arthur. 1937. Pie in the Sky. London: Jonathan Cape. Carnie Holdsworth, Ethel. [1913] 2013. Miss Nobody. Scotland: Kennedy and Boyd. ———. [1925] 2011. This Slavery. Nottingham: Trent Editions. Cazamian, Louis. 1973. The Social Novel in England 1830–1850. London and New York: Routledge. Chandler, Frank. 1907. The Literature of Roguery. New York: B. Franklin. Crabbe, George. 1829. The Poetical Works of George Crabbe: Complete in One Volume. Paris: A. and W. Galignani. Crawford, James Hunter. 1900. The Autobiography of a Tramp. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Croft, Andy. 1990. Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s. London: Lawrence and Wishart. ———. 2011. ‘Introduction’ to Means-Test Man, by Walter Brierley. Nottingham: Spokesman Books: vii–xvi. Davies, W.H. 1911. A Weak Woman. London: Duckworth & Co. ———. [1911] 1951. The Essential W.H. Davies. London: Cape. ———. 1927. Dancing Mad. London: Cape. Dickens, Charles. 1838. Oliver Twist; Or, The Parish Boy’s Progress. London: Richard Bentley. ———. 1841. The Old Curiosity Shop. London: Chapman and Hall. ———. 1842. Oliver Twist. London: Lea & Blanchard. ———. 1867. Our Mutual Friend. London: Ticknor and Fields.

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Fanger, Donald. 1998. Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Fludernik, Monika. 2008. ‘The Eighteenth-Century Legacy.’ In A Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. David Paroissien. London: John Wiley & Sons: 65–80. Fordham, John. 2002. James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Fox, R.M. [1919] 1993. ‘Casuals of the City.’ In Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries: Working-class Stories of the 1920s, ed. H. Gustav Klaus. London and Colorado: Journeyman: 25–9. Fox, Pamela. 1994. Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working Class Novel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Garrett, George. 1999. ‘The Pianist.’ In The Collected George Garrett. Nottingham: Trent Editions: 181–184. Gay, John. [1728] 1729. The Beggar’s Opera. London: John Watts. Gissing, George. [1889] 2008. The Nether World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. [1891] 2012. New Grub Street. London: Penguin. ———. 1895. ‘The Place of Realism in Fiction.’ The Humanitarian 7 (1): 14–16. ———. 1901. ‘Transplanted.’ In Human Odds and Ends. London: A.H. Bullen: 244–50. Goldsmith, Jason. 2015. ‘Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, 1800.’ In The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, ed. Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 204–20. Goode, John. [1982] 2018. ‘Margaret Harkness and the Socialist Novel.’ In The Socialist Novel in Britain, ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Sussex: Edward Everett: 45–66. Greene, Robert. [1591] 1923. A Notable Discovery of Coosnage, ed. G.B. Harrison. London: John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd. Halward, Leslie. 1937. ‘On the Road.’ In Writing in Revolt: Theory and Examples. No. 4. London: Fact: 54–8. Hanley, James. [1930] 1944. Drift. London: Nicholson and Watson. ———. [1931] 2007. Boy. London: Oneworld Classics Ltd. ———. 1931. ‘Rubbish.’ In Men in Darkness. London: John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd.: 261–76.  Harrison, Gary Lee. 1994. Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse: Poetry, Poverty, and Power. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Harvey, Richard. 1984. ‘English Pre-Industrial Ballads on Poverty, 1500–1700.’ The Historian 46 (4): 539–561. Haywood, Ian. 1997. Working-class Fiction: From Chartism to “Trainspotting”. Plymouth: Northcote House. Head, Richard. [1665] 2013. The English Rogue—Described in the Life of Meriton Latroon a Witty Extravagant Being a Complete History of the Most Eminent Cheats of Both Sexes. London: Routledge. Hilton, Jack. 1937. Champion. London: Jonathan Cape.

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Hitchcock, David. 2016. Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Hitchcock, Tim. [2004] 2017. Down and Out in Eighteenth Century London. London: Continuum. Jameson, Fredric. [1981] 2002. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Oxford: Routledge. Jameson, Storm. 1961. Morley Roberts: The Last Eminent Victorian. London: The Unicorn Press. Joseph, Betty. 2014. ‘The Political Economy of the English Rogue.’ The Eighteenth Century 55 (2/3): 175–191. Kennedy, Bart. 1898. The Wandering Romanoff. London: Thomas Burleigh. ———. [1902] 1913. A Sailor Tramp. London: George Newnes, Ltd. Kinney, Arthur. 1990. Rogues and Vagabonds & Study Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press. Klaus, H.  Gustav. [1982] 2018. ‘Silhouettes of Revolution: Some Neglected Novels of the Early 1920s.’ In The Socialist Novel in Britain, ed. H.  Gustav Klaus. Sussex: Edward Everett: 89–109. ———. 1993. Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries; Working-class Stories of the 1920s. London and Colorado: Journeyman. ———. 2017. ‘On the Road: All Manner of Tramps in English and Scottish Writing from the 1880s to the 1920s.’ In A History of British Working Class Literature, ed. John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan. London and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 296–310. Lambert, Carolyn. 2013. The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction. Brighton: Victorian Secrets Limited. Langan, Celeste. 1995. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Law, John. [Margaret Harkness] 1888. Out of Work. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Lester, Paul. 2011. Tales of a Lifer: The Writings of Jim Phelan. Birmingham: Protean. MacGill, Patrick. [1914] 1985. Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of a Navvy. London: Caliban Books. Marcus, Steven. 1991. ‘Homelessness and Dickens.’ Social Research 58 (1): 93–106. Massie, Chris. [1912] 1967a. ‘The Soul in a Blind Alley.’ In The English Review, Volume 11. London: Duckworth & Company. ———. [1913] 1967b. ‘Willie Pink.’ In The English Review, Volume 15. London: Duckworth & Company. ———. 1939. Penny Whipp. London: Secker and Warburg. Morgan, Charlotte. [1911] 2010. The Rise of the Novel of Manners: A Study of English Prose Fiction Between 1600 and 1740. New  York: Columbia University Press.

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Morrison, Arthur. [1869] 2012. A Child of the Jago. Oxford: Oxford World Classics. ———. 1894. ‘Without Visible Means.’ In Tales of Mean Streets. London: Methuen & Company: 65–83. Moseley, C.W.R.D. 1971. ‘Richard Head’s “The English Rogue”: A Modern Mandeville?’ The Yearbook of English Studies 1: 102–107. Moult, Thomas. 1934. W.H. Davies. London: Butterworth. ———. 1938. ‘Short Stories.’ The Manchester Guardian, November. O’Flaherty, Liam. [1924] 1993. ‘The Tramp.’ In Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries; Working-class Stories of the 1920s, ed. H. Gustav Klaus. London and Colorado: Journeyman: 15–24. Orwell, George. [1940] 1998. ‘The Proletarian Writer.’ In The Complete Works of George Orwell: Volume Twelve: A Patriot After All, 1940—1941, ed. Peter Davison. London: Secker and Warburg: 294–8. Phelan, Jim. 1938. Ten-A-Penny People. London: Gollancz. ———. 1954. Tramp at Anchor. London: George G. Harrap. Pollard, Arthur. 2003. George Crabbe: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge. Roberts, Morley. 1912. The Private Life of Henry Maitland. London: E. Nash. ———. 2015. ‘Red Jim of the S.P.’ In Selected Stories of Morley Roberts, ed. Markus Neacey. London: Victorian Secrets Ltd.: 41–54. Skene, Felicia. 1893. ‘The Autobiography of a Tramp.’ In The Belgravia: A London Magazine. London: Arthur F. May & Co.: 167–79. Stamper, Joseph. 1934. Slum. London: John Long. ———. [1931] 1966. Less Than Dust. London: Hutchinson and Co. Sutherland, John. 1989. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Swafford, Kevin. 2007. Class in Late-Victorian Britain: The Narrative Concern with Social Hierarchy and its Representation. New York: Cambria Press. Winton, Calhoun. 1994. ‘Richard Head and Origins of the Picaresque in England.’ In The Picaresque: A Symposium on the Rogue’s Tale, ed. Carmen Benito-Vessels and Michael Zappala. Newark: University of Delaware Press: 79–93. Wordsworth, William. [1798] 2008. ‘The Female Vagrant.’ In Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1800: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, ed. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter. Peterborough, ON, Canada: Broadview Editions: 218–226.

CHAPTER 4

Conclusion

In the introduction to this text, having explored the possibility that tramp literature could be seen to represent a reverse discourse challenging values relating to work, gender and sexuality, and community—as well as embodying the possible advantages of partial extrication from societally produced estrangement effects linked to capitalism—it was proposed that it is potentially problematic to fixate upon a marginalised group identity in this way, on the grounds that no text can be seen to be fully representative of such an identity, and on the grounds that foregrounding marginal group status detracts from a more necessary and politically effective focus on questions pertaining to the social totality. At the same time it was acknowledged that the texts in question are, in essence, works tied to a particular identity. The solution envisaged was therefore to avoid reading works of tramp literature in terms of how representative they are of the minority group whose experiences they chronicle, but to instead read them in terms of what they might be seen to say in relation to society as a whole—while at the same time acknowledging that as many of these texts take the form of an identity-­oriented reverse discourse, they might resist such a reading. More specifically, it was proposed that following the suggestion that  select works within the tramp literature tradition might be read as embodying a challenge to work culture and associated norms, the object of this study should be to determine which of the texts fall into this category and whether they lend themselves to being interpreted as texts that comment on these issues in a manner that has a radical dimension: the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Lewin Davies, The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73432-9_4

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hope being that we might thus be able to defend our interest in them by proving that they can be read as works of radical anti-productivist literature (or literature that questions a disciplinary preoccupation with the demand to be productive in a manner that pertains to the social totality), rather than as merely subversive works that though still of interest cannot be seen to fully represent the social group whose experiences they depict and cannot be seen in themselves to function as an adequate riposte against the work-oriented machinations of disciplinary and capitalist society. In order to clarify what it might mean if  select works of reverse discourse tramp literature resist or permit being read in this way, three models of anti-productivist literature were then outlined: namely, radical anti-productivist discourse, non-radical anti-­productivist discourse and implicitly radical anti-productivist discourse. In attempting to determine which (if any) of these categories given works in the reverse discourse tramp literature tradition might be situated alongside or within, it was proposed that we ask three sets of questions: first, whether the texts do indeed function as a reverse discourse, and whether in the process they exhibit anti-productivist tendencies; second, whether they reflect a totalising dimension indicating a radical bent, and whether this is in an implicit or an explicit mould; and third, whether there are any broader limitations that we should be aware of.

1   Summary of Findings In the concluding passages of the preceding two chapters we have established some clear answers to these questions, while at the same time acknowledging that attempts to categorise given works are necessarily reductive and that the overview offered in this study cannot claim to be comprehensive. Within the domain of tramp memoir writing it was for instance suggested that of the thirty-three authors considered, twenty-­four are classifiable as authors in the reverse discourse tradition—and of these, nine are classifiable as authors in the radical anti-productivist discourse tradition. Within the domain of tramp fiction writing, though it was not possible to offer so precise an estimate of the proportion of reverse discourse works owing to the number of possible texts—the conclusion was drawn that the reverse discourse tendency was a minority though significant trend within the broader domain of tramp or homeless fiction in the period under consideration. Of the eighteen authors of reverse discourse tramp fiction

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identified, fourteen were found to be classifiable as authors who either permitted, encouraged or demanded radical anti-­productivist interpretation. Of all of the examples of radical anti-productivist reverse discourse tramp literature gathered together in this study—the vast majority were found to either fall into the implicitly radical category or into a new previously unidentified category of text that permits but does not actively encourage radical interpretation (six out of the nine identified radical anti-­ productivist tramp memoirs, and thirteen out of the fourteen identified  works of radical anti-productivist tramp fiction). Few (if any) were seen to be radical in the sense of indicating that the tramp experience should be directly emulated. The most effectively radical works were generally found to be those that underlined the advantages of the tramp’s perceived circumnavigation of productivist norms while also acknowledging the severe limitations of homelessness as a mode of resistance—thus pointing to the need for more effective means of realising a resistance against the disciplinary demand to be productive, and associated norms. In terms of the broader limitations of these two genres of writing—two recurring conclusions were drawn. First, the texts were seen to occasionally counteract subversive or radical inclinations by reflecting disciplinary ideology. Second, the texts were seen to sporadically prove exclusionary in terms of the outlooks expressed, and more consistently in terms of the backgrounds of the authors who wrote them. Concerning this second point, we noted three obvious shortcomings: first, of the thirty-three tramp memoir writers accounted for only two were female, while of the eighteen authors of reverse discourse tramp fiction covered again only two were female; second, both domains were overwhelming homogeneous in terms of the race, ethnicity and nationality of their authors; and third, within both genres there was an absence of authors with a declared non-­ heterosexual orientation and a shortage (though not a total lack) of instances in which non-heterosexual orientation was written into the texts.

2   Significance of Findings To return to the claims made in the introduction to this text, it was hypothesised that if a significant number of reverse discourse tramp literature texts could be read as contributions to radical anti-productivist discourse (which has proven to be the case)—this would be significant on two grounds: first, because it would represent a rare example of a radical

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anti-productivist discourse produced during a period with few such examples; and second, because it would indicate the compatibility of a Foucauldian interest in societally produced identity formations with a Badiouian interest in transcending the limitations of an identity-oriented focus—in short, suggesting that resistant identity formations are (in spite of their acknowledged limitations) capable of evolving into (and in fact in this instance prone to evolving into) radical discourses that pertain to the societal whole. As regards the first point: I would make the claim that select works within the reverse discourse tramp memoir and fiction writing traditions undoubtedly indicate a neglected strain of radical literature that challenge Adorno and Horkheimer’s suggestion that following Marx the idea of freedom from work became temporarily obsolete, and that may in turn be added to the handful of examples of anti-productivist literature produced in this period (such as select works of utopian fiction and the theoretical texts of anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin). I would add to this by returning to another line of inquiry highlighted in the introduction to this text in relation to a noted divide within radical anti-productivist theory between writers who endorse the total abolition of work (e.g. the American anarchist Black) and writers who instead object to the capitalist conditions of work but who refuse to depict all work as inherently bad or to engage in utopian speculations about the possibility of entirely abandoning it (e.g. Žižek). If we were to try to situate the reverse discourse radical tramp literature genre as a whole on one side of this divide, and thus to develop a firmer sense of its relationship to the wider body of anti-productivist literature to which I have argued that it belongs, I would suggest that it comes closest to falling in the second category, with authors such as Kennedy, O’Flaherty and Brown being quite happy to extol the value of certain types of labour while highlighting the problematic nature of how it generally manifests itself within capitalist and disciplinary society—and with few of the identified authors actively promoting utopian visions of the possibility of a world in which there is no work whatsoever. Thus, select texts in the reverse discourse tramp literature tradition might be viewed not just as a contribution to a wider radical anti-productivist discourse, but also to a strain of it that specifically objects to the conditions of labour under capitalism. As regards the second point: I would argue that what Foucault describes with the term ‘reverse discourse’—meaning a body of work that may be seen to reflect the emergence of an identity formation produced under adverse circumstances—has undoubtedly been proven in this study to be

4 CONCLUSION 327

capable of pushing beyond an originally merely subversive status and of developing a Badiouian preoccupation with the social totality. Of course this is not a major surprise: post-war working-class fiction to a limited degree already serves as an example of an identity-oriented discourse that can also be interpreted as radical (although it is questionable whether it is a reverse discourse), and we could if we wanted to no doubt identify numerous other examples of reverse discourse identity formations precipitating radical awareness. The important thing to note, however, is that this study has not merely proven the possibility that representations of reverse discourse identity formations can result in a radical preoccupation with questions pertaining to the social totality—but in the case of reverse discourse tramp literature, it has indicated the high probability of this outcome within identified works (with nine out of twenty-four reverse discourse memoirs and fourteen out of eighteen reverse discourse fiction texts being found to be classifiable as either permitting, encouraging or demanding radical interpretation). In other words, we might be seen to have deduced what to some may not be entirely surprising: namely, that appropriated identity formations defined in opposition against the adverse societal conditions that have produced them (such as the figure of  the tramp) while limited in terms of their immediate relation to the social totality can nonetheless provide a vehicle when represented in works of literature—and an effective vehicle at that—for reflection on the need for more widespread societal change (very often by concurrently exposing the advantages and the limitations of the given identity-bound mode of resistance). If accepted, the ramifications of this claim are not insignificant. In particular, it perhaps suggests that though we should continue to be cautious of presenting identity-oriented reverse discourses as fully representative of the social groups whose experiences they depict, and though we should perhaps also remain aware of the political limitations of narrowly identityoriented discourse—we should also acknowledge that in many cases subversive identity formations might be a helpful or even necessary enabling ground in facilitating radical awareness. To be clear: this study fully supports the attempts of theorists like Badiou to critique the limitations of discourses too narrowly oriented around the marginal status of a given social group. At the same time, however, it also issues a modest warning against on these grounds constructing too narrow a binary between subversive marginal identities of the kind highlighted by Foucault and this

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same Badiouian insistence upon pertaining to the social totality by demonstrating that instances of the former can and in fact very often do (although of course they don’t always) lead to the latter—as well as implicitly stressing the need to get behind such examples when they arise. As for the question of how we can get behind such examples, or in other words how we can encourage this kind of development—I would shamelessly suggest that this might be achieved by emulating the process developed in this study: namely, by insisting on both the unrepresentativeness and the political limitations of reverse discourse identity formations in and of themselves, while at the same time acknowledging that they can be effective vehicles for precipitating radical awareness. In short, as well as drawing attention to a significant and overlooked body of work in the radical anti-productivist tradition, this study has simultaneously underlined the shortcomings and the radical possibilities of subversion as represented by the genre of reverse discourse tramp literature. It has done so by suggesting that while we should perhaps remain questioning of the scope of reverse discourse literature, we should at the same time not be dismissive of its capacity to awaken radical inclinations— something that it perhaps does best when exposing the concurrent advantages and limitations of isolated and identity-oriented embodiments of subversion.

3   Coda A not entirely unrelated question that remains to be asked is: if I am correct in claiming that the reverse discourse tramp literature phenomenon was one that died out in the post-war period—what exactly is the explanation for its demise? The most obvious answer in a British context relates to the formation of a welfare state: while the disciplinary pressures to work and to comply with norms ostensibly pertaining to the wealth and welfare of the general population may not have abated as a consequence of this in some ways modest development, and while the hardships wrought by such conditions of existence may be in some respects just as merciless today—as suggested in the introduction to this text, the emergence of a welfare state in the post-war period may be seen to have nonetheless had the effect of at least temporarily (and to a limited degree) taking the pressure off the homeless community, in turn very likely explaining how homelessness subsequently ceased being the site (to the same extent, at least) of resistant identity formations that when represented prove capable of precipitating

4 CONCLUSION 329

radical awareness. A final question we might therefore ask ourselves is this: if this particular imperfect but nonetheless valuable and rare locus of anti-­ productivist resistance may be seen to have consequently virtually disappeared, what other avenues are currently available to us for precipitating an awareness of the possibilities that this body of work can be seen to address?

Index1

A Actors/acting, 123, 150, 170, 190, 234 Addiction, 107, 111, 170 Adorno, Theodor, 58, 59, 69, 71, 195, 210, 326 Towards a New Manifesto, 58 Africa, 125, 147, 149, 150 Alcalá, Roberto del Valle, 67, 68, 154, 158, 175 British Working-Class Fiction: Narratives of Refusal and the Struggle Against Work, 67 Alcohol, 107, 111, 113, 114, 237, 283 Allen, John, 75n1, 76, 87, 228, 244 Homelessness in American Literature: Romanticism, Realism and Testimony, 76, 228 Altick, Richard, 97 America, 2, 4, 5, 31, 34–37, 127, 129, 131, 134, 135, 141, 150, 152,

159, 160, 171, 191, 192, 202, 267, 274, 306 American anarchism, 58 Amigoni, David, 98 Anarchism, 57, 59, 62 Angier, Humphrey, 94, 96 Army, 104, 146, 161, 165, 207 The Athenaeum, 136 Augustine, Saint, 90 Australia, 125, 147, 149, 182 Autobiography, see Life writing Autonomist Marxism, 58 B Badham, Samuel, 95, 96 Badiou, Alain, 45–49, 60, 66, 72, 154, 327 alterity/otherness, 45–48 Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 45 Rhapsody for Theatre, 66 Baldwin, Oliver, 286

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Lewin Davies, The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73432-9

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332 

INDEX

Ballads, 20, 93, 102, 115, 218, 232–235 Ballad singer, 102 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 238 Basset, Josiah, 73, 87, 118 The Life of a Vagrant, or the Testimony of an Outcast, 118 Beales, H.L., 286 Memoirs of the Unemployed, 286 Beaumont, Matthew, 56 Beggars, 5, 10, 17–19, 22, 25, 34, 95, 117, 118, 136, 137, 177, 218, 234, 241, 273 ‘The Begger-boy of the North,’ 234, 238 Begging letters, 95, 96 Beier, A.L., 1, 7, 20–22, 37 Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640, 1 Belloc, Hilaire, 133, 178, 180, 188 The Path to Rome, 178 Bentley, John A., 87, 90, 220 The Submerged Tenth; The Story of a Down-and-Out, 220 Biography, 90, 91, 97–100, 106, 121, 127, 179, 236 Black, Bob, 59, 61, 62, 71, 326 ‘The Abolition of Work’, 59 Black homelessness/homeless people of colour, 36, 123, 218, 317 Blake, William, 246 Blind/blindness, 117, 123 Bohemia/bohemianism, 63, 126, 182 Booth, Alison, 90, 97 Booth, Charles, 24 Life and Labour of the People in London, 24 Borrow, George, 64, 65 Borzage, Frank, 78 Boswell, James, 97

Bourgeoisie, 103, 142, 177, 200, 210, 254, 262 Bower, Fred, 75, 141–142, 198 Rolling Stonemason: An Autobiography, 75, 141 Bowery, 142 Boyer, George, 12 Brierley, Walter, 74, 230, 277–279, 286–291, 299, 315 Means-Test Man, 286–288 The Sandwichman, 279, 286–288, 290, 291 Brighouse, Harold, 230, 260, 266 ‘Once a Hero,’ 260 Brine, George Atkins, 87, 88, 90, 122–125, 214 The King of the Beggars: The Life and Adventures of George Atkins Brine, 122 Bristol, 111 British Columbia, 131 Brooker, Peter, 63 Brown, Edwin, 5 Brown, John, 73, 87, 90, 194–213 I Saw for Myself, 197 I Was a Tramp, 197, 198, 200 Brown, William, 75, 101–103, 198, 199 A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of William Brown who was Thirteen Years on Board of His Majesty's Ships, Glory, Barfleur, Triumph, Zealous, Ganges, Lively, Stag, Spartan, &c., 101 Bruns, Roger, 32, 35 Bum, 4, 5, 33, 160, 171, 186 Burn, James Dawson, 73, 87, 101–121 The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy, 106–109, 111

 INDEX 

Burnett, John, 75–77, 99, 100, 140, 148, 198 Idle Hands: The Experience of Unemployment, 1790–1990, 140 Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s, 99 C Calder-Marshall, Arthur, 230, 259–264, 266, 316 Pie in the Sky, 262, 263 Cameron, William, 73, 87, 89, 101–121, 124, 139, 163, 166, 214, 215 Hawkie: The Autobiography of a Gangrel, 115 Canada/Toronto/Ontario/Rockies, 129, 152, 163, 169, 203 Capra, Frank, 151 Carew, Bampfylde Moore, 74, 93, 123, 135, 229, 235–242, 247, 256, 314 The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew, 238 Carnie Holdsworth, Ethel, 74, 230, 277–279, 286, 291–298, 305, 315 Miss Nobody, 291–294 This Slavery, 291, 295, 297 Carnival/carnivalesque, 29, 273 Case, Shannon Marie, 1–3, 5, 11, 14, 15, 18, 22, 76, 77, 87, 88, 186 Tramping Writers, Writing Tramps: Literary Vagrancy in England, 1860–1940, 1, 76 Casuals/casual labourers, 5, 11, 13, 180, 283 Casual ward, 5, 10, 11, 13, 14, 23, 144, 162, 195, 198, 204, 205, 263, 310

333

Caterpillars of the commonwealth, 20 Catton, Samuel, 99 Cazamian, Louis, 248, 249 Cervantes, Miguel de, 236 Don Quixote, 236 El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (Don Quixote), 236 Chanters, 5 Chapbook, 92, 115, 116 Chaplin, Charlie, 78 Charity, 8, 96, 117, 247, 285, 312 Charity Organisation Society, 122 Chartism, 107, 110, 277 Chesterton, Ada, 28, 29 In Darkest London, 28 Children/child, 7, 37, 102, 105, 107, 119, 123, 128, 141, 144, 150, 202, 205, 208, 245, 260, 269, 282, 296 Christianity, 103, 116, 118, 119, 171, 211, 263, 272, 273, 299 Circus, 146, 190, 309 Clodhoppers, 5 Clouston, Harry, 87, 90, 181–184, 186, 214 The Adventures of a Tropical Tramp, 182 The Happy Hobo, 182 Cobbett, William, 64 Codrington, Isabel, 79 Colin, 73, 87, 89, 101–121, 124, 139, 150, 163, 166, 214, 215 The Life and Adventures of Colin: An Autobiography, 111 Comensoli, Viviana, 20, 21, 93 Common lodging house, 134, 135, 218, 273, 275, 293 Communism, 56, 62, 67–68, 197, 200, 209, 262, 306, 307 Communist Party, 200, 262, 306, 307 Community, 25, 30–38, 48, 55, 65, 204, 205, 213, 273, 323

334 

INDEX

Cony-catchers, 20, 93, 233 Cooper, A.N., 179 Cora, Gordon, 87, 103, 181, 182 The London Roundabout, 182 Corn Laws, 10, 114 Costering/coster monger, 155 Coventry, Francis, 231 Cow herding/punching, 163, 182 Coxey’s Army, 32, 33, 191, 195 Crabbe, George, 74, 229, 244–250, 252, 256, 264, 265, 314 ‘The Hall of Justice,’ 245 The Parish Register, 245 Crawford, J.H., 230, 259–264, 266, 316 The Autobiography of a Tramp, 259 Cresswell, Tim, 75n1 Crime, 94, 122, 129, 159–162, 166, 172, 174, 206, 233, 237, 245, 267, 289, 293, 304 Croft, Andy, 262, 278, 279, 286, 287, 290, 291, 298, 300 Cutler, Ian, 75n1, 77, 87, 88, 103, 131n2, 133, 149 The Lives and Extraordinary Adventures of Fifteen Tramp Writers from the Golden Age of Vagabondage, 77 D The Daily Worker, 287 Davies, W.H., 73, 74, 77, 87–89, 121–140, 149, 151, 167, 176, 179, 214, 216, 230, 257, 264–265, 270–277, 281, 282, 285, 301, 315 The Adventures of Johnny Walker, Tramp, 134, 270n1 The Autobiography of a Super-­ Tramp, 133, 134, 134n3, 136, 276

‘The Bed-Sitting Room,’ 273 Beggars, 134, 137, 272 Dancing Mad, 271, 274, 276 ‘Facts,’ 272 ‘Saints and Lodgers,’ 273 ‘The Sleepers,’ 271–273 The True Traveller, 134, 137, 270n1 A Weak Woman, 270–271, 274, 276 Young Emma, 270n1 Death, 6, 23, 95, 102, 105, 107, 118, 123, 134, 193, 283, 289, 293, 297, 299, 310–313 de Courville, Albert, 79 Defoe, Daniel, 231, 236 Deleuze, Gilles, 44, 51 Dent, J.M., 168 Depastino, Todd, 2, 5, 14, 32–36, 186 Deserving poor/undeserving poor, 11, 26, 27, 129, 250, 251 Dickens, Charles, 74, 229, 248–252, 255, 256, 264–266, 270, 314 Bleak House, 249 The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 249 The Old Curiosity Shop, 250, 251 Oliver Twist, 249, 250 Our Mutual Friend, 249, 251 The Pickwick Papers, 249 Digit, 87, 90, 143–148, 161, 183, 214 The Confessions of a Twentieth Century Hobo, 143, 146, 147 Dionne, Craig, 20–23, 92, 232 Disability, 96, 116, 134, 155, 234 Disalienate/disalienation, 41, 51, 61, 204, 211 Disguise, 21, 117–118, 123 Disraeli, Benjamin, 249 Documentary, 73, 91, 92, 142 Dorchester, 122 Doss-house, 13, 133, 186 Douglas, James, 168 Dover, 198

 INDEX 

Doxies, 20 Drugs, 160, 170 Dublin, 94, 190, 207 Du Maurier, George, 64 E Editors/publishers, 94, 96, 106, 111–113, 115, 121–124, 155, 162, 164, 168, 169, 207, 238 Edwardian, 101, 121–140, 214, 215 1845 Scottish Poor Law Act, 118 Eighteenth century, 8–9, 14, 16, 17, 19, 22, 37, 64, 73, 89, 92–98, 100, 105–107, 117, 177, 231, 235, 239, 240, 243, 249 1824 Vagrancy Act, 10 Elizabethan Poor Laws, 7 Embankment, 142, 156, 186, 211, 212, 272 Emic/etic, 25, 29 Enclosure, 6, 9, 235 Engels, Friedrich, 55–57, 69, 198 The Communist Manifesto, 58 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 55 England/English, 1, 7, 12, 13, 57, 64, 77, 78, 126, 132, 146, 177, 184, 193, 218, 240, 248, 249, 267 Englander, David, 11 English Review, 155 The English Rogue, 236–238 Enlightenment, 41 Epstein, Jacob, 133 Estrangement/alienation, 4, 43, 45–48, 51, 61, 323 Etherege, George, 237 The Man of Mode, 237 F Fascism, 197 Featherstone, Simon, 77 Federici, Silvia, 59

335

Female homelessness, 1, 103, 105, 144, 202, 211, 218, 269 Fielding, Henry, 231, 236, 240 First World War, 164, 165, 260, 274 Foster, Harry, 87, 90, 181–184, 186, 214 The Adventures of a Tropical Tramp, 182 Foucault, Michel, 3, 16–20, 23, 24, 29, 30, 34, 36, 44, 51, 54, 78, 94, 100, 120, 220, 326, 327 disciplinary society, 3, 16, 17, 20, 29, 34 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 16, 17, 30 ‘Governmentality,’ 17 The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, 29, 34 Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, 44 Jeremy Bentham, 16, 19 ‘Of Different Spaces: Heterotopias’, 29 Fourier, Charles, 55 Fox, Pamela, 291, 297 Fox, R.M., 230, 257, 279–286, 308, 316 Frankfurt School, 58 Freeman, Mark, 24 Fumerton, Patricia, 75n1 G Gaggers, 5 Gambling/cards, 233, 267 Gangster, 159, 160, 163, 164, 172, 174, 215 Gape, William, 13, 73, 87, 88, 90, 194–215, 217 Half a Million Tramps, 202–204, 206

336 

INDEX

Gardaphe, Fred, 159, 160, 164, 166, 172, 174 Garnett, Edward, 133, 207 Garrett, George, 87, 90, 149–151, 214, 216, 230, 279–286, 303, 315, 316 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 249 Gay-cats, 4 Gay, John, 74, 93, 135, 229, 240–243, 314 The Beggar’s Opera, 241, 242 Gender, 30–38, 54, 205, 213, 217, 218, 291, 316, 323, 325 Germany, 146 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic, 67 Gilmore, Charlotte Perkins, 56 Herland, 56 Gissing, George, 124, 252, 259–264, 266, 270, 281, 316 New Grub Street, 261 The Nether World, 261 ‘The Place of Realism in Fiction,’ 260 ‘Transplanted,’ 261, 262 Glasgow, 107, 110, 115, 144, 184, 188 Glasgow Evening Times, 184 Gluck, Mary, 64 Goadby, Robert, see Carew, Bampfylde Moore God, 102, 112, 118, 119, 255, 300 Goldsmith, Oliver, 246 Graeber, David, 62 Graham, Douglas, 116 The History of John Cheap the Chapman, 116 Graham, Stephen, 87, 303 The Gentle Art of Tramping, 180 The Tramp’s Anthology, 179 Gray, Frank, 13, 142–143 Great Depression, 12, 161, 197 Greatheed, Samuel, 103

Greenblatt, Stephen, 21 Greene, Robert, 74, 93, 229, 232–236, 238 A Dispvtation Betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a Shee Conny-catcher, 93 Greenwood, James, 28–29 The Seven Curses of London, 27 Griffith, D.W., 78 Grzyb, Amanda, 78 Guy, Josephine, 249 Gypsies, 5, 10, 102, 105, 123, 237–240, 246, 247, 259 H Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!, 33, 79 Hallward, Peter, 47 Halward, Leslie, 230, 279–286, 308, 315, 316 Hamilton, Robert, 65 Hanley, James, 74, 230, 257, 277–280, 286, 298–303, 305, 308, 311, 315, 317 Boy, 302 Drift, 279, 298, 300 Men in Darkness, 298 ‘Rubbish,’ 298, 301–303 Hannington, Wal, 195, 196 Harkness, Margaret, 74, 229, 254, 256, 314 Out of Work, 254 Harman, Thomas, 21–24, 26, 93, 117, 233, 234, 237 A Caveat Or Warning for Common Cursetors, Vulgarly Called Vagabonds, 21 Harrison, Austin, 155 Harrison, Gary Lee, 177, 244–247 Harvey, Richard, 234 Hawkers, 5, 115, 116, 119, 149, 171, 199

 INDEX 

Haywood, Ian, 252, 253, 260, 261, 277, 278, 280, 287, 290, 298 Head, Richard, 74, 93, 135, 229, 235–242, 247, 256, 314 Heslop, Harold, 67 Higbie, Frank Tobias, 32 Higgs, Mary, 25, 28–29 ‘A Night in a Salvation Army Shelter,’ 25, 28 The Tramp Ward, 28 Highlands, 171, 184, 185 Highwayman/highwaymen, 8, 9, 22, 149, 241 Hilton, Jack, 230, 278–286, 316, 317 Champion, 278, 284 Hitchcock, David, 8, 19, 21, 231, 238, 239 Hitchcock, Tim, 8, 95, 236, 238, 245 Hobo, 4, 5, 31–36, 75n1, 76, 137, 141, 146, 147, 169, 171, 180, 203, 211, 268 Hoboes of America Incorporated, 32 Hoboes’ Union, 203, 205, 206 Hobohemia, 32 The Hobo Jungles Scout, 32 Holdsworth, Alfred, 257 Homosexuality, 30, 170, 212, 219, 317 Hop-picking, 102 Horkheimer, Max, 58, 59, 69, 71, 195, 210, 326 Towards a New Manifesto, 58 Horn, Trader, 77, 87, 88, 90, 149–151, 214, 303 Harold the Webbed, 150 Trader Horn, 149 Trader Horn in Madagascar, 150 The Waters of Africa, 149 Horsley, Terrence, 87, 90, 143–148, 150, 214 The Odyssey of an Out of Work, 143–145 Houseless Poor Act of 1864, 11, 14

337

How, James Eades, 32 Hudson, W.H., 64, 189 Humanitarianism / humanism, 7 Humphreys, Robert, 12, 13 Hunger, 130, 156, 171, 173, 250, 261, 275, 282, 292, 306 Hunger marches, 150, 306 Hygeine/cleanliness/dirt, 142, 171, 250, 284 I India, 125 Industrial Revolution, 2, 10, 15, 37, 98, 243, 249 Industrial Workers of the World, 32, 33, 150, 195, 203, 209, 263, 281 International Brotherhood Welfare Association, 32 Interwar period, 13, 140, 142, 148, 159, 181, 196, 277–303 Ipswich, 112 Ireland/Irish, 5, 10, 78, 87, 94, 128, 150, 189–191, 193, 195, 207, 218, 280, 281, 283, 305, 317 Irish republicanism/Irish nationalism, 190, 191, 193, 207, 305 Iron Molders’ Journal, 32 J Jameson, Fredric, 261 Jameson, Storm, 124, 127, 265 Jan, Gordon, 87, 103, 181, 182 The London Roundabout, 182 Jarrow, 199, 200, 305, 306 Jefferies, Richard, 64, 189 Jennings, Frank, 142–143 John, Augustus, 133 Jones, Catherine, 96 Jones, Lewis, 67 Jungles, 33–35, 165, 171

338 

INDEX

K Kant, Emmanuel, 46 Keating, Peter, 25, 142, 161 Kelley’s Army, 33 Kennedy, Bart, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 87–89, 121–140, 149, 151, 179, 214, 215, 217, 230, 257, 264–265, 267–272, 276, 280, 281, 285, 315, 326 A Man Adrift; Being Leaves From a Nomad’s Portfolio, 129, 131 A Sailor Tramp, 79, 267–270 Slavery: Pictures from the Depths, 129 A Tramp in Spain: From Andalusia to Andorra, 130 A Tramp’s Philosophy, 132, 269 The Wandering Romanoff, 267 Kettle, Arnold, 248 Kinney, Arthur, 6, 233, 234 Kipling, Rudyard, 252 Kirkham, Francis, see Head, Richard Klaus, Gustav H., 76, 77, 129, 257, 258, 278, 280, 298 The Socialist Novel in Britain, 76 Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries: Working-class Stores of the 1920s, 76 Koven, Seth, 168 Kromer, Tom, 161, 162 Waiting for Nothing, 161 Kropotkin, Peter, 59, 326, 57 The Conquest of Bread, 57 Kusmer, Kevin, 2, 3, 5, 14, 15, 30, 32–34, 36, 186, 218 L Labour Exchange, 12, 200, 201 Labour Party, 140, 197, 198, 200, 286 Lacan, Jacques, 39, 47 Lambert, R.S., 286 Memoirs of the Unemployed, 286

Landery, Charles, 73, 87, 90, 149–158, 193, 207, 214, 216, 291, 303 Hollywood is the Place!, 151 So What? A Young Man’s Odyssey, 152, 155 Langan, Celeste, 177, 178, 180, 188, 247 ‘La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades (The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities),’ 236 Law, John, see Harkness, Margaret Leeds, 128 Lefebvre, Henri, 40–43, 137 Critique of Everyday Life, Volume One, 40, 41 Lehmann, John, 305 Lester, Paul, 189, 190, 304–306, 308 Levinson, David, 76, 77 Lewis, Etherelda, 149 Life writing, 90–100 The Listener, 286 Little Red Song Book, 33, 203, 263 Liverpool, 150, 169, 191, 298, 301 Locke, William J., 8, 9 Loftus, Donna, 97, 98 London, 8, 112, 118, 124, 134, 141, 142, 153, 156, 160, 163–165, 170, 182, 183, 186, 187, 198, 200, 202–204, 207, 208, 218, 234, 253, 261, 266, 275, 304, 311 London County Council, 12, 160 London Daily Express, 168 London, Jack, 4, 5, 33, 129, 257, 306 ‘The Apostate,’ 306 The Road, 33, 129 Low, Sampson, 155, 162 Lucas, John Templeton, 79 Lumpenproletariat, 56, 298

 INDEX 

M Macartney, Wilfred, 305 MacDonald, Ramsay, 12 MacGill, Patrick, 230, 257, 279–286, 316 Children of the Dead End; The Autobiography of a Navvy, 280, 281 Machines, 210 Mackenzie, Compton, 305 MacKinnon, Archibald, 79 Maclean, John, 194–196 MacMahon, Ryan, 87, 90, 181, 182 Tramp Royal: An Autobiography, 182 Malthus, Thomas, 10, 118 Manchester, 124, 128, 198, 292, 305 Marcuse, Herbert, 41–43, 204 One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 41 Marcus, Stephen, 249 Mare, Walter de la, 133 Marriage, 34, 95, 107, 112, 172, 189, 191, 205, 218, 245, 263, 274, 275, 292, 295, 297 Marshall, Matt, 73, 87, 90, 176–194, 203, 214, 216, 217, 283 Tramp-Royal in Spain, 184 Tramp-Royal on the Toby, 184, 186, 187 The Travels of Tramp-Royal, 184 Marx, Karl, 10, 38–42, 55–60, 63, 78, 198, 209, 326 Capital, 38 The Communist Manifesto, 58 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 38 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 56 Mason, Paul, 62

339

Massie, Chris, 15, 73, 74, 87, 88, 90, 149–158, 193, 207, 214, 216, 230, 291, 303, 304, 309–315 The Confessions of a Vagabond, 155, 309 Corridor of Mirrors, 309 Esther Vanner, 309 A Modern Calvus: Being the Life Story of Karl Frank, Midget, and Man of Genius, 309 Peccavi, 313 Penny Whipp, 309, 311–314 Pity My Simplicity, 309 ‘The Soul in a Blind Alley,’ 309, 310 ‘Willie Pink,’ 309, 310 Massingham, H.J., 64, 189 Match seller/matches, 103, 211, 284 Matthews, William, 76, 77 Maugham, Somerset, 252 Maunder, 237 Mayall, David, 75–77 Mayhew, Henry, 25–27 London Labour and the London Poor, 25, 26 McShane, Harry, 194 Means Test, 12, 13, 196, 287 Memoir, 14, 24, 33, 51, 69, 71, 73, 87–213, 215–217, 219, 220, 227, 238, 256, 264, 267, 271, 272, 281, 282, 304, 309, 313, 314, 316, 317, 324–326 Mendicant, 5, 261 Mentz, Steve, 20–23, 92, 232 Methodology, 48, 72–73 Methuen, 286 Mexico, 149 Middle East, 182, 197 Migration/travel, 4, 6, 98, 104, 117, 119, 125, 126, 129, 130n1, 134, 141, 149, 152, 161, 163, 164, 170, 177, 179, 181–184, 186, 197, 202, 203, 267, 283

340 

INDEX

Milestone, Lewis, 78 Miller, Henry, 161, 162 Tropic of Cancer, 161 Milligan, James, 73, 87, 90, 159–176, 193, 214, 216, 282, 283 I Didn’t Stay Honest, 162–164, 166, 167, 169 Minimum wage, 195 Modernism, 161, 298 Molls, 20 Moochers, 5 Moore, George, 252 Morris, William, 56, 254 News from Nowhere, 56 Morrison, Arthur, 74, 229, 252–254, 261, 264, 265, 314 A Child of the Jago, 252 Tales of Mean Streets, 253 ‘Without Visible Means,’ 253 Moseley, C.W.R.D., 237 Mugfakers, 5 N Napoleonic wars, 10 National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), 13, 194–197, 200, 201, 212, 284 Navvie/navvy, 5, 107, 131, 141, 280 Negri, Antonio, 59 Neville, Hippo, 87, 90, 160–162, 183, 214 Sneak Thief on The Road, 161, 162 Newcastle, 116, 198 The Newgate Calendar, 73, 89, 92–94, 96–98, 100, 106 New Guinea, 163 Newport, 134 New realism, 74, 243–244, 252–254, 260, 261, 278 New York, 60, 159, 164, 171, 208 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 211, 213

1906 Committee on Vagrancy, 12 Nord, Deborah Esptein, 75n1 Northumberland, 109 O O’Flaherty, Liam, 73, 87, 90, 149, 191–215, 217, 230, 257, 279–286, 303, 305, 308, 316, 326 Shame the Devil, 207 ‘The Tramp,’ 282 Two Years, 208 Operaismo, 59 Orwell, George, 5, 28–29, 133, 142–143, 218, 277 Down and Out in Paris and London, 28, 142 ‘The Proletarian Writer,’ 277 Owen, Robert, 55 P Padders, 5, 186, 190, 192 Paris, 142, 164 Patterson, J.E., 141–142, 198 My Vagabondgage, 141 Pavement artists, 5, 182, 274 Pawn shop, 186 Pearson, George, 79 Pedlars, 5, 107, 115, 149, 177, 251, 275 Peripatetic literature, 176–179, 181, 186, 188, 193, 215 Phelan, Jim, 5, 73, 74, 77, 87, 88, 90, 149, 176–194, 203, 207, 214, 215, 230, 257, 278, 280, 303–309, 311, 313, 315 Green Volcano, 305 Lifer, 305 Museum, 305 The Name’s Phelan, 189–193

 INDEX 

341

Ten-A-Penny People, 278, 305, 307 Tramp at Anchor, 304 We Follow the Roads, 189, 191, 192 Phelan, Kathleen, 103 Philanthropy, 153, 259, 277 Picaresque, 74, 93, 96, 97, 104, 106, 123, 124, 146, 159, 229, 232, 235–242 Pittenger, Mark, 35 Pity, 26–28, 113, 138, 192, 245, 274 Plutarch, 90 Poetry, 134, 177, 244, 247, 271, 273, 277 Police, 11, 27, 149, 172, 186, 297, 306 Poor Law of 1834, 10, 12–14, 118 Population of homeless, 6, 11, 13, 15 Postcapitalism, 53, 62, 210 Postcolonial theory, 47 Postmen, 5 Pound, Ezra, 133 Poverty ballads, 93, 232–235 Prior, Charles, 87, 90, 160–162, 214, 216 So I Wrote It, 160 Profeshes, 4 Protestantism, 7, 116, 299 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 57 Prushuns, 4 The Public Assistance (Casual Poor) Order of 1931, 13 Pugh, Albert, 140–141, 198 Punishment, 16, 313 Punks, 4, 164 Puritanism, 7

Railway, 134, 140, 141, 157, 266, 269 Rand, Ayn, 309 Ransome, Arthur, 63, 133 Rape, 245, 313 Reading, 198 Realism, 74, 243–245, 252–254, 261 Reform, 11, 17, 19, 28, 100, 106, 120, 122, 213, 260, 294, 295 Reform Act of 1832, 249 Regency, 101–121, 215, 249 Reitman, Ben, 4, 5, 103 Sisters of the Road: The Autobiography of a Box-Car Bertha, 103 Rendall, Jane, 103, 104 Rendle, Morgan, 79 Repentance tract, 103, 108 Richardson, Samuel, 236 Roadmenders, 5 Roberts, Morley, 73, 87, 88, 121–140, 265–266 The Private Life of Henry Maitland, 124–126, 266 ‘Red Jim of the S.P.,’ 266 A Tramp’s Notebook, 125–127 The Western Avernus, 125, 126 Rogue literature, 16, 20–26, 29, 74, 92, 93, 96, 108, 117, 229, 232 Romanticism, 177–180, 182, 186, 243–248 Rose, Jonathan, 99 Rose, Lionel, 10, 12, 13, 135 Rosmer, Milton, 79 Rowton House, 135 Russia, 179, 197, 198 Ryley, Peter, 57

R Race, 17, 34, 36, 132, 212, 217, 218, 316, 317, 325 Railroads, 127, 134, 140

S Sadlier, Michael, 305 Sailor, 101, 117, 129, 141–142, 150, 208, 267–269, 302, 310

342 

INDEX

Saint-Simon, Henri de, 55 Salman, Jeroen, 115 Salvation Army, 25, 160, 162 San Francisco, 125, 147, 163 Saunders, Max, 91 Saxby, Mary, 73, 87, 89, 101–121, 124, 139, 163, 166, 214, 215 Memoirs of a Female Vagrant; Written by Herself, 102 School, 119, 122, 146, 207, 260, 268, 310 Scotland/Scottish, 7, 76, 111, 116, 118, 152, 171, 179, 184, 185, 195, 218 Screevers, 5, 182, 274 Seaber, Luke, 25, 29 Second World War, 77 Settlement Act, 7, 8 Seventeenth century, 7–9, 11, 14, 19, 20, 107, 231, 233–236, 243 Sex, 29, 34, 35, 105, 159, 170, 205, 299, 311, 313, 317 Sexuality, 29–38, 54, 159, 174, 205, 213, 217, 219, 317, 323, 325 Sex work/prostitution, 25, 105, 170, 205, 299, 311, 313 Seymour, Henry, 57 The Two Anarchisms, 57 Shaw, George Bernard, 133, 134, 254, 305 Shaw, Thomas, 95 Sherborne, 122 Shields, Rob, 41 Ships, 101, 134, 151, 163, 208, 212, 306 Shrewsbury, 198 Sillitoe, Alan, 67, 68, 154 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 67, 68, 155, 158 Singapore, 163 Sitwell, Edith, 133

1662 Act for the Better Relief of the Poor, 7 Sixteenth century, 6–7, 14, 16, 20–24, 26, 27, 37, 93, 232–234 Skene, Felicia, 230, 259–264, 266, 316 ‘The Autobiography of a Tramp,’ 259 Slack, Paul, 7, 9, 20, 235 Slum/slums, 150, 304, 311 Smith, John Thomas, 218 Smollett, Tobias, 236 Social exploration, 24–25, 27–29, 75, 75n1, 139, 142, 143, 161, 162, 183 Social investigation, 16, 20, 24–29, 75n1, 94 Socialist novel, 74, 243–244, 254 Social problem novel (condition of England novel), 248 Southampton, 198 Southey, Robert, 246 South Shields, 197 Spain/Spanish, 130n1, 132, 160, 184, 236, 240 Spiv, 5, 169, 173–175 Spivak, Gayatri, 44, 45, 47, 49, 72 Can the Subaltern Speak?, 44 A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, 44–45 Srnicek, Nick, 62 Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, 62 Stamper, Joseph, 87, 88, 90, 143–149, 214, 216, 303–304 Less Than Dust, 143, 147, 148 Slum, 303 Stiffs/bindle stiffs, 4, 137, 272 Strathesk, John, 115

 INDEX 

Street performers, 5 Street singers, 5, 102, 171, 202 Strike/general strike/industrial action, 110, 197, 253, 263, 292, 295, 297, 304–306, 308 Stuart, F.S., 87, 90, 143–148, 150, 214 Vagabond, 143, 145, 146 Sumpter, Caroline, 65 Swafford, Kevin, 254 Swift, Jonathan, 231, 236 T Temperance, 73, 111, 114 Theatre, 66, 150, 170, 186 Thirties, 13, 14, 140, 142, 159, 194, 200, 278, 279 Thomas, Edward, 64, 65, 133, 180, 189 Thompson, E.P., 9, 10, 114 The Making of the English Working Class, 9 Thoreau, Henry David, 178, 180 Thorne, Will, 140, 141, 198 Thornton, Floyd Martin, 79 Tillett, Ben, 140–141, 198 Tinkers, 5 Tramp Trust Unlimited, 194–197, 199, 212 Tressell, Robert The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 277 Tronti, Mario, 59, 62, 68 Workers and Capital, 59, 68 Tschopp, Albert, 7, 19 Turner, Ribton, 122 Twenties, 13, 14, 140, 142, 159, 251, 278, 279, 298

343

V Vagrancy Act of 1935, 13 Vernon, James, 200 Vincent, David, 75–77, 106–108 Vorspan, Rachel, 11 W Wales/Welsh, 12, 13, 78, 134, 184, 203, 218 Walking, 153, 176–181, 184, 188, 190, 192, 193 Wallace, Anne, 177 Walsh, J.H., 33 Wanderlust, 141, 147, 170, 174, 183 War/army/conflict, 9, 10, 104, 146, 158, 161, 164, 165, 208, 247, 260, 274 Wellman, William, 78 Wells, H.G., 305 Welsh, Irvine, 67 Skagboys, 67 Whyte, Ian, 6–8 Wilkinson, Ellen, 200 Williams, Alex, 62 Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, 62 Williams, Raymond, 9, 248 The Country and the City, 9 Wilson, Jean Moorcroft, 65 Wilson, Thomas, 64 Winn, Godfrey, 305 Woodbridge, Linda, 22, 233 Worby, John, 15, 73, 87, 88, 90, 159–176, 189, 193, 214, 216, 219, 282, 283, 308 The Other Half, 168, 170–172, 174 Spiv’s Progress, 168, 169, 173 Wordsworth, William, 74, 177, 178, 229, 245–250, 252, 255, 256, 264, 265, 270, 314

344 

INDEX

Wordsworth, William (cont.) ‘The Female Vagrant,’ 246–248, 255 Lyrical Ballads, 177, 245 Work, 30–38, 227, 323 Workhouse, 8–11, 27, 29, 95, 118, 122, 137, 155–157, 251, 272, 281, 282, 290, 301–303, 310–313 Working-class autobiography, 73, 75, 99, 100, 107, 121, 141 Working-class fiction, 53, 67–68, 154, 176n4, 215, 257, 278, 327 Worthington, Heather, 93 Wycherley, William, 237 The Country Wife, 237

Y Yeats, W.B., 133 Yeggs, 5 York, 198 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 39, 40, 43, 60–62, 71, 211, 326 Communism: A New Beginning, 60 The Fragile Absolute, 60 ‘The Politics of Alienation and Separation: From Hegel to Marx … and Back,' 39 Zola, Émile, 252