Vagrancy In The Victorian Age

An interdisciplinary study of the rich Victorian taxonomy of vagrancy, and the concepts of poverty, mobility and homelessness it expressed.

Investigating the history of vagrants in colonial Australia and New Zealand, this book provides insights into the histories and identities of marginalised peoples in the British Pacific Empire. Showing how their experiences were produced, shaped and transformed through laws and institutions, it reveals how the most vulnerable people in colonial society were regulated, marginalised and criminalised in the imperial world. Studying the language of vagrancy prosecution, narratives of mobility and welfare, vagrant families, gender and mobility and the political, social and cultural interpretations of vagrancy, this book sets out a conceptual framework of mobility as a field of inquiry for legal and historical studies. Defining 'mobility' as population movement and the occupation of new social and physical space, it offers an entry point to the related histories of penal colonies and new 'settler' societies. It provides insights into shared histories of vagrancy across New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and New Zealand, and explores how different jurisdictions regulated mobility within the temporal and geographical space of the British Pacific Empire.

In eighteenth-century England, the law surrounding vagrancy was complicated, and practice stood in complex relationship to law. Drawing on extensive archival research and in-depth study of both statute law and local administrative records, this book examines the complexities of vagrancy law and the realities of its practice during the long eighteenth century. It shows how settlement law and poor law provision failed to address both the changing demographic situation and the impact of wars, leaving significant numbers without support. Focusing on the 1744 Vagrant Act, the study traces how and why the law evolved, from 1700 when vagrancy was first made a county charge, and what changes followed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It explores how vagrancy law was used and to what effect, how it was extended and adapted to plug gaps in both poor law provision and in dealing with petty crime not covered by statute law, and how law and practice intersected with social reality. Using the Quarter Sessions records of six counties: Westmorland, Cambridgeshire, Dorset, Hampshire, Lancashire and Middlesex, the book is able to give the first account of vagrancy law in provincial England, rather than focusing on metropolitan areas, thus also demonstrating the tensions between parishes, justices and counties over the use of law and its financial impact. By detailed reference to cases of individual vagrants, the book also shows what sorts of people were dealt with under vagrancy law, what happened to them, and how and why the justices discriminated between the unfortunate and the criminal elements among them. This analysis reveals the principal causes of the vagrancy problems and the misfit between the law and social reality, with particular emphasis on the impact of wars and immigration from Ireland and Scotland. As the first full-length study of vagrancy law and practice in the eighteenth century, this book will constitute an essential item in any collection of books on the old poor law.

This set reissues ten books that explore the history of crime and punishment. The titles, which were originally published between 1970 and 1988, examine many different aspects of historical criminology over a span of over 400 years, with particular focus on the nineteenth-century. This set will be of particular interest to students of both history and criminology.

This study, first published in 1982, is concerned with the nature of crime in nineteenth-century Britain, and explores the response of the community and the police authorities. Each chapter is linked by common themes and questions, and the topics described in detail range from popular forms of rural crime and protest, through crime in industrial and urban communities, to a study of the vagrant. The author pays special attention to the relationship between illegal activities and protest, and emphasizes the context and complexity of official crime rates and of many forms of criminal behaviour. This title will be of interest to students of history and criminology.

The most enduring version of the hobo that has come down from the so-called 'Golden Age of Tramping' (1890s to 1940s) is an American cultural icon, signifying freedom from restraint and rebellion to the established order while reinforcing conservative messages about American exceptionalism, individualism, race, and gender. Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos shows that this 'pioneer hobo' image is a misrepresentation by looking at works created by transient artists and thinkers, including travel literature, fiction, memoir, early feminist writing, poetry, sociology, political journalism, satire, and music. This book explores the diversity of meanings that accrue around 'the hobo' and 'the tramp'. It is the first analysis to frame transiency within a nineteenth-century literary tradition of the vagabond, a figure who attempts to travel without money. This book provide new ways for scholars to think about the activity and representation of US transiency.

Both the Victorian age and the late twentieth century are often characterised by contemporaries as times of apparent economic affluence and stability. They are often depicted as periods that shared a conviction that the stability of society, including its affluence, was threatened by the activities of social deviants. These essays aim to examine crime of a socially visible nature, in the context of social panic and moral outrage in both the Victorian period and the late twentieth century. Through a series of interconnected case studies, exploring the social and legal responses to such offences and their public presentation through popular reporting and the court system, a series of apparent continuities as well as discontinuities are highlighted in the making of legislation. The innovative approach taken by the editors and contributors to concepts of crime and bad behaviour, make this essential reading for academics and practitioners. The interdisciplinary focus of the book allows it to locate the legal processes and system firmly within the socio-cultural context, instead of examining it as a discrete area of individual study, making this text central to work in law, criminology and social policy, and history.

Throughout history, those arrested for vagrancy have generally been poor men and women, often young, able-bodied, unemployed, and homeless. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on the European and American experiences. Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective is the first book to consider the shared global heritage of vagrancy laws, homelessness, and the historical processes they accompanied. In this ambitious collection, vagrancy and homelessness are used to examine a vast array of phenomena, from the migration of labor to social and governmental responses to poverty through charity, welfare, and prosecution. The essays in Cast Out represent the best scholarship on these subjects and include discussions of the lives of the underclass, strategies for surviving and escaping poverty, the criminalization of poverty by the state, the rise of welfare and development programs, the relationship between imperial powers and colonized peoples, and the struggle to achieve independence after colonial rule. By juxtaposing these histories, the authors explore vagrancy as a common response to poverty, labor dislocation, and changing social norms, as well as how this strategy changed over time and adapted to regional peculiarities. Part of a growing literature on world history, Cast Out offers fresh perspectives and new research in fields that have yet to fully investigate vagrancy and homelessness. This book by leading scholars in the field is for policy makers, as well as for courses on poverty, homelessness, and world history. Contributors: Richard B. Allen David Arnold A. L. Beier Andrew Burton Vincent DiGirolamo Andrew A. Gentes Robert Gordon Frank Tobias Higbie Thomas H. Holloway Abby Margolis Paul Ocobock Aminda M. Smith Linda Woodbridge