Vagrant ‘loafers’ were a preoccupation of novelists and social reformers who saw them as emblematic of social and racial decline during the 1880s and 1890s. This chapter first examines the articles and book-length reports that sought to define and solve the problems of unemployment, inefficiency and vagrancy. These were underwritten by theories of degeneration, social Darwinism and eugenics, ideas that ensured that the vagrant poor were increasingly characterised in ‘scientific’ terms as a biological threat to society and the white ‘imperial’ race. The second half of the chapter examines how this anxiety was expressed in the slum fiction of Arthur Morrison and Margaret Harkness, and in particular how the portrayal of loafers in slum novels and social investigations shaped H. G. Wells’s first dystopia, The Time Machine (1895). Although the influence of social investigation has been noted, Wells’s engagement with the slum novel, and what he perceived to be its failings, has hitherto been overlooked.

This essay considers some of the spectacular events of 1887, ranging from Queen Victoria’s Jubilee procession in June to the ‘Bloody Sunday’ protests in November, taking in the opening of the People’s Palace, the Lord Mayor’s Day parade, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, the Military Tournament and the Hippodrome Circus. It notes the construction in the same year of two large venues designed for the production of visual entertainments (Earls Court and Olympia) and asks what constituted ‘spectacle’ at this time. A brief coda examines the ways in which the spectacles of 1887 were represented in the works of three writers: George Gissing, Margaret Harkness and William Morris.