Before gays and lesbians could claim their full rights as Americans, they needed to overcome a host of laws and legal practices that created an imposing barrier to reform. This chapter provides a brief overview of the antiqueer world of mid-century America, detailing the myriad laws and policies that kept gays and lesbians out of public life. It then examines how and why lawmakers began decriminalizing homosexuality, detailing the demise of sexual psychopath, consensual sodomy, and vagrancy laws. It argues that the key to these changes was not lawyers, legislators, or judges, but rather sociologists – more specifically, Alfred Kinsey. His research revealed that same-sex intimacy was far from aberrant, which undermined the assumption on which the laws were based. His work influenced the thinking of leading legal scholars and advocates, who pressed for law reform.

In Chapter One, I outline a brief history of the representation of US transiency from the postbellum period into the early twentieth century. I explore how the term ‘tramp’ developed as a term of moral and legal exclusion to describe the mobile poor, who were felt to be opting out of the capitalist work ethos. I show that while the tramp had been a figure of mockery in popular culture, during the late nineteenth century the problem began to be treated more seriously by a range of proto-sociological figures. In the early twentieth century, investigators increasingly accepted a connection between vagrancy and unemployment, and representations became less hyperbolic as a result, although no less tainted by class bias. Finally, the chapter shows how the term ‘hobo’, constructed to mean a transient wage-worker, was developed by the IBWA, the IWW and others to fight back against the cultural meaning and legal implications of the term tramp, creating what I call the ‘frontier defence’ of transiency. However, this defence had problematic connotations and exclusions based on gender and race.

Chapter 2 shows how two Elizabethan and Jacobean engagements with problematic multitudes undermined the body politic as a framework for managing multitudes in a context of rapid population growth, economic change and political challenges beyond England. Turning first to growing anxieties about poverty and vagrancy in England, it examines how rogue literature constructed vagrants as a foreign and inherently idle counter-polity, rather than a displaced and degenerated multitude; it then shows how municipal ordinances, surveys and poor laws came to treat the mobile poor as inherently idle of quantification as well as regulation, for whom systematic intervention and routine management was necessary to instill the virtues of industry. Second, it follows late Tudor and early Stuart efforts to undo the degeneration (through mixture with the Irish) of the Old English in Ireland, and to civilize – through projects of plantation, conquest or legal reform – the putatively barbaric Gaelic Irish themselves. In both cases, problematic groups were no longer seen as displaced organs of a body politic but rather as populations that must be made governable in the first instance through policy.

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.

How were vagrants represented in the Victorian period? This chapter argues that the Victorians inherited many strategies of representation from the early modern period, including the moral concept of the deserving and undeserving poor, and stereotypes about the lawlessness, deceptiveness and rebelliousness of wanderers and itinerants. But they were also influenced by new epistemologies and ways of knowing. In particular, Victorian representations of vagrancy were influenced by emerging racial theories, such as extinction theory, degeneration theory, social Darwinism and eugenics. This chapter provides an overview of how these theories interlocked with older prejudices and moral frameworks, and in the process introduces the key vagrant archetypes addressed by this study: Gypsies, hawkers, poachers, casual paupers, loafers, pauper immigrants, American Indians, American vagabonds and beachcombers. Together, these figures comprise the taxonomy through which commentators understood, imagined and interpreted vagrancy in the Victorian age.

Beachcombers lived in the Pacific Islands and were the vagrants of the South Seas. Historically, they were most prominent in the early nineteenth century and belonged to the medial phase between the Pacific Islanders’ first contact with Europeans and the formal colonisation that followed. By the 1880s and 1890s they had been thoroughly displaced by white missionaries and merchants; however, despite this, the beachcomber became an increasingly prominent figure in British culture during this period. This chapter examines the importance of the beachcomber in the imperial imagination. It explores how the beachcomber was presented in popular novels and the periodical press as both an imperial pathfinder and as a degraded ‘white savage’ destined for extinction; and how these alternative representations were key to the public’s understanding of the Pacific Islands. This analysis provides the context for a close reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide (1894), a novella in which the beachcomber serves as an essential figure in Stevenson’s critique of empire.

Vagrants abound in the writings of British travellers who visited antebellum America. This chapter focuses on the representation of three of these vagrant figures. First, the pauper immigrant, a figure whose mobility was vigorously contested by British and American commentators. For the British these immigrants belong to the deserving poor – their rootlessness was temporary and incidental; for the Americans they were often perceived as undeserving vagrants and a potential financial burden. Second, the American Indian, a figure who was frequently compared to the English Gypsy, and whose nomadism was often repositioned as vagrancy and a sign of their impending extinction. And third, the American vagabond, a vagrant and anarchic figure who was represented as a lawless reprobate living on the frontiers. These three figures were interpreted using a range of representational strategies that were current in Britain, and together they demonstrate the flexibility of vagrant discourses – their ability to circulate globally as well as locally. Among other writers, this chapter examines the works of Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens.

The Gypsy is one of the most prominent vagrant figures in nineteenth-century literature and culture, and has received a considerable amount of critical attention. This chapter situates the Gypsy alongside other rural itinerants, such as hawkers and handicraft tramps, in order to address how racial and aesthetic assumptions conditioned the representation of Gypsies in British print culture. Focusing on the period 1830–60, this chapter first examines how a legacy of picturesque representation combined with more recent theories of extinction, and how these were combined in periodical articles that depicted the Gypsies as a ‘vanishing race’. This is followed by an in-depth analysis of George Borrow’s autobiography Lavengro (1851) and its sequel The Romany Rye (1857). Here I argue that while Borrow reiterated racial interpretations of English Gypsies, he actively critiqued the picturesque tradition that sought to idealise them and other rural itinerants in Britain. Alongside Borrow, this chapter examines works by George Eliot and Mary Russell Mitford.

The afterword summarises the key arguments of the book through a case study of Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903).

London was a centre of vagrancy in the Victorian period. Its refuges, lodging-houses and workhouses ensured that large numbers of vagrants travelled to the capital, especially during the winter months when travelling on the open road could be difficult and dangerous. The first half of this chapter examines how these forms of relief structured the vagrants’ movement and resulted in what I call ‘metropolitan vagrancy’. This was a constrained form of movement, typically limited to the winter months, that was contoured by the resources that the vagrant poor were able to access and the mounting restrictions that were placed on them by the Poor Law. The second half examines an understudied depiction of homelessness that was, in part, a product of these restrictions: the queue outside the ‘casual’ or vagrant ward of the workhouse. This became an image that articulated anxieties about the difficult distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, and also conveyed fears about the illiberality of the Poor Law and the potentially revolutionary response that it might provoke. This chapter examines works by Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley and the painter Luke Fildes.

Most actual poachers were not vagrants in the Victorian period; but a significant number of literary ones were, especially during the so-called Hungry Forties. Examining popular and literary sources from across the political spectrum, this chapter argues that the vagrant poacher became a politically loaded figure in British print culture during the 1840s. In the conservative ‘poacher’s progress’ the poacher’s vagrancy was a sign of selfishness and a staging post on the road to ruin. These morality tales supported the landowning elite and their monopoly on game by depicting the poacher as a predatory criminal. Meanwhile, in radical literature, such as Charles Dickens’s The Chimes (1844), the poacher was represented as a victim of permissive laws; these included both the vagrancy laws and the game laws. In these texts the poacher’s vagrancy was a sign of social oppression and was used to critique what many liberals and radicals perceived as the criminalisation of poverty. Alongside Dickens, this chapter examines Charles Kingsley’s Yeast (1848) as well as works by Hannah More and Charlton Carew.

This chapter consists of a literature review of girls’ and young women’s crime and deviance from a long-term perspective. It shows how certain themes have dominated European discourses and realities of female juvenile delinquency across several centuries and up until the present day, and how these various threats and transgressions have been countered by recurrent strategies. In assessing sexual misconduct, theft and vagrancy – three crime categories that were prevalent among prosecutions of young women – it identifies powerful and enduring narratives centering on concerns about girls’ sexuality and independence. Finally, in comparing responses to female juvenile crime and deviance across Western Europe since the eighteenth century, certain ‘solutions’ have proven dominant and very enduring: institutional confinement of criminal and problem girls on the one hand, and the pathologisation of female (juvenile) crime on the other.

This chapter traces efforts by Baltimore and its courts to grapple with the expanding prostitution trade in the decades before the Civil War. Initially, local officials and courts attempted to take a suppressive approach to prostitution, in keeping with long-standing common-law precedents that enabled the state to police urban disorder. However, efforts at suppression proved prohibitively taxing on city resources, which prompted the adoption of a bifurcated approach to commercial sex in which the local officials and magistrates continued to punish public prostitution while largely tolerating indoor prostitution. By the 1840s, Baltimore had developed a regulatory approach to the sex trade that was intended to ensure that it remained as contained and orderly as possible. This system continued to function for nearly two decades before a groundbreaking 1857 legal intervention allowed city residents to seek equitable remedies for the presence of brothels in their neighborhoods. The precedent set in Hamilton v. Whitridge would set the stage for the containment of brothels within red-light districts, although it would take the Civil War to usher in that new phase of spatial regulation.

As I show in this chapter, the broader developments in interpersonal and intersubjective relations that have taken place over the twentieth century have impacted on the way in which criminal responsibility organises relations of responsibility between individuals. I make two main arguments in this chapter. First, I argue that consorting laws fall into two generations. The first generation of laws, which appeared around the turn of the twentieth century, had a distinctive orientation, mode (which denotes the way in which criminal responsibility is expressed) and form. The second main argument made in this chapter is that these generations of consorting laws correspond to different relations of responsibility between individuals or ‘others’.