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Wordsworth's Vagrants

DOI link for Wordsworth's Vagrants

Wordsworth's Vagrants book

Police, Prisons, and Poetry in the 1790s

Wordsworth's Vagrants

DOI link for Wordsworth's Vagrants

Wordsworth's Vagrants book

Police, Prisons, and Poetry in the 1790s
ByQuentin Bailey
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2011
eBook Published 11 February 2016
Pub. location London
Imprint Routledge
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315546421
Pages 230 pages
eBook ISBN 9781315546421
SubjectsHumanities, Language & Literature
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Bailey, Q. (2011). Wordsworth's Vagrants. London: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315546421

Wordsworth's Vagrants explores the poet's treatment of the 'idle and disorderly' in the context of the penal laws of the 1790s, when the terror of the French Revolution caused a crackdown on the beggars and vagrants who roamed the English countryside. From his work on the Salisbury Plain poems through to the poetry about vagrants, beggars, and lunatics in Lyrical Ballads, Quentin Bailey argues, Wordsworth attempted to imagine a way of relating to the vagrant and criminal poor that could challenge the systematizing impulses of William Pitt and Jeremy Bentham. Whereas writers had previously relied on sensibility and fellow-feeling to reveal the correct ordering of society, Wordsworth was writing in a period in which legislators, magistrates, and commentators agreed that a more aggressively interventionist approach and new institutional solutions were needed to tackle criminality and establish a disciplined and obedient workforce. Wordsworth's interest in individual psychology and solitude, Bailey suggests, grew out of his specific awareness of the Bloody Code and the discussions surrounding it. His study offers a way of reading Wordsworth's poetry that is sensitive to his early radicalism but which does not equate socio-political engagement solely with support for the French Revolution.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

chapter |12 pages

Introduction: Prisoners, Poetry, and the “Jacobin Creed”

chapter 1|20 pages

A “rapid and alarming increase of crimes”: Law and Order in Eighteenth-Century England

chapter 2|24 pages

“Tyranny and Implements of Death”: Crimes, Punishments, and the “distracted times” of 1792–1795

chapter 3|28 pages

A “Traveller … Upon the Plain of Sarum”: Sacrificial Altars, Penal Reform, and the Salisbury Plain Poems

chapter 4|26 pages

“If Good Angels Fail”: Government, Lawlessness, and Sympathy in The Borderers

chapter 5|32 pages

“Dangerous and Suspicious Trades”: The Pedlar, the Board of Police Revenue, and the Poetry of Human Suffering

chapter 6|26 pages

“Have you any honest means of livelihood, and if so, what is it?”: Idle and Disorderly Persons in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads

chapter 7|24 pages

“Laugh and be gay, to the woods away!”: Madness and the Limits of Poetic Knowledge

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