ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the physical and mental constitution of the tramp, and the public's popular image of him. The free and easy moral atmosphere in harvesters' camps, where the sexes mingled uninhibitedly, was also a draw for seasonal farm labourers. Drunkenness appears to have been first and foremost a cause and a condition of the tramp's existence in Victorian and Edwardian times. At the same time there was in the Victorian and Edwardian period a sentimentalised treatment of the tramp that gushed out in the wealth of Victorian and Edwardian parlour songs on the vagabond theme. They can be broadly divided into celebrations of the freedom of tramp life, and mawkish personal tragedies. Such was the curious dichotomy of public attitudes to the tramp; at some times he was the menacing wild man of the woods, at others the enviable personification of freedom.
