ABSTRACT
Simon Lee is the first poem discussed, in which William Wordsworth reports upon a direct encounter with a member of that large class of paupers and vagrants that was such a feature of the contemporary social landscape. Wordsworth's experiences of and meditations upon the vagrant poor are, implicated within the same preoccupations with property and labour that we have seen to figure so largely in his moral and aesthetic doctrines. Kenneth Johnston has suggested that the draft passages that eventually became 'The Old Cumberland Beggar', 'Old Man Travelling' and the 'discharged soldier' episode of The Prelude were central to Wordsworth's early schema for The Recluse. The poem of 1807 in which Wordsworth engages with the relation between charity and vagrancy is 'Alice Fell'. For many of Wordsworth's poems do not appear as the result of a writer having mastered, in some conscious and conclusive way, the terms and implications of his own displacement.
