Wordsworth's Vagrants
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€50.99
A01=Quentin Bailey
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Author_Quentin Bailey
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ballads
bloody
Bloody Code
British social policy
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code
COP=United Kingdom
cottage
Cumberland Beggar
Darwin's Zoonomia
Darwin’s Zoonomia
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Discharged Soldier
Distracted Times
Drawn Back
eighteenth-century criminal justice
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female
Female Vagrant
Female Wanderer
George III
Houseless Woods
Human Suffering
Idiot Boy
Language_English
literary radicalism
lyrical
Lyrical Ballads
Mad Mother
Margaret's Suffering
Margaret’s Suffering
Martha Ray
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penal reform history
Peter Bell
plain
poems
poetry and penal law intersection
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ruined
Ruined Cottage
salisbury
Salisbury Plain
Salisbury Plain Poems
social exclusion studies
softlaunch
Uninvited Guest
Unjust Tribunals
vagrancy legislation
Vagrant Dwellers
Westminster Police Bill
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781032926391
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 14 Oct 2024
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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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.
Quentin Bailey is an Assistant Professor at San Diego State University.
