Wordsworth's Vagrants

Quentin Bailey is an Assistant Professor at San Diego State University.

• Introduction Prisoners, Poetry, and the “Jacobin Creed”; Chapter 1 A “rapid and alarming increase of crimes”: Law and Order in Eighteenth-Century England; Chapter 2 “Tyranny and Implements of Death”: Crimes, Punishments, and the “distracted times” of 1792–1795; Chapter 3 A “Traveller … Upon the Plain of Sarum”: Sacrificial Altars, Penal Reform, and the Salisbury Plain Poems; Chapter 4 “If Good Angels Fail”: Government, Lawlessness, and Sympathy in The Borderers; Chapter 5 “Dangerous and Suspicious Trades”: The Pedlar, the Board of Police Revenue, and the Poetry of Human Suffering; Chapter 6 “Have you any honest means of livelihood, and if so, what is it?”: Idle and Disorderly Persons in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads; Chapter 7 “Laugh and be gay, to the woods away!”: Madness and the Limits of Poetic Knowledge; conclusion Peter Bell and “the Spirits of the mind”;

'Wordsworth's Vagrants pivots in admirable fashion between the evolving details of the penal code in the late eighteenth century, the debates about the nature of crime and punishment in pamphlets and treatises, and the imaginative literature that responds to these developments.' Toby Benis, Saint Louis University, USA 'Wordsworth’s Vagrants shows an impressive command of existing Wordsworth criticism, while offering a convincing and original series of readings.' Review of English Studies ’Wordsworth’s Vagrants performs the valuable service of laying out detailed evidence demonstrating how what Foucault calls Power shaped policy and attitudes toward crime and the poor in Georgian society...’ European Romantic Review 'Bailey offers a Wordsworth who engages in narrow, precise, insightful critical reflections on crime and punishment and seeks alternatives to the solutions proposed by governmental leaders and political tlleorists.' Wordsworth Circle