... ephemera, bureaucratic forms, and legal cases to history that justified empire and literature—poetry and novels—from the long eighteenth century. She offers an important reconsideration of the picaresque, resituating the genre in the context of vagrancy laws and shifting attention away from the singular...

... The Vagrancy Law Amendment Act of 1898 "did more to criminalize a putative homosexual identity" by "heighten[ing] the significance of behavior that was not explicitly sexual" (44). As Cook explains in his chapter on "The Grossly Indecent City," men like the actor Alan Horton could be sentenced...

... , Celeste . Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995 . Levine , Caroline . The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt . Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2003 . Levine , George . The Realistic...

... vacillations at Ford's counter as a model of the “aimlessness” ( 18 ) of Emma's desire, her libidinal “vagrancy,” and “inherently inconclusive . . . fancy” (19) as she considers each of her suitors. In this reading, Harriet's indecision provides a synecdoche for the unfolding of the novel's marriage plot...

... to individual parishes. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in their monumental English Local Government, label the logic of the Old Poor Law a "framework of repression" (407), indicating a reality in which the destitute were either incarcerated or forced into vagrancy by a system that was geared to avoid poor...

... the city streets collapses all distinctions between sanitation and filth, work and idleness; his vagrancy is not the opposite steinlight | biopolitical imagination of victorian fiction 237 of domesticity but rather carries with it the homelessness of home itself. Further, in a genre...

... and gratuitous forms of economic activity” ( 63 ). Due in large part to their association with vagrancy and immorality, casual workers were often viewed suspiciously ( Jones 1 ). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mayhew contextualized these behaviors as the effect rather than the cause of poverty ( Yeo 82...