Location: Literary London 2012, UCL

July 2013: This paper was awarded The President’s Prize for best graduate paper at the Literary London Conference

This is a paper about spectatorship and leisure in early nineteenth-century London, and how such terms related to the representation of the city’s poor at this time. In the period 1815-1825, the economic downturn caused by the Napoleonic Wars had put the poor before the eyes of Londoners more  insistently than ever before, provoking a host of literary and artistic works on the subject. This paper takes one such work, the Vagabondiana of John Thomas Smith and Francis Douce (1817), and asks how it was able to represent the mendicants of the capital in such a way as to make them, in its authors’ words, “not unamusing”. In order to contextualise this effort, I shall set both Douce’s prose and Smith’s plates against, on one hand, the morally censorious anecdotes given in the Select Committee Reports on Mendicity of 1815 and 1816, and, on the other,
Charles Lamb’s ‘A complaint of the decay of Beggars in the Metropolis’ (1822), which urges readers to “rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth” and thus consider the city’s poor as “comedians”.

Drawing on William Gilpin’s theories of the picturesque in art (1786), the practices of eighteenth-century antiquarianism, and such ‘catalogue’ literature of the period as William Pyne’s Microcosm (1806), I will show how the Vagabondiana is able to hold the morally-critical view of the beggar as “idle” in abeyance, and at the same time provide what Celina Fox has called a “glow of reassuring emotions” for its readers. Whilst Lamb, in the persona of Elia, writes with an excessive, self-parodying rhetoric that exposes the contradictions of such a position, it is my contention that Smith and Douce seek to make observation of the poor a kind of luxury leisure activity. The Vagabondia is, after all, a beautiful book, sharing many of the attributes of Smith’s and Douce’s other publications, all targeting the tastes and entertainments of contemporary amateur historians. Douce wrote for the journal Archaeologia, and Smith, appointed Keeper of the Prints at the British Museum, published the “two hundred and forty-six” of his Antiquities of Westminster in 1807.”