Harriman-Smith J. Representing the Poor: Charles Lamb and the Vagabondiana. Studies in Romanticism 2015, 54(4), 551-568.

Recent criticism has often paired Charles Lamb’s “a complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis,” published in the character of Elia in the May 1822 issue of the London Magazine, with John Smith and Francis Douce’s Vagabondiana. Yet while Simon P. Hull and Gregory Dart only briefly evoke how Lamb’s essay “seems to owe something” to the earlier work, a comparison between the two publications merits a more sustained attention than hitherto available. Under close analysis, the sophistication of both works’ engagement with the pressing contemporary problem of how to represent—both politically and aesthetically—the urban poor, and beggars in particular, soon becomes apparent. While Vagabondiana mobilizes parliamentary rhetoric, the techniques of both antiquarian and catalogue literature, and the picturesque mode in an effort to reassure its readers, Lamb takes the same approaches and pushes them to their extreme, revealing both their limits and, most disturbingly of all, those of his readership as well.