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In the opening stanzas of “The Thorn,” the narrator offers a puzzling description of three natural objects: a thorn, a pond, and a hill of moss. The speaker intrigues us by emphasizing how these items partake of multiple, and at times opposing, intangible qualities or physical properties. The thorn is associated both with infancy – it is “Not higher than a two-years’ child” – and advanced age – it “looks so old and grey” (5, 4).1 The small, muddy pool nearby, never completely dry, is neither a proper pond nor dry land. And the adjacent moss heap’s resemblance to “an infant’s grave in size” is qualified, since no grave was ever “half so fair” (52, 55). Finally, the speaker explains what distinguishes these three items

Calling them “juvenile productions, inflated and obscure,” in a letter of 1801 Wordsworth nevertheless offers Anne Taylor An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches as examples of his independent thinking, referring specifically to their “new images, and vigorous lines” (Early Years, 327–8). Wordsworth’s choice of texts emphasizes his belief that their artistic characteristics have an intellectual as well as ideological basis. In choosing productions for publication that would in effect introduce him to the public in 1793, Wordsworth fixed on poems that from their inception acknowledge and interrogate law, culture and literature’s assumptions about wandering and respectability. Both poems depart from conventional topographical writing by introducing speakers who identify with traditionally ornamental homeless people, even as that identification arouses anxiety and physical danger. The 1793 version of An Evening Walk explores similarities between poet and vagrant only, in the end, to prefer a life of directed wandering to the aimless rambles of the text’s opening lines. More than an exploration of a place, An Evening Walk presents the Lake District through the eyes of an observer familiar with the terrain yet estranged from the people and settings he describes. In its tentative exploration of the possibilities of the topographical genre and the rewards and perils of a vagrant aesthetic, the poem is an instructive baseline against which to measure Wordsworth’s subsequent compositions.

The political situation in Britain during the 1790s receives scant attention in any version of The Prelude, especially when we consider the thousands of lines devoted in the 1805 and 1850 versions of the text to events occurring at the same time across the Channel. The one brief commentary on the conservatives who dominated British government during this decade attributes this omission not to indifference to domestic conditions but rather to the poet’s still almost uncontrollable rage over them. In the 1805 Prelude, the narrator claims “this is passion over near ourselves, / Reality too close and too intense” (X.640–1). He adds

To the contemporary reader, the 200 years separating us from the Romantic period may appear a formidable barrier; like the speaker of Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper,” perhaps we only indistinctly perceive in its poetry and prose “old, unhappy, far-off things, /And battles long ago” (19–20). To scholars seeking a more profound understanding of the culture of the era, this gap may seem wider still. Typically recipients rather than providers of charity, the homeless nevertheless offer this gift to us: a particular and immediate opportunity to reduce this distance. Unlike the poor who have housing, however inadequate, the homeless in today’s cities and towns are unique in their visibility. If the French Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars seem remote, many Americans have become all too familiar with one of the most common occurrences in the tumultuous Romantic era generally and in Wordsworth’s poetry in particular – an encounter with the homeless. Then, as now, these encounters engendered the twin responses of pity and fear, of relief and repression. Then, as now, the homeless were perceived both as broken people in need of help – as victims of economic and social forces beyond their control – and as willfully idle, as dangers to life, as threats to the value of homes and property. Their poverty elicits pity, even as their social alienation evokes the frightening specter of disorder and crime.

In a comment particularly pertinent to Wordsworth (and indeed to most Romantic writers), Foucault explains the central role that biography played in an important innovation in nineteenth-century police: the development of the concept of delinquency. This rubric replaced the amateur constable’s mission of apprehending criminals, guilty of a discrete offense, with the professional policeman’s diagnosis of delinquents, individuals whose predilection toward crime – whether they actually had violated a law or not – was verified by a “slow formation … shown in a biographical investigation,” carried out from the “triple viewpoint of psychology, social position, and upbringing” (Foucault, D&P, 252). Investigators policing delinquency associated details about an individual’s life seemingly irrelevant to a particular offense with a tendency to commit crime – a practice that in our own time has been rationalized in the profession of the criminal profiler. The twentieth-century identification of certain types of crime with social isolation, regularly disseminated through the newcast cliche for murder suspects, “s/he was a loner,” is one obvious example of the kind of link legal professionals make between crimes and character traits with no obvious, causal connection. Delinquency enters British policing practice not through a desire to circumvent the actions of violent criminals, for example, but in response to the vagrancy problem in London during the 1790s and early 1800s.

When Wordsworth returned to Britain in 1792, the marginality embodied by the homeless had come under unique and extreme pressure. Throughout the volatile 1790s, the crown would work to polarize all political discourse into the categories of radical or conservative – traitorous or loyalist. The Pitt ministry struggled to define virtually all government opposition as sedition or treason. Yet the government’s many critics advocated various shadings of change, ranging from parliamentary reform to revolution, that strained against the authorities’ simplifying agenda, and in key trials English juries defended the right to disagree with aspects of government policy or structure. Representations of the homeless in Wordsworth’s “Salisbury Plain” explore the polyvalent social and legal status, not only of vagrancy itself, but also of the varieties of political expression under attack during the poem’s composition. The female vagrant’s history underscores the injustice of laws labeling her a criminal vagabond by casting her as a victim of powerful political and economic forces. The vagrant and her male companion also indirectly defend an embattled political middle ground, criticizing a conservative government that would lump all reform with revolution. Ultimately the poem views radical and reactionary rhetoric alike with subtle skepticism, implying that these two agendas can be equally restrictive and dogmatic.1 The female vagrant’s homelessness further enables her to evade another kind of tyranny, identified through Burke with the Tory political program: the destructive submersion of individual identity in inflexible, gender-based roles that Wordsworth associates with domestic life.