Salisbury Plain and the Recuperation of Freedom

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.