VICARIOUS VAGRANTS: INCOGNITO SOCIAL EXPLORERS AND THE HOMELESS IN ENGLAND, 1860-1910.

Edited, with annotations and an introductory essay by Mark Freeman and Gillian Nelson.

 

     "This vivid and worthwhile book brings together some of the most revealing writing about workhouse and vagrant experience in the nineteenth centuries...As the editors remark in their excellent introduction, these writers are all 'precursors in a longstanding tradition of undercover social research that remains influential and popular.'...This work is valuable not only for the Doré-like illumination it shines on low-life tramping existence in the Victorian eras, but also as a collection of writings that have an important place in the history of social policy and research, investigative journalism, and modern ethnography...[T]his is social history at its most harrowing...an  intensely interesting collection, and the editors have done a most valuable service to social history in producing it."

Economic History Review, (November 2009)

     

     "Freeman and Nelson (both, Univ. of Glasgow) have compiled a useful...collection of reprinted accounts revealing contemporary perceptions of poverty. Ten documents are included. Highlights are James Greenwood's "On Tramp" (1883), J. H. Stallard's "The Female Casual and Her Lodging" (1866), and Mary Higg's "The Tramp Ward" (1904). British history students assigned either Seth Koven's Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (2004) or Gareth Stedman Jones's Outcast London (1971) would benefit from reading specific selections of this collection. Likewise, in teaching historiography, the editors' introduction, which makes the claim that these social explorers were the forerunners of modern anthropological researchers, could be set in useful dialogue with the work of Koven and Jones, as well as with Gertrude Himmelfarb's Poverty and Compassion (1992). Summing up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."

Choice, (01 November 2009)

 

     "The selection of sources for...Vicarious Vagrants is...tightly focused [and] well-chosen. In particular, the editors use these to demonstrate how concern about vagrancy in England shifted in important ways over three distinct periods...Freeman and Nelson do provide further justification for the reproduction of extracts from within this particular genre: that this early undercover research helped to lay the foundations for modern sociological and anthropological studies."

Crime, Histoire & Sociétés/ Crime, History & Societies, (no. 1, 2010)

 

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