This chapter offers a new reading of vagrancy in early Romantic poetry. By reading the poetry of Mary Robinson against the backdrop of police reform and vagrancy law at the end of the eighteenth century, it proposes a turn away from lyric or legal subjectivity in order to see other crucial poetic valences of what can be termed “Romantic vagrancy.” Robinson not only pushes one to reconsider a literary-historical narrative that has long been dominated by William Wordsworth, but also offers an engagement with vagrancy that theorizes law and lyric as intersecting precisely where legal persons and lyric subjects disappear. Tracing how Robinson's collection brings rural English poverty into the same frame as global war, the scandal of destitute Asian sailors stranded in London by the East India Company, the Sierra Leone colonization project, and the role of police reformers in reshaping dockside labor in London, the chapter argues that poetic vagrancy allows one to understand its most iconic recurring image — the dispossession of the rural English poor — as an optic for invoking vast scales and distant populations. Vagrancy's relation to police, especially as a mode of governmentality that spanned scales from local to global, is in fact crucial to its poetic redeployment.
Mother India: The Role of the Maternal Figure in Establishing Legal Subjectivity