The Novel and the Sexuality of Vagrancy

This chapter examines the role of vagrancy law in regulating the affective, sexual, reproductive, and domestic lives of the English poor. It traces vagrancy's appearance at the margins of both the novel and the marriage plot across a series of texts, including Jane Barker's Patchwork Screen for the Ladies (1723), Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762), and, most centrally, Henry Fielding's The Female Husband (1746). Fielding, as novelist, magistrate, and major eighteenth-century theorist of police, is at the center of the chapter, which reads his figuration of vagrancy as a kind of sexuality that disrupts labor-discipline, marriage, and legitimate inheritance. At the same time, Fielding's text and the archival records of policing that surround it reveal how one might take vagrancy as a category of analysis for transgender history, since the construction of the sexed body as metonym for juridical identity developed through a nexus of policing, surveillance, and transatlantic print culture for which vagrancy was a foundational legal category. Finally, through readings of Scott's Millenium Hall and Mary Saxby's posthumously published Memoirs of a Female Vagrant (1806), the chapter shows that literary histories of sexuality look profoundly different if one centers the parish rather than the family as the field of analysis.

Toward an Abolitionist Literary History of the Police

This coda presents a reading of George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson's enormously influential article “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety” (1982) as a remarkably politically successful redeployment of the tropes of eighteenth-century vagrancy. This article both draws on and occludes the prehistory of the police. Kelling and Wilson rely significantly on early histories of policing — in particular, the history of vagrancy law. At the same time, they push their readers insistently away from historical modes of thought. Through a reading of this text, much of whose political influence relies on the persuasive success of its master metaphors, the chapter proposes that reading methods of literary history can offer unique critical insights into the deep histories still animating contemporary theorizations of policing.

Police Archives Before the Police

This introductory chapter discusses the definitional undefinability of the notion of “police.” This undefinability offers a conundrum when it comes to textual interpretation, but vagrancy offers a generatively loquacious archive of police. In the archive of vagrancy, one sees the making of police through the “minute particulars.” As it was a paradigmatic target of police, vagrancy also remained crucially resistant to definitional certainty, and yet it had a material, practical life as well — many of its “minute particulars” were elaborated in administrative, theoretical, and literary texts, thus generating an archive of police before “the police” had taken institutional form. Through precise attention to the deceptively small category of vagrancy as it traverses legal theory, legal practice, and print culture, one gains crucial insight into the array of practices, theories, modes and purviews of violence, and habits of perception that coalesced as “police” before the establishment of the modern police force. The chapter then considers how vagrancy connected local order-keeping to political economy.

Settler Vagrancy

This chapter assesses the legal and imaginative specificity of vagrancy law and its relation to land in North America. It reads Charles Brockden Brown's novels Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799) — both long regarded as crucial and ambivalent meditations on the viability of the new American republic — alongside archival records of vagrancy arrests in Philadelphia in the 1790s. The chapter shows how the emergent category of nationally distinct American whiteness relied on figures of mobility through the frontier, yet remained uncomfortably difficult to distinguish from the criminalized (and often differently racialized) category of vagrancy. It also looks at the startling prominence of literary history in the landmark 1972 Supreme Court case Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, which struck down vagrancy laws as unconstitutional. The chapter argues that a particularly potent literary afterlife of the figure of the vagrant rendered this figure a symbol of free, white settler mobility.