Abstract
Unsanctioned Wanderings: Capturing the Vagrant in Romantic Prints
The gentlemanly or artistic wanderer is integral to the Romantic
imagination, yet the ideal of the peripatetic existed against a backdrop of
less desirable forms of vagrancy and nomadism. Through changing Poor Laws
and Vagrancy Acts, as well as the enclosure of lands, these forms of
unsanctioned wandering became increasingly criminalized and unsustainable,
even as the endorsed amblings of the inquisitive artist-gentlemen were
celebrated. This essay looks at depictions of unauthorized wandering in
early-nineteenth-century British prints in order to explore Romantic
constructions of vagrancy in relationship to the artist’s construction of
self. More specifically, this project examines visual strategies that
contradict or resist the implicit project of containment, arrest, and
classification, and which complicate the supposed stasis of the print, the
stability of language, and the book as commodity.