On the subject of the tramp, British sources at the turn of the century were no less immune to international influence than their American counterparts. At the same time, one cannot speak of the tramp in Britain in the twentieth century without acknowledging the long history of vagabond literature there: tramp prototypes and adjacent groups – such as rambling men, tinkers and gypsies – abound in cultural sources from the British Isles since the early modern period. In the nineteenth century, representations of vagrant figures in literature shifted alongside wider transformations in British society as a result of industrialisation, expansion of the rail system and redoubled land enclosure (Robinson 28–9). Although this chapter will focus on authors in the early twentieth century – and the linkages between US and British authors in particular – it is useful to linger briefly on this earlier period in order to help distinguish the innovations I associate with the more modern version of the tramp-writer. Well before the American ‘tramp scare’ in the late nineteenth century, Britain's Romantic poets were making vagrants and vagabonds the subjects of their art. ‘Romantic vagrancy’, as Celeste Langan puts it, was concerned with vagrancy insofar as it is ‘susceptible to analogy and subsequent idealization’ (17). Vagrant figures appear everywhere in Romantic literature, in other words, but they appear primarily as abstractions removed from the social institutions that generate poverty. The turn from this abstract sense of vagrancy to embodied vagrancy is at the centre of this chapter.

William Wordsworth's ‘Beggars’ (1815) is illustrative of the abstract understanding of vagrancy that characterises Romantic writing on the subject. The poem relates a brief encounter between the narrator and a pauper of ‘Amazonian’ appearance, who troubles the narrator's sense of time and place (11):

As these lines indicate, the beggar instigates the overflow of powerful feelings that is characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry. The focus therefore remains exclusively on the narrator's emotional response to the pauper – whose own story, so to speak, remains a mystery throughout the poem.