Vaga/bondage

Toni Wein

From 1816 to 1820, Parliament convened four special hearings, with the goal of modernizing the laws governing the poor, immigrants, and vagrants. Current events and the times lent urgency to the task: the influx of demobilized men, hungry, jobless, and often homeless at war’s end exerted special pressure on London’s already crowded streets and strained parish resources necessary to feed the indigent. Moreover, the unregulated circulation of this ‘mob’ aroused fears of insurrection that simmered in the public mind, fueled as these fears had been by the riots of 1780 and the carnage in France.

However, no decision could be reached with respect to new provisions or execution of the law unless legislators agreed upon a fixed common definition for vagrancy, indigence, and idleness, since the law prohibited the support of those able but unwilling to work. In the ensuing debate over that definition, agreement rested on just one point: no artistic or intellectual work qualified for the designation ‘productive.’ This dismissive attitude provoked defensiveness on the part of artists, already struggling to accommodate the shift from a patronage to a market system reliant on circulation.

My talk focuses on one work that perfectly reticulates this complex of ideas and actions, John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana (1817). Smith was Keeper of the Prints in the British Museum and an accomplished artist in his own right. His black and white renderings of notable London poor, engaged in the meager occupations by which they earned an even more meager ‘living,’ resembles the genre of Cries which had furnished artistic representations of London street folk as early as the sixteenth century. These drawings reveal a humane empathy with the hardships entailed upon the poor, especially when their incapacity resulted from wounds sustained in service to the country.

Yet the text with which he brackets his drawings sounds a more critical note. An uneasy merger of artistic history and social philosophy, the text participates in the attempt to define vagrancy by sorting its parade of hawkers and beggars into two categories, able-bodied and maimed, an indexing destabilized by the frequent practice of fraud, against which Smith fulminates. Racializing his physical discriminations provides Smith with a way to fix categories: the Irish are able-bodied, while the Jews are not. Yet, ironically, the figure he draws of the Jew becomes the site for new marketing techniques to enhance his circulation and profits. Vagabondiana thus illuminates correspondences between politics, the growth of a culture market, and the performance of ethnicity

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