If women are like soldiers to Mary Wollstonecraft, in “The Female Vagrant” William Wordsworth shows us how vagrant women are like parched, shipwrecked sailors. They are Robinson Crusoes of proto-feminism. Though he speaks metaphorically, Wordsworth’s equating the female vagrant with a shipwrecked sailor is an example of an important turn toward realism that writers pursued in the Romantic era when addressing this figure. Consider that traditionally the fallen woman, who turns into the female vagrant, had for centuries been cast as not the survivor, but the storm:

He cover’d her body, then home he did run,
Leaving none but birds her death to mourn;
On board the Bedford he enter’d straitway,
Which lay at Portsmouth out bound for the sea.

For carpenter’s mate he was enter’d we hear,
Fitted for his voyage away he did steer;
But as in his cabbin one night he did lie,
The voice of his sweetheart he heard to cry.

O perjur’d villain, awake now and hear,
The voice of your love, that lov’d you so dear;
This ship out of Portsmouth never shall go,
Till I am revenged for this overthrow.

She afterward vanished with shrieks and cries,
Flashes of lightning did dart from her eyes;
Which put the ships crew into great fear,
None saw the ghost, but the voice they did hear.

“The Gosport Tragedy” (c. 1760) tells the story of Molly and William, a conventional ballad narrative of a young man who impregnates a young woman and refuses to marry her before setting off to sea. After Molly pleads too much for him to marry her, William lures her to the woods, stabs her, and buries her. Molly gets her revenge by wrecking William’s ship in storms generated by her supernatural vengeance. Tanya Evans, who devotes a section on “vengeful ghosts” in her history of single mothers in the eighteenth century, explains that these tales filled the void left by the decline of parental involvement in a society growing more fluid—children were moving farther from home for work, young men were charting seas for trade and war, and young adults were seeking more autonomy in choosing their mates. “Poor, eighteenth-century unmarried mothers could do nothing to change the story of their life,” Evans writes, “but the tales related in ballads and chapbooks of men humiliated in front of their mates, read or heard on the streets or within households at work or leisure, allowed poor, pregnant and deserted women the fantasy of revenge on lovers whom many were never to set eyes on again” (66). However, still more and more women were becoming homeless by the end of the century, and tales of supernatural revenge could no longer satisfy. The test of time, of course, had proven women have no power in death. By turning the sea witch into the sailor, Wordsworth, and the writers I consider in this project, makes an important step toward what I call dispossessing homeless women. They are exorcised, that is, dispossessed of their inherited demons and vengeance. Like the heroine of “The Female Vagrant,” the characters I examine are also dispossessed of their home and loved ones even as they are dispossessed by the nation in which they should be someone’s property but there is no one left to claim them.

The chapters that follow examine the profile of the homeless woman in the late eighteenth century and her representation in Romantic-era literature and the links between this character and movement toward naturalistic realism. My work tracks a coalescing of three literary and social phenomena that led to a major refiguring of the homeless woman in the public consciousness. First, across the eighteenth century and coming to a crisis in the last decades, there was a ballooning in the population of destitute and houseless women, who were either overlooked or punished by public officials. Second, a nascent movement promoting communal care rather than policing of the poor was gaining momentum. And third, by the start of the Romantic era, many critics, both literary and social, voiced exhaustion with and aversion to both the stock figure of the fallen woman in novels and ballads as well as their real life counterparts in the crowds of 4 desperate women on the street. These forces combined during the Romantic-era, I argue, in a way that lastingly altered the way the public not only perceived but also treated the homeless woman. William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frances Burney, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith: virtually every major (and minor) writer of the period engaged this alarming problem.

The first British Parliamentary Select Committee reports on vagrancy policy, questioning the efficacy of the administration of vagrancy laws, began in 1815 (Rogers 129). But this official report came at the end of a long process, which saw British concern over the outbreak of the French Revolution causing one of the nation’s most intense crackdowns on vagrants, with federal officials essentially eliminating a local constable’s discretion and requiring the whipping of male vagrants (Rogers 130). Within this time period, public discussion considered a range of extremes regarding the identification and treatment of homeless people (in addition to their distinction from criminals and idlers). I argue that not only were Romantic-era writers, particularly female writers, drawn to this controversy, but they also successfully employed new genres to complicate and expand the general perception of the dispossessed female.