Associate professor Alistair Robinson says Victorian attitudes toward the homeless have “filtered through into the 21st century.”
LONDON — In England and Wales, a centuries-old law is still regularly used to prosecute those spotted sleeping or begging on the streets.
According to figures from the U.K. Ministry of Justice, the Vagrancy Act of 1824 was used to prosecute almost 300 people in 2023. As well as using it as a prosecution tool, the law gives police the power to impose fines of up to £1,000 ($1,300).
The statistics back up a conclusion that Northeastern University associate professor Alistair Robinson has drawn from his work researching vagrancy in Victorian Britain (1837–1901) — that not all that much has changed.
“We like to distance ourselves from the Victorians,” says Robinson, “because they represent moral prudery, a severity and racist attitudes that we would like to divorce ourselves from. But I think they are much closer cousins than we would like to think.
“Victorian attitudes are dealing with a much earlier set of concerns about how you decipher who deserves charity and who does not; who deserves benefits and who does not. And I absolutely see that filtering through into the 21st century.”
In the example of the Vagrancy Act, large parts of it have been repealed but elements are still used to police begging and sleeping on the street. This is despite campaigners arguing that it is counterproductive to criminalize those who are homeless when support is required instead.
Robinson, in a chapter written for “Navigating the Nineteenth Century Institution: Asylum and Workhouse,” a book edited by Carol Beardmore, uses historical and literary sources to depict how attitudes toward vagrants fluctuated during the 19th century.
It builds on research that the lecturer in English published in 2021 as part of his book, “Vagrancy In the Victorian Age.”
In his latest chapter, “Casual Wards of London: Vagrants, Poor Laws and the Metropolitan Workhouse,” Robinson shows how the stance towards those staying in casual wards — the 19th-century’s version of a homeless hostel — eventually hardened to become more punitive. Tramps, wanderers and vagrants were trapped by a heavily policed and tightly controlled system.
In a bid to keep the homeless off the streets, vagrants were prevented from leaving the wards until late morning — a scenario that meant they missed the chance to secure a laboring job, such as those available at London’s docks, which typically recruited early each day.
Robinson argues that, almost 200 years later, those forced onto the streets of the U.K. capital face similar systematic barriers to improving their fortunes.
Today, there are ambitions to end homelessness. During his winning pitch for a third term last year, London Mayor Sadiq Khan pledged to eradicate it by 2030.
But for Khan to achieve it, he would have to take thousands of people off the streets. In July, August and September, close to 4,800 people were counted as sleeping on the streets of London.
Robinson says people today can be “trapped” in a “cyclical” system. “If you don’t have a house, you can’t get a bank account. And if you don’t have a bank account, you can’t get a job,” he says.
“It is a little bit like in the chapter — people [in the Victorian era] couldn’t get jobs if their clothes were shabby. We have a similar situation. You can’t make that thing better without changing something else first.
“Victorian attitudes toward the homeless provide a clear case study of a social attitude which is endemic in British society from the year dot to today.”
There are other modern parallels that Robinson, who teaches on Northeastern’s London campus, draws out in his chapter. He says some of those using the casual wards were “living in a subsidence economy,” equating them to the “gig workers of the 21st century” in the way that they would look to “pick up different types of work” to stay afloat. But when they dropped out of the labor market, they would end up looking for support from a charity or a workhouse run by the state.
He also points out that the founding of London’s modern police force was intrinsically linked with the issue of homelessness. The homeless were targeted in the 1829 Metropolitan Police Act, with officers assigned to deal with those seen at night “lying in any highway, yard, or other place, or loitering therein, and not giving a satisfactory account of themselves.”
Those police in the 1830s would likely have used the same Vagrancy Act that today’s London law enforcement officers use to prosecute those spotted sleeping on the sidewalks.
Robinson’s 26-page contribution to Beardmore’s book examines how “topsy-turvy” life was for the homeless navigating the rules that governed them and the aid they received.
By the turn of the 19th century, places like the casual wards — where patrons had to hand in their clothes in exchange for a uniform, slept on the floor of dormitories and completed menial work in the morning before being let out — were seen as fuelling degeneracy.
That view would soften during better economic times in the 1850s and 1860s, according to Robinson’s research, but toughened again in the runup to the 20th century.
“The context in the late 19th century is a general hardening towards people who are in poverty and those on the street,” Robinson says.
“And a lot of this comes from quite a nasty place — a kind of social Darwinism, a survival of the fittest. There were great concerns during the 1880s and 1890s around the fitness of the British population and fears around degeneracy of the nation.
“People who are homeless, and particularly those who are wandering and homeless, were deemed to very much belong among this class. They were commonly referred to during this later period as ‘the residuum’, which is to say that they were regarded as the waste of the population. We start leaning into the territory of eugenics very quickly from there.”
He describes how there was a “wave of legislation” passed through Parliament in the late 1800s that was concerned with “keeping the homeless more confined, locked up and under surveillance.” Rather than dormitories, casual wards were instructed to install single-occupant cells — an architecture imported from prisons.
Stricter rules were enforced concerning how often wards and workhouses could be visited in a calendar month, with punishments for those found to be flouting the stipulations.
But Robinson shows that there were ways of circumventing the rules, whether by chance or design.
The workhouses were independent organizations, so officials in charge could choose to ignore rules around how often vagrants could stay. And accounts written by former tramps speak of unofficial areas, such as Trafalgar Square and near London Bridge — where police would turn a blind eye to rough sleeping.
The comparison with modern-day London is uncanny. Even today, there are hotspot areas, often in the vicinity of homeless shelters and soup kitchens, where rough sleepers will gather for the night.
As Robinson says, “there are always these areas where there is mutual agreement that people are allowed to be.”