Copyright © 2004 Louis Suárez-Potts

 

Late-nineteenth century industrialism in the U.S. produced a nomadic class comprised of male transient workers and unemployed men, who were represented by bourgeois writers as existing in an unknown and mysterious "trampland." Jack London, whose association with the middle classes was always something of a performance, described trampland as a "realm as unexplored as fairyland" and just as invisible to the uninitiated[1]. Other ethnographic, journalistic, and literary writers used similar language to emphasize the alien remoteness of the world the tramp inhabited and the difficulty of understanding the tramp. This ignorance engendered at once a literature of discipline and a torrid romance of speculation, so much so that writings on tramps, whether ethnographic, literary, or journalistic, constituted a veritable genre.

The problem of writing on tramps created a epistemological crisis: on the one hand, one could (and many did), observe the tramp from a distance, and for purposes of disciplining the tramp (usually by imprisonment), this method did perfectly well.

But on the other hand, this method of knowing did not satisfy those curious about the tramp in situ, or outside of the prison; nor did it provide much room for the masculine romance of "escape": from home, from responsibility. For deeper knowledge, a more direct and personal knowledge of the tramp was required. This "deeper" knowledge was hardly disinterested and removed from tactics of subjugation; it was, by and large, material for a homosocial romance of escape and invisibility into "fairyland."

This paper examines the logic of ignorance and its problematic antidote, the genre of writing on tramps. I focus on the popular strategy of representing tramps and their community via ethnographically framed personal accounts, chiefly those of Josiah Flynt, who wrote several criminological works based on his own "dromomania" (irresistible tramp urges) and Mark Twain, whose famous children's work, The Prince and the Pauper has, at its center, a romance of tramping between a young boy and an older, more experienced man, the dispossessed knight, who teaches him about tramping while they seek to regain what is theirs. Both works, the criminological and the literary, present the unknown field of tramping within the circumference of the law; and both present that same field as a paradoxical place of escape.

There is more to this equation of romance bracketed by its reassuring failure to be anything but real. Bourgeois writing on tramps, even the most ethnographically-inclined, embodied an erotic frisson that historians have largely downplayed in favor of more populist or Marxian-inspired accounts of the tramp as victim of capitalism.

Thus, in Josiah Flynt's accounts, the tramp is a dangerous criminal not just because he looks not unlike regular people, but because he seduces young boys. But, that very pedophilia is, I want to suggest, a kind of saving grace for other writers on tramps. Mark Twain, for instance, in a manner that echoes the Ragged Dick stories by Horatio Alger, in which the pedophilic affection displayed by the older man for the young boys seems to enable the success of the boy.

But what is interesting about Twain's story, and what brings it back into large agreement with Flynt, is precisely the manner in which the romantic space of tramping ultimately and paradoxically serves the interests of the governmental.

From one perspective, of course, this neat conclusion is morally necessary: the alternative would be to end it with a kind of endorsement of anarchy and tramping. But rather than emphasizing the unalloyed virtue of government, both the criminological and fictive accounts rather end up representing government as a performance little different from the anarchic itself.

I want to turn to Josiah Flynt's representations of the tramp; I will then conclude with a brief reading of Mark Twain's more sympathetic account of tramp desires.

Why did Flynt tramp? It is a fair question, and one that that he poses to himself repeatedly and answers excessively. Depending on his book and audience, he tramped not because he needed work but because he was psychologically compelled to (his autobiography); or, as he says in what is probably his most famous account of tramps, Appendix B to Havelock Ellis's 1897 Sexual Inversion:

"I have made a rather minute study of the tramp class in the United States England and Germany, but I now it best in the States. I have lived with the tramps there for eight consecutive months, besides passing numerous shorter periods in their company, and my acquaintance with them is nearly of ten years' standing. My purpose in going among them has been to learn about their life in particular and outcast life in general. This can only be done by becoming part and parcel of its manifestations."

(Appendix B, "Homosexuality Among Tramps," 252)[2]

To learn of tramps--to study them scientifically--one must become a tramp. The explanation is bogus, of course: Flynt lived among the tramps because he desired to--I implicitly believe Flynt's autobiography more than his scientistic ethnography. But this ethnography, replete with extensive glossaries (a kind of tradition for this sort of writing) was hardly distinguishable from Lumbroso-like police guides, and in fact, Flynt more than once betrayed his erstwhile friends and threw his chips in with the police and railway companies and happily became an undercover operative, tramping in the name of the law and indulging a voyeuristic appetite as a gesture of science and government.

The point of the appendix--coming after Ellis's sympathetic account of sexual inversion, is to shed light on "situational homosexuality," the sort one might find among sailors and prisoners and, as it happens, tramps: environments where women are not present. But if Ellis's account of inversion is generally sympathetic, Flynt's account of tramp homosexuality is anything but friendly, and his reports vary from the scene seduction below to quite graphic accounts of rape.

Boys are the victims of this passion. The tramps gain possession of these boys in various ways. A common method is to stop for a while in some town, and gain acquaintance with the slum children. They tell these children all sorts of stories about life "on the road", how they can ride on the railways for nothing, shoot Indians, and be "prefeshunnels" (professionals), and they choose some body who specially pleases them. By smiles and flattering caresses they let him know that the stories are meant for him alone, and before long, if the boy is a suitable subject, he smiles back just as slily. In time he learns to think that he is the favourite of the tramp, who will take him on his travels, and he brings to plan secret meetings with the man. The tramp, of course, continues to excite his imagination with stories and caresses, and some fine night there is one boy less in the town.

(Ellis, 253)

What comes across most clearly in this scene of seduction, and what seems to be the key to it, is the affection the tramp displays for the boy. The tramp offers what the working-class boys on whom the tramps "preyed" seemed to lack: a kind of love. The boy is led to believe that he is special, and that his lot with the tramp would be special, filled with Tom Sawyer-like adventures. The tramp, however, wants the boy only for his sexual purposes; to be, as it were, not free but a sex slave (Flynt goes into considerable detail here). The seduction is also an induction: Eventually, Flynt tells us, the boy is so taken with the life of the tramp that he, too, becomes one of them and goes on to seduce new members--young boys--into the cabal of tramps.

But from a different perspective, the tramp succeeds not just because he tells better stories and is nicer than the environment promises but because the state cannot recognize just how dangerous he is. Yet what remains, as a supplement to the governmental inquiry is the erotic possibility enabled by tramping. Moreover, for all of Flynt's writings on the tramp as sexual sociopath, which served to tighten the noose of the normal, the tramp in the last two decades of the 19^th century existed in a space in which the ostentatiously "normal" provisions of official, governed society did not obtain. In fact, what is interesting about Flynt's reportage and Twain's accounting is the degree to which trampland existed as a kind of unknown heterotopia outside and against the law, even as it was being striated by ever-sophisticated disciplines of the normal.

Tramping, in other words, is exciting to these writers precisely because it allows for what is otherwise impermissible. And that which is impermissible is both the pedophilic relationship between the older tramp and younger boy and the camaraderie, repeatedly described by writers, among tramps. The "normal" is suspended in favor of a kind of fantasy. At the same time, tramping exists self-consciously within a bracketed domain: the governmental is never far from the tramp and represents in effect the enabling as well as disabling field of the tramp.

Twain's The Prince and the Pauper (1881), written at a time when millions of men were on the road because of repeated economic panics, illustrates precisely that relocation into the fantastic and the sanctioned return to the normal. Tramping lies at the heart of the novel. Thus, the young prince, Edward, who is ejected from the royal palace after exchanging clothes with the pauper, Tom Canty, tramps because he is forced to by the ogre-like John Canty, who mistakes him for his ragged son. In his own flight from the law for the murder of a priest, Canty takes the young prince to the roving gang of tramps in which he himself had been "trained" as a vagabond criminal. Once with the tramps, Canty hopes that the boy--in fact, the young prince--will "relearn" the duplicitous ways of the successful tramp. The drama of The Prince and the Pauper thus lies less with the pauper adjustments made by Tom Canty, who inhabits Edward's rightful place, and strives to make England a more just place, than with the peril of losing Edward to the tramps.

For the most part, Twain scorns the tramp, whom he identifies as a mountebank or confidence man. In this, he is in keeping with nineteenth-century bourgeois sentiments. But not all tramps are the same; indeed, the central relationship in the book is between a tramp and the young boy Edward. Thus, Twain does not scorn Edward's savior, the tramp Miles Hendon, whom Twain describes as a "fantastic figure" out of romances.

Miles is a tramp, although Twain never quite calls him that. The middle son of minor baronet, Miles is a dispossessed and dislocated small-time aristocrat seeking to regain his fortune, or failing that, to wander the world with his young charge, whom he considers crazy for claiming to be king and demanding, implausibly, obeisance.

Thus, Miles seems to be perpetually saving Edward from the rabble, a calling he feels early on in his relationship with Edward:

"Poor little friendless rat, doubtless his mind has been disordered with ill usage. Well, I will be his friend; I have saved him, and it draweth me strongly to him; already I love the bold-tongued little rascal. How soldier-like he faced the smutty rabble and flung back his high defiance! And what a comely, sweet and gentle face he hath, not that sleep hath conjured away its troubles and its griefs. I will teach him, I will cure his malady; yea, I will be his elder brother, and care for him and watch over him; and whoso would shame him or do him hurt, may order his shroud, for though I be burnt for he shall need it!"

(90)[3]

Edward's character, his training, his helplessness all inspire Miles's love; but what seems to "draw" him most is his own saving of Edward, i.e., his own role in Edward's life. In this role, he will be an "elder brother"; Miles's love for Edward is thus the seemingly innocent love that an older brother might have for a younger. But the explanation of fraternal love does not encompass what Miles feels at the end of the book, when a "a writhing, struggling jam of howling and hurrahing people," a "mass of humanity" (247, 248) gathered on London Bridge for the coronation of the new king (Tom, impersonating Edward) separates the two friends, and forces Miles yet again, when he finally exits the "riot on London Bridge" (276), to look for the boy (who, as it happens, has gone off to Westminster Abbey, where the coronation is to be held, to denounce the impostor Tom and proclaim himself king):

      He would not hunt for the boy, he would hunt for a crowd; in the centre of a big crowd or a little one, sooner or later, he should find his poor little friend, sure; and the mangy mob would be entertaining itself with pestering and aggravating the boy, who would be proclaiming himself king, as usual. Then Miles Hendon would cripple some of those people, and carry off his little ward, and comfort and cheer him with loving words, and the two would never be separated any more.

(278)

Miles's love for Edward is both touching and a little strange; the intimacy that he desires with Edward, which nowadays would strike one as suspect, is nevertheless one that is meant to protect Edward.[4] If Miles earlier had meant for his role to be pedagogical, as well as protective, here it seems that it is merely protective; as protector, he can "comfort and cheer him with loving words" and ensure that Edward stays the child. And as child who needs such protection, Edward is innocent: too innocent not to proclaim his identity, too innocent not to think that what he does, always, is right. The relationship is thus motivated by the protection of Edward's innocence, and is "saved" from depravity by that innocence that Edward bears and Miles protects. Protects, that is, from the "pestering" crowd that necessarily forms around Edward because of his woeful and attractive innocence and that would destroy him for being so mad as to claim superiority over and difference from the crowd. What Miles protects, in short, is the illusion of power that Edward articulates, the illusion, that is, of the child having the power over the man. Edward's apparent lunacy thus becomes a sort of pretext for imagining an inversion of power. Edward may not be king, but it is Miles' desire that he treat the boy as if he were. And because Edward is in fact king, Miles of course ends up, as the dispossessed baronet protecting his liege, safeguarding the governmental.

Yet if Miles saves Edward from those who either use his proclaimed identity against him or do not accept it, he nevertheless ends up saving him only for the road. Miles is a tramp, although, as I mentioned earlier, not a vagabond, if only because he is not a lying mendicant. Despite the insistent respectability of Miles's relationship with Edward it nevertheless echoes what writers on tramps and tramp lore of the turn of the century would describe as that between a "jocker" or "profesh" and a "preshun," or that between an older tramp and a young, "apprentice" tramp. In short, the pedophilic relationship described echoes that of Ragged Dick and supporters and is, as writers such as Jack London and the great tramp sociologist Nels Anderson described, plausibly "consensual" on the part of the child. Twain's knowledge of tramp language--he copiously and evidently knowledgeably annotated his copy of Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), which he autographed in 1875--signifies a considerable awareness of vagabondage. It is unlikely, that is, that Twain was ignorant of the sexual relations, especially of the pedophilia, for which tramps were, apparently, well-known.

But the novel was not received as scandalous at all. In fact, it was lauded as an exemplary children's story. If the affectional force of the story is, as I've been suggesting, predicated on a pedophilic dynamic, that dynamic does not breach decorum. Why not? In part, I would argue, because although Miles is like a tramp in being unemployed and homeless, is most not like a tramp in being able to claim the barest thread of the aristocracy, that is, in being, like Edward, an agent of the governmental. As someone who claims to be a baronet (we don't know that he is for real, but Twain doesn't let us really believe otherwise) who is in fact a tramp (penniless, threadbare, a vagabond ruffler), Miles never threatens the status quo; in fact, the opposite, and despite his imprisonment, his flogging, his maltreatment, never gets upset, outraged, or unhappy about the governmental system. Thus, despite their vagabond wandering and the time they spend in prison for imposering, the two are never condemned for being the same as the mountebank rufflers Twain so harshly savages. In fact, our sympathy for Miles grows. Indeed, because of Miles's protection, Edward is able to return to the throne.

It would seem that the "real" narrative of tramping here drops out in lieu of the fantasy allowed by tramping and delimited by the logic of the governmental. In fact, Flynt's, London's, and even Twain's accounts of tramping set in motion a mode of representation that would culminate in Nels Anderson's magisterial work on hoboes.[5]