Glimpses into the Abyss

“The nomad is the foundation stone of human society,” Mary Higgs writes—yet the people cast adrift by modern society are treated as criminals. How does a wanderer become a vagrant?

In early twentieth-century England, Higgs traces vagrancy through centuries of upheaval, from the enclosure of land to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of factory work. Drawing on six years of firsthand investigation in shelters and lodgings, she asks who ends up on the road: those drawn to a wandering life, those unable to work, or workers left behind as industry changes. Laws grew harsher, even threatening whipping and death, but vagrancy endured. Higgs argues that people pushed out of the social order cannot be understood by punishment alone. What would it take to see the causes—and change the conditions that keep producing them?

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