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Pedestrian Politics: William Wordsworth's The Old

Cumberland Beggar

Article  in  The Explicator · December 2009

DOI: 10.3200/EXPL.67.2.80-83

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of David’s ascension into the middle class. This ascension centers not simply
on his profession, marriage, and family, but also on his dietary habits, which
mark his body as middle class, but only if he practices moderation.

—DANIEL LEWIS, Ball State University

Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications

KEYWORDS

Charles Dickens, diet, middle class

WORKS CITED
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
Marlow, James E. “Social Harmony and Dickens’ Revolutionary Cookery.” Dickens Studies
Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 17 (1988): 145–78.

Pedestrian Politics: William Wordsworth’s THE OLD CUMBERLAND

BEGGAR

William Wordsworth’s “The Old Cumberland Beggar” (1797, published

1800) reveals a disciplinary social regime through its rhetoric of walking
framed within a discourse of officialdom.
Infirm old beggars, writes Wordsworth in his headnote, “confined them-
selves to a stated round in their neighbourhood, and had certain fixed days, on
which, at different houses, they regularly received alms, sometimes in money,
but mostly in provisions” (49). This sense of regimentation is the poem’s key-
note. As so often occurs in the picturesque depictions of Romantic pedestrian-
ism (Jarvis 53–61), the beggar first appears in the scene of the poem while the
speaker is on a walk. Here, the beggar is perched “On a low structure of rude
masonry / Built at the foot of a huge hill” (lines 3–4)—that is, near a human
construct and a natural feature. This combination of landmarks gives us the
beggar’s exact coordinates, providing the reader with a kind of grid of infor-
mation. Furthermore, the landmarks circumscribe the beggar within a system,
which will become more clear later in the poem.
Wordsworth then carefully emphasizes the order and disorder within the
scene by contrasting items whose shape and number are easily measured with
those whose existence is more chaotic. The beggar sits upon the “second step”
(13) of the masonry with his staff laid “across the broad smooth stone / That
overlays the pile on the heap” (7–8). Yet his food is an assortment of shape-
less “scraps and fragments” (10) and, although he “scan[s]” the food “with a

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fix’d and serious look” (11), his mind is only engaged in “idle computation”
(12). This locational and computational imagery anticipates the theme of
regimentation and order.
Wordsworth then begins to detail, with the arithmetic and geometric exac-
titude demanded by his discourse of regimentation and order, the beggar’s
meal, his location, and his pattern of perambulation. The beggar sits in “soli-
tude” (15) and food crumbs fall “in little showers” (18) from his shaking hand.
The “small” (19) birds standing “within the length of half his staff” (20) await
their share. Having consumed his meager rations, he proceeds on his walk.
The horseman lodges a coin firmly “within the old Man’s hat” (29), the girl
lifts the tollgate for him, and the post-boy’s carriage makes way for him. But
the beggar “does not change his course” (40), moving slowly, his eyes fixed
on the ground. Wordsworth contrasts the grandeur and appeal of the panoptic
“prospect” view, which an observer sees when gazing down at farmland, roll-
ing plains, or distant horizons—in this age linked to vast landscapes, posses-
sions, and power (Barrell)—with the poverty and weakness of this landless
beggar’s perspective:
Instead of common and habitual sight
Of fields with rural works, of hill and dale,
And the blue sky—one little span of earth
Is all his prospect. (48–51)
Wordsworth’s reference to a “habitual sight / Of fields with rural works, of
hill and dale, / And the blue sky” is the prospect view that the beggar does not
have. The beggar does not even see the tracks in the road—tracks which are
“in the same line, / At distance still the same” (57–58). In sharp contrast to
the panoptic view, the beggar is so deprived of any autonomy or vantage that
he cannot even see the tracks that are right before him.
For Lefebvre, walking by members of a community constitutes a social
practice through which the land or path becomes a common space. Thus the
community is concerned about the paths available for walking, the nature of
the walkers (whether they are vagrants or criminals), and the conventions
of walking (making way for the carriages of lords, for example, or tollgates
where one stops). The social practice of walking is different for different
people—here the beggar can only walk along certain routes approved by the
community, which has rights over the paths. The beggar ignores the social
conventions—making way for the carriage, for instance—of the pedestrian.
This nonparticipation in the regular spatial practices locates the beggar out-
side of the community. Being outside, the beggar is condemned to trek only a
specific path. The villagers’ behavior might indicate that they grant him a spe-
cial status and, in making their decision to help him, defer to his needs (such
as his hunger, frailty, and poor eyesight), but it also suggests the beggar’s
exclusion from social and communal spatial practices.

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 The poem maps his totally circumscribed movement:
While thus he creeps
From door to door, the Villagers in him
Behold a record which together binds
Past deeds and offices of charity
Else unremember’d (79–83)

The rhetoric of walking and the discourse of officialdom (“deeds,” “offices”)

conflate: as the beggar “creeps” along, he becomes a “record.” Not only is the
beggar, on his circumscribed (prerecorded, predetermined) walk, a record of
charitable acts, he is reduced to those records. The wandering beggar is firmly
embedded within the discourses of the age when the evolving network of
statistics, demography, and classification was concomitant with debates about
human freedom (Porter 151–92; Headrick 59–95). The system (this age’s key
concern [Siskin]) of numbers, account books, and laws—over which the beg-
gar has no control and in which he does not consciously participate—maps
the beggar’s movements. And rather than performing any spatial practices that
locate him in a position of some power over the land, the beggar is a system-
atic record of others’ actions.
The beggar is himself being recorded. He exists only as a record, his cir-
cumscribed walk a record of people’s charitable acts. The beggar “takes his
rounds” and the people offer alms because “habit does the work of reason”
(90–93). Both begging and alms-giving are acts performed within a larger
regiment of conditioned behavior.
A solitary beggar is a manageable nuisance. For the numerous villagers
“who live / Shelter’d, and flourish in a little grove / Of their own kindred”
(112–14), the solitary beggar poses no threat. The villagers “behold in him
/ A silent monitor” (114–15). In turn, the beggar, as a register of the villag-
ers’ “offices” (82), monitors their kindnesses and humanitarian actions. It is
clear that the man who is monitoring is also being monitored: the villagers
“behold” him (81, 114)—containing a concealed pun in the latter half of
the word, “hold,” and allied with “bind”—when he is on his rounds. There
is an alignment of the money economy with the beggar’s movement in
Wordsworth’s imagery of “lodged” coins and “industry” (Langan 71), but
it is also significant that the beggar accounts for the villagers’ industry and
acquisition of blessings. The money economy that benefits the beggar has
an interesting, if ambivalent, relationship with the philanthropic economy:
alms for blessings.
When the poem concludes, Wordsworth prays: “May never House, mis-
named of Industry, / Make him a captive” (172–73). Yet, ironically, he has
never been free outside of either. The villagers offer alms to the beggar
because he can be monitored, because he is not a vagabond. In an age when

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 England—and Europe—had witnessed the horrors of the anomic mobs of
the French Revolution, Wordsworth’s poem actually celebrates order, pre-
dictability, and certainty while ostensibly revering the beggar’s freedom.
The beggar remains firmly embedded within the “system” that sought to
impose order on vagrancy and unruliness: the domain of numbers, laws, and
demographic accounts.
It is significant that the beggar is an old man. Poverty in old age is a
function of lower economic and social status prior to aging. The economic
dependency of old people is not the result of age; rather, because a worker’s
occupation determines his or her income, social security benefits, savings
for retirement, pension, and health care options, various social situations
and policies could be said to combine to create poverty, in that they
determine whether a worker is more or less dependent later in life (Walker).
Wordsworth’s prayer that the old man, even if infirm, may be allowed to
continue begging perversely proposes that the conditions which created
poverty prior to his aging may be retained.
The poem showcases a politics of walking, especially monitored walking,
and, with its rhetoric of regimentation and ordering, proves the failure of
Wordsworth’s prayer for the freedom of the beggar.

—PRAMOD K. NAYAR, University of Hyderabad, India

Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications

KEYWORDS

begging, discourse, officialdom, pedestrianism, regimentation, William

Wordsworth

WORKS CITED

Barrell, John. “Public Prospect and Private View.” The Birth of Pandora and the Division of
Knowledge. London: Macmillan, 1992. 41–61.
Headrick, Daniel R. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of
Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Jarvis, Robin. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. London: Macmillan, 2000.
Langan, Celeste. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1995.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell,
2000.
Porter, Theodore M. The Rise of Statistical Thinking 1820–1900. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1986.
Siskin, Clifford. “Novels and Systems.” Novel 34.2 (2001): 202–15.
Walker, Alan. “Poverty and Inequality in Old Age.” Ageing in Society: An Introduction to
Social Gerontology. Ed. John Bond, Peter Coleman, and Sheila Peace. London: Sage, 1998.
280–303.
Wordsworth, William. William Wordsworth. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984.

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