Vagrant,Convict, Cannibal Chief: Abel Magwitch and the Culture of Cannibalism in Great Expectations

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations opens with a jolt, as Abel Magwitch – an escaped convict – pounces on the narrator and protagonist, Pip. Despite this rather dramatic introduction, and the pivotal role that he goes on to play in the plot, Magwitch has never been given the sustained critical analysis that he warrants. More often than not he has been treated as one of Dickens’s infamous ‘flat’ characters; a kind of ‘pantomime wicked uncle’, in the words of George Orwell. This is a critical legacy that this paper seeks to redress. Seeing Magwitch as an essential element in Dickens’s critique of mid nineteenth-century society, this paper examines Magwitch’s largely ignored peripatetic and homeless past. By contextualizing Magwitch in his role as a vagrant outsider, and then exploring how this marginal position nuances the cannibalistic appetite he displays in the first pages of the novel, I argue that Magwitch’s violence and ‘savagery’ forms a foil for the more sadistic practices of civilized society. In doing so I position Magwitch at the dark heart of Dickens’s social pessimism, and re-evaluate the culture of cannibalism that we see in Great Expectations.     

The Public Assistance Policies of Cities and the Justice Concerns of Elected Officials: The Centrality of the Floors Principle in Addressing Urban Poverty

City councils are significant, though seldom central, actors in local policy networks providing public assistance to disadvantaged residents. Mayors and council members in 12 American cities more often support than oppose public assistance initiatives. They claim that their own normative judgments are more important to their preferences and voting behavior on such matters than are public opinion, group demands, or economic considerations. While such elected officials hold a variety of justice principles, the most important of these affecting their positions on public assistance issues is the “floors” principle. A broad ethical commitment to providing social minimums enhances support for living‐wage ordinances, for linking subsidies for economic development to assistance to less advantaged citizens, and for exempting spending on social services from budget cuts. We discuss the implications of these findings for major theories of urban politics and policies—collective‐action theory, regime theory, and pluralism—and for advocates on behalf of the urban poor.     

Grieving home

Drawing on the growing areas of research on emotional embodiment, this paper develops an understanding of the spatiality of grief as central to the discussion of young people's experiences of homelessness. In the context of my engagement with young homeless people in inner-city Sydney, I explore grief as central in shaping young people's everyday body–place relations. I argue that grief over often brutal past homes continues to haunt young people and impact on the ways in which they relate to place, including the place of their own body. I explore young people's displacement and grief-stricken forms of inhabitation as well and their discovery of ‘therapeutic’ places which allow the re-formation of more positive relations to place and self. I argue that while it is understood that grief and trauma are key causes of homelessness amongst young people, grief is rarely explored as an embodied practice, or as a key factor which continues to underpin trajectories of homelessness after initial exits from home.     

“Compassionate” Strategies of Managing Homelessness: Post‐Revanchist Geographies in San Francisco

Abstract: After almost 30 years of Federal retraction from anti‐poverty initiatives, many American cities have been left with the dual burden of intensified poverty and far fewer resources to combat the problem. At the same time, such devolution has afforded cities the authority to forge poverty policy at the local level, such that the familiar neoliberal imperatives of state retraction and the mobilization of territory for capitalist expansion are frequently tempered by more progressive political imperatives at the local scale. What has thus emerged is a deeply ambivalent policy landscape, of which “kinder and gentler” poverty management strategies are a central feature. Using the example of a recent homeless program in San Francisco, “Care Not Cash”, this paper argues that such poverty management strategies, while less punitive than their revanchist predecessors, nonetheless introduce a new set of exclusions to the service delivery system, many of which are obscured by the language of compassion. In order to illustrate those new exclusions, I describe the city's homeless geographies—the public spaces, shelters, service sites, and housing models—that have been produced and reconfigured according to a logic of managing homelessness through the provision of care.     

La mobilité forcée des personnes utilisatrices de drogue par injection et inhalation en situation d'itinérance à Montréal

This article focuses on the various actors in the urban setting who contribute to the increase in the forced mobility of homeless injection drug users and crack smokers in Montréal, Canada. The objective is to analyze who these actors are and how they contribute to increasing this forced mobility from the perspective of homeless injection drug users and crack smokers in relation to three needs : basic needs, acquisition of financial resources, and drug use. One hundred and six semi-structured interviews were conducted among this population. The results indicate that various actors—police officers, community organization, peers, municipal administration, storekeepers, and residents—contribute to the forced mobility of this population in their daily activities. As for their needs, it is when they use drugs, sleep, or loiter that they are more likely to experience events of forced mobility. Police officers are by far the actors who contribute the most to this, often in a repressive way. The role of the municipality is also a determining factor in the daily activities of homeless injection drug users and crack smokers.     

Tramp: Sentiment and the Homeless Man in the Late-Victorian and Edwardian City

The recent rehabilitation of sentiment as a topic worthy of scholarly engagement tends to focus on the work of Adam Smith and early to mid-Victorian visual and literary cultures. Focusing on the League of Welldoers, a Liverpool charity that catered for houseless men, this essay considers sentimentality as a tool for stimulating compassion for one of the most controversial and potentially unsympathetic groups among the outcast poor. The essay identifies how late-Victorian and Edwardian philanthropy deployed sentiment as a tool to motivate practical compassion and demonstrate the ways in which sentiment could be politically charged. The essay examines the League's attempts to imagine the tramp in sentimental terms in a political and social context that regarded male vagrancy as a ‘problem’ and understood able-bodied men as breadwinners. It highlights continuities in the sentimental tradition from the heady days of Dickens's fiction: the emphasis on physiological sensation to advance a notion of common humanity; the reliance on the child as sentimental subject par excellence; and melodrama. At the centre of the League's sentimental project was the confused identity of the tramp. Contemporary commentators knew that when men lost their jobs, especially those who were not members of a friendly society, they often went ‘on the tramp’ in search of work. It was less clear when ‘tramping’ came to define the man himself.     

Alternative Cartographies of Homelessness: Rendering visible British women's experiences of ‘visible’ homelessness

This article focuses on a group largely ignored by both geographers and feminist scholars of homelessness alike—the growing number of ‘visibly homeless’ women in Britain. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 19 ‘visibly homeless’ women, we delineate between four ‘alternative cartographies’ of homelessness, each articulating quite different gendered homeless identities. The article suggests that whilst it is important to recognise that women too suffer the exclusions of visible homelessness, it is also clear that the experience of visible homelessness differs for different women. Any attempt to respond to the (immediate) needs of such women necessitates a recognition rather than denial of these differences.