| Abstract: | 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. |
