Toby R. Benis, Romanticism on the Road: The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth's Homeless. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. ISBN: 0312223021 (hardback). Price: US$59.95 (£47.50).

Despite its title, this book is not really about the road, nor does it make Wordsworth into a Beat poet. But Toby Benis's Romanticism on the Road does address a very timely and still controversial subject: homelessness. In the past few years, the debate on homelessness in the United States has petered out at the same time that the homeless of New York City have been mysteriously eclipsed. Under the new Bush administration, it is likely that the Federal government will encourage Mayor Guliani's strong-armed homeless policy on a nation-wide scale. Thus Benis's study of vagrancy during the ideological wars of 1790s England, presented by the author as a "cultural history of vagrancy in the Georgian period as refracted through the early poetry of William Wordsworth" (p. 1), will be of interest not only to the Wordsworth specialist, but also to generalist readers seeking a historical perspective on the relation between homelessness, aesthetics and political ideology. While Uvedale Price in 1794 was transforming gypsies and beggars into picturesque figures, a young man named William Wordsworth was completing a poem known much later as "Guilt and Sorrow," part of which was published in 1798 as "The Female Vagrant." In a 1795 letter to Francis Wrangham, Wordsworth noted that the purpose of the poem was "to expose the vices of penal law and the calamities of war as they affect individuals." While the final 1842 version of the poem does expose these "vices" and "calamities," it is in its earlier forms that Wordsworth's voice of protest is most strongly heard. His narrator's pathos-filled encounter on Salisbury Plain with the Soldier's Widow is perhaps the most powerful poetic indictment of government policies against marginal behavior in the English language. If the first "Female Vagrant" poem marks the apotheosis of the poet's identification, or literal empathy with the homeless, then Wordsworth's career as a whole may be seen as a repeated revision and distancing from such a figure. Romanticists by now are familiar with the poet's many revisions of himself in the Prelude, revisions intended to yoke together the poet's youthful radicalism with the conservatism of his maturity. Tony Benis's book gives Wordsworth's "politics of self-presentation" (to borrow another title, by Ashton Nichols, in the same 'Romanticism in Perspective' series) a new twist by tracing the figure of marginality from his earliest works such as "An Evening Walk" and "Descriptive Sketches" through the vagrant poems in the Lyrical Ballads all the way to the 1805 Prelude. Benis subtitles her work the "marginal gains of Wordsworth's homeless" not only because the book examines those living on the margins of society, but also because it demonstrates how small are the gains of marginality. If Wordsworth's greatest failure is his inability to finish The Recluse, it might have to something do, argues Benis, with his inability to make the public roles imposed on him coincide with his youthful identification with the homeless. The Introduction very elegantly summarizes the problem of homelessness in the Georgian era based on historical and contemporary sociological sources as well as on the author's acute critical judgement. Very often in the study, the most perceptive and well-written passages are those in which Benis complements or "personalizes" theory with her own highly intelligent and sensitive comments derived from personal experience. For example, discussing our bad faith in regard to the homeless, she notes that "one's perceptions of the homeless change from day to day, from encounter to encounter" (p. 11) and that, between homelessness then and now, "certain core problems have remained the same" (p. 10). Perhaps the most obvious similarity …