Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies
Natalie Prizel
Published:
2024
Online ISBN:
9780191982309
Print ISBN:
9780192888563
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Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies
Natalie Prizel
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Natalie Prizel
Pages
123–162
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Published:
May 2024
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Prizel, Natalie, 'The Beggar’s Opera', Victorian Ethical Optics: Innocent Eyes and Aberrant Bodies (
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Abstract
This chapter centers on the figure of the disabled beggar (and the overlapping figure of the street-seller) whose significance and self-presentation became morally and economically prescribed and proscribed in the Victorian period, during which the government was intent on giving economic force to the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. The performances of everyday life—though often spectacular—are the primary means by which disabled beggars and street-sellers escape nascent social-scientific categorization under the Poor Law Amendments of 1834 and the implementation of workhouse labor. Performance as visual spectacle is both a necessary means by which these figures earn a living and the source of the near-obsessive concerns about imposture that haunt the period. This chapter treats a wide range of texts and illustrations from Charles Lamb to Henry Mayhew (and his collaborator, photographer Richard Beard), Thomas Carlyle, and others.
Keywords: labor, street work, New Poor Laws, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Lamb, George Sala, Henry Mayhew, street-sellers, beggars, vagrants
Subject
Literary Studies (19th Century)
Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Victorian Ethical Optics. Natalie Prizel, Oxford University Press. © Natalie Prizel (2024). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192888563.003.0004
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