This chapter examines the role of vagrancy law in regulating the affective, sexual, reproductive, and domestic lives of the English poor. It traces vagrancy's appearance at the margins of both the novel and the marriage plot across a series of texts, including Jane Barker's Patchwork Screen for the Ladies (1723), Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762), and, most centrally, Henry Fielding's The Female Husband (1746). Fielding, as novelist, magistrate, and major eighteenth-century theorist of police, is at the center of the chapter, which reads his figuration of vagrancy as a kind of sexuality that disrupts labor-discipline, marriage, and legitimate inheritance. At the same time, Fielding's text and the archival records of policing that surround it reveal how one might take vagrancy as a category of analysis for transgender history, since the construction of the sexed body as metonym for juridical identity developed through a nexus of policing, surveillance, and transatlantic print culture for which vagrancy was a foundational legal category. Finally, through readings of Scott's Millenium Hall and Mary Saxby's posthumously published Memoirs of a Female Vagrant (1806), the chapter shows that literary histories of sexuality look profoundly different if one centers the parish rather than the family as the field of analysis.
Squaring the Triangle: Queer Futures in Centlivre’s The Wonder