This book brings together, for the first time, a comprehensive collection of essays from leading scholars on the writing, and literary and social contexts, of the ‘tramp-poet’ and memoirist W. H. Davies (1871–1940). Its aim is to reconsider Davies's major works and themes, and reassess his place in the literary and cultural life of his period.

Davies is a unique literary figure of the early twentieth century, most famous now for The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) and poems such as ‘Leisure’, which came 14th in the BBC's search to find ‘The Nation's Favourite Poems’. His reputation, 80 years after his death, is otherwise modest, and most of his other work is now out of print. He was, however, one of the most widely read and admired poets of his time, the author of several once-popular and unique memoirs about the tramping life, a novelist, an occasional editor and critic, and a playwright – albeit with differing levels of finesse and success. Moreover, he was well connected with a considerable number of writers and artists. Indeed, for scholars and students he is an important and often overlooked counterpart to figures such as Edward Thomas, George Bernard Shaw and Walter de la Mare. This book not only provides a reassessment of Davies, putting him in his literary and cultural context (as the ‘tramp-poet’ and memoirist, a prominent Georgian poet, a Welsh writer and a disabled writer), but also sheds light on several of the more central literary figures in his milieu.

Davies was born the second of three children in Newport, a large and then rapidly expanding, overwhelmingly working-class Welsh port on the Severn Estuary, eight miles from the English border. His mother's family was Welsh. His paternal grandparents were English, and his grandfather was a former man of the sea, who had become landlord of the Church House Inn. When Davies was 2 , his father Francis died and his mother Mary remarried. She remained in Newport, but was forced to leave her first three children to grow up with their father's parents.