How would the figure of a tramp been taken when W. H. Davies published his highly successful The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp in 1908? Certainly the word ‘tramp’ would have caused a jolt to the sensibilities of the reading public then, not only for the strikingly modern prefix suggested by George Bernard Shaw, who wrote the preface, but also because of the change in a tramp's image from the negative conception of the vagrant common in the mid-nineteenth century to something of a more romantic figure by the turn of the century. Thus, I will consider the tramp as seen in two popular songs and in a different style in a poem by Rudyard Kipling, where all three also point to a fruitful literary ambiguity seen in The Autobiography.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Scottish hawker ‘Besom Jimmy’ Henderson wrote a song about tramps and hawkers that since the folk revival of the 1950s has become a classic number, having now been recorded by scores of artists. At the same time in Australia, the solicitor, journalist and poet A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson wrote a song about the suicide of a travelling workman that became Australia's unofficial national anthem. And in the same decade Kipling wrote his ‘Sestina of the Tramp-Royal’ where, as in the above songs, there is a strange confluence of what might be called the mediated literary trope and the more immediate expressive reference. These two contrasting styles combine to create a literary artefact that we can deem both authentic and engaging. And yet not too many years before this the itinerant worker or vagrant, as he was known, had been reviled in the press and in official publications as an abomination, a social evil expressing the worst depravity. It would be difficult to pinpoint the change from the journalist Henry Mayhew's blistering observations and commentaries on mid-century vagrants in his London Labour and the London Poor (1851)3 to the paeans to the tramp at the end of the century: perhaps another historian could map the change in social attitudes.