This chapter examines representations of and responses to the law’s attempts to regulate poverty in early nineteenth-century England. Drawing upon poems by William Wordsworth, periodical essays, legislative reports, legal cases, and popular treatises, the chapter shows how writers alternately affirmed and interrogated the law’s efforts to strip paupers of agency. It focuses on the legal discourse that governed metropolitan paupers and that some paupers themselves deployed in the service of self-representation. Many writers cast beggary as a professional mode characterized by inventiveness and effort, qualities that paupers were thought to lack. In mobilizing the theatricality of which they stood accused, paupers emerge as both competent and competitive, internally well-regulated and chaotic, criminalized by their very performance of selfhood. By defending their own character in both law courts and the court of public opinion, beggars interrogated legal constructs such as property and testimony.

Frequently serving as accusers, or as facilitators for other accusers, Northwest Mounted Police officers were coached on how and when to delimit social disorder. The fifth Chapter highlights examples of their training to perform as accusers (or to facilitate other accusers) around theatres that categorized criminal acts and actors. Here officers were instructed in both ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ governance (as per Bentham), with lessons derived from paramilitary and police science disciplines. Recruits learned how to follow commands to deploy violence, and how to use discretion in efforts to prevent dissent. With inspiration from the Royal Irish Constabulary, police officers also learned how to become criminal accusers by habit. That training, with its colonial biases clear, is detectable from a paradigmatic example of police responses to the first death of a Northwest Mounted constable in 1882. Located within a settler assumptive universe supporting dispossessing visions of social order, one glimpses how police training in this case focused accusations on Indigenous persons.