My Life Was Ecstasy

‘Journeys into Poverty Kingdom’: Complete Participation and the British Vagrant, 1866–1914

“…Nevertheless, many similarities can be discerned. Flynt, according to one admirer, 'had a profound contempt for … [t]he confessions of the vagrant in captivity [which] are always, he said, false'; 104 and by the same token James Patrick, himself an approved school teacher in Glasgow, believed that the 'free-ranging delinquent, observed in his natural habitat, is a very different character from the time-serving, compliant boy in the artificial setting of an approved school or borstal'. 105 Similarly, the theme of the barriers to entry and the necessity of observing and learning the customs of the researched group persisted.…”