page_title: Tramp
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Tramp / History
caption_attribution_description: "A Tramp's Nest in Ludlow Street"
context_page_description: A tramp is a long-term homeless person who travels from place to place as a vagrant, traditionally walking all year round.
context_section_description: Wanderers have existed since ancient times. The modern concept of the "tramp" emerges with the expansion of industrial towns in the early nineteenth century, with the consequent increase in migrant labor and pressure on housing. The common lodging house or "doss house" developed to accommodate transients. Urbanisation also led to an increase in forms of highly marginalized casual labor. Mayhew identifies the problem of "tramping" as a particular product of the economic crisis of the 1840s known as the Hungry Forties. John Burnett argues that in earlier periods of economic stability "tramping" involved a wandering existence, moving from job to job which was a cheap way of experiencing adventures beyond the "boredom and bondage of village life".    
  The number of transient homeless people increased markedly in the U.S. after the industrial recession of the early 1870s. Initially, the term "tramp" had a broad meaning, and was often used to refer to migrant workers who were looking for permanent work and lodgings. Later the term acquired a narrower meaning, to refer only to those who prefer the transient way of life. Writing in 1877 Allan Pinkerton said:
  "The tramp has always existed in some form or other, and he will continue on his wanderings until the end of time; but there is no question that he has come into public notice, particularly in America, to a greater extent during the present decade than ever before."
  Author Bart Kennedy, a self-described tramp of 1900 America, once said "I listen to the tramp, tramp of my feet, and wonder where I was going, and why I was going." John Sutherland (1989) said that Kennedy "is one of the early advocates of 'tramping', as the source of literary inspiration."
  The tramp became a character trope in vaudeville performance in the late 19th century in the United States. Lew Bloom claimed he was "the first stage tramp in the business".
caption: "A Tramp's Nest in Ludlow Street", How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890), by Jacob Riis
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