How Media Representations Of Homelessness Changed Over The Twentieth Century

3e) How, and why, have media representations of homelessness changed over the twentieth century?

Charles Dickens writes of “ferocious looking ruffians” in his 1850 novel David Copperfield. 164 years later, a 2014 documentary follows a handful of different homeless people in Swansea, interviewing them about their experiences, and supporting these with statistical evidence of issues raised. Clearly, a major shift took place in the years in between, reflecting changes in experiences, perceptions, and portrayals of homelessness.

There’s a mass of different representations and themes that emerge in 20th century representations of homelessness. Margaret Anne Crowther’s seminal article “The Tramp” identifies three approaches to the ‘vagrant’ or

1966 saw the first showing of Cathy Come Home, the crucial significance of which can hardly be overstated. This both triggered and coincided with a shift to depictions of the homeless which fit more with Crowther’s concept of ‘pity’. Loach and Sandford’s ground-breaking film showed Cathy and Reg, a couple dealing with increasingly difficult housing conditions due to circumstances outside of their control. By the film’s bleak, harrowing end, Cathy is on a train station bench, alone and helpless. Several years earlier, in 1962, media reports claimed 1000 ‘vagrant’ individuals were sleeping rough in London. Townshend and Abel’s work brought the ‘rediscovery of poverty’ to academic circles. As lawmakers and the public were first presented with the entrenched nature of homelessness, some depictions coinciding with this shift emphasised the homeless as victims of wider structural issues. Post-war complacency and optimism were shattered, and the romanticisation of ‘tramping’ in earlier decades gave way to depictions of the harsh realities of a wide range of precarious housing situations. Homeless people were shown, in many cases, as pitiable victims. A 1975 ITN (Independent Television News) report conforms with this trend. Titled Down and Outs, it films individual recipients of charity at Christmas, those who have “nowhere else to go”. The insufficiency of government provision, and lack of options for the charity recipients is emphasised, and inspires pity in the viewer. This is one of two contradictory narratives which characterise portrayals of homelessness in the late twentieth