"Circling Eye" and "Houseless Stranger": The New Eighteenth-Century Wanderer (Thomson to Goldsmith)

This essay presents an argument for the literary figure of the wanderer or traveller having developed in the eighteenth century out of a reimagining of the prospect overview. Through examination of a single moment of transition--the shift from the elevated prospective view of Alexander Pope and especially James Thomson's prospect poems to the wanderer narrative embodied in Oliver Goldsmith's The Traveller--I propose the poetic wanderer as the figure for what Kevis Goodman has recently described as a shift around the mid-century from the observer as an "contemplative, closed subject" to an "open, vulnerable and dependent being."