The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp

W. H. Davies was born in a public house called the Church House in the town of N——, raised by his grandparents after his grandmother took him and his siblings in following his father's early death and his mother's remarriage. His grandfather was a retired sea captain of strong habits and stronger pride, and the household also included an imbecile elder brother and a sister. Davies played truant from school, excelled at athletics, and organized a gang of schoolboy thieves who stole goods from shops until they were caught, tried, and sentenced to birching, ending his school career in disgrace, though not in lasting remorse. Apprenticed to the picture-frame trade, he neglected his work for reading, discovering Byron through his friend Dave and developing a lifelong passion for literature and verse, encouraged also by a young woman he knew briefly before her early death. His grandfather died, followed by his grandmother, whose estate left him a small weekly income. After drifting and drinking in Bristol, he resolved to emigrate to America. Arriving in New York, he soon fell in with Brum, a seasoned professional beggar, and the two tramped across the United States living by begging, riding freight trains as hoboes, and camping outdoors. Davies learned the customs and ethics of the tramp fraternity: the etiquette of begging, the dangers of riding bumpers and rooftops, and the casual cruelty and camaraderie of life on the rails. He and Brum separated when Davies missed a train, and Davies partnered instead with Australian Red, with whom he picked berries in Michigan, worked cattle boats across the Atlantic to Liverpool, London, and Glasgow, and encountered a colorful cast of fellow tramps and thieves, including Cockney More and Donovan, inveterate pickpockets among their own companions. He witnessed the hard, often lethal labor on the Chicago drainage canal, a lynching of a Black prisoner in the South, and brutal interracial violence along the Mississippi, where he also made a leisurely houseboat voyage with two companions, one of whom fell gravely ill with malarial fever. Davies himself nearly died of fever alone in a swamp before reaching hospital in Memphis. After further tramping through Texas and the South, witnessing another lynching and the gruesome relic of a burned murderer, Davies returned to Baltimore, worked a final cattle boat to Liverpool, and went home to his family after five years away, arriving with almost nothing despite his inheritance. Restless and drinking heavily, he failed to settle into any trade or business scheme, including an abortive plan to open a London bookshop, and instead resolved to seek his fortune in the land of gold he had read of in an evening paper, converting part of his savings into a money belt and sailing for Canada. Landing at St. John's, he made his way to Montreal, lodged among fellow tramps at the Salvation Army's version of the old Joe Beef's saloon, and fell in with a new companion, Three Fingered Jack, with whom he began beating his way west by rail toward Winnipeg amid lingering winter snow, narrowly avoiding danger from a wrecked train and enduring suspicious jailhouse searches along the way, his onward journey still in progress.

By W. H. Davies · First published 1908 · Genre: Autobiography, Memoir, Travel Writing · 34 chapters · 96,875 words

First lines

I was born thirty-five years ago, in a public house called the Church House, in the town of N -- -- , in the county of M -- . It was kept by my grandfather, native of Cornwall, a retired sea captain, whose pride it was, drunk or sober, to inform all strangers that he had been master of his own ship, the said ship being a small schooner. In those days there was a steam packet, called the Welsh Prince, trading regularly between N -- -- and Bristol, and in the latter town we had relatives on my grandmother's side. The fact of the matter was that my grandmother belonged to Somerset, and she often paid a visit to three maiden sisters, first cousins of hers, living, I believe, near Glastonbury, who had a young relative that had gone on the stage, and was causing some stir under a different name from his own, which was Brodrib. My grandmother held very strong opinions about the stage, and when these first cousins met, no doubt the young man, in those early days, was most severely discussed, and, had he not been a blood relation, would have been considered a sinner too far advanced for prayer.

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autobiography · memoir · tramping · hobo · vagrant · poverty · begging · adventure · coming-of-age · survival · working class · social class

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The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp is listed on Textopian as a historical account by W. H. Davies, dated 1908 CE.

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