“No better than a vagabond upon this earth”

This chapter employs the Vagrancy Act of 1824 as a context for exploring vagabondage and what Deleuze and Guattari define as “the nomadic war machine” in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Discussion of the nomadic centers around the description of Becky Sharp as “no better than a vagabond” and Chapter 64, titled “A Vagabond Chapter,” to explore how the novel charts the expansion of nomadic populations and fair-like spaces associated with itinerancy that ultimately overwhelm the scope and power of sedentary spaces as located in the great house and the town house. The chapter examines how the nomadic war machine, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari, operates to introduce smooth space associated with nomadism, in opposition to striated or hierarchical space associated with sedentism. It explores Thackeray’s nuanced depiction of nomadism in contexts of globalization and empire, and his departure from convention, in constructing the mobile, cosmopolitan reader as witness to events.