In letter XVIII, ‘The Poor and Their Dwellings’, of George Crabbe's long poem The Borough (1810), the narrator describes an ‘antient Widow’ who lives with her idiot son:

The introductory header at the start of letter XVIII forecasts the section's contents, including ‘Some Characters of the Poor’ and then (in order) ‘The School-mistress, when aged’, ‘The Idiot’, ‘The poor Sailor’ and ‘The declined Tradesman and his Companion’. As a result, even before we reach the passage quoted above, Crabbe's ‘harmless Idiot’ is presented as a feature of the Borough's social landscape, whose presence signified poverty in 1810, the year of the poem's publication. He collects shells, imagining them to be money, and plots to use these shells to acquire political power. The passage condenses some key recurring characteristics associated with representations of male ‘idiots’: dependence on a female caregiver, an incapacity for handling financial or business affairs, and a sort of mental inconstancy implied by the term ‘changeling’. And the ‘ambitious Changeling’ also serves as a vehicle for satire or critique, in this case of those rulers who would sell access to political power by accepting bribes.