Gypsies and the British imagination, 1807

IN MATTHEW ARNOLD’S “The Scholar-Gipsy,” the “wild brotherhood” of wanderers that welcomes the sometime Oxford student into its ranks never appears. The Gypsies of the Cumner Hills are represented in the poem only by the image of their “smoked tents,” glimpsed from afar and taken as the metonymic confirmation of their presence. The scholar, himself a ghostly figure who mediates between poet and invisible Gypsies, serves as the latter’s surrogate, his “gipsy-lore” and mysterious immortality proof of the Gypsies’ existence and influence. He is the only link to the evanescent Gypsies, whose identity is, as a result, greatly attenuated in the poem. The phantasmal nature of Arnold’s Gypsies presaged a thoroughgoing elision of Gypsy experience in favor of mythic or literary representation in British culture by the last decades of the nineteenth century.¹ Emptied of reference to personal observation or contemporary social realities, the literary representation of Gypsies came to rely increasingly on two-dimensional caricatures, intertextual allusions, shorthand tropes, and simple fantasy. Even the most sympathetic chroniclers, even those who had firsthand knowledge of Gypsy life, clung to certain comforting and yet wholly indefensible myths, like Dora Yates’s post-Holocaust dream of the “only free race,” the “last romance.” Their powerful need to see the Gypsies as a restorative antidote to modern life—an idea that is also traceable to Arnold’s poem—eclipsed the complexity of Gypsies’ lived experience and, in part, the distinctiveness and humanity of British Gypsies.

Four texts, taken together, trace the movement from a tendency to obscure Gypsy experience to an acknowledgment of the need to accommodate Gypsy subjectivity. The iconic or symbolic use of Gypsies certainly did not end with the twentieth century (it surely survives even in contemporary literary texts), but there was a discernible retreat from the easy deployment of Gypsy stereotype and caricature.² In Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” the Gypsies who are central to both the title and the resolution of the mystery never appear, while D. H. Lawrence’s novella The Virgin and the Gipsy both exploits and debunks the cultural myths of Gypsies’ elemental passion, association with nature, anonymity, and inarticulateness. The voices of Gypsies themselves are heard in the autobiography of Gordon Boswell, a British Gypsy, and the reflections of John Megel, an American Gypsy. The two literary narratives, Conan Doyle’s and Lawrence’s, rewrite in obvious and striking ways Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, respectively, and thereby illustrate the deeply literary and allusive nature of Gypsy representation. The last three texts—Lawrence’s, Boswell’s, and Megel’s—comment either directly or obliquely on the issue of Gypsy literacy and imagine it as the pivot of self-expression and self-consciousness. Megel’s piece makes a link not only between trauma and history but between writing and history and, beyond that, between knowing the past and possibilities for the future. He strives to recast Romany identity and subjectivity through the claiming of history and the illumination of the past.

Reputed to be Arthur Conan Doyle’s best loved story among ordinary readers and Sherlock Holmes aficionados alike, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1891) turns on an erroneous theory and invisible murder suspects.³ Holmes, called on by a young woman, Helen Stoner, to investigate the strange death of her twin sister at the estate of their dissolute stepfather, Dr. Roylott, initially concentrates his suspicions on the “wandering gypsies” who camp on the doctor’s grounds and serve as his sometime companions. Roylott, descended from a long line of degenerate and profligate aristocrats, managed to obtain a medical degree and went on to practice medicine, ultimately quite successfully, in India. A scandal involving the doctor’s fatal beating of a manservant and his subsequent incarceration for the crime sent him back to England, where he lives, now a widower, with his two stepdaughters in the ancestral home of Stoke Moran. While the young women remain unmarried and under his roof, the doctor benefits from his wife’s—their mother’s—considerable wealth through an annuity; when they marry, as Helen’s dead sister was about to do, he will no longer receive the allowance.

Given the criminal history and obvious financial motive of the doctor (Helen is also about to marry and fears for her safety), Holmes’s suspicions might well have fallen immediately on Roylott, but Conan Doyle throws a red herring Holmes’s way. When Helen discovered her sister close to death, the stricken woman called out, “Oh, my God! Helen! It was the band! The speckled band!”⁴ Holmes probes the meaning of this cryptic phrase and asks Helen if the Gypsies were in the area at that time. Yes, she replies; she, too, had wondered if the word “band” refers to the Gypsies. It might describe not only the group, but the spotted kerchiefs worn by the Gypsies on their heads: they both constitute and wear a speckled band. Holmes concludes that the Gypsies, Roylott’s companions, may have acted as his surrogates in doing away with his stepdaughter. Holmes and Watson pursue this line of reasoning in their investigation, which now takes them to the scene of the crime, Stoke Moran, although each man sees “many objections to any such theory” (356). The objections remain obscure, and the reader, typically, has no idea what Holmes is thinking as he goes through the ingenious process of discovering the mode and perpetrator of the murder.

The murderer turns out, of course, to be Roylott himself or, rather, the Indian puff adder—the “speckled band”—he unleashed in his stepdaughter’s room through a vent. Holmes catches him in the act of trying to repeat the assault, this time on Helen Stoner, and is able to reverse the adder’s course so that it poisons the doctor. They find Roylott dead in his room, the spotted snake wrapped around his forehead in a gruesome parody of the Gypsies’ reputed headgear. As John A. Hodgson has pointed out, the phrase “speckled band” is rhetorically misleading, “a false scent,” but the visual image of the coiled adder redeems—indeed, proves partially true—Holmes’s initial hypothesis (342).

As a term referring to both a scarf-like headdress and a cluster or an assembly of wanderers, “band” functioned commonly as a metonym for Gypsies. Like caravans, wood fires, gold earrings, swarthy skin, Arnold’s “smoked tents,” and tinkering, the word “band” conjures up the Gypsy without the need for any explanation or substantiation of the actual link between individuals and the accoutrements with which they are automatically associated. George Eliot makes comic use of this metonymic way of evoking the Gypsy in Silas Marner, when the folks of Raveloe wish to invent a suspect for the theft of Silas’s gold and spin the tale of a peddler who wears gold earrings and has curly black hair. Kenneth Grahame deploys a broader kind of comedy in his Edwardian elegy for a pastoral England, The Wind in the Willows, when Toad becomes smitten with a gypsy caravan “shining with newness, painted a canary-yellow picked out with green, and red wheels.” “There’s real life for you,” Toad exclaims, “embodied in that little cart. The open road, the dusty highway, the heath, the common, the hedgerows, the rolling downs! Camps, villages, towns, cities! Here to-day, up and off to somewhere else to-morrow!”⁵ Grahame lampoons the early-twentieth-century craze for caravanning by launching, through Toad, a laundry list of images and tropes associated with Gypsy life, all of them inspired by the appearance of a caravan. And in The Wind in the Willows, as in Silas Marner, there is not a Gypsy in sight. Eliot’s Gypsy is apocryphal; Grahame’s, simply unnecessary. It is striking, although not surprising, then, that Gypsies never actually appear in “The Speckled Band.”

The story’s metonymic use of the phrase “speckled band” is underscored by the absence of Gypsies in the narrative. Helen Stoner’s initial account to Holmes includes the salient feature of the Gypsies’ presence on the family estate; her stepfather gives “these vagabonds leave to encamp upon the few acres of bramble-covered land … and would accept in return the hospitality of their tents, wandering away with them sometimes for weeks on end” (350). Aside from the dying sister’s words and Holmes’s articulation of the theory of Gypsy guilt, there is no further mention of the Gypsies and there is never a rendering of them that is not secondhand. Holmes does not see them in his journey to the estate, nor does anyone glimpse them from the window of the women’s bedrooms at Stoke Moran. How, then, does the story sustain the possibility—even the likelihood—of the Gypsies’ guilt when a more obvious suspect exists in Roylott, when we are told that Holmes himself has doubts about his theory, and when we are shown no actual Gypsies to imagine as the perpetrators? There is no evidence to link them to the crime, and the absent Gypsies can exhibit no suspicious behavior for detective or reader to observe.

Conan Doyle’s story depends on its ability to divert attention from the true solution, and so, of course, it requires a red herring. But what interests me here is why Gypsies—even invisible ones—serve as an ideal “false scent,” the “band” an easy shorthand by which to conjure criminal suspects. The story is able to rely on a reader’s knowledge of the iconography associated with Gypsies, both because of the stereotypes at large in the culture and because of literary precedent and allusion. Gypsies appear as likely companions to the dissolute Dr. Roylott, given their bands’ mythic role as a haven for dropouts, bohemians, and those generally in retreat from respectability. As two critics have put it, Roylott’s friendship with the Gypsies is indicative of his degeneracy and “presented as simultaneously self-explanatory and suspicious.”⁶ Although Gypsies were not indeed much associated with murder, they were linked to criminality, especially theft and cheating, and to base, semihuman impulses. When Helen Stoner tells Holmes about her stepfather’s odd taste for the company of Gypsies, she follows this comment directly with the information that he also “has a passion for Indian animals … and has at this moment a cheetah and a baboon, which wander freely over his grounds” (350). The doctor is a collector of both Gypsies and animals—exotic species out of place on a gentleman’s grounds, creatures that, whether human or not, can be mentioned in the same breath and conflated as signifiers of Roylott’s immorality and decadence.

Readers of “The Speckled Band” might also be expected to recognize, either consciously or not, that the story rewrites Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering or, at least, relies on it as a precursor in the representation of Gypsies and in their handy use for the purposes of a mystery plot. In Scott’s novel, a Gypsy band makes its home on the estate of a laird and is suspected of perpetrating a crime: the kidnapping of the laird’s young son. Scott exploits the common association of Gypsies with the abduction of non-Gypsy children in order to set his plot in motion and, like Conan Doyle after him, establish a red herring. Just as Conan Doyle’s Gypsies prove to be innocent, so are the Gypsies of Guy Mannering. The ultimate culprit in both stories is not a reviled “race” of wanderers, but the lord of the manor, although in Scott’s novel, of course, the “lord” is an arriviste and not a faded aristocrat. Guy Mannering also establishes and makes use of an implicit link between Gypsies and the experience of empire or, more specifically, India, the Gypsies’ presumed place of origin, and “The Speckled Band” follows suit. The astrologer Guy Mannering spends many years as a soldier in India before returning to Ellangowan, the scene of his earlier predictions, and Harry Bertram, the kidnapped heir, finds his way to India as well. Dr. Roylott, too, has spent a period of his life in India, and both he and Mannering return from empire after killing—or apparently killing—someone. Mannering believes that he killed a young man named Brown—really Harry Bertram—in a duel over his wife, and Roylott murdered a butler. The Gypsies on Roylott’s estate are likened implicitly to the exotic animals that the doctor imported from India—a comparison made possible in part by assumptions about the Gypsies’ homeland.⁷ In Guy Mannering, it is through Meg Merrilies’s appearance that Scott establishes the Gypsy tie to India: when Brown/Bertram sees her again after an absence of many years, he recognizes her, either from a dream, as he says, or from his “recollection … of the strange figures I have seen in our Indian pagodas.”⁸ Both Scott and Conan Doyle capitalize on the whiff of scandal that can hover over those who return from empire and yoke the plot of empire to the mysteries of landed estates at home through the figure of the Gypsy.

If Conan Doyle’s readers knew Guy Mannering or even its cultural legacy (remember that the novel and, especially, its best known character, Meg Merrilies, were enormously popular), they knew enough to read the signs of potential Gypsy culpability in “The Speckled Band.” They also were primed for the ultimate exoneration of the Gypsies, although, this time, had no investment in the Gypsies’ innocence. Here the contrast with Scott’s novel is telling. Not only does Scott give us the colorful and charismatic Meg Merrilies, the larger-than-life Gypsy sibyl who helps raise and rescue Harry Bertram, but he includes in his narrative the history of the Scottish Gypsies and the drama of their expulsion from the laird’s estate. In so doing, he creates considerable sympathy for the novel’s Gypsies, despite their quick disappearance from the scene and Meg’s convenient death. Harry’s childhood attachment to Meg and identification as wanderer and exile further heighten the sense that the novel mounts a subtle criticism of the dispossession of the Gypsies and the unfair suspicions that plague them. “The Speckled Band,” however, offers no actual Gypsies with whom to sympathize or identify. The reader’s reaction to the discovery of their innocence is likely to be an intellectual appreciation of a mystery cleverly solved and a false lead effectively deployed rather than any pleasure or relief associated with the Gypsies themselves. Further, to the extent that the story or its more sympathetic characters express any attitude toward the generic Gypsy, it is one of dismissiveness and callous indifference. Helen Stoner’s words conflate the Stoke Moran Gypsies and her stepfather’s Indian animals, and she implicitly condemns the former as Roylott’s companions in dissoluteness. The weight of cultural prejudice, combined with a well-established tradition of literary evocation, makes possible Conan Doyle’s metonymic representation of the Gypsies in the story. This method of characterization does not invite the reader to regard the suspect Gypsies as either human or individuated: it is simply a device, and a highly successful one, for putting the reader off the scent. “The Speckled Band” hinges on the Gypsy as a literary referent that has been wholly drained of historical or even contemporary social meaning.

Six years after the publication of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” Bram Stoker appears to have taken inspiration from its use of Gypsies for the early chapters of Dracula (1897). Jonathan Harker, held prisoner in the count’s castle, seizes on the possibility of using a “band of Szgany [east European Gypsies] … encamped in the courtyard” to convey some letters to friends in England. Harker has noted that these particular Transylvanians, “allied to the ordinary gipsies all over the world,” tend to “attach themselves to some great noble”—like Roylott or the laird of Ellangowan—and are both fearless and godless.⁹ Failing to heed the import of his own research, he allows himself to be tricked by the Szgany, who deliver his letters right into the hands of the count and then transport him in his coffin away from the castle. Although, unlike Conan Doyle’s Gypsies, Stoker’s Szgany both appear and speak, they resemble the Gypsies of Stoke Moran in their loyalty to an evil landlord, their lawlessness, and their wholly fictional genealogy.

The eponymous Gypsy in D. H. Lawrence’s novella The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930) also wears a band, but his yellow-and-red silk kerchief is tied around his neck. Indeed, the virgin Yvette Saywell’s first glimpse of him in the narrative draws on a number of visual clichés of Gypsy representation. Driving a cart and horse next to the automobile that Yvette and her smart set of “young people” occupy, he is a “black, loose-bodied, handsome” Gypsy with a “thin black moustache,” a “dark face under his dark-green cap,” a flamboyant scarf, and “loose, light shoulders.”¹⁰ The pairing of cart and car immediately suggests the warring relationship between nature and modernity that occupies Lawrence both in this and in other works and for which the trope of the Gypsy, as we have seen, has often been enlisted. The Gypsy’s insouciance and compelling physical presence have a predictable effect on Yvette. When she sees him, her “heart [gives] a jump,” and, as her eyes meet his, “something [takes] fire in her breast” (33–34). The language of Lawrentian passion coalesces with the metaphorical baggage that had attached itself to the Gypsy over decades. Just as Conan Doyle did not have to elaborate on—or even produce—the Gypsy suspects in “The Speckled Band,” Lawrence can signal with considerable economy the sexual appeal of the virgin’s Gypsy. Lawrence’s is not the lawless Gypsy stereotype of the Holmes story, but a male version of the objectified erotic beauty and passive seductress favored by Gypsy lorists and others. A first incarnation of the gamekeeper Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), this Gypsy initially appears in Lawrence’s novella as a sexual object and remains that way for much of the narrative in the mind and desires of Yvette Saywell.¹¹ What interests me is the way Lawrence milks this virtually ready-made imagery of charismatic, socially marginal masculinity throughout the narrative, only to expose it as cliché and fantasy in the end.¹²

Lawrence’s story proceeds according to an apparent opposition of forces that vie for Yvette’s psychic allegiance and future. On one side is her mother, referred to throughout most of the novella as “she-who-was-Cynthia,” a free-spirited woman who left her vicar husband and two very young daughters to run off with a “young and penniless man.” The scandal of her mother’s disappearance haunts Yvette both as a source of guilt (the sisters think she left “because their mother found them negligible”) and as a temptation. The mother, dangerous and selfish but also glamorous and vivid, paved a path that the daughter might follow, and the Gypsy whom Yvette glimpses on the road appears as the likely means of the daughter’s replication of the mother’s abandonment of respectable life.

On the other side is respectability itself: the smothering domestic world over which her aggrieved father, pious aunt, and, above all, pinched and life-denying Granny preside. The rectory as locus of stultifying and decaying life is crucial to Lawrence’s evocation of this oppressive familial domain. Yvette, lying on her bed and thinking that she would like to be a Gypsy, considers that wandering in a caravan and sleeping in a camp, with a man who “never lived in a house,” would be preferable to remaining in the rectory, against which her heart turned “hard with repugnance”:

She loathed these houses with their indoor sanitation and their bathrooms, and their extraordinary repulsiveness. She hated the rectory, and everything it implied. The whole stagnant, sewerage sort of life, where sewerage is never mentioned, but where it seems to smell from the centre of every two-legged inmate, from Granny to the servants, was foul. If gypsies had no bathrooms, at least they had no sewerage. There was fresh air. In the rectory there was never fresh air. And in the souls of the people, the air was stale till it stank. (52)

Which of these lives will claim her? The choice that confronts her is familiar, and its literary and folkloric antecedents are clearly alluded to in the story. The narrative compares her longing for escape explicitly with the Lady of Shalott’s and implicitly with Maggie Tulliver’s. Like the lady, Yvette is trapped in her home, staring out the window (albeit not through a reflection) and “imag[ining] that someone would come along singing Tirra-lirra! or something equally intelligent, by the river” (62).¹³ Like Maggie, she contemplates running off with the Gypsies to flee her stultifying home and feels herself more akin to the vagabonds that live on the periphery of settled society than to her own family. As critics have remarked, the novella’s debt to George Eliot’s novel is most apparent in the flood that concludes each narrative.¹⁴ Although the flood in The Mill on the Floss can be understood to represent the rush of female desire—Maggie’s desire for her brother and for a return to childhood unity—her childish Gypsy fantasies have little to do with sexual longing. The elements that Lawrence takes from both Tennyson’s poem and Eliot’s novel were also readily gleaned from the well-known Irish folk song “The Raggle Taggle Gypsy,” in which a lord’s bride runs off with a wandering Gypsy. When the aggrieved husband tracks down his wife in a “wide open field,” he demands of her why she left her house, her land, her money, her comfortable bed, and her wedded lord, and she responds:

The story’s revision of the Gypsy myth coincides with its complication of the apparent duality of forces—open-road bohemianism and suffocating domesticity—that compete for Yvette’s allegiance. Indeed, it is through Yvette’s eyes that we see the Gypsy as the scandalous alternative to the stifling world of the rectory, the potential reprise of the “young and penniless man” who rescued—or stole—her mother. Through free indirect discourse, the narrative portrays Yvette’s Gypsy as the dark, brooding, sexually potent man who has designs on her virginity, but when the story provides a different view of him, the easy dichotomy of raw and cooked, nature and civilization, begins to break down (70). Major Eastwood, the blond, Nordic companion of the wealthy, spoiled “Jewess” who encounters Yvette as she is about to enter the Gypsy’s cart, had previous experience of the Gypsy that casts him in a role far removed from caravan and fortune-telling. A groom in Eastwood’s artillery regiment during World War I, the Gypsy suddenly becomes, in the major’s telling, a man of skill and mastery, with an institutional identity and a history. So successfully does this shifted angle of vision remake the Gypsy’s character that Lawrence would repeat the fact of a military past for Mellors in Lady Chatterley.¹⁶ Eastwood describes the Gypsy not only as “the best man we had, with horses,” but as a man whose toughness enabled him to defeat death: “Nearly died of pneumonia. I thought he was dead. He’s a resurrected man to me. I’m a resurrected man myself.… I was buried for twenty hours under snow” (107). No longer only an object of desire or an agent of liberatory feeling, the Gypsy is now seen to be as resilient as the major himself and to possess powers of rebirth and renewal.

It is ultimately the Gypsy’s power to revivify and not his sexual potency that redeems Yvette. In the story’s climactic flood, a harbinger of spring like the snowdrops that dot the landscape and the Gypsies’ imminent departure from their winter camp, the Gypsy saves Yvette’s life and brings renewal to her family. Although some readers have understood the flood and the attendant physical intimacy between Yvette and the Gypsy as a sexual climax, it seems clear that what transpires between them is not the sexual consummation that the narrative has led us to expect. The events of the flood defy expectations, both because the couple’s coming together fails to result in sexual union and because the Gypsy saves Yvette not by rescuing her from her home but by leading her toward its very center—the chimney, the hearth. When the floodwater begins to invade the Saywells’ house and it begins to crumble, the Gypsy coaxes Yvette toward “the back chimney … [because] the chimney will stand” (133). At the heart of the house, a sanctuary from destruction, they find Yvette’s bedroom, with its narrow fireplace against the wall. Disturbing the opposition of home and freedom, Lawrence stages Yvette’s salvation in her own house, in her own room.

In the bedroom, the Gypsy removes his sodden clothes, urges Yvette to do the same, rubs his flesh to warm himself, and then warms her. In a gesture that, in another key, would inevitably be sexual, the Gypsy’s ministrations to her are tender, protective, and life-giving: “With his towel he began to rub her, himself shaking all over, but holding her gripped by the shoulder, and slowly, numbedly rubbing her tender body, even trying to rub up into some dryness the pitiful hair of her small head” (135). As they dry themselves and the waters recede, they move to the bed, where, again, the climax that might be sexual appears to be something else. Yvette is shuddering and convulsed, dangerously close to dying of the cold, and the Gypsy wraps his naked limbs around her body to warm her. He, too, shudders, until the warmth they derive from each other relaxes them, and they are revived and “pass[…] away into sleep” (138). The emphatic nakedness, the possibility of sexual union, and the language of orgasm—shudder, convulsion—make plausible an ambiguous reading of the scene.¹⁷ I think, however, that Lawrence seduces us into such a reading as a way of heightening his refusal of the cliché (a cliché that he has partly invented and then dilates on in Lady Chatterley, not with a raggle-taggle Gypsy, but with a man of the people).

In Lawrence’s revision of the conclusion to The Mill on the Floss, the heroine not only survives but is able to reconcile with her family as a result of the cataclysm of the flood. But Lawrence’s novella reproduces faithfully another aspect of Eliot’s novel: the debunking of Gypsy myth. As Carol Siegel puts it, both Maggie and Yvette discover in the end that “beneath the surface strangeness the gypsies are ordinary Englishmen.”¹⁸ Maggie learns this after she runs off to Dunlow Common to join a Gypsy band; Yvette, after she receives a letter from the Gypsy once he has left town and moved on. In a gesture that parallels the story’s defiance of romantic expectation, the letter explodes a number of myths of Gypsy identity. This man—regarded by Yvette and by the narrative generally as the embodiment of desire and the forces of unsettled, unhoused life that oppose her dreary, trapped existence—turns out to be literate (if not perfectly so), to express himself in an ordinary and homely style, to live according to the rhythms of cattle fairs, and, finally, to have a name.

His signature—“Joe Boswell”—startles the reader as it startles Yvette: “And only then she realised that he had a name” (146). No longer the generic Gypsy, readily and cursorily evoked through his dark looks and colorful scarf, he is now an individual who has been accorded the particularity of his identity. The last line of the story, “And only then …,” serves as a rebuke to Yvette, who has yearned for a man she regarded as nameless. Maria DiBattista calls Joe Boswell “the last Laurentian avatar of inviolate humanity,” a humanity the writer establishes through naming him.¹⁹ Lawrence’s imbuing of Boswell with common literacy and a name sheds light back onto the long lineage of anonymous literary and folkloric Gypsies who stand behind this one. It also offers a curious commentary on the novella’s repeated and unrelenting references to Mrs. Fawcett, Major Eastwood’s companion, as the “Jewess.” It is difficult to say if Lawrence fails to expose or even to recognize as problematic the nasty stereotype of the spoiled Jewish woman he uses or if, rather, he launches a backward-looking critique of this habitual form of identifying her when he gives Joe Boswell a name. In either event, the story’s naming of Boswell seems a deliberate redress of the notion of the iconic Gypsy, the Gypsy who is less than human, the Gypsy who lacks individuation or who, as in Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band,” does not even have to be visible in order to signify a generic Gypsy presence.

Boswell’s letter, however mundane, also communicates passion and hope and stands as a testament to the power and singularity of human expression. Lawrence would use the same strategy for concluding Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and, although Mellors’s letter to Connie is far more elaborate and suffers from no infelicities of expression, it hints at the primacy of language or, perhaps, the need for language as a conduit for passion when physical contact is impossible. The “ink could stay in the bottle,” Mellors writes, if only I could touch you.²⁰ There is surely a greater likelihood that Connie and Mellors will be reunited than that the Gypsy will return to Yvette, even if, as he says in the letter, he does come her way again. Yvette moans with love for him but is, after all, “acquiescent in the fact of his disappearance” (145). However, the Gypsy’s “I live in hopes” is more than a naïve articulation of misplaced dreams; it is an expression of longing that provides a glimpse of Boswell’s interior life and vulnerability. Mellors’s letter, which ends with the phrase “a hopeful heart,” does the same.²¹

D. H. Lawrence did not choose the name of his Gypsy idly or arbitrarily. The Boswells were a well-known clan of British Gypsies, one of the three principal families that Francis Hindes Groome used as sources for In Gypsy Tents. British readers would very likely have been able to identify Boswell as a common Gypsy name. Rather like calling a Jewish character Cohen, as George Eliot does the pawnshop owner in Daniel Deronda, naming a Gypsy character Boswell casts him as ordinary and, presumably, recognizable. It is mainly, although not wholly, coincidental that the first full-length autobiography produced by a British Gypsy born before the turn of the twentieth century is Silvester Gordon Boswell’s The Book of Boswell: Autobiography of a Gypsy, a memoir that, as we will see, shares details and motifs other than surname with Lawrence’s novella. Partly written and largely dictated, it tells the story of Boswell’s life from his birth in 1895, in his own words.²² Although Gypsy voices and stories can be heard in the writings of the Gypsy lorists and other observers, it is difficult to gain access to sustained Gypsy self-representation for much of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Boswell’s book follows the shape of autobiography, creating a clear trajectory and interpretation for the events of his life. He offers a narrative of Gypsy existence that might be expected to differ from those considered in this book. The question we must ask, then, concerns the story of identity that one particular Gypsy tells when he tells it himself. Some of the themes that Boswell emphasizes echo those in the works of non-Gypsy writers. He meditates, for example, on the meaning of modernity as it affects a traditional Gypsy existence and laments the passing of a time when a true rambling life was possible. But he also introduces the vexed question of education for the peripatetic Gypsy, and he envisions a way of prospering in the modern world that combines elements of assimilation, accommodation, cultural continuity, and separateness.

When the Boswell family appears in the works of Gypsy lorists, its significance is almost always linked to purity. Groome regards the infrequency of intermarriage between Boswells and górgios as the feature that distinguishes them from the Lovell and, especially, Wood clans and remarks that of sixty-eight members on the Boswell family tree, “all of them [were] seemingly full-blooded.”²³ Groome tries to correlate this genealogical “purity” with linguistic purity, as well as with the survival of authentic Gypsy culture, and has difficulty in doing so. Nonetheless, the Boswells remained a touchstone of pristine Gypsy identity. In the text where Groome found the Boswell family tree, B. C. Smart and H. T. Crofton’s The Dialect of the English Gypsies, Gordon Boswell’s grandfather Silvester—or Wester—appears in the role of pure Gypsy and pure Romani speaker: “Among these conservators of ancient ways,” Smart and Crofton write in their introduction, “we have met with no Gypsy anywhere who can be compared with our friend Sylvester Boswell, for purity of speech and idiomatic style … a fine old ‘Romani chal’—a regular blue-blooded hidalgo—his father a Boswell, his mother a Herne—his pedigree unstained by a base ‘gaujo’ admixture.”²⁴ Wester proves invaluable to the authors because he can identify six Romani dialects and is considered an expert in the old ways of speech: “Go to Wester,” the young Gypsies tell one another, “he speaks dictionary.”²⁵

What lies hidden in the back pages of Smart and Crofton’s study is that Wester is literate, as well as pure of blood and speech. In the section “Genuine Romany Compositions,” the authors include a number of his translations, one into Romani of a passage from Scripture and a few into English of letters that he wrote in Romani.²⁶ This particular aspect of Wester’s knowledge—a form of book learning and not just oral lore—receives no particular attention from the gypsiologists, but takes on enormous significance in his grandson’s autobiography. And although Gordon’s family tree is extremely important to him and a source of great pride, he never uses the discourse of purity.²⁷ What distinguishes his pedigree, according to Boswell, is not the absence of intermarriage, but the early appearance of formally educated ancestors. He places at the heart of his narrative not some notion of unsullied race, but the distinction of having a literate grandfather. Because his great-grandfather was forced into military service by a press gang (probably around 1820), his grandfather Wester was schooled by the state along with other soldiers’ dependents. This was, Gordon asserts, “the first instance of any education among Romanies” (13 [emphasis added]).²⁸

The inheritance of literacy is crucial to Boswell’s keen awareness of himself not just as a representative Romany who wants to tell his story, but as the author of a book. The title he gives his memoir—The Book of Boswell—is itself a signal of his investment in creating a document, a record that will stand for future generations of Romany and górgios to consult. The “best of everything” world he inhabited as a boy and young man has disappeared and will now exist “only in a book,” according to the poem “On the Road Again,” which he uses as an epigraph at the beginning of his narrative. What autobiographer could not say the same? Nonetheless, the capturing of the past in print—the writing of history—sets his efforts apart from the overwhelmingly oral traditions of Romany transmission. An appendix to Gordon’s book includes a description of his grandfather Wester’s notebook, an annotated record of milestones in his own family and other clans. A source for gypsiologists interested in genealogy, this “Regester Book” and “famaley Memerandum” is the book-within-a-book that confirms Boswell’s inheritance not just of literacy but of authorship as well.

Throughout his memoir, Boswell alludes to his own experiences as an educated Gypsy child. The son of a literate man, Gordon’s father, Trafalgar, insisted that his children attend school whenever the family settled, however briefly, in a new spot. The family inevitably moved on, but the Boswell children took their couple of weeks or months of learning in periods of settlement. The narrative makes clear the difficulty of reconciling an itinerant life with formal education. Teachers, assuming that Boswell and his siblings were ignorant or at least badly educated, automatically placed them one grade below the level at which they belonged. Boswell, always a big boy among smaller ones, was called a dunce, ridiculed, and snubbed by his peers; his recourse was physical aggression and daily fights. The children eventually learned to lie about their ages, telling teachers that they were one grade ahead in order to be placed in the right one. At school, Boswell believes, they began to tell serious lies, the result of knowing that the non-Gypsy world would never trust their truths (22–23).

Boswell’s education, the experience that set him apart from almost all other Gypsy children he knew, also introduced him to the realities of discrimination. However proud he was of his book learning, he understood school as one of the British institutions that taught him the nature of his own inevitable marginality. At the age of twelve, he left home after the school he was attending denied him the recognition his talents warranted simply because he would not be a permanent member of the community. In a contest for the best drawing of an animal, Boswell’s work was chosen by a panel of judges as the winner. The schoolmaster ruled that, because he was a Gypsy and would be moving on, Boswell could not receive the first-prize banner, an award that was customarily displayed in the school. If Boswell took the banner with him, there was no point in giving him the prize, and so the runner-up won. This incident convinced Boswell of the irreducibility of his identity as a Gypsy in the view of the settled English community, and he rebelled: “It hurt me. I was a Gypsy again, you see. It was another bit of persecution. And I cried when I got home and I said: ‘I will never go to that school again!’ And I ran away” (56). Like the hero of many a bildungsroman, Boswell left school and home to make his way in the world in response to an experience of humiliation and perceived injustice. And like those heroes as well, he would find a means to overcome his debased position and come to consider adversity as the pivot of his life’s progress.

“I think the army was the beginning of me,” Boswell writes after recounting the story of his service in World War I (92). If school alerted him to his difference, the army convinced him that persecution would haunt him and his people without foreseeable end. At the age of twenty, he signed up and was placed in the veterinary corps. Like Lawrence’s Joe Boswell, who serves as a groom during the war, Gordon Boswell drew on his experience with animals—specifically, horses—to make a place for himself in the military. He treated horses for shellshock, wrestled as a representative of the Veterinary Hospital at Boulogne, and went up to serve with the First Cavalry Division. Despite his successes, Boswell suffered the isolation that resulted from having no Gypsy companions in the service, punishment for insubordination, and unnecessarily prolonged confinement in a military hospital. These experiences led him to question the nature of his allegiances and identity and, ultimately, to feel that his interests and Britain’s did not coincide. “It used to dawn on me how one British subject can treat another,” he writes, and then muses about an alternative national allegiance that would have supplied him with a wholly different military experience: “For we still haven’t got a country we can call our own, … and I don’t suppose there’s a spare country anywhere now that can be given us” (78, 84). He searched for anyone dark-skinned to confide in, tried out a few phrases in Romani, and satisfied himself with “swop[ping] words with” Bengalis and Gurkhas (84). Still, he credits this period of war service with the making of him. His resolve was forged in the overcoming of maltreatment and discrimination: “I’d think: if I get free I’ll never grumble again—no matter how my life takes me! … [F]rom the day of my discharge … I’ve tried to defend myself in persecution. I’ve lived through it, and I’ve got through it—and I’ve conquered something!” (92). His sense of triumph, mixed with regret at the unresolved marginality of his people, sends him back again to the question of education. Although he has achieved some measure of success and equanimity in his life, he still thinks with sadness of the “people on the roads today” who are both persecuted and uneducated. They lack the defenses of literacy and knowledge that his father forced his children to acquire.

Almost every British writer on Gypsy life I have considered thus far associated Gypsies with nostalgia for a pastoral, preindustrial, or lost world and, concomitantly, with the Edenic origins of a vanished England. The Gypsy interlocutors of lorists and other observers also sounded this nostalgic strain, and Boswell proves no exception. At a number of points in his narrative, he expresses regret that “no Gypsy children since the 1914 War finished has had times that we … had in my younger days” (21). World War I demarcates a loss of innocence both for himself and for Romany in general. He speaks of “those days of unspoiled England,” in which he and his siblings looked forward to spring travels; to lanes full of violets, primroses, and wild roses; and to potatoes roasted over a fire (21). The natural world has been invaded by the machine and, for the Gypsy, nothing exemplifies this more urgently than the disappearance of the horse-drawn caravan and the restrictions placed on free travel. “They’ve taken our by-ways, our lovely lanes away from us,” he laments, “so we’ve got to revert back [sic] to tin cans and iron trailers and that is everything on wheels” (33–34). The juxtaposition of motorcar and Gypsy cart in The Virgin and the Gipsy and even in The Wind in the Willows marks this particular contrast between mechanical and animal power as a common trope for the shocks of modern life. For Boswell, this change in mode of transportation has its legal and moral corollary in oppressive and constraining rules of movement. “Old England was a wonderful place,” he writes, using a term for his nation common to so many non-Gypsy critics and bemoaners of change, “but now it seems to me like a police state. Wherever you go nowadays, you’re doing wrong, or you’re attempting to do wrong, or you’re about to do wrong, and what then? … It’s all restrictions. Old England isn’t like it was when I was a child” (33).

What, then, distinguishes the nostalgia of Gordon Boswell from that of John Clare, Matthew Arnold, George Borrow, or the Gypsy lorists? He appears to accept the trope of a golden age, the reality of a better past, just as the others do. The distinctions are twofold, and they reflect both the difference of Romany subjectivity and the trajectory of Boswell’s autobiographical narrative. First, Boswell accepts modernity as his means to prosperity and, second, he manages to find a balance between integration into and aloofness from both modernity and the dominant culture. Boswell’s is a story of success and, to some extent, assimilation. His autobiography combines the teleological plot of bildung with an outsider’s chronicle of overcoming. “Old England” and the caravan may have been more congenial to Romany life, but iron is what made him.

After earning a living in horse trading, a traditional Romany source of income that he had parlayed into a small international business by buying Russian ponies in Brussels and selling them for pit ponies in England, Boswell realized that tractors were replacing horses in farming. Not wishing to remain a “one-track man,” as he believed the average horse dealer to be, he started in the scrap-metal trade (121). He did not resist trailers but actually acquired one as early as 1927. And finally, during World War II, he entered into a contract with the Ministry of Transport that brought him prosperity and launched him on an extensive family business. During the war, when gasoline was at a premium, those who wanted to purchase new trucks or other large vehicles had to turn in their old ones to be made into scrap and melted down. Boswell became the middle man, signing for the old vehicles and cutting them into scrap before sending on the metal to be used in manufacturing. He continued and expanded the business, brought his sons into it, and, as of the time of the writing of his memoir, was dealing with many of the largest farms and tractor firms in the district. The confidence of his clients had become a source of tremendous pride for him: “I’ve lived for it and we’ve achieved it and I hope we carry on like this” (153). In an appendix to The Book of Boswell, the editor notes that a large number of British Gypsies entered the scrap-metal business in the twentieth century (190–91). Their traditional metalworking skills—tinkering and the like—may have prepared them for this line of work, but there is nonetheless an irony in their resourceful approach to the death of the old ways and the ascendancy of the machine. Nostalgia for the open road did not overwhelm Boswell’s sense of enterprise. His narrative makes clear that the cost of romanticizing without qualification the preindustrial past is too high for the Gypsies themselves. While non-Gypsy writers and cultural critics can afford to make a fetish of “Old England,” a Gypsy like Boswell cannot.

Still, accommodation to the new ways had limited appeal for Boswell, who was able to withstand assimilation because he fully understood its benefits and costs. Iron to him, he writes, is simply a livelihood—“there’s no music attached to it” (155). He awaits longingly the time when he can stop working, leave the scrap business in the hands of his sons, and resume traveling. Only because he has been able to combine his job with his “original life,” as he puts it, has he lasted so long as a businessman living a more or less settled existence. His entrepreneurial success is tempered by the refusal of his own father to live in a house. The old man objects to having a toilet upstairs, with waste flushing through the pipes, a detail that recalls Yvette Saywell’s disgust at the thought of “indoor sanitation … [and the] whole stagnant, sewerage sort of life.” Although Boswell does not explain his father’s dislike of indoor plumbing, it is most likely connected to prohibitions against contact between food preparation and bodily, as well as other sorts of, waste and, as a result, to the Gypsies’ reluctance to have bathrooms in the home, whether stationary or mobile.²⁹ Whereas for Lawrence, indoor plumbing serves as an avatar of modernity and a symbol of the putrefaction that can be associated with civilized life, for Boswell’s father, it signals the compromises attendant on assimilation that he is unwilling to make. Trafalgar Boswell also demonstrates his lack of respect for Gordon’s success, permanent dwelling, and wealth by using the teasing and feminizing epithet “millionette” to refer to his son (159).

Gordon Boswell signals his own ambivalence about modern life and entrepreneurial success both by including his father’s jaundiced views of wealth and plumbing and by leaving the reader to contemplate the legacy of his sons. Boswell has two, one a settled businessman and the other a “typical Gypsy man” who still travels and is unlikely to stop. This second son, Lewis, an outward confirmation of Boswell’s attachment to the old ways, “loves his stick fire, [and] his green grass,” although he will send his children to school and, like his father, insist on their getting as much education as their peripatetic life allows (163–64). This Romany vision of life—a combination of practicality, pleasure in achievement, attachment to custom, and qualified aloofness from modernity—emerges only in the Gypsy Boswell’s own account. He transforms the rhetoric of nostalgia, characteristic of virtually every text we have considered, into a complex posture toward his own culture and the modern world. With the gift of self-expression that he inherited from family tradition and the means to disseminate his views that late-twentieth-century publication allows, Boswell’s narrative supplants the phantom Gypsy, who has no voice and no history and whose silence and even invisibility are often required.

Gordon Boswell argues for the importance of Romany literacy even as he prizes the culture of rambling and the open road. His ability to narrate and, in part, to write his own story stands as testimony to the virtues of linguistic expression in the cause of self-representation. If nothing else, Boswell’s memoir offers a history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Gypsy life that amplifies and, in some respects, negates the accounts of gypsiologists, literary observers, and even academic historians and social scientists. What Lawrence hints at in The Virgin and the Gipsy—that what the Gypsy himself speaks does not conform to the mythology that surrounds him—is borne out by The Book of Boswell. Although no absolute line can be drawn between mythology and history, it is fair to say that, without history, mythology is allowed to stand in for the written record. In the case of the Gypsies, the absence of writing—especially by the Gypsies themselves—feeds the dominance of myth in the representation and understanding of Romany existence. The mystery of origin, so crucial to the literary representation of Gypsies, lies at the center of almost all mythologizing of the Romany past. And, as we have seen, it is this deliberately nurtured mystery that has persistently linked the Gypsies to the trope of an ambiguous, hidden, or Edenic genesis. It is tempting to speculate that with the benefit of history—with a written record—the origin of the Gypsies might have been transparent and the Gypsy as potent symbol of the primal past impossible.

I close this book with the reflections of a late-twentieth-century American Gypsy on the paradox of history. In the 1980s, when plans for the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., were under way, John Megel from Alexandria, Virginia, became an informal representative from the Romany community to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. In a paper published by the Gypsy Lore Society, Megel writes movingly of the importance of the museum and of the momentous events in which he participated.³⁰ For the first time, the United States government was acknowledging the murder of more than 500,000 Gypsies during the Holocaust. But this recognition also marked—and here is where the paradox becomes evident—a coming into self-awareness of the Romany people. Out of the horror of the Nazis’ attempted obliteration of the Gypsies had come the beginning of a form of Romany history, a public record of their lives and of the events that had so devastated them. In his introduction to the memoir of Walter Winter, a German Sinto who was interned at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück during World War II, Struan Robertson writes, “[Winter] is convinced that it is only by confronting the past that we can understand the present and secure the future.”³¹ Like Megel, Winter regards the historical record of cataclysm as crucial to the Gypsies’ ongoing need to establish a group identity for themselves and their children.

Megel begins his paper with the admission that many American Romany were themselves ignorant of the devastation of the war, at least in part because they had lost contact with their relatives in Europe. “[M] ost of us could not read or write,” he remarks, and so had no way of communicating with their brethren on the Continent (187). It was the trial of Adolf Eichmann, with its overwhelming publicity, that first alerted Megel and others to the events of the Holocaust and prompted them to investigate what had happened. He recalls going to the Smithsonian Institution in the early 1960s in search of more information about the fate of European Gypsies. After museum staff quizzed him aggressively and, regarding him as an anthropological specimen, even tried to measure his skull, he was referred to the German Embassy—of all places. However limited and however much an afterthought might be the Holocaust Museum’s inclusion of material on the Sinti and Roma (the two primary Gypsy groups in Germany and eastern Europe targeted for extermination by the Nazis), the museum represents both a public recognition and documentation of Romany suffering and a source of information open to all Gypsies in search of their own history.³² Megel finds it fitting that his people should now be paired with the Jews. “It seems to me we are always next door,” he writes, “whether it comes to immigration, persecution or the Holocaust.… We have both been strangers, Rom and Jews. According to the old stereotypes, we would steal the kids and then sell them to the Jews” (189).³³ Both peoples can prepare for the future by understanding their separate and mutual pasts. “Through an awareness of the Holocaust,” he concludes, again sounding the note of painful paradox, “we will become aware of our own history” (189). It is this awareness and not simply the history itself that is meaningful. Megel wants others to represent and understand his past, but he wants even more to integrate that past into his own identity and to take possession of the history that knowledge of catastrophe has initiated. For those who read John Megel’s words, the phantom Gypsy recedes into the realm of the literary.