Gypsies and the British imagination, 1807

3. As the historian George Behlmer writes in an excellent essay, gypsiologists were intent on “advertising an oriental subculture” within Victorian England (“The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 28, no. 2 [1985]: 244).

4. B. C. Smart and H. T. Crofton, The Dialect of the English Gypsies (London: Asher, 1875), xvi.

5. For a history of English legislation aimed against Gypsies, see David Mayall, English Gypsies and State Policies (Hatfield: Gypsy Research Centre and University of Hertfordshire Press, 1995). Mayall’s very useful survey suggests that, although harsh measures were on the books throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their enforcement was seldom rigorous (46). “Surveillance, discrimination, and harassment” were far more common than prosecution (54).

6. David Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 91. One year before she took the throne, Victoria befriended a Gypsy family, the Coopers, who camped near Claremont. She wrote about them extensively in her journal and painted them in watercolor. She insisted in letters that they were not heathens or criminals, but good English Christians. As Lynne Vallone comments, “Victoria reinvents the gypsy outcasts as an English underclass, unrelated, finally, to those others of the race who are not Christians” (Becoming Victoria [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001], 188–92).

7. Arthur Morrison, “The Case of the Missing Hand,” in Chronicles of Martin Hewitt (New York: Appleton, 1896), 165. Hewitt explains later that this man is a Wallachian and, although not the murderer he seeks, is guilty of having cut off a dead man’s hand in order to use it for a ritual that would allow him to thieve without danger of being caught (173–75, 183–85).

8. Jonathan Boyarin, “The Other Within and the Other Without,” in Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 431, 433.

9. John Hoyland, A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies: Designed to Develope the Origin of This Singular People, and to Promote the Amelioration of Their Condition (York: Darton, Harvey, 1816), 191.

10. Francis Hindes Groome, In Gipsy Tents (Wakefield, Eng.: EP Publishing, 1973), 279. For a Gypsy’s version of this myth, see Silvester Gordon Boswell, The Book of Boswell: Autobiography of a Gypsy, ed. John Seymour (London: Gollancz, 1970), 14.

11. Said, Orientalism, 27.

12. For a variety of excellent analyses of the figure of the Jew in modern literature, see Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995); Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, eds., The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995).

13. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 34–35.

14. Pancks is almost never written about as a Gypsy, largely, I think, because he does not fit the literary stereotype. It is possible that Dickens did not intend him as a Gypsy, but simply as an outsider who refers to himself as such because of his fortune-telling role in the Dorrits’ life. The description of Pancks, however, suggests otherwise: “[T]he short dark man held his breath and looked at him. He was dressed in black and rusty iron grey; had jet black beads of eyes; a scrubby little black chin; wiry black hair striking out from his head in prongs, like forks or hair-pins; and a complexion that was very dingy by nature, or very dirty by art, or a compound of nature and art” (Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967], 189–90).

15. Michael Stewart comments that Gypsies have not thought of themselves as a “diaspora population” waiting to return to a homeland, imagined or real (“The Puzzle of Roma Persistence: Group Identity Without a Nation,” in Romani Culture and Gypsy Identity, ed. Thomas Acton and Gary Mundy [Hatfield: University of Hertford Press, 1997], 84).

16. Angus M. Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 110–20.

17. Mayall, English Gypsies, 25.

18. Holger Pedersen, Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century: Methods and Results, trans. John Webster Spargo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931), 17.

19. Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb Grellman, Dissertation on the Gipseys: Representing Their Manner of Life, Family Economy. With an Historical Enquiry Concerning Their Origin & First Appearance in Europe, trans. Matthew Raper (London: Ballintine, 1807), 199.

20. “A Southern Faunist,” Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1802, 291; Francis Hindes Groome, Gypsy Folk-Tales (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1899), xxii.

21. George Henry Borrow, The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (London: Dent, 1914), 90.

22. Grellman, Dissertation on the Gipseys, 140.

23. Boswell, Book of Boswell, 14, 181n.2

24. J. W. Burrow, “The Uses of Philology in Victorian England,” in Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain, ed. Robert Robson (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 185.

25. Burrow, “Uses of Philology,” 189.

26. George Henry Borrow, Lavengro: The Classic Account of Gypsy Life in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Dover, 1991), 267, 196.

27. Sheila Salo, “‘Stolen by Gypsies’: The Kidnap Accusation in the United States,” in Papers from the Eighth and Ninth Annual Meetings of the Gypsy Lore Society, North American Chapter, ed. Cara DeSilva, Joanne Grumet, and David J. Nemeth (New York: Gypsy Lore Society, 1988), 26–36.

28. Walter Simson and James Simson, A History of the Gipsies: With Specimens of the Gipsy Language (London: Sampson, Low, 1866), 45.

29. Michael Holroyd, Augustus John: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 15.

30. Simson and Simson, History of the Gipsies, 45.

31. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 87.

32. Salo, “Stolen by Gypsies,” 27.

33. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 9:237–41. “Here the influence of sex is already in evidence,” Freud writes, “for a boy is far more inclined to feel hostile impulses toward his father than towards his mother and has a far more intense desire to get free from him than from her” (238).

34. Holroyd, Augustus John, 45.

35. For a discussion of the perception of the Gypsy in France, see Marilyn R. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985). Brown stresses the association between Gypsy and artist-bohemian in French letters and culture. This configuration came relatively late to England. See chapter 6.

36. Hoyland, Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies, 125–26. See also, for example, Arthur Symons, “In Praise of Gypsies,” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 1, no. 4 (1908): 297.

37. Behlmer, “Gypsy Problem in Victorian England,” 237–44. “Together,” Behlmer writes, “the Ryes and their literary friends generated ‘a very craze for the Gypsy’ that had no European equivalent save perhaps for the celebration of Provençal culture in France” (243).

38. Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar-Gipsy,” in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 2d ed., ed. Kenneth Alott and Miriam Alott (London: Longman, 1979), 366 (ll. 203–4), 361 (ll. 77–78).

39. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, or, The Astrologer, ed. Andrew Lang (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1892), 1:203, 19.

40. Marianne Hirsch, “Jane’s Family Romances,” in Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature, ed. Margaret Higonnet (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 162–85; Deborah Epstein Nord, “‘Marks of Race’: Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing,” Victorian Studies 41, no. 2 (1998): 189–210.

41. It is uncommon to hear people use the verb “to jew,” meaning “to cheat,” at least in the United States, but “to gyp,” meaning the same thing, is still used, often, I suspect, without any idea of its etymology.

42. Katie Trumpener, “The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People Without History,’” in Identities, ed. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 344.

43. An almost steady stream of articles about the continuing persecution of Gypsies in eastern Europe appears in newspapers, especially since the “fall” of Communism has made these countries more accessible to the press. See, for example, Steven Erlanger, “Across a New Europe, a People Deemed Unfit for Tolerance,” New York Times, April 2, 2000, Week in Review, 1, 16, and “The Gypsies of Slovakia: Despised and Despairing,” New York Times, April 3, 2000, A8.

44. Jane Austen, Emma (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 331. Trumpener refers to this episode in Emma as a “violent incident,” which it clearly is not.

45. Austen, Emma, 333.

46. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (London: Penguin, 1985), 173.

47. David Mayall makes the valuable point that to distinguish between fiction and fact is not sufficient in the matter of Gypsy representation; one also has to distinguish between nonfictional record and fact and to acknowledge “the significance of shifts [in representation] over time” (Gypsy Identities, 1500–2000: From Egipcyans and Moon-Men to the Ethnic Romany [London: Routledge, 2004], 43).

48. John Megel, “The Holocaust and the American Rom,” in Papers from the Sixth and Seventh Annual Meetings of the Gypsy Lore Society, North American Chapter, ed. Joanne Grumet (New York: Gypsy Lore Society, 1986), 189.

49. Boyarin, “Other Within and Other Without,” 431. The Holocaust, he writes, “precludes serious cultural criticism of the situation of Jews before or after World War II” (431).

50. Fraser, Gypsies, 2, 8.

51. Judith Okely, The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 13–14.

52. Okely, Traveller-Gypsies, 10.

53. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 78–80.

54. Wim Wellems, In Search of the True Gypsy: From Enlightenment to Final Solution, trans. Don Bloch (London: Cass, 1997), 4.

55. Fraser, Gypsies, 9, 317–18; Thomas Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change: The Development of Ethnic Ideology and Pressure Politics Among British Gypsies from Victorian Reformism to Romany Nationalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), esp. chaps. 5 and 7.

56. Grattan Puxon, “The Romani Movement: Rebirth and the First World Romani Congress in Retrospect,” in Scholarship and the Gypsy Struggle: Commitment in Romani Studies, ed. Donald Kenrick and Thomas Acton (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2000), 94–113.

57. Mayall, Gypsy Identities, 7.

58. Frédéric Brenner, Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, 2 vols. (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). Brenner, a French anthropologist, set out to answer pictorially the question: What is a Jew? Photographing Jews all over the world, he discovered that diversity of appearance and way of life made the question impossible to answer.

59. George Eliot, Silas Marner (London: Penguin, 1996), 5–6.

60. George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 26–27.

61. George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 65.

62. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 64. See, too, Douglas A. Lorimer, “Race, Science and Culture: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities, 1850–1914,” in The Victorians and Race, ed. Shearer West (Aldershot, Eng.: Scolar Press, 1997), 12–33. In this excellent and judicious essay, Lorimer writes that when we assess the use of the word “race” in theories and statements of the 1840s, “we need to be wary of a temptation to tease out a more precise meaning, when its ambiguous, and even contradictory, character was the source of its utility” (14). He is at pains to distinguish the use of ideas of “race” from varieties and degrees of racism.

1. Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb Grellmann, Dissertation on the Gipseys: Representing Their Manner of Life, Family Economy. With an Historical Enquiry Concerning Their Origin & First Appearance in Europe, trans. Matthew Raper (London: Ballintine, 1807), 109.

2. “A Southern Faunist,” Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1802, 291–92.

3. Walter Simson and James Simson, A History of the Gipsies: With Specimens of the Gipsy Language (London: Sampson, Low, 1866), 14.

4. William Marsden, “Observations on the Language of the People Commonly Called Gypsies. In a Letter to Sir Joseph Banks,” Archaeologia, or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity 7 (1785): 382–86. Marsden was interested in establishing both that the Gypsies’ language was a real one, distinct from cant or fabricated slang, and that it was related to “Hindostanee.” He includes a “Table of Comparison” between Romani and “Hindostanic” words (386). The inclusion of this article in the midst of pieces on ancient Britain, Greece, and Rome suggests the seriousness with which philologists and antiquarians regarded the study of Romani in the late eighteenth century.

5. Grellman, Dissertation on the Gipseys, i.

6. Grellman, Dissertation on the Gipseys, iii.

7. Grellman, Dissertation on the Gipseys, 2.

8. Grellman, Dissertation on the Gipseys, 84–85.

9. Grellman, Dissertation on the Gipseys, 14.

10. John Hoyland, A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies: Designed to Develope the Origin of This Singular People, and to Promote the Amelioration of Their Condition (York: Darton, Harvey, 1816), 47, 95.

11. Hoyland, Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies, 103.

12. For a discussion of the frequency of Gypsy–górgio (non-Gypsy) marriage, see David Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 84–86.

13. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 82, 87.

14. Simson and Simson, History of the Gipsies, 45.

15. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 9:237–41.

16. Simson and Simson, History of the Gipsies, 117. Common Gypsy names, although often recognizable as such, tended to be indistinguishable from non-Gypsy names: for example, Boswell, Buckley, Clayton, Heron, Holland, Stanley, and Wood. See Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 85.

17. Simson and Simson, History of the Gipsies, 184.

18. Simson and Simson, History of the Gipsies, 287, 303.

19. George Behlmer, “The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 28, no. 2 (1985): 240–44.

20. Simson and Simson, History of the Gipsies, 218.

21. For Scott’s antiquarianism, see Iain Gordon Brown, The Hobby-Horsical Antiquary: A Scottish Character, 1640–1830 (Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, 1980), and George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 53–55. On Scott as a pioneer of the mass-culture industry that embodied a new “sensibility for the past,” see Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 21–22.

22. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, or, The Astrologer, ed. Andrew Lang (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1892), 1:22. Subsequent references are cited in the text.

23. John Keats, “Meg Merrilies,” in Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 158; Charles Lamb, “The Gipsy’s Malison,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review 25 (1829): 64. For Meg Merrilies’s life after Guy Mannering, see Joan Coldwell, “‘Meg Merrilies’: Scott’s Gipsy Tamed,” Keats–Shelley Memorial Bulletin 32 (1981): 30–37; Peter Garside, “Meg Merrilies and India,” in Scott in Carnival, ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1993), 154–71; Catherine Gordon, “The Illustrations of Sir Walter Scott: Nineteenth-Century Enthusiasm and Adaptation,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 34 (1971): 297–317; and Claire Lamont, “Meg the Gipsy in Scott and Keats,” English: The Journal of the English Association 36 (1987): 137–45.

24. Garside, “Meg Merrilies and India,” 156.

25. Katie Trumpener discusses the European tendency, whether in literary texts or in visual displays, to imagine Gypsies in static set pieces or tableaux (“The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People Without History,’” in Identities, ed. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 341–43).

26. George Eliot quotes Meg Merrilies at least twice in letters to close friends, on April 27, 1852, and December, 30, 1859, and does so without referring to her source (The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954], 2:21, 3:238). This suggests a general familiarity with the novel and the character.

27. John Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 4.

28. Sutherland, Life of Walter Scott, 1, 3.

29. Simson and Simson, History of the Gipsies, 241; Walter Simson, “Notices Concerning the Scottish Gypsies,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1 (1817): 54–56. Simson identifies Walter Scott as the author of a description of Jean Gordon in one of his articles.

30. Simson, “Notices,” 54. Jean Gordon was referring to Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Pretender and next best hope for the Jacobites, who were centered in the Scottish Highlands.

31. Andrew Lang, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Scott, Guy Mannering, 1:xxi.

32. Sutherland, Life of Walter Scott, 182; Graham McMaster, Scott and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 159.

33. J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1844), 277.

34. Sutherland, Life of Walter Scott, 181.

35. In his notes to Guy Mannering, Lang identifies Grimm’s fairy tales and other German fables as possible sources for Meg’s spinning (1:282).

36. In a suggestive essay, Jana Davis discusses characters’ habits of glancing through apertures in Guy Mannering in connection with the theme of limited perception and mental confusion (“Landscape Images and Epistemology in Guy Mannering,” in Scott and His Influence, ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt [Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1983], 125–26). My emphasis is slightly different, associating this kind of vision in the novel with seeing or spying; with something forbidden, mysterious, ritualistic, and only partly decipherable; and, ultimately, with memory.

37. Sigmund Freud, “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms,” in The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), 371.

38. In the preamble to his study of the poor of London, Henry Mayhew discusses the “wandering tribes” that exist on the periphery of “civilized” nations as the prototype for his London street folk (London Labour and the London Poor [New York: Dover, 1968], 1:1–2). He cites the work of ethnologists Andrew Smith and James Prichard and uses language very similar to Scott’s to define a pariah culture.

39. Lamb’s poem about Meg Merrilies is called “The Gipsy’s Malison,” the word “malison” meaning “curse.” Keats’s poem includes a reference to Margaret of Anjou—“Old Meg she was brave as Margaret Queen / And as tall as Amazon”—with whom the narrator of Guy Mannering compares Meg directly after she utters her curse (1:72–73). Coldwell suggests that it was Sarah Siddons’s performance of Margaret of Anjou in a minor play, rather than in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, that probably influenced Scott’s comparison (“Meg Merrilies,” 34–35). Later in the novel, the tragic Meg is likened to Sarah Siddons (2:284), which would tend to confirm Coldwell’s hypothesis.

40. David Mayall, English Gypsies and State Policies (Hatfield: Gypsy Research Centre and University of Hertfordshire Press, 1988), 29–31.

41. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 184.

42. Garside, “Meg Merrilies and India,” 162–64.

43. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 183–92.

44. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 62.

45. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 192.

46. Georg Lukács dismisses both the critical belief that Scott’s art “propagated feudal tendencies” and the equally “false theory,” disseminated by “vulgar sociology,” that he was a poet “of the English merchants and colonizers of contemporary English imperialism” (The Historical Novel [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969], 51).

47. Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 116. My reading and Duncan’s converge at many points, although his emphasis is on the form of romance.

48. Duncan refers to Guy Mannering and Meg Merrilies as Harry’s “symbolic parents—authors of his destiny—far more powerful than his dim biological parents” (Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel, 126).

49. Garside, “Meg Merrilies and India,” 160.

50. Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel, 131.

51. The Bertram motto is “Our Right Makes Our Might,” while the motto that Glossin has invented to replace it is “He who takes it, makes it” (2:138–39).

52. Trumpener mistakenly attributes the kidnapping to the Ellangowan Gypsies (“Time of the Gypsies,” 362).

53. Lukács, Historical Novel, 31.

54. Lukács, Historical Novel, 32, 61.

55. Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourses on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 61–63. Brantlinger describes James Fenimore Cooper’s novels as just such stories of extinction and compares them with Scott’s historical fictions about the origins of modern Britain.

56. Garside argues, on the contrary, that Meg is effectively and brutally written out of the end of the novel: “The final un-figuring of Meg could represent a betrayal more devastating in its effects that the elder Bertram’s original sin in evicting the Gypsies” (“Meg Merrilies and India,” 168).

57. Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 100.

58. Freud, “Paths to the Formation of Symptoms,” 371; C. G. Jung, “On the Psychology of the Unconscious,” in The Essential Jung, ed. Anthony Storr (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 69.

59. Discussing the patterns of father–son relations in Scott’s Waverley novels, Alexander Welsh speculates on the influence of nineteenth-century fiction on Freud’s theorizing and marshals an especially apt formulation from Terence Cave’s Recognition: A Study in Poetics: “psychoanalysis is the elaboration of a plot structure according to rules which are already demonstrated by literary texts” (quoted in The Hero of the Waverley Novels, with New Essays on Scott [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992], 223).

60. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (London: Penguin, 2004), 72. Note that both Scott’s memory of the outsize Jean Gordon and Lang’s recollection of her similarly larger-than-life granddaughter, Madge, are rooted in childhood.

61. Dickens, David Copperfield, 28.

62. Grellman, Dissertation on the Gipseys, 92; Hoyland, Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies, 125–26.

63. Deborah Epstein Nord, “‘Marks of Race’: Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing,” Victorian Studies 41, no. 2 (1998): 189–210. Harry’s tutor, Dominie Sampson, another beloved character from the novel, is Meg’s mirror image: a feminized and sentimental male. He is also, in many ways, Harry’s other parent. For Dominie, see Peter Garside, “Scott, the Eighteenth Century, and the New Man of Sentiment,” Anglia 103 (1985): 71–98.

64. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London: Penguin, 1996), 221–28. See also Nord, “Marks of Race,” 194–97. Bronte was plainly thinking of Meg Merrilies here: Rochester’s gypsy is referred to as a “Sybil” (221) and shares “elf-locks” with Meg (1:20).

65. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 227.

66. That the masculinized Gypsy figure had already become a mythic figure or literary convention is underscored by comparing Dorothy Wordsworth’s description of the real-life model for the Gypsy in William’s poem “Beggars”—“a very tall woman, much beyond the measure of tall women”—with her brother’s opening line (entry for June 10, 1800, in Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth: The Alfoxden Journal, 1798; the Grasmere Journals, 1800–1803, ed. Mary Moorman [London: Oxford University Press, 1971], 26). William compares her not with a tall woman, but with a tall man.

67. Trumpener, “Time of the Gypsies,” 344.

1. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 171.

2. David Mayall, English Gypsies and State Policies (Hatfield: Gypsy Research Centre and University of Hertfordshire Press, 1995), 31. For a succinct history of legislation relating to Gypsies, see 17–26. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Gypsies were persecuted not simply for being “Egipcians,” but for living in tents, telling fortunes, and camping in the wrong place.

3. Mayall, English Gypsies, 25, chap. 3.

4. For literary responses to enclosure, see, especially, Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), chap. 10, and Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).

5. John Clare, “[Gipseys],” in John Clare by Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington, Eng.: Carcanet Press, 1996), 87.

6. See chap. 1, note 38.

7. Williams, Country and City, 96.

8. Williams, Country and City, 96, 128, 130.

9. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation, 7.

10. David G. Riede, Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988), 59.

11. Anne Williams remarks that Gypsies had become a “cliché of the picturesque” by the end of the eighteenth century (“Clare’s ‘Gypsies,’” Explicator 39, no. 3 [1981]: 10). On the picturesque and its associations with, among other things, Gypsies, see Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 12.

12. Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village: Sketches of Rural Characters and Scenery (London: Bell, 1876), 451. Subsequent references are cited in the text.

13. For a discussion of another, much later case of displacing ostensible characteristics of Gypsies onto animals, especially dogs, in Virginia Woolf’s story “Gipsy, the Mongrel,” see Katie Trumpener, “The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People Without History,’” in Identities, ed. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 370–74.

14. “Pastoral at its simplest,” writes Roger Sales, “represents an escape to another country where things are done differently as blissful innocence and homespun simplicity rule” (“The Politics of Pastoral,” in Peasants and Countrymen in Literature, ed. Kathleen Parkinson and Martin Priestman [London: Roehampton Institute, 1982], 92). William Empson complicates this idea by reminding us that all pastoral is “based on a double attitude of the artist to the worker [or peasant or shepherd], of the complex man to the simple one (‘I am in one way better, in another not so good’)” (Some Versions of Pastoral [New York: New Directions, 1974], 14).

15. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation, 159.

16. Clare, “[Gipseys],” 83. Eric Robinson describes Clare’s vast and eclectic knowledge of ballads and ballad music; dances and dance tunes (“some of which he collected from gypsies”), including Morris dances; local festivals, such as May Day, Valentine’s Eves, and Plough Mondays; bull-runnings; local flora and fauna; and Gypsy and London slang (introduction to John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Eric Robinson and John Lawrence [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983], xiv). For the Boswells, see Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, 2003), 94.

17. Bate, John Clare, 94. For Clare and the Gypsies, see 93–99.

18. Clare, “[Gipseys],” 83–86

19. Clare, “Cousins,” in Autobiographical Writings, 65.

20. John Clare, “The Gipsies Evening Blaze,” in The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804–1822, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 1:33.

21. John Clare, “October,” in The Shepherd’s Calendar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 112–13.

22. On Clare’s love of secret, hidden spots, see Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation, 152.

23. John Clare, “The Gipsy Camp,” in The Later Poems of John Clare, 1837–1864, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 1:29. This poem is also referred to as “Gypsies,” according to Williams, “Clare’s ‘Gypsies.’”

24. Williams, “Clare’s ‘Gypsies,’” 11.

25. Clare, “Journey out of Essex,” in Autobiographical Writings, vii, 153.

26. Clare, “Journey out of Essex,” 153.

27. Trumpener observes that Wordsworth and Clare mark opposite responses to Gypsies among Romantics. The former, she writes, belongs with those who “still seem to harbor eighteenth-century fears for the forces of civilization,” and the latter with those who “celebrate in the Gypsies a community united by a love of liberty and a tradition of political resistance” (“Time of the Gypsies,” 360–61). See, too, her discussion of Clare’s “The Gipsy’s Song.”

28. David Simpson, “Criticism, Politics, and Style in Wordsworth’s Poetry,” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 1 (1984): 62. Both this essay and David Simpson, “Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender: What Is the Subject of Wordsworth’s ‘Gipsies’?” South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 3 (1989): 541–69, are among the most interesting critical statements about the poem. In the latter article, Simpson reads “Gypsies” as an incest fantasy.

29. John O. Hayden, notes to “Beggars,” in William Wordsworth, Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 1:975–76.

30. Entry for June 10, 1800, in Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth: The Alfoxden Journal, 1798; the Grasmere Journals, 1800–1803, ed. Mary Moorman (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 26–27.

31. Wordsworth, “Beggars,” in Poems, 1:516–17 (emphasis added).

32. The contradictoriness of Wordsworth’s stance is also reflected in what he purportedly told Henry Crabb Robinson about “Beggars.” He wrote it, he said, to “exhibit the power of physical beauty and health and vigour in childhood even in a state of moral depravity” (quoted in Hayden, notes to “Beggars,” 1:976).

33. Wordsworth, “Sequel to ‘Beggars’ Composed Many Years After,” in Poems, 1:17–18 (l. 14).

34. I am using the original 1807 version of “Gypsies.” In response to complaints about its callousness, Wordsworth added the following lines in 1820: “In scorn I speak not;—they are what their birth / And breeding suffer them to be; / Wild outcasts of society” (Wordsworth, “Gypsies,” in Poems, 1:735 [ll. 26–28], 1025). The first version, without this awkward apology, is a better poem.

35. According to physicist Edward Groh, the poet is making his journey one day past a full moon, evident from his remark that the moon comes up one hour after sunset. The almost new moon brightens the scene and makes the Gypsies visible, and the renewal of the monthly cycle emphasizes the activity and constancy of nature, as opposed to the sloth and stagnation of the Gypsy group.

36. According to Simpson, “The speaker cannot thus project with any complete confidence the persona of honest laborer. … He can hardly accuse them [the Gypsies] of wasting time in leisure when his own occupation is so darkly ambiguous in precisely the same way” (“Criticism, Politics, and Style,” 65–66).

37. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 289.

38. William Hazlitt, “On Manner,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1930), 4:45–46n.2.

39. Simpson, “Criticism, Politics, and Style,” 66.

40. Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence,” in Poems, 1:553 (ll. 33–35).

41. According to Mayall, “Anyone found begging, being a lewd or disorderly prostitute, sleeping in the open, or having no visible means of subsistence, could be prosecuted as a vagrant” (English Gypsies, 29).

42. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 219

43. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 221. “Clare’s pastoral,” Armstrong writes, “and the educated pastoral of Arnold’s ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’ and ‘Thyrsis,’ poems which Arnold hoped could become a therapeutic antidote to the ‘confusion’ of the nineteenth century, strangely reduplicate one another” (171).

44. Matthew Arnold, “Resignation (To Fausta),” in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 2d ed., ed. Kenneth Alott and Miriam Alott (London: Longman, 1979), 88–100 (ll. 132–35).

45. Riede, Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language, 57–59.

46. The “unbroken knot” of bodies in Wordsworth’s “Gypsies” provides Simpson with the starting point for his interpretation of the poem as an incest fantasy involving the poet’s sister (“Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender,” 558). Simpson suggests that Wordsworth associated Dorothy with dark Gypsy looks. This reading raises another possibility for understanding the Arnold–Wordsworth connection in “Resignation.”

47. The lines read “they rubbed through /Yesterday in their hereditary way” (ll. 138–39). Arnold’s use of the word “hereditary” suggests both a cultural and a biological inheritance.

48. Traditional Arnold critics tend to think and write of the scholar-gypsy as “the scholar,” while critics interested in Gypsies tend not to register the fact that the scholar-gypsy is not a Gypsy or, rather, not simply a Gypsy. For the latter interpretation, see Antony Harrison, “Matthew Arnold’s Gipsies: Intertextuality and the New Historicism,” Victorian Poetry 29, no. 4 (1991): 365–83.

49. Quoted in Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 140–41.

50. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), 183.

51. Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing: Reproduced from the Edition of 1661 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 196. Arnold spells the author’s name with only one l.

52. Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatizing, 197.

53. Arnold, “The Scholar-Gipsy,” in Poems of Matthew Arnold, 355–96 (l. 62).

54. Riede comments that “The Scholar-Gipsy” contains “the most lush descriptive verse Arnold ever wrote” and almost certainly includes allusions to Tennyson’s “Lotus-Eaters” and Keats’s “To Autumn” (Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language, 139).

55. Trumpener, “Time of the Gypsies,” 355–56.

56. Critics have pondered the significance of this apparent rejection of Greek civilization. James Harrison asks, “How can Arnold the Hellenist intend us to see Greeks as in any way the equivalent of those afflicted with ‘this strange disease of modern life’?” and concludes that in doing so the poet signals the “immoderation of his indictment of contemporary society” (“Arnold’s ‘The Scholar-Gypsy,’” Explicator 45, no. 3 [1987]: 35). G. Wilson Knight’s reading of the coda seems more consistent with what I have been trying to say about Arnold’s unconventional representation of the Gypsies: “Arnold’s poem confronts our western tradition with suggestions of a wisdom, lore, or magic of oriental affinities or origin. The intellectual legacy of ancient Greece has clamped down with too exclusive a domination, too burning a weight of consciousness, or intellect. … Our consciousness has become … too purely ‘Apollonian,’ too heated, and needs fertilization again from the cool depths of the ‘Dionysian,’ the more darkly feminine, and eastern, powers” (“The Scholar-Gipsy,” in Matthew Arnold: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom [New York: Chelsea House, 1987], 72).

57. Arnold, “Thyrsis,” in Poems of Matthew Arnold, 537–50.

1. George Henry Borrow, The Romany Rye (London: Dent, 1906), 343. Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the abbreviation RR.

2. The title of one of the most recent biographies of Borrow, by Michael Collie, is George Borrow: Eccentric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

3. Ian Duncan, “Wild England: George Borrow’s Nomadology,” Victorian Studies 41, no. 3 (1998): 394. Duncan’s superb essay is the best piece of writing on Borrow to have appeared in recent years.

4. On Borrow’s work for the British and Foreign Bible Society, see Collie, George Borrow, chap. 3, and Letters of George Borrow to the British and Foreign Bible Society, ed. T. H. Darlow (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911). The books that made Borrow’s reputation were The Zincali, or, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841) and The Bible in Spain (1843). It is difficult to know exactly where Borrow traveled because, as is true about many things in his life, the relationship between his actual experience and its representation in writing is unclear (Collie, George Borrow, 51–52).

5. Borrow to the Bible Society, September 1835, in Letters, 94.

6. Michael Collie, “George Borrow and Claude Lorrain,” English Studies in Canada 9, no. 3 (1983): 326–27. Collie notes that The Bible in Spain “made Borrow’s reputation overnight” and appeared in four English editions in the year it was published (326).

7. Collie, “George Borrow and Claude Lorrain,” 335–36.

8. William Ireland Knapp, Life, Writings and Correspondence of George Borrow (1803–1881); Based on Official and Other Authentic Sources, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1899); Collie, “George Borrow and Claude Lorrain,” 326n.4. Between 1909 and 1914, articles on Borrow included “The Wanderer: George Borrow,” Edinburgh Review, October 1909, 303–28; C. M. Bowen, “George Borrow,” Westminster Review, March 1910, 286–304; “Musings Without Method,” Blackwood’s, March 1912, 417–21; and Urbanus Sylvan [pseud.], “The Borrow Commemoration at Norwich,” Cornhill, September 13, 1913, 330–35, as well as many in less prominent journals. Even earlier appeared “The Borrow Revival,” Outlook, January 5, 1901, 55–58.

9. Jan Marsh, Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914 (London: Quartet Books, 1982); Alun Howkins, “The Discovery of Rural England,” in Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 62–88.

10. Marsh, Back to the Land, 87.

11. Marsh, Back to the Land, 78, 88–89.

12. John Sampson, ed., The Wind on the Heath: A Gypsy Anthology (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930); George Henry Borrow, Lavengro: The Classic Account of Gypsy Life in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Dover, 1991), 164. Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the abbreviation L. The passage from Lavengro amounts to a Gypsy credo and is uttered by Jasper Petulengro, Lavengro’s Romany brother.

13. Borrow Selections, with Essays by Richard Ford, Leslie Stephen, and George Saintsbury, ed. Humphrey S. Milford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924).

14. George Saintsbury, “George Saintsbury on George Borrow,” in Borrow Selections, 33.

15. Leslie Stephen, “Leslie Stephen on George Borrow,” in Borrow Selections, 25–26.

16. Stephen, “Leslie Stephen on George Borrow,” 20.

17. Augustine Birrell, “George Borrow,” in Res Judicatae: Papers and Essays (New York: Scribner, 1897), 120.

18. George Henry Borrow, Wild Wales: The People, Language and Scenery (London: Dent, 1906), viii. Theodore Watts-Dunton also wrote the introduction to an edition of The Romany Rye (London: Ward, Lock, n.d.). In it he describes a comical episode involving Borrow’s decision, prompted by a friend, to read Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy” aloud to a Romany beauty (xiv–xx). Watts-Dunton lived for some twenty years with Algernon Swinburne and married very late in life, nine years before his death at the age of eighty-two.

19. Duncan, “Wild England,” 391.

20. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1985), 39.

21. The female plot, Brooks comments, “takes a more complex stance toward ambition”: for the heroine, selfhood is asserted “in resistance to the overt and violating male plots of ambition” (Reading for the Plot, 39).

22. Critics who have explored the Victorian construction of masculinity point to a number of routes to the realization of masculine ambition, prophecy and celibacy among them. See, especially, James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 27, 35, and Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47.

23. Duncan, “Wild England,” 397.

24. The last eighteen chapters of Lavengro and first sixteen chapters of The Romany Rye were published together in a single volume: George Borrow, Isopel Berners, ed. Thomas Secombe (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1901).

25. Lavengro urges the same thing again a few pages later, echoing the scene in Genesis 18:1–15 when Abraham asks Sarah to prepare food and drink for the strangers who have appeared at their tent in the desert. Sarah herself does not come out at first, and, when she hears the visitors’ prediction that she will give birth to a son, she laughs from inside the tent. Another biblical woman who is urged to appear before visitors but refuses is Vashti, whose unwillingness to bend to men’s wishes inspired Charlotte Brontë’s character in Villette (1853) and is shared, to a degree, by Belle.

26. Duncan refers to Lavengro’s “gifted, mildly autistic weirdness” (“Wild England,” 397).

27. W. E. Henley, “Borrow,” in Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation (New York: Scribner, 1890), 137.

28. A. S. Byatt, “The Scholar Gypsy,” review of A World of His Own: The Double Life of George Borrow, by David Williams, and Lavengro, by George Borrow, The Times, December 2, 1982, 10.

29. As Duncan has phrased it, comparing Lavengro with Harry Bertram, Scott’s reinstated laird, “Lavengro refuses the romance of a homecoming in modernity” (“Wild England,” 394). No fortune, estate, bride, or title awaits him.

30. Duncan, “Wild England,” 397.

31. Duncan sees this moment as a possible indication that Lavengro “would appear to be electing himself as the forerunner of those secret servants of empire … imagined by Kipling and Buchan and enacted by Burton and Lawrence” (“Wild England,” 400). He asserts, however, that we cannot know what Lavengro will do next. I would add that Lavengro’s difficulties with the recruiting agent suggest that he would be unlikely to work within any institutional frame, imperial or otherwise.

32. J. W. Burrow, “The Uses of Philology in Victorian Britain,” in Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain, ed. Robert Robson (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 187. See also, on Max Müller, J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 149–53, and Holger Pedersen, Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century: Methods and Results, trans. John Webster Spargo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931), esp. 12–17.

33. Burrow, “Uses of Philology,” 189.

34. In a well-known letter, written in October 1900, Freud told Wilhelm Fliess that Dora’s case “has opened smoothly to my collection of picklocks” (quoted in Philip Rieff, introduction to Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff [New York: Collier Books, 1963], 7).

35. We might also consider that Moll falls in with and lives for a brief time with Gypsies at the very beginning of Moll Flanders. For a discussion of this episode, see Ellen Pollak, Incest and the English Novel, 1684–1814 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 127–28.

36. George Borrow, The Bible in Spain; or, the Journeys, Adventures, and Imprisonments of an Englishman, in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula (London: Ward, Lock, n.d.), 20.

37. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, 47. Sussman discusses two models of Victorian brotherhood, the Carlylean and the Pre-Raphaelite, which illuminate but do not fully correspond to Borrow’s fraternal narratives. In Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, for example, male desire is channeled into production, which cannot be said of Lavengro, and for the Pre-Raphaelites, nonbourgeois, bohemian heterosexuality dominates relations between the sexes. In this respect, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is closer to the late-nineteenth-century ryes, like Augustus John and John Sampson, than to Borrow.

38. Andrew Motion, review of “George Borrow: A Centenary Lecture,” Cheltenham Festival of Literature, Times Literary Supplement, October 30, 1981, 1266.

39. Michael Mason, “A Philologist in the Wild,” review of A World of His Own: The Double Life of George Borrow, by David Williams, and George Borrow: Eccentric, by Michael Collie, Times Literary Supplement, December 10, 1982, 1353.

40. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), 700–709. Thompson actually cites Borrow’s The Romany Rye as a source on Thistlewood (701).

1. In her recent book, Alicia Carroll devotes a chapter to tracing Eliot’s use of the Gypsy figure (Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot [Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003], chap. 2).

2. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 165–81. For a related analysis of Eliot that employs Ferdinand Tönnies’s terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft with great effectiveness, see Susan Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Social Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), esp. 14–25.

3. Williams, Country and City, 165–81.

4. Steven Marcus, “Literature and Social Theory: Starting in with George Eliot,” in Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Random House, 1975), 190.

5. Williams, Country and City, 174.

6. Gillian Beer, “Beyond Determinism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf,” in Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 88.

7. Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), esp. chaps. 4 and 6; Bernard Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 5. I am indebted to Semmel’s excellent book, which suggests that Eliot’s emphasis on nationality and “national inheritance” in The Spanish Gypsy and Daniel Deronda is the final phase in her long-standing concern with the problem of disinheritance.

8. Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (London: Penguin, 1986), 117.

9. George Eliot, Silas Marner (London: Penguin, 1996), 5–6. Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the abbreviation SM.

10. Jonathan Boyarin, “The Other Within and the Other Without,” in Constructions of Jewish Culture and Identity, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 424–49. In theorizing the Jew as “the Other inside Europe,” Boyarin mentions in passing that the transnational or non-national Romany are analogous to the Jews in this sense (433). This pairing is an old one, but Scott and Eliot seem to be the two nineteenth-century writers most compelled by this comparison.

11. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (London: Penguin, 1985), 59–60. Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the abbreviation MF.

12. For the chronology of Eliot’s writing, see Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 385, 402, 420. Eliot began work on The Spanish Gypsy in 1864 and finished Felix Holt in 1866. Middlemarch had been in her mind since completing Holt.

13. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Penguin, 1994), 366. Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the abbreviation M.

14. Lydgate’s full comment is that Will is “sort of a gypsy; he thinks nothing of leather and prunella.” The editor’s note explains that this phrase, from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733–1734), refers to social distinction, leather being a material for the cobbler’s apron, and prunella a cloth for a parson’s robe.

15. Thomas Pinney, “Another Note on the Forgotten Past of Will Ladislaw,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 17 (1962): 69–73. Pinney takes issue with the position of Jerome Beatty, who regarded Will as at least partly Jewish, and believes that “genetic speculation” is unnecessary in light of what is really important in Middlemarch: that Eliot created a series of characters all “cut off from their rightful inheritances” (72–73). While I think that Pinney is right to stress that Will’s ostensible Jewishness is attributed to him by unreliable and small-minded gossips, I hope to show that Daniel Deronda’s and Fedalma’s actual genetic—or “racial”—difference is crucial to Eliot’s representation of their respective inheritances.

16. Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance, esp. 103–4.

17. George Eliot, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” in Impressions of Theophrastus Such (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1879), 347 (emphasis added). Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the abbreviation “MH.” The “State” to which the text refers is Italy. Eliot was an admirer of Giuseppe Mazzini, leader of the movement to reunite Italy as a republican state and a refugee in London for a number of years. See Haight, George Eliot, 99.

18. There has been a good deal of critical debate about the “imperialist” implications of Eliot’s notion of a Jewish homeland. Views of the current Israeli–Palestinian conflict have colored and distorted this issue, but recently some more lucid and historically informed voices have been heard. See, for example, Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), chap. 4, and Nancy Henry, George Eliot and the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chap. 4.

19. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 592, 594. Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the abbreviation DD. Daniel himself talks about Mazzini and his vision for a reunited Italy just after Mordecai’s declaration. Shortly thereafter, Mordecai’s sister Mirah, Deronda’s future wife, sings Giacomo Leopardi’s “O patria mia,” an ode to Italy (619).

20. As Anderson puts it, “the best result of a lamentable diaspora is that it issues in a deliberate and chosen affirmation of those previously tacit communal and cultural bonds that have been subjected to such fragmenting and destructive forces” (Powers of Distance, 131)

21. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 5–6.

22. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 11.

23. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12.

24. Irene Tucker argues that in Daniel Deronda, Eliot redefines what it means to read a novel by inviting us to imagine a place that does not yet exist—a utopia—and a “world that she has not yet written” at the novel’s end (A Probable State: The Novel, the Contract, and the Jews [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 119). This is a large claim, but it offers an interesting new gloss on the idea of “imagined” communities.

25. Beer, “Beyond Determinism,” 88.

26. It is interesting to note that Eppie rejects her biological inheritance—and the prosperity and status that it would bring her—in favor of remaining the daughter of Silas, her adoptive father. Fedalma and Deronda do the opposite, severing filial ties to those who raised them and answering the call of blood. For them, of course, biological inheritance is associated with a national cause and a people to help redeem. See Semmel’s discussion of Silas Marner, in George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance, 24–26.

27. Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance, 75.

28. George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1868), 147 (emphasis added). Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the abbreviation SG.

29. George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, ed. J. W. Cross (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1895), 3:32.

30. George Eliot’s Life, 3:35.

31. George Eliot’s Life, 3:33, 35.

32. George Eliot’s Life, 3:33.

33. Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 136–59.

34. Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 155.

35. Carroll, Dark Smiles, 51.

36. One can easily imagine that Eliot meant to stress this parallel: Zarca is denied entry into the Promised Land, as is Moses, and both are punished, partly for their excesses, and replaced by more temperate leaders.

37. As Anderson puts it: “Deronda cannot imagine that perhaps his mother’s experience of tradition was in fact profoundly alienating and could not accommodate her individuality, her art, or her gender; his more capacious dialogical model narrows and hardens in the face of a direct challenge to its underlying investments in family and nation” (Powers of Distance, 142). When she goes on to say that a “recuperation” of Deronda’s character “should not be made at the expense of Leonora, who represents a viable and deeply felt response to her own cultural context,” I think she is offering an extra-textual, ethical analysis that departs from Eliot’s own ethical convictions as expressed in the novel, however vexing and contradictory those convictions may seem to us.

38. The best known argument against the idea that Deronda freely chooses his Jewishness is in Cynthia Chase, “The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel Deronda,” PMLA 93 (1978): 215–25. For a critique of Chase’s analysis, see Anderson, Powers of Distance, 132–33.

39. For Philip’s affinity with Philoctetes, see The Mill on the Floss, bk. 2, chap. 6. Eliot extends the connection between male effeminacy and bodily stigma in the episode of Tom Tulliver’s accident with a sword while pretending to be the duke of Wellington. Tom drops the sword on his foot, making himself into a kind of Philoctetes and bringing him closer to Philip, and faints (255–56). All this happens at Mr. Stelling’s school, where Tom “became more like a girl than he had ever been in his life before,” largely because he feels inadequate and quite vulnerable as a student (210).

40. The first to make this observation was Marcus, who attributes it to Lennard Davis, then his graduate student: “In order for the plot to work, Deronda’s circumcised penis must be invisible, or nonexistent—which is one more demonstration in detail of why the plot does not in fact work” (“Literature and Social Theory,” 212).

41. George Eliot, unsigned autograph manuscript notes on the persecution of the Jews in Spain, 53, Parrish Collection, box 9, folder 15, Firestone Library, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.

42. Katie Trumpener, “The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People Without History,’” in Identities, ed. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 344

43. George Eliot’s Life, 3:32.

44. Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance, 107. Haight was perhaps the first to wonder if Eliot had been influenced by Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, but he notes as well that she does not mention it as a source (George Eliot, 376).

45. The Gypsies of Spain did not, in fact, suffer grave persecution at the hands of the Inquisition. George Borrow, whose Zincali Victorian readers might well have known, asserts that the “Inquisition, which burnt so many Jews and Moors, and conscientious Christians … seems to have exhibited the greatest clemency and forbearance to the Gitanos” (The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain [London: Dent, 1914], 95). Angus M. Fraser, in a history of the Gypsies, concurs, pointing out that the Gypsies were not perceived as heretics because they apparently lacked any religious faith and that those who were hounded by the Inquisitors had been baptized (The Gypsies [Oxford: Blackwell, 1992], 184–85). As Borrow further remarks, it was the secular authorities rather than the ecclesiastical courts that took responsibility for reigning in Gypsies (Zincali, 95).

46. For Eliot’s sources, see George Eliot’s Life, 3:58. August Friedrich Pott was a German philologist who practiced the Indo-Germanic science of language and was especially interested in the Gypsies. Ann Ridler identifies the allusion to Borrow reading the New Testament to Gypsies in Middlemarch (305) as a reference to his book Zincali (“George Eliot and George Borrow,” George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Newsletter, September 1984, 3–4).

47. Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance, 108; Eliot, unsigned autograph manuscript notes.

48. For Eliot’s knowledge of a variety of aspects of Judaism and Jewish life, including proto-Zionist aspirations to return to a homeland in Palestine, see William Baker, George Eliot and Judaism (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1975), 134–42.

49. In the well-known passage that begins chapter 3 of Daniel Deronda, the narrator implies that Gwendolen’s rootlessness is the basis for future failures and deficits of character: “Pity that Offendene was not the home of Miss Harleth’s childhood, or endeared to her by family memories! A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land. … [B]ut this blessed persistence in which affection can take root had been wanting in Gwendolen’s life” (50). Eliot’s use of the phrase “native land” immediately establishes the connection between Gwendolen’s lack of a home and Daniel’s discovery of a homeland.

1. For an account of Sampson’s funeral, see Anthony Sampson, The Scholar Gypsy: The Quest for a Family Secret (London: Murray, 1997), 166–74, and Dora Yates, My Gypsy Days: Recollections of a Romany Rawnie (London: Phoenix House, 1953), 117–22. Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the abbreviation GD.

2. Sampson, Scholar Gypsy, 166.

3. The Gypsy Lore Society was established in 1888 by founding members Henry Crofton, Francis Hindes Groome, Charles Leland, David MacRitchie, and Archduke Joseph of Austria-Hungary. The first run of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society went from 1888 to 1892; it was revived in 1907 and lasted until 1914; its third and longest run went from 1922 to 1973. After all its early members were dead, the fourth series was published from 1974 to 1978 and the fifth, from 1991 to 1999. Currently, a successor to the journal is published in the United States as Romani Studies. For a brief history of the society, see Angus Fraser, “A Rum Lot,” in One Hundred Years of Gypsy Studies: Papers from the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Gypsy Lore Society, North American Chapter, ed. Matt T. Salo (Cheverly, Md.: Gypsy Lore Society, 1990), 1–15.

4. For the best introduction to the British folklore movement, see Richard M. Dorson, The British Folklorists: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

5. George Lawrence Gomme, “The Science of Folk-Lore,” Folk-Lore Journal 3 (1885): 1.

6. David Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 83.

7. David Nemeth, “‘To Preserve What Might Otherwise Perish’: The JGLS, Gypsy Studies, and a New Challenge,” in Papers from the Sixth and Seventh Annual Meetings of the Gypsy Lore Society, North American Chapter, ed. Joanne Grumet (New York: Gypsy Lore Society, 1986), 7.

8. Charles Leland refers to Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy” in The Gypsies (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 223, and even seems to take seriously the “faculty … as strange as divination” that scholar-gypsies acquire. Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the abbreviation G. On Leland, see Regenia Gagnier, “Cultural Philanthropy, Gypsies, and Interdisciplinary Scholars: Dream of a Common Language,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 1 (2005), http://www.nineteen.bbk.ac.uk.

9. John Sampson, The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales: Being the Older Form of British Romani Preserved in the Speech of the Clan of Abram Wood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), vii. Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the abbreviation DGW.

10. George Henry Borrow, Lavengro: The Classic Account of Gypsy Life in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Dover, 1991), 164.

11. Charles Godfrey Leland, Memoirs (New York: Appleton, 1893), 417.

12. Thomas Acton, introduction to Scholarship and the Gypsy Struggle: Commitment in Romani Studies, ed. Thomas Acton (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2000), xx.

13. Fraser, “Rum Lot,” 2; George Borrow, The Romany Rye, ed. John Sampson (London: Methuen, 1903), xxviii; Francis Hindes Groome, In Gipsy Tents (Wakefield, Eng.: EP Publishing, 1973), 7. Subsequent references are cited in the text, with the abbreviation GT.

14. Quoted in Elizabeth Bradburn, Dr. Dora Yates: An Appreciation (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1975), 29.

15. Nemeth, “To Preserve What Might Otherwise Perish,” 11.

16. Walter Starkie, in Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society [Festschrift for Dora Yates’s eightieth birthday], 3rd ser., 39 (1960): 18. For Kenrick’s debt to Yates and Sampson, whose informants’ descendants he used for his own language study, see Acton, introduction to Scholarship and the Gypsy Struggle, xx, xxii.

17. Fraser, “Rum Lot,” 7.

18. For the connection between French writers and Gypsies, see Marilyn R. Brown, Gypsies and Other Bohemians: The Myth of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1985).

19. Brown cites this essay by Charles Dickens, “The True Bohemians of Paris,” Household Words, November 15, 1851, 190–92 (Gypsies and Other Bohemians, 2).

20. Lisa Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 53–54. Elizabeth von Arnim documents the early-twentieth-century craze for caravanning in The Caravaners (1909; reprint, London: Penguin-Virago, 1990). The Edelgards, a German couple on vacation in the south of England, travel about in a caravan “bearing a strong resemblance to the gipsy carts that are continually (and very rightly) being sent somewhere else by our local police.” Unlike the harassed Gypsies, the Edelgards plan to “lead a completely free and Bohemian existence … wandering through the English lanes … and drawing up for the night in a secluded spot near some little streamlet” (14).

21. Michael Holroyd, Augustus John: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 358.

22. Holroyd, Augustus John, 360; Augustus John, Chiaroscuro: Fragments of Autobiography (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1952), 63–64.

23. For the marriage of Groome and Lock, see Yates, My Gypsy Days, 102, and John, Chiaroscuro, 60. Henry Crofton kept a scrapbook of clippings from both British and foreign newspapers that touched on Gypsy matters. The book includes at least two on the scandal of Groome’s marriage, as well as a number on Esmeralda Lock’s first marriage, to Hubert Smith, also a gypsiologist (clippings, Daily Telegraph, March 2, 1876; Manchester Critic, March 10, 1876, K-35, Gypsy Lore Society Archive, University of Liverpool).

24. Herbert Samuel, in Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society [Festschrift for Dora Yates’s eightieth birthday], 3rd ser., 39 (1960): 5.

25. Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 4–5.

26. John Sampson, preface to The Wind on the Heath: A Gypsy Anthology, ed. John Sampson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), vii.

27. George Henry Borrow, The Romany Rye (London: Dent, 1906), 82.

28. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 87–88.

29. Borrow, Romany Rye, 343–44.

30. Arthur Symons, “In Praise of Gypsies,” Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 1, no. 4 (1908): 298. It is important to note that Symons has none of Lamb’s irony.

31. Symons, “In Praise of Gypsies,” 295–96. In a letter to Edward Hutton, Symons described this essay as “a violent attack on civilisation” (Karl E. Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987], 251). In a letter to Augustus John, written in 1910, Symons included a “Gypsy proverb” that he had translated and punctuated with the comment “Splendid!”: “We are not used to live as a Christian log: / We are used to live as a savage dog” (Arthur Symons: Selected Letters, 1880–1935, ed. Karl Beckson and John Munro [London: Macmillan, 1989], 214).

32. Symons, “In Praise of Gypsies,” 296 (emphasis added).

33. Symons, “In Praise of Gypsies,” 298.

34. R. A. R. Wade, obituary for Dora Yates, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 3rd ser., 52 (1974): 100.

35. Quoted in Bradburn, Dr. Dora Yates, 39.

36. Dorson, British Folklorists, 440.

37. Mary Beard, “Frazer, Leach, and Virgil: The Popularity (and Unpopularity) of The Golden Bough,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 2 (1992): 219.

38. Beard, “Frazer, Leach, and Virgil,” 219. On the anthropologist Edward Tylor’s use of the analogy between peasant and savage, see Dorson, British Folklorists, 212.

39. Christopher Herbert, “Frazer, Einstein, and Free Play,” in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 144–45.

40. Herbert, “Frazer, Einstein, and Free Play,” 155.

41. Quoted in Herbert, “Frazer, Einstein, and Free Play,” 164.

42. Dorson, British Folklorists, 160–66.

43. William R. Bascom, “Folklore and Anthropology,” in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965), 54.

44. Dorson, British Folklorists, 205–8.

45. A. J. Cinch, foreword to Groome, In Gipsy Tents, xi.

46. Dorson, British Folklorists, 270. See also Francis Hindes Groome, Gypsy Folk-Tales (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1899), lxxxiii.

47. Dorson identifies three “illustrious newcomers” to the Folk-Lore Society in the late 1880s who were all strong diffusionists: Groome; Joseph Jacobs, a Judaic scholar from Australia; and Moses Gaster, a rabbi from Romania (British Folklorists, 266–77). It makes sense that a Gypsy lorist and two Jewish refugees, scholars who studied and, in two cases, belonged to dispersed groups of people, would automatically be sympathetic to the theory of diffusion.

48. Groome, Gypsy Folk-Tales, lxiii, lxix.

49. Groome, Gypsy Folk-Tales, lxxxii–iii. Throughout his collection, Groome offers commentary on the resemblance of certain tales to stories from other cultural traditions. He refers, for example, to “Two Thieves,” a Romanian Gypsy tale, as a “curious combination of the ‘Rhampsinitus’ story in Herodotus and of Grimm’s ‘Master Thief’” (52).

50. Dorson, British Folklorists, 273.

51. Michael Owen Jones, “Francis Hindes Groome: ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and Gypsy Scholar,” Journal of American Folklore 80 (1967): 76–77.

52. Dorson, British Folklorists, 333.

53. Bradburn, Dr. Dora Yates, 19–21; Wade, obituary for Dora Yates, 102.

54. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 83–87.

55. Quoted in James Douglas, Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic (New York: Lane, 1905), 390.

56. In notes on Groome’s life, Yates indicated that Rossetti had painted Esmeralda as Victor Hugo’s heroine on the parapet of Notre Dame, dancing with a tambourine (GLS C.8.38, Gypsy Lore Society Archive). I have found no evidence that the Rossetti story is true, although he did do at least one drawing called La Gitana, whose present whereabouts are unknown. See Virginia Surtees, The Painting and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882): A Catalogue Raisonné (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 130. Rossetti’s father was a passionate reader of Hugo. Rossetti himself was both a reader and a translator of Hugo and the author of a poem, “The Staircase of Notre Dame, Paris,” that may allude to Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris. Theodore Watts-Dunton became Rossetti’s close friend in the early 1870s and was at his bedside when he died. For the poem, see Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 349; for Rossetti’s life, see Oswald Doughty, A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 46, 122, 559, 667.

57. Symons, “In Praise of Gypsies,” 297.

58. Lee MacCormick Edwards, Herkomer: A Victorian Artist (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 1999), 32–33.

59. A collection of illustrations, largely from newspapers like the Illustrated London News, in the Gypsy Archive at the University of Liverpool, includes many such images of women with babies and children. These representations of maternal love and labor offer an interesting contrast to common images of kidnapping, such as “The Stolen Child—From a Picture by Schlesinger,” Illustrated Times, January 18, 1862. In this picture, a group of swarthy people gather around their chief, who holds a pale-complexioned baby.

60. Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects, 73.

61. Theodore Watts-Dunton, “The Coming of Love,” in The Coming of Love and Other Poems (London: The Bodley Head, n.d.), 20.

62. Arthur Symons, “Ballad of the Tent of Yester-Year,” typescript, C13.15, Gypsy Lore Society Archive. Sampson’s biography of his grandfather makes the identity and parentage of this child the central mystery of the family’s history; Sampson and Imlach named the child Mary Arnold, in homage, the grandson believes, to the author of “The Scholar-Gipsy” (Scholar Gypsy, 197). Yates appears to have been the keeper of this secret, and her letters suggest that it remained a secret until as late as the 1950s (see, for example, Augustus John to Dora Yates, March 10, 1952, GLS D9-39, Gypsy Lore Society Archive).

63. Renée Christine Furst takes a debunking and, to my mind, ungenerous look at Yates in “Dora Yates: Prominent Female Gypsiologist and Liverpool Academic or ‘the Wretched Dora’? A Critical View of Her Life and Work” (M.A. thesis, University of Liverpool, 1999), H.3.440, Scott Macfie Collection, University of Liverpool. Although an unsung heroine of the Gypsy Lore Society, Furst writes, Yates’s scholarship was unimpressive, she was not a feminist or a “new woman,” she was a romantic folklorist with no political instincts, and the driving force behind her work was really a man: John Sampson (18–19, 46–50, 57–60).

64. Bradburn, Dr. Dora Yates, 8.

65. Yates was recording secretary of the Refugee Students Committee at the University of Liverpool from 1938 to 1940. Liverpool welcomed and granted scholarships to many refugees from Nazism in the 1930s, a history that Yates recounted in a speech about the university that she delivered after World War II (GLS DY2.1.20, Gypsy Lore Society Archive). Yates’s father had been involved in similar work with Russian-Jewish refugees in the 1880s (GLS DY1.1.3, Gypsy Lore Society Archive).

66. Wade, obituary for Dora Yates, 103.

67. The degree to which Yates has been neglected in accounts of the Gypsy Lore Society is striking. Fraser’s “Rum Lot” does not mention her at all.

68. Thomas Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change: The Development of Ethnic Ideology and Pressure Politics Among British Gypsies from Victorian Reformism to Romany Nationalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 68–69, 83–84.

69. Acton refers to Groome’s attempt to “reconcile his own observations of outmarriage with the racist genetic determinism which was, as with most Victorians, his normal frame of reference” (Gypsy Politics and Social Change, 68).

70. See, especially, Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 97–150, and Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change, 106–23.

71. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 135.

72. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 138, 142, 145.

73. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 131–32.

74. Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change, 110–11, 126.

75. Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change, 128. Given that the work of the Gypsy lorists is filled with contradictions, it is no surprise that their critics’ commentary should be so as well.

76. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 132.

77. Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change, 125.

78. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers, 91.

79. For a concise chronology of German racist actions in relation to Sinti and Roma, beginning with the end of the nineteenth century, see Walter Winter, Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto Who Survived Aushwitz, trans. Struan Robertson (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004), 142–49. Winter emphasizes the degree to which Gypsies and Jews were paired in racial laws and decrees.

80. Fraser, “Rum Lot,” 8.

81. Clipping, “Anthropometrical Measurements,” The Times, 1879, Crofton scrapbook, K-35, Gypsy Lore Society Archive.

82. Fraser, “Rum Lot,” 10. Fraser has seen a copy of Dillman’s Zigeuner-Buch for 1905 (identifying some 3350 individual German Gypsies), which Augustus John gave to Scott Macfie and inscribed with a reference to this “revolting book.”

83. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 119, 127.

84. John, Chiaroscuro, 39–40.

85. Dora E. Yates, “Hitler and the Gypsies,” Commentary, November 1949, 455–59. The typescript, which differs from the published article, is called “The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies” (GLS D11-6, Gypsy Lore Society Archive).

86. Yates, “Hitler and the Gypsies,” 459.

87. Quoted in Yates, “Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies,” 15.

1. Katie Trumpener offers a very similar vision of the increasingly literary representation of Gypsies. She calls this a “process of ‘literarization’” and refers to “a progressive dissociation and conflation of literary traditions with living people” (“The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People Without History,’” in Identities, ed. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 344).

2. In two recent British novels, Gypsies figure in a self-consciously literary and allusive way. Margaret Drabble describes two young friends as “angel fair” and “dark as a gypsy”: “light and dark were they, the princesses of a Walter Scott romance” (The Peppered Moth [San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 2001], 31). The parents of Ian McEwan’s ill-fated protagonist spend their honeymoon picking hops and living in a Gypsy caravan. In a photograph from that time, his father wears a neck scarf and a rope belt, “playful Romany touches” (Atonement [London: Vintage, 2001], 83).

3. For the popularity of the story, see John A. Hodgson, “The Recoil of ‘The Speckled Band’: Detective Story and Detective Discourse,” in Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories, with Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. John A. Hodgson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 335–36.

4. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” in Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories (New York: Bantam, 1986), 1:352. Subsequent references are cited in the text.

5. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (New York: Scribner, 1908), 29.

6. Rosemary Hennessy and Rajeswari Mohan, “‘The Speckled Band’: The Construction of Woman in a Popular Text,” in Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories, 391 (emphasis added).

7. Cyndy Hendershot points out that, in fact, none of the animals on Roylott’s estate is indigenous to India and that there is no such creature as an Indian puff adder (“The Animal Without: Masculinity and Imperialism in The Island of Doctor Moreau and ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band,’” Nineteenth-Century Studies 10 [1996]: 22). Conan Doyle requires that they be Indian for a number of reasons, one of which is their link to the Gypsies.

8. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, or, The Astrologer, ed. Andrew Lang (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1892), 1:204.

9. Bram Stoker, Dracula (Mattituck, N.Y.: Amereon House, 1985), 43.

10. D. H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gipsy (New York: Vintage, 1992), 33. Subsequent references are cited in the text.

11. Although written before Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Virgin and the Gipsy was not published until 1930, after Lawrence’s death. Many have compared the two. See, for example, Keith Cushman, “The Virgin and the Gypsy and the Lady and the Gamekeeper,” in D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady”: A New Look at “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” ed. Dennis Jackman and Michael Squires (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 154–69.

12. For a related and similar reading of Lawrence’s story, see Janet Lyon, “Gadže Modernism,” Modernism/modernity 11 (2004): 517–38. Lyon is interested in the modernist trope of the Gypsy as marker of sociability and in the modernist investigation of the “incommensurability” between Gypsy and non-Gypsy cultures (532).

13. On Yvette, the Lady of Shalott, and the Sleeping Beauty plot, see Cushman, “The Virgin and the Gypsy and the Lady and the Gamekeeper,” 155.

14. For Lawrence’s debt to George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, see Carol Siegel, “Floods of Female Desire in Lawrence and Eudora Welty,” in D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors, ed. Keith Cushman and Dennis Jackson (Basingstoke, Eng.: Macmillan, 1991), 114.

15. For this version of “The Raggle Taggle Gypsy,” see http://www.lecairde/Lieder/Raggle_Taggle_Gypsy.html.

16. The fact of Mellors’s service in the military remakes his image as well: it recalibrates his class position, adds world travel and foreign languages to his experience and knowledge, and makes him a more cosmopolitan and worldly figure.

17. Critics have differed about what transpires between Yvette and the Gypsy during the flood. Cushman agrees that their encounter is “not romantic or even sexual” (“The Virgin and the Gypsy and the Lady and the Gamekeeper,” 165), but Jeffrey Meyers, who represents the other camp, writes that Lawrence’s “description of their regenerative embrace and consummation … is a superb example of a rippling, rhythmic, energetic prose that approximates their sexual union” (“The Voice of Water: Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gipsy,” English Miscellany 21 [1970]: 205).

18. Siegel, “Floods of Female Desire,” 114. Siegel also discusses the influence of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

19. Maria DiBattista, First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 58.

20. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London: Penguin, 1994), 301.

21. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley, 302.

22. Silvester Gordon Boswell, The Book of Boswell: Autobiography of a Gypsy, ed. John Seymour (London: Gollancz, 1970). Subsequent references are cited in the text.

23. Francis Hindes Groome, In Gipsy Tents (Wakefield, Eng.: EP Publishing, 1973), 250–51.

24. B. C. Smart and H. T. Crofton, The Dialect of the English Gypsies (London: Asher, 1875), ix.

25. Smart and Crofton, Dialect of the English Gypsies, x–xi.

26. Smart and Crofton, Dialect of the English Gypsies, 229, 248.

27. Boswell’s family tree is displayed on both the front and back end papers of his memoir, and an appendix contains a detailed account of his genealogy (169–74). In this narrative, he mentions, among other things, that the son-in-law of his grandfather Tyso Boswell was the fiddler who taught John Clare to play (169). See Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, 2003), 94, and chapter 3.

28. Groome comments on the prevalence of illiteracy among Gypsies, although he acknowledges variations from place to place. He attributes this illiteracy to the reluctance of schoolmasters to educate Gypsy children (Boswell’s account bears this out), as well as to Gypsies’ reluctance to send their children to school. Groome wants to promote the idea that families that settle for even a period of months might send their offspring to be educated or, alternatively, that teachers might circulate among Gypsy tents to teach reading (In Gipsy Tents, 254, 258–59).

29. For the spatial organization of contemporary Gypsy domestic life and its connections to rituals of purity, see Judith Okely, The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 85–89. “Whereas Gorgio hygiene consists to some extent in containing, covering or hiding dirt,” Okely writes, “for the Gypsies, polluting dirt can be visible, but it must be a clear distance from the clean” (86). Lawrence clearly knew about such taboos (“If Gypsies had no bathrooms, at least they had no sewerage”) and transferred them to Yvette’s more general disgust at the hypocrisies of modern, sanitized life.

30. John Megel, “The Holocaust and the American Rom,” in Papers from the Sixth and Seventh Annual Meetings of the Gypsy Lore Society, North American Chapter, ed. Joanne Grumet (New York: Gypsy Lore Society, 1986), 187–90. Subsequent references are cited in the text.

31. Walter Winter, Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto Who Survived Auschwitz, trans. Struan Robertson (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire, 2004), x.

32. There have been ongoing disputes about the degree to which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has excluded groups other than Jews who were systematically murdered by the Nazis. According to Ian Hancock, an official representative from the Gypsy community was first appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1987, presumably after the period of Megel’s unofficial or informal service; in 2002, however, President George Bush canceled Romany representation to the council (We Are the Romany People [Ame sam e Rromane džene] [Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002], 50). For Hancock’s views on the museum, his anger at the exclusion of the Gypsies from discussions of the Holocaust—or Porrajmos, as he prefers to call it, emphasizing the Gypsy experience as unique—and his belief in the modest progress that has been made in rectifying these omissions, see “Jewish Responses to the Porrajmos (The Romani Holocaust),” http://www.chgs.umn.edu/HistoriesNarrativesDocumen/RomaSintiGypsies/JewishResponsestothePorraj/jewishresponsestotheporraj.html.

33. With considerable justification, Hancock bitterly criticizes Jewish accounts of the Holocaust that ignore or minimize Gypsy suffering, but he also remarks that only Jews and Gypsies can come close to understanding each other’s experiences. Nonetheless, he concludes, neither group can fully grasp the other’s history or interpret it with full authority (“Jewish Responses to the Porrajmos,” 2). Megel may be expressing a naïve sentiment, but the two people’s sufferings are better twinned than placed in a hierarchy of victimization.