Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930, is the first book to explore fully the British obsession with Gypsies throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Deborah Epstein Nord traces various representations of Gypsies in the works of such well-known British authors John Clare, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and D. H. Lawrence. Nord also exhumes lesser-known literary, ethnographic, and historical texts, exploring the fascinating histories of nomadic writer George Borrow, the Gypsy Lore Society, Dora Yates, and other rarely examined figures and institutions. Gypsies were both idealized and reviled by Victorian and early-twentieth-century Britons. Associated with primitive desires, lawlessness, cunning, and sexual excess, Gypsies were also objects of antiquarian, literary, and anthropological interest. As Nord demonstrates, British writers and artists drew on Gypsy characters and plots to redefine and reconstruct cultural and racial difference, national and personal identity, and the individual's relationship to social and sexual orthodoxies. Gypsies were long associated with pastoral conventions and, in the nineteenth century, came to stand in for the ancient British past. Using myths of switched babies, Gypsy kidnappings, and the Gypsies' murky origins, authors projected onto Gypsies their own desires to escape convention and their anxieties about the ambiguities of identity. |
From inside the book
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... wandering . The Gypsies of " Resigna- tion ” travel back and forth , returning repeatedly to places they have occupied before , weary , like Wordsworth's Gypsies , but not indolent . They are subject to change , to age and infirmity ...
... wandering " -to identify the likes of Silas that Scott's Isaac uses to describe the Jews in Ivanhoe , but Gypsies also come to mind . Both groups are peripatetic : they wander the globe in exile but live , always within view of settled ...
... wandering away with them sometimes for weeks on end " ( 350 ) . Aside from the dying sister's words and Holmes's ... wander freely over his grounds " ( 350 ) . The doctor is a collector of both Gypsies and animals — exotic species out of ...