Gypsies and the British Imagination 18071930 is the first book to explorefully the British obsession with Gypsies throughout the nineteenth century andinto the ... » 

Gypsies and the British Imagination 18071930 is the first book to explorefully the British obsession with Gypsies throughout the nineteenth century andinto the twentieth. Deborah Epstein Nord traces various representations ofGypsies in the works of such wellknown British authors John Clare WalterScott William Wordsworth George Eliot Arthur Conan Doyle and D. H.Lawrence. Nord also exhumes lesserknown literary ethnographic and historicaltexts exploring the fascinating histories of nomadic writer George Borrow theGypsy Lore Society Dora Yates and other rarely examined figures andinstitutions.Gypsies were both idealized and reviled by Victorian and earlytwentiethcentury Britons. Associated with primitive desires lawlessness cunning andsexual excess Gypsies were also objects of antiquarian literary andanthropological interest. As Nord demonstrates British writers and artistsdrew on Gypsy characters and plots to redefine and reconstruct cultural andracial difference national and personal identity and the individualsrelationship to social and sexual orthodoxies. Gypsies were long associatedwith pastoral conventions and in the nineteenth century came to stand in forthe ancient British past. Using myths of switched babies Gypsy kidnappingsand the Gypsies murky origins authors projected onto Gypsies their owndesires to escape convention and their anxieties about the ambiguities ofidentity. The literary representations that Nord examines have their roots inthe interplay between the notion of Gypsies as a separate often despised raceand the psychic or aesthetic desire to dissolve the boundary between Englishand Gypsy worlds. By the beginning of the twentieth century she arguesromantic identification with Gypsies had hardened into caricaturea phenomenonreflected in D. H. Lawrences The Virgin and the Gipsyand thoroughly obscuredthe reality of Gypsy life and history. «