The Gypsy Woman: Representations in Literature and Visual Culture 9781788318822, 9781786734846

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To Roger Christofides, always my first and most appreciative reader and, crucially, a partner in life who makes academic work and family life compatible. To our girls, Belinda and Xanthe, for not complaining too much when I have to work rather than play, and for reminding me what really matters. And to my parents, who have supported my academic life in myriad ways.

Published in 2018 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2018 Jodie Matthews The right of Jodie Matthews to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of Ethnicity, Identity and Culture 6 ISBN: 978 1 78831 381 0 eISBN: 978 1 78672 484 7 ePDF: 978 1 78673 484 6 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Minion Pro by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Acknowledgements In 2012, I received AHRC funding for a research review of Humanities work undertaken in Romani Studies; I am pleased to acknowledge that funding in helping with the evolution of this project. Some of the textual examples used in the current work have appeared in earlier-published articles, explored from a slightly different angle. Researching and thinking about the ‘Gypsy picnics’ in Chapter 5 was the result of a collaborative process with Charlotte Boyce. I thank her for this, and for twenty years of friendship and wry commentary on life and academia. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable resource that is the archives and arts and cultural services of various local authorities, including Calderdale, Manchester, Kirklees and Sheffield. An enormous amount of British cultural heritage is in their care, thanks to bequests over the centuries and the ongoing commitment of archivists and other professionals. Some of these collections have been digitised through initiatives such as artuk.org, but it would be a tragedy if these gems disappeared into private ownership (or a skip) as councils have to make awful decisions between culture and care in an age of austerity. I must thank colleagues and students at the University of Huddersfield, my academic home since 2009, for providing an environment conducive to thought and research. In particular, I thank Professor Paul Ward, a valued academic mentor for all of that time. I thank Ken Lee who, at a crucial point in the writing of this book, appeared in my email inbox by happy coincidence and in Liverpool a short while after, providing me with inspiring and supportive conversation and references and connections to follow up afterwards. I also thank all those who, over the years, have shared their experience of Romani identity. I especially thank Lisa Goodrum at I.B.Tauris for approaching me about a book along these lines.

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1 Timely Introductions

Travelling by car along the pitted roads of rural Madhya Pradesh, our driver suddenly slowed down. Not, this time, to avoid wandering buffalo, but to point out two women in saris sitting beneath a corrugated iron structure, cleaning vegetables behind a low boundary they had made from soil. They smiled and waved. ‘Gypsies’, said the driver. ‘You know ‘‘Gypsies’’?’ I knew what the term often signified in Britain. Here, though, it meant something very different. The driver was referring to people who travelled from place to place and were respected by local people, especially farmers, for their skill in making tools. They were paid not necessarily in cash, but in food, clothes and other goods. When he said ‘Gypsy’ it was not a derogatory term; these were not women he wanted to complain about. The word, referring to a group of people and their culture, has specific meanings across time and space. This was one, in twenty-first-century India. This encounter, between the women and me, was particular; but I brought existing ideas to it. Ideas about linguistic evidence connecting the Romani spoken in Britain to the languages of northern India. Ideas about my privilege and position as a comparatively wealthy white Western tourist in a country formerly colonised by Britain. About Orientalism. About the treatment of Romani women in the British media. About the Anglophone literature and art I had been researching for a decade or more. 1

The Gypsy Woman As for the women’s ideas about the encounter? They were theirs. I had no access to those ideas. Every time we read or view a representation of a Gypsy woman, we have a textual encounter, a moment with her, one that has a context and a history. This book explores the texture of those encounters and the way they open out onto other encounters of the past, present and future. Individual Gypsy characters have been studied in the past, as has the representation of Gypsies in particular time periods. This work departs from previous scholarship by taking a feminist transhistorical approach to convergent textual encounters with the Gypsy woman, an approach explained in more detail throughout this introduction. This does not mean it is simply a wide (never mind exhaustive) survey or catalogue of representations of Gypsy women across all periods, but rather a sustained examination and appreciation of the way that textual encounters – the reader or viewer meeting the Gypsy woman in a text – are connected to others and how, via that connectivity, they converge on particular ideas: race (Chapter 2); Orientalism (Chapter 3); authenticity (Chapter 4); fortunes and curses (Chapter 5); and a kind of travelling domesticity (Chapter 6). When, in the proceeding chapters, I draw close comparisons between nineteenth-century British representation and texts produced in the twenty-first century, it is not simply to suggest that contemporary images of Gypsy women unproblematically or simplistically reproduce the stereotypes of the past (though some are extremely good at doing that). More than this, the way representation works, as reproduction, as bringing around again, particularly in the digital age, means that the often-uncomfortable history of textual encounters between Gypsy women and the non-Gypsy reader or viewer is drawn near; texts must work very hard to depart from stereotypes. The telescoping of textual encounters with each new fictional Gypsy woman is not always completely to her detriment, as one might expect from a glance at headlines and television schedules. There are many celebrations of Romani culture in the examples throughout these five central chapters, and still more strong women to admire and look up to. There is also, though, exoticisation, racism and fetishisation.

Affective Romani Studies This exploration of textual encounters in Britain with the Gypsy woman might be categorised under the heading of ‘Romani/Gypsy Studies’, a field 2

Timely Introductions often seen as having been inaugurated with Heinrich Grellmann’s lateeighteenth-century Dissertation, according to some the first text to examine ‘Gypsies’ as a subject of study (though it drew heavily on, if not plagiarised, earlier works by different authors, including that of Samuel ab Hortis).1 Study of Gypsy culture received a shot in the arm in the nineteenth century with the establishment of the Gypsy Lore Society in 1888, some of whose core members are featured throughout the chapters of this book – I refer to them as ‘lorists’ (like folklorists). Much more recently, the International Journal of Romani Language and Culture was initiated in 2010, and the online and open access Journal of Gypsy Studies published its first issue in 2017. The Gypsy Woman is not a work that necessarily hopes to enlighten readers about the experience of female Romani identity, however; that is not my book to write. I have no desire to perpetuate what Ethel Brooks powerfully calls the ‘Gadje [non-Romani] problem’, working to ‘represent us, [. . .] manage us, govern us’. Brooks refuses ‘this representation, the cultural theft and exploitation that has been carried out in the name of that which is interesting, that which is exotic’.2 Instead, this work is in the – to my mind – politically important tradition of non-Romanies accounting for the ‘Gypsy woman’ found in creative works and non-fiction made by non-Romanies, the ‘Gypsy woman’ problematised by Ian Hancock, amongst others.3 It is a contribution to the labour of explaining why anti-Gypsyism, informed by literature and visual forms as well as writing intended to be non-fiction, persists so toxically in the twenty-first century. There are, of course, a group of real people to which these historical and contemporary texts refer. There is much debate about the exact location, but early Romani groups originated in north-western India, moving into the Middle East and then westwards within the Ottoman and Byzantine empires. It is thought that the diaspora first moved into Europe in the medieval period. Groups within this diaspora split off from each other, some spreading into north and eastern Europe, others westwards and to the south. Throughout Europe, these new arrivals were often referred to as ‘Egyptians’, though this probably refers to ‘Little Egypt’ in what is now Greece. It is from here that the English term ‘Gypsy’ derives. The first record of Romanies in England is sometimes evidenced at the year 1514 (an inquest that mentions an Egyptian woman), though, as Becky Taylor notes, the English probably already had some ideas about a ‘dark’ and

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The Gypsy Woman different people distinct from the rest of the population from earlier accounts written in other countries.4 Indeed, a male skeleton unearthed in Lincolnshire, dated to the tenth century, was found to have a haplotype (i.e. a DNA sequence) matching the rare modern Romani lineage.5 Such a find apparently subverts assumptions about the dates of the Romani diasporic journey westwards. Explanations for the presence of this DNA in Britain at this date include the enslavement of, or liaisons with, Romani women by Vikings during trade expeditions to the Byzantine Empire. What remains an open question is whether Romani people were actually living in England several hundred years earlier than previously thought.6 It is recorded (much later, by a nineteenth-century author) that in 1519 the Earl of Surrey entertained Romanies (‘Gypsions’) at Tendring Hall in Suffolk and gave them safe conduct.7 Other encounters can be traced in nineteenth-century readings of gentry account books, when Gypsies were paid to perform (shrewdly capitalising on their cultural novelty) in places such as Thornbury in Gloucestershire.8 A legal document from Hereford in 1530 records ‘Gipsies’ travelling in a group of nineteen men, women and children led by one Antony Stephen. The group described themselves as ‘pilgrims’, which was common in Europe in this period and is thought to have led to a positive welcome for some Romani groups as they arrived in new settlements. This document is signed by Roger Millward, probably a Justice of the Peace. He says that during their nine days in the city they ‘dydde no hurte’.9 Many other early reactions to Romanies were negative, however. Because they were ‘masterless’ travellers, they were accused of being beggars or rogues – terms of abuse that implied danger and disorder. In 1537, Thomas Cromwell wrote to the Lord President of the Marches of Wales about ‘lewd persons calling themselves Gipcyans’, instructing him to ‘compel them to depart to the next seaport’.10 They were treated with suspicion, thought to harbour political and religious subversives. North of the border, George Crawfurd’s 1716 Peerage of Scotland quotes an earlier writer, Sir George Mackenzie, in asserting that during the fifteenth-century reign of King James II of Scotland ‘a Company of Saracens or Gipsies from Ireland, infested the Country of Galloway; whereupon the King emitted a Proclamation, bearing That whoever should disperse them, and bring in their Captain dead or alive, should have the Barony of Bombie for his Reward’. Horrifyingly, the severed head of the ‘captain’ was reportedly presented to the King. The murderer duly became

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Timely Introductions Baron of Bombie and adopted as his Crest a ‘More’s Head on the point of a Sword, and THINK ON for his Motto’.11 This crest and motto were retained into the nineteenth century by the Kirkpatricks, a history of bloody persecution heraldically inscribed.12 That in the fifteenth century Saracens, Moors and Gypsies should be thought of interchangeably demonstrates, first, the fluidity of categories of otherness, in particular that of the ‘Gypsy’, and, second, one of the historian’s challenges in defining Romani history in Britain; it can be hard to determine how these accounts map onto categories of identity we understand today. I approach such references as a literary scholar interested in ‘texts’ in their broadest sense and what they mean in their contexts of production and their relationships to our cultural lives today, enabling me to trace ideas about ‘Gypsies’ in British culture that converge on various encounters. In this Scottish case, two darker, othered, eastern groups seen as barbaric (Gypsies and Moors) are conflated to fashion a heroic image of conquest, might and rule on an enduring and patrilineal artefact of class symbolism. Andrew Borde’s The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge from 1547 is probably the first English attempt to record words from the Romani language; from this one can assume that the English were interested enough in the Gypsies to want to record and communicate some of their culture. Elizabethan author Thomas Dekker commented on how different the Romani people looked to the English, partly because of their ‘od and phantastique’ clothes. The ‘strangeness of the attyre of their heades’ was also commented on by his contemporaries, a fact to bear in mind when the book turns to discussing Meg Merrilies in the following chapter.13 The Egyptians Act of 1554 refers to those who ‘have enterprised to come over againe into this Realme’, so we know, even without the other incidental sixteenth-century evidence, that Romanies were in England well before this.14 Previously, all ‘strangers’ had been commanded to leave the realm. The 1554 Act was extreme (it introduced the death penalty for ‘Egyptians’ who refused to leave the country), but it was not comprehensively implemented because of the number of Romani people who stated that they had been born in England. The Act allowed for Egyptians to stay if they put themselves in the service of an ‘honest and able inhabitant’, thus signing away some fundamental rights. By the 1550s, then, Romanies were not just an immigrant group in England, but also known to be native-born – a position Sarah Houghton-Walker sees take

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The Gypsy Woman on increasing significance in literature of the Romantic period, around 200 years later. An Act of 1562 made it a felony for anyone born in England to join the group calling themselves Egyptians – bringing English-born Romanies under anti-Gypsy legislation.15 The first fifty-or-so years of documented Romani experience in England veer from fascinated welcome to persecution, and the much later encounters I describe throughout this book also tend to switch from one extreme to the other, though the suspicious and romanticised encounters are intimately connected. The accuracy or otherwise of literature and visual culture in its representation of Romani life is somewhat by-the-by in my readings here: ‘accuracy’ is only one small part of why anyone reads a novel or lingers over a painting; I will not be mapping the art directly onto lived history in each case. This is a move away from a purportedly logical reading of art and culture and towards affect: the felt responses to the Gypsy woman as she is described (with horror or desire, for instance) and, slightly separately, the way one feels about representation (shame, anger, glee). This is the interface of history, the female Gypsy body in these texts, and traditions of representation legible in each textual encounter. The readings of literary and visual forms in this book thus welcome affect, but do not lose sight of the role of the discursive, the ideological and the semiotic in those reactions. In other words, the way one responds to something is not necessarily internal, individual and discrete but informed by the text’s and the person’s place in culture. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth’s introduction to their 2010 reader of affect theory – a collection which includes Sara Ahmed’s chapter on ‘Happy Objects’ – remains an important reference point for the explanation of this set of ideas in literary and cultural studies. Ahmed is a key proponent of affect theory and situates herself, as Donovan Schaefer also points to in work drawing Ahmed and Lauren Berlant’s work together, within a lineage of ‘feminist cultural studies of affect’.16 Gregg and Seigworth suggest that ‘affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body’, including ‘human, nonhuman, partbody, and otherwise’. This book is interested in the many textual instances of intensities passing between female Gypsy body and nonGypsy body, and how those intensities are categorised and explained. Affect is found ‘in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or

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Timely Introductions variations between these intensities and resonances themselves’. If this description sounds abstract, then that is precisely because of the nature of affect: it is specific to the moment, to the encounter. It is, they add: the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability.

They suggest that affect can be understood as synonymous with ‘forces of encounter’. As should already be clear from the number of times ‘encounter’ has so far appeared in this introduction, and as I make clear with specific reference to Ahmed, below, the transhistorical forces of encounter with the textual Gypsy woman are what this book explores. Affect, say Gregg and Seigworth, ‘marks a body’s belonging to a world of encounters’ but also the ways in which a body does not belong to a particular world. Each chapter that follows this introduction thematises the way the female Gypsy body is considered to belong to a world of textual encounters, but also the ways in which the Gypsy woman exceeds knowledge about her in those encounters, resists them, does not belong to them. The real powers of affect lie ‘in this ever-gathering accretion of forcerelations (or, conversely, in the peeling or wearing away of such sedimentations) [. . .], affect as potential: a body’s capacity to affect and to be affected’. In this book, then, the body of the Gypsy woman, as constituted through a world of encounters, can speak of the future, can confound orthodox ideas about movement and travel, can condense centuries of diasporic experience. But it is also affected by oppression, by being cast as strange, and by being constantly objectified as the site of white male desire.17 In terms of works of visual art, such as paintings of Gypsy women, subtly deconstructive readings of these forms are again combined in the proceeding chapters with insight offered by affect theory. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Simon O’Sullivan asserted that:

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The Gypsy Woman in a space such as art history where deconstructive – let alone semiotic – approaches to art [. . .] have become hegemonic, the existence of affects, and their central role in art, needs asserting. For this is what art is: a bundle of affects or, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, a bloc of sensations, waiting to be reactivated by a spectator or participant. Indeed, you cannot read affects, you can only experience them. Which brings us to the crux of the matter: experience.

It is for this reason, as well as my echoing Ahmed, that I use the term ‘encounter’ when describing what happens with texts, and consider the ways in which representations from the past affect and are affected by the contexts in which they are viewed today. The comprehensive textual/visual survey of a particular subject matter (for instance, engravings of Gypsy women since the eighteenth century) serves an informative purpose, but it does not necessarily enable an exploration of the intensities, unexpected confluences and experiences that I aim for here by putting the popular, literary, visual, commercial, collectable and digital versions of the Gypsy woman together. O’Sullivan calls for an art history that moves beyond art’s signifying character alone, placing that function alongside ‘art’s affective and intensive qualities’.18 I also agree that one must look beyond the frame for art’s affective qualities. If, on the way to visit a gallery which holds a well-known nineteenth-century painting of a Gypsy woman, I see someone reading a newspaper with screaming anti-Gypsy headlines, my experience of the painting is altered, both in terms of what I feel about it and what I read into it. If that same painting is pinned on Pinterest in a new context, my feelings and readings change again. Our twenty-first-century analogue and digital textual encounters with nineteenth-century Gypsy women have personal, political and intellectual resonances, which differ from the texts’ reception when they were first created. Griselda Pollock has described the necessity of exploring the encounter as part of ‘feminist interruptions of art history’s usual business of period, medium, master and style’.19 In other words, there are more interesting, more politically engaged, more relevant ways of understanding what we look at (online, on a postcard, in a book, in a gallery) and what it means to us than taxonomic categories and academic traditions. I hope to understand the visual field as she advises: ‘a shared terrain diversely approached, and thus being always remade’. She asserts that this field 8

Timely Introductions ‘may be rendered semantically complex and affectively vivid in the act of constant, and situated, re-readings’ – different encounters in different times and places.20 I would add that the terrain is shared not only by individual interpretations, but by various forms. No matter one’s focus (the painting, the newspaper, the recall of a television programme, a soundtrack through our headphones), other forms crowd in to make the encounter noisy, busy and polytextual. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s distinction between linear time and cyclical and monumental time, Pollock suggests that we might dare to breach a number of disciplinary conventions that are confining the study of art within a concept of time, and of history that, by having foreclosed on the difference of the feminine, risk killing the liveliness of art past and present.

This is a thread I take up in emphasising the transhistorical encounter, described more theoretically below, but at this point I want to repeat that this book engages with texts of various forms, breaching linear chronologies, high/low cultural boundaries and formal differences in order to understand how we encounter a tradition of representing Gypsy women today. This book is interested not just in a series of singular texts, then, but in the way these different encounters open out on to each other, through similarity, difference, repetition and departure, and the cultural effects of those openings. Throughout the book, I generally refer to the lived experience of Romani people in Britain and America (though in places ideas about and movement to and from Europe form a necessary part of the discussion), and the representation of/encounters with fictional Gypsies. The texts in question are largely British, though American representations are included – and these have been consumed as part of a globalised digital culture experienced in Britain. They no doubt have different resonance when encountered in America or elsewhere. In her Songs of the Gypsy Women (1979), Susu Jeffrey describes her Romani ancestors in a section titled ‘Migration to Mystery’. Her grandfather, Sampson Jeffrey, was born in the USA, and Jeffrey finds that Ohio existence ‘not quite the romantic background’ she had wished for herself. ‘And aside from tea drinking, it’s difficult to think of gypsies as English’. Instead, for ‘gypsy mystery’, Jeffrey turns (as did George Eliot) to Spain.21 9

The Gypsy Woman With this statement, Jeffrey does not deny the existence of English (or other British) Romani people, of course – the statement itself is evidence for nineteenth-century British Romani migration across the Atlantic. It does, however, emphasise something resolutely non-English about Romani culture. While pointing to the ways in which centuries of written and visual representation have gestured to a similar non-English/ Britishness of Gypsies, this book also makes clear the extent to which ideas about a recognisable Gypsy woman infuse texts consumed in Britain. In thinking about her ancestors, Jeffrey also claims the name ‘Gypsy’. There are still people who self-identify as ‘Gypsy’, and there is a degree of debate within the Romani community of Britain as to whether this should be seen as a derogatory exonym or proudly reclaimed label. Similar debates take place in other national contexts. For instance, having undertaken interviews in Sofia, Bulgaria, Evgeniya I. Ivanova and Velcho Krustev use both the exonym ‘gypsies’ and endonym ‘Roma’, because some respondents preferred ‘gypsy’ [‘tsiganka/tsiganin’] to describe themselves.22 The editors of the new (at the time of writing) Journal of Gypsy Studies acknowledge the potential controversy in their use of the term ‘Gypsy’, but their decision to use it ‘is informed by a desire to challenge the stereotypes it conveys, aiming at a (re)definition of the word’ and valuing ‘approaches that problematize the word ‘‘Gypsy’’ in a world where discriminatory acts and discourses are common’.23 My use of ‘Romani’ and ‘Gypsy’ is not intended to quieten or contribute to debates within the community, but to more easily distinguish between text and life. The redefinition for which G€une et al. strive is one which sits more easily with what I attempt in this book, in particular its challenge to discrimination. I also use ‘Romani language’ as a term in this work; I might instead have used ‘Romanes’ as do most of the Romani people with whom I have spoken about language, but I have conformed to the current academic practice in that regard. It is no great novelty to assert that such choices of terminology are inextricably tied to the politics of representation; to the centrality of origin narratives in diasporic identities; to the history of ‘Gypsy studies’ and the relationship between ‘experts’ and the objects of their study; and to the rights and prejudices attached to particular labels. All of these debates take place in the shadow of genocidal policies against the Romani people in Europe in the early modern period and at the hands of the Nazis in the

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Timely Introductions mid-twentieth century. This is not a case of academic fussiness, then: the terms up for debate have been used to mark individuals for murder and persecution. They continue to be variously used as racial or ethnic slurs, reasons to deny people jobs and homes, a banner for political unity and an identity through which one might claim rights and services. ‘Ethnic identities and the boundaries that define them’ are, Adrian Marsh and Elin Strand note, ‘more often than not contested’.24 As well as being personal (in terms of both ownership and their effects), terms that define identity are most often assigned by people outside the designation, so they are also profoundly impersonal. It is such external assignment of Gypsiness that defines the textual encounters with the Gypsy woman explored here. At the same time as apparently offering a constant and functional categorisation, identity terminology is historically and politically contingent. While offering a common identity to some, it is considered exclusive by others. These paradoxes are true of all ethnic definitions, but have extra poignancy when the group in question is an abused or often-uncelebrated minority, and has academic relevance when there has been so much scholarly and activist disagreement about the use of terms. In many academic or public policy disciplines, the use of terms like ‘Gypsy’ and/or ‘Romani’ has another set of problems because it acts as a shorthand for talking about a number of diverse groups (e.g. Romanichals, Kale and Roma). This shorthand might be used outside the community to categorise people for purposes of legislation, taxonomisation and enumeration, and within the community for reasons of political contingency or because it represents a shared culture of which individuals, families and groups feel a part. For instance, while Toby Sonneman notes that Gypsy subgroups ‘define themselves separately’, despite sharing a common root language and cultural practices, the texts she studies ‘address a fictional unified population [and so] the group designation will have to suffice’.25 In this book, it is less a case of the term ‘Gypsy’ being sufficient as a term, but actually the most appropriate because it gathers together texts that set up particular kinds of encounter. ‘Roma’ is used to distinguish between a Romani culture that has had a presence in Britain for at least five centuries (probably longer) and Roma groups who have come to Britain more recently (especially since the accession of Eastern European states to the European Union in 2004 and 2007). Politically, some activists and writers support a transnational

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The Gypsy Woman Romani identity that emphasises the commonalities between these British and European (and American, Australian and Indian) peoples. Others say that, in practice, British Romanies are likely to see Eastern European Roma as just as ‘foreign’ as a non-Romani British person might. Most of these groups have been labelled with a local variant of the term ‘Gypsy’, and in Europe the equivalents of this term are considered much more offensive than is ‘Gypsy’ in Britain (though, of course, there are those who deem that word unacceptably offensive in English and it is their prerogative to call for its censorship). While it is important to note that there is a difference between British Romanies/Gypsies and other national European Romani groupings, rather than assuming a global, undistinguished Gypsy population, it is not a distinction without problems. Katrin Simhandl notes that EU official discourse shifted to use the term ‘Roma’ in about 1997–8. However, ‘the geographical association of Roma issues with Eastern Europe serves to uphold the separation of ‘‘Eastern Roma’’ and ‘‘Western Gypsies and Travellers’’’, a separation that enables ‘the establishment of ‘‘Roma’’ as a category that refers exclusively to ‘‘the East’’’ and thus, in stereotypical European terms, to poverty, oppression and corruption’.26 Such Orientalism is not, of course, the invention of the European Union; Robert Fraser describes how, since at least the fifteenth century, ‘the Roma have played out the role of a permanent, shifting repository of ‘‘Eastness,’’ eerily identified by the very indeterminacy of its origins’.27 This is explored in more detail in relation to literature and visual culture in Chapter 3. In his work on ‘Gypsy’ music, which considers the productions and reproductions of Gypsiness, David Malvinni explores the contradiction inherent in definitions which prioritise localness but continue to refer (sometimes implicitly) to transnational constructs: the essential Gypsy, or what Wim Willems called the ‘monolithic concept’.28 Similarly, Brian Belton finds that while ‘[academic] literature recognizes the multifarious character of the Traveller population, [. . .] it contains an undercurrent that presents Gypsy connectivity’.29 I want to make that undercurrent visible, and show how textual encounters with Gypsy women are connected to each other in a way that produces and reproduces particular ideas about race, Orientalism, authenticity, the occult and travel, but also potentially undermines them. Bancroft points to the ‘common distinction made between those who belong inside’ what is sometimes called ‘the ‘‘Big Tent’’ and the ‘‘Little Tent’’’; in other words, ‘between a core of Romani speaking

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Timely Introductions groups and a wider set of traditional Travelling people, which includes English Romanichals, Scottish Nawkens and Irish Minceir’.30 Most, if not all, of the encounters described in this book do not acknowledge that there are two tents, let alone different groups within them, and homogenise them all in one Gypsy tent. Connected with that metaphor of mobile living, Simhandl has, as noted above, traced the definitions used by the European Union, noting that ‘in its earliest stages, the discourse was structured by the category of nomadism’, a perception that persists in accounts of contemporary Romanies/Gypsies, Roma and Irish and Scottish Travellers and the frames through which we read the past.31 While nomadism may be, or have been, a distinctive feature of some communities labelled in this way, it is not necessarily a defining, permanent or exclusive feature. Ideas about Gypsy women and a kind of ‘travelling domesticity’ around Britain are explored in Chapter 6.

Strange encounters The Gypsy woman is strange. This is not a perception of Romani lived experience; I mean that the encounter that readers and viewers have with representations of the Gypsy woman make her a stranger. Mark her as a stranger. She is not simply strange as the literary and visual stereotype of the Jew or the Moor or the Muslim or the Queer or the other ‘other’ marks out an interchangeable stranger, as in the Scottish history of the Baron of Bombie where the Gypsy and Moor and Saracen signified the same. All the texts examined in this book recognise and constitute the Gypsy woman as a particular kind of other. Indeed, Ken Lee has asserted that, ‘irrespective of the historical period, geographical location, or state form, the Romani people have been discursively constructed as ‘‘the stranger,’’ as outside the boundaries of normalised subjects’.32 As a non-Romani, I am in no position either to validate or to reject that recognition. What I can do is observe and account for how these encounters operate – demonstrating the recognition of the Gypsy woman in the twenty-first century according to images from the nineteenth, the stubborn refusal by Western culture to drop the stereotype – and examine how a twenty-first-century perspective on strangeness shapes encounters with texts of the past. I am certainly not the first academic to think about the ways in which the Gypsy has been figured as a stranger. For instance, Colin Clark has 13

The Gypsy Woman drawn on Georg Simmel’s essay on this subject, as has Ken Lee (noted above), and Sarah Houghton-Walker returns to it in considering literature of the Romantic period. Here, I take another elaboration of Simmel’s ‘stranger’ to consider literary and visual representations of the Gypsy woman as encounters – as I have already indicated thus far. In her powerful Strange Encounters, first published in 2000, Sara Ahmed insists on the particularity of encounters with ‘the other’, a theoretical position often inhabited by the Gypsy woman of literature, criticism, folklore, anthropology and ethnography, popular culture and art. This is the Gypsy woman as she is fashioned by non-Gypsies, a mediated encounter with the other – as all encounters are mediated because they have a history and are informed by the culture, time and place in which they happen. Ahmed suggests that when thinking about these encounters we should not see gender and race as something that the other, in this case the Gypsy woman, has, an approach that ‘would thematise this other as always gendered and racialised in a certain way’. Instead, we might ‘consider how such differences are determined at the level of the encounter’.33 This approach segues with Rita Felski’s consideration of the relationship between texts and other actors, the social not as ‘being’ (Gypsiness as something the woman has) but as ‘doing’ (understood in interconnected textual encounters), ‘the ongoing connections, disconnections, and reconnections between multiple actors’.34 It is these sorts of connected/disconnected/ reconnected encounters in different media, rather than a strictly chronological model, that I favour. Taking Ahmed’s approach, it is important to remember that, while twenty-first-century representations of the Gypsy woman revisit the tropes of two centuries earlier, if one is to avoid an analysis of this representation itself becoming a form of fetishism, it must not turn ‘Gypsiness’ into a property of the Gypsy woman’s body or speech but attempt to name ‘the meetings and encounters that produce or flesh out others, and hence [differentiate the Gypsy woman] from other others’.35 In her detailed examination of the Romantic period, Sarah Houghton-Walker finds such canonical literary writers as Wordsworth, Cowper, Clare and Austen failing ‘to penetrate the reality of gypsy life’, discovering that Gypsies are ‘still strange’.36 That these writers’ encounters with the Gypsy are framed as an attempt at penetration suggests that they are read with particular expectations about the Gypsy as an object of investigation, as a body, and

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Timely Introductions as a stranger. The purpose of an Ahmed-led approach is ‘not to hold the other in place, or to turn her into a theme, concept or thing’, a transformation that always threatens a project of this kind and haunts some scholarship in the field of Romani/Gypsy Studies. Rather, it is to account for ‘being faced by her in such a way that she ceases to be fully present’, partly because the parties in the encounter do not have full access to what it is to ‘be’ the other, but also because the meaning of the Gypsy stranger, all the ideas brought to the encounter, are produced for the one who encounters her across culture, across forms, across time and space.37 As Felski notes, ‘works of art, by default, are linked to other texts, objects, people, and institutions in relations of dependency, involvement, and interaction’. Those linkages and effects are not ‘hidden in the convoluted folds of texts’ but are open for interpretation, part of what makes the work of art available, noticeable in every textual encounter.38

Encounters in The Graphic and on Pinterest As an example of transhistorical textual interaction, I propose to look at the connections and disconnections between two forums for publishing images of Gypsies in order to see how a digital encounter with the Gypsy woman gathers together encounters that have happened before and elsewhere. The first publishing forum is Pinterest, the content-sharing platform that allows users to collect and share images, launched in 2010 and still popular – particularly amongst white, upper- and middle-class women – several years later. Writing about the site’s representation of gendered domesticity, Julie Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim have described Pinterest as a ‘highly feminized digital platform [. . .] relentlessly reinforc[ing] gendered ideologies and norms’. While we might expect the ‘postfeminist media milieu’ to offer ‘new and relatively diverse images of women and work in both public and private spheres’, the prevailing discourses of race and gender are largely sustained by digital media such as Pinterest. What is more, the relentless yet erratic flows of data via digital social media ‘only come to matter, only become powerful, in relation to the affective contexts of everyday life’.39 In other words, the value and meaning of what one sees or collects on Pinterest is realised through (as Felski noted in relation to the work of art, above) ‘other texts, objects, people, and institutions in relations of dependency, involvement, and interaction’. 15

The Gypsy Woman The ‘Gypsy woman’ collected on Pinterest is a strange amalgamation of early studio portraits (often not actually of Romani women), head scarves decorated with coins, tumbling locks, ornate vardos or caravans, Mata Hari, Edwardian actress Lily Elsie in The Merry Widow, tambourines and tarot cards. A simple search reveals a condensation of vintage, Oriental, bohemian styles. It should be noted that, unlike a newspaper such as The Graphic (with which I will compare Pinterest), or its twenty-firstcentury paper equivalents, what one sees on Pinterest is highly curated by the consumer. My comparison of these forms is not intended to flatten out the difference between them, but to insist that our consumption of the textual past is informed by the ways in which we access text and image today; that textual encounters always open out onto other encounters in other times and places; and, specifically, that the depicted Gypsy woman one encounters in Britain today cannot be seen in isolation from historical representation. This is not the same as saying that all the Gypsy women of centuries past are present in each new representation; I suggest that when one examines frequent thematic occurrences, historical Gypsy women make themselves known. The second forum publishing images of Gypsies on which I want to focus here is the periodical The Graphic, specifically between 1888 and 1891. Clearly, these two forums, the newspaper and the digital scrapbooking site, have radical differences, not least the centuries in which they are used, but some of the conditions of a twenty-first-century viewer encountering ‘Gypsy’ pins on Pinterest were also produced by The Graphic of the nineteenth century. To repeat: The Graphic and Pinterest are very different. The Graphic was a printed newspaper initiated in 1869 partly as a result of a dispute over image rights with the Illustrated London News; image-sharing sites play fast and loose with copyright. The Graphic had an editor with total control over content, whereas millions of Pinterest users edit their own boards. The process of painting and drawing illustrations, engraving them, and printing and distributing them was laborious and involved a number of skilled professionals; almost anyone with internet access can pull content together on Pinterest. However, both are popular bitextual media (using images and text together – a limited amount of the latter in the case of Pinterest) and, as part of what they offer, both circulate images of Gypsy women to a much wider audience than, say, a painted portrait or stage play. Image and text

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Timely Introductions together, as Julia Thomas suggests, produce each other’s meaning in relation to the other, and those meanings are also produced in relation to text and image the viewer has seen beyond that particular page.40 The Graphic had included ‘Gypsy’ stories prior to 1888, of course. For instance, a ‘vagabond existence in the country’ was celebrated with reference to Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ (1853) and the tales of Bampfylde Moore Carew. After a short ramble, ‘it is with an effort that [the walker] turns his back on the woods and fields to resume harness’.41 The sentiment is typical of a dream of Gypsy freedom of a kind explored in Chapters 4 and 6. The three years I focus on here, though (1888 – 1891), demonstrate the regularity and repetition of Gypsy representations. In 1888, three scenes from The Sorceress, a play or ‘musical tableau vivant’ produced by the painter and illustrator Hubert Herkomer at Bushey, were illustrated by Lockhart Bogle (who had a role in the play himself), engraved and reproduced in The Graphic.42 Herkomer was on good terms with the producers of the publication, having illustrated for them in the 1870s – Vincent Van Gogh, in fact, collected Herkomer’s scenes of poverty and hardship.43 If Van Gogh had been on Pinterest, Herkomer’s Graphic illustrations would have been pinned on his board. The 1888 scenes included ‘The Gypsies Worshipping the Stolen Child’, ‘The Gypsy Dance’ and ‘Love Scene between the Gypsy Minstrel and the Sorceress’. Herkomer himself produced a watercolour illustrating The Sorceress, which would appear later in his My School and My Gospel (1908) along with Bogle’s illustrations and a photograph of Miss Griffiths (later Mrs Herkomer) playing the title role. Like the vintage pin-ups featured on Pinterest, the feeling evoked is authentically dramatic, but the Gypsiness is not. My School and My Gospel could be seen as being like Herkomer’s blog or personal website, in which he re-uses the earlier images. The play itself reproduced lines from George Eliot’s 1868 narrative poem The Spanish Gypsy – a text explored in more detail later in this book. In this digital analogy, then, Herkomer takes Eliot’s Gypsy imagery and pins it to his ‘Sorceress’ board. Intriguingly, scenes by Lockhart from this production also appeared in the Illustrated London News the same day – readers of two different periodicals were offered the same representations of the same portrayal of Gypsies. Images of fictional and dress-up Gypsies were being shared and recontextualised in a very similar way to the digital sharing we

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The Gypsy Woman see today, and each of those encounters is informed by others that are happening at the same time, or happened in the past, in other places. Not quite the same as reposting, but not a million miles away, an advert in The Graphic in 1888 told readers of the forthcoming edition of Harper’s magazine, which would feature an article with illustrations about a ‘gypsy fair’ in Surrey. The article is then even reviewed in the Graphic as a ‘charming paper of the lighter sort’.44 For readers of The Graphic in 1888, then, the category of ‘Gypsy’ means theatricals, dancing, art, headdresses, child-stealing, Spain, sorcery and a travelling fair. Those readers do not get all that from just one encounter, but from multiple sources informing that encounter. Once we later readers recognise that, it is possible to see the way in which these citations and re-uses mark out the Gypsy woman from other others, and how this textual encounter is full of pointers elsewhere, to other forms and other encounters. A year later, an article about seeking out Gypsies in Scotland points to the authentic Gypsiness of the past, something explored in Chapter 3. It laments the ‘change of times. [. . .] There was no romance here.’ Sorcery is evoked, a feature of textual encounters with the Gypsy woman on which Chapter 5 elaborates, even as the author notes that there is nothing ‘left of the old witchcraft and superstition’. The author perceives a ‘deteriorated gypsy spirit’ (insisting on the term ‘gypsy’ despite his interlocutor disliking it). She, by contrast, rejoices that her people have ‘mixed with the housedwellers’. The ‘pure gypsy’, this article mourns, exists no longer.45 Two years later, another writer who lamented the loss of the authentic Gypsy in his work received a good review that also reinvigorated the sorcery connection. In a book review section, Charles Godfrey Leland’s Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling (to which I also return later in this book) was lauded under the heading ‘The Gypsy and his Magic’.46 All of these ideas: authenticity, race and purity, dwelling, witchcraft and superstition, are explored in the chapters that follow in order to account for textual encounters with the Gypsy woman. What I want to highlight here is that, even in the pages of a single publication, the Graphic, over a few short years, these ideas are in dialogue with each other to produce the preconditions for readers encountering a Gypsy woman of the text, and are in dialogue with the culture that surrounded them to reinforce those ideas, and are now also in dialogue with the culture that informs readers of the digitised or archival Graphic today.

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Timely Introductions Certain ideas about the Gypsy woman, about her race, sexuality, Orientalism, magic and migrancy, come around again and again, and in the period that produced those newspaper articles that I saw as repinning images like Pinterest, the physical means by which that circulation happened are still with us in the way we talk about those ideas.47 I mean to point out the tight relationship between circulation, re-use/quotation, stereotypes, attitudes towards mobility and the desire to ‘fix’ people in particular categories. On the first page of the first edition of the Illustrated London News, fairs, a travelling entertainment with which Gypsy women were often associated, are listed as one of the ‘pleasures of the people’ the publication seeks to illustrate for consumption by its readers, one of the many sights they will no longer need to leave their armchair to experience. The physical encounter (with all its threat and opportunity) becomes textual. The circulation of the newspaper implies the expectation of middle-class sedentariness. The authors of the paper’s effusive opening editorial have ‘watched with admiration and enthusiasm’ the ‘vast revolution’ that technological improvements to illustration have ‘wrought in the world of publication through all the length and breadth of this mighty empire’. Representation and subjugation are thus linked. The ‘impetus and rapidity’ of periodical literature is compared to ‘the gigantic power of steam’: texts, like trains and ships, are on the move. The new medium has ‘given wings’ to wood as engravings make flights of the imagination and physically travel further and further. The metaphor of travel is also taken further, likening illustration to a vessel, and the technologies of mobility are to be deployed to create the illustrated news: ‘no estaffette [sic] – no telegraph – no steam-winged vessel – no overland mail, shall bring intelligence to our shores that shall not be sifted with industry, and illustrated with skill in the columns of this journal’. The metaphor even strains at the limits of nineteenth-century travel technologies, practically predicting the gliders and aerodromes of the end of the century. The Illustrated London News was, as an exemplar, aware of the way it used and represented movement, and the circulation of image and text.48 A later edition of a local newspaper exemplifies this movement and what it does to the encounter. In January of 1857, the Huddersfield Chronicle reported on a recent visit to the town by the Drury Lane English Opera Company to perform Verdi’s Il Trovatore or The Gipsy’s Vengeance. Those in the audience encountered Verdi’s vengeful Gypsy, but then so did

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The Gypsy Woman readers of the Chronicle. This in a newspaper proudly proclaiming the ‘latest news by electric telegraph’.49 Technology was enabling a new mediation of encounters, so that more people than ever before shared particular perceptions of the Gypsy woman. The Illustrated London News was also clear that each representation had a value beyond the aesthetic; the periodical would not just present information, it would ‘uphold public morality’. There was clearly a lot at stake in increasing the number of people who would have textual encounters with different people, places and experiences (while staying in one place) thanks to the newspaper’s circulation and the transmission of news via telegraph. The Illustrated London News was compelled to describe what it did to and with representation: re-presenting news, images, ideas and events to more people at greater speed, yet with a sense of the effect that that information had on its audience. It is striking to compare this to the internet, often described in the 1990s as the ‘information superhighway’: bringing information to more people and at greater speed. In 1999, while examining the metaphors people used when they talked about accessing this technology (as the Illustrated London News does so expansively with regard to the technology of its own day), Harry Bruce noted that the internet ‘is a social technology, an advanced communication medium, a new publishing paradigm, a recreational and commercial entity’.50 He could equally be talking about the Illustrated London News as it perceived itself. All of this is by way of saying that a) textual encounters are governed by technologies of communication, determining the ways in which an encounter opens out onto others, and b) the digital revolution is not the first to be seen as new, paradigm-shiftingly fast and constituting its audience in novel ways. This shared awareness of the ways we access texts and intertexts is one reason for examining nineteenth-century textual encounters with the Gypsy woman from the explicit perspective of the cultural present (the ‘transhistorical’). Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley suggest that ‘media’ became a ‘key term anchoring ways of knowing in [the nineteenth century,] a century of wild transformation’.51 One instance of historically specific mobile representational technology, and one with particular relevance to the Illustrated London News and The Graphic, is that of wood-engraved illustrations. They were labour-intensive to produce, so the cut was re-used. Perhaps more important than the effort needed to produce

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Timely Introductions the illustration was the ease with which it could be transported. Amy Von Lintel remarks that Walter Benjamin misses out wood engraving in his famous consideration of the ‘new stage’ of art reproduction in Illuminations. This form has, however, ‘particular modernity’, producing ‘finely detailed images that could be printed on the most advanced steampowered presses simultaneously with relief type’.52 Von Lintel’s article focuses on the production of art history books, but the international collaboration of three firms producing these books demonstrates the mobility of wood engravings more generally: Louis Hachette in Paris, Sampson Low in London and Charles Scribner in New York exchanged wood engravings ‘in the form of electrotype plates that were easily shipped via railroad and steamship to be printed with a translated or reworked text’. Little wonder, then, that in this period the very same illustrations of Gypsies can be found in newspapers, books and pamphlets. The movement of images, as transportable woodcuts that also moved from form to form, ironically served to ‘fix’ ideas about the strangeness of a notoriously mobile group of people, because the same images were appearing again and again. These visual forms influenced the creative writers who saw them, and the painters looking to achieve the perfect Gypsy stranger subject. That the technical vocabulary of this process includes the terms ‘cliche’ and ‘stereotype’ makes it absolutely clear that the circulation and re-use of these images produces the stereotype as we use the term today – though as I make clear throughout the book, each re-use marks a new kind of encounter, one in dialogue with what came before but also opening out onto other forms. The Penny Magazine described the stereotyping process it used for its readers, an expensive and laborious system of taking a Plaster of Paris mould of relief type and wood engravings together, baking the mould, placing it in a casting box and plunging it into molten metal to produce a plate that could make endless exact copies. Later, electrotyping used a current to adhere a thin skin of metal to a wax mould. The original relief block could be remounted and thus recontextualised in its circulation.53 To put it briefly, the stereotype as a tool of textual circulation produced the stereotype as a tool of ideological construction. The stereotype produced by circulating media, the desire for a textual encounter with this exotic yet also worryingly indeterminate and possibly threatening Gypsy woman, means ‘Gypsy’ texts are enthusiastically consumed. This could also be called – using terminology from the digital

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The Gypsy Woman age as well as the steam age – ‘spreadable’. Jenkins et al. use this term to mean participatory – and messy – sharing of material. Engaging the affective approach to texts I use in this book, one could consider the textual encounter a messy business, whether it happens in the nineteenth or the twenty-first century. It is partial, individual, unfinished, opening out, connected in multiple ways. ‘Spreadability’ is the potential, according to Jenkins et al., for audiences to share content.54 It is also, I suggest, a way of describing the particular features of textual encounters on which this book focuses. The reappearance again and again of particular themes is accounted for by a spreadability made possible by analogue and digital technologies of cultural circulation, repetition and re-use.

Resisting recognition The ‘Gypsiness’ of the representations in this book insists on both the author/artist/creator and the reader/viewer/consumer knowing who the Gypsy woman is, recognising her, placing her, but, as I have indicated, not being able to make her fully knowable or present. This is one key characteristic the representations in this book share. The advantage of Ahmed’s approach casts these particular modes of encounter so that the Gypsy woman might not be who you think she is, might turn away, and might become someone else in the future. Many of these representations already concede this, in a way that Ahmed anticipates, because ‘encounters between others involve the production and over-representation of the stranger as a figure of the unknowable’.55 I do not think many of these writers and artists would be surprised to see a reading that centres strangeness and the unknowable; it is one explanation for the enduring artistic interest in the Gypsy woman. Those works, as Jennifer Fleissner suggests in relation to other texts featuring women, ‘evoke powerful responses precisely for the ways in which they do not boil down either to oppressive or liberatory formulation’.56 We can see as much in a description by Charles Godfrey Leland – one of those founder members of the Gypsy Lore Society mentioned above – of the Gypsy who slips ‘like the wren in and out of the shadow of the Unknown’.57 His project is to bring the Gypsy out of the shadows and in to the realm of Western knowledge, to enable encounters between his readers and the Oriental Gypsy to which I turn in Chapter 3. To mark out the Gypsy woman as strange is to 22

Timely Introductions over-represent her as unknowable while also laying claim to her as a stranger; to catch the wren and put her in a cage. ‘The stranger’, after all, ‘is produced as a category within knowledge, rather than coming into being in an absence of knowledge’.58 Accounting for these textual encounters, turning that strangeness around, opens the cage door. Leland’s approach, which I use here as synecdoche for a swathe of nineteenth-century attitudes towards knowledge about and representation of the Gypsy woman, attitudes which inform the culture that surrounds us today, deploys a poetically visual image: the secretive wren in shadowy darkness, brought deliberately into the light of knowledge – knowledge about it. The image he writes is, like the media images of Asian women described by Pratibha Parmar, ‘rooted in, and locked into, the political and social systems of domination’.59 Parmar rallies Asian women to rescue themselves from the dehumanising and belittling prevailing images that surround them in Britain, and I would suggest that in such reconstitution there is a role for all consumers of texts representing non-white women to try to understand the relationships between representation and power, and the way experiences exceed representation. Feminist composer, artist and author Trinh T. Minh-ha has written about the ways in which the ubiquitous claim of making visible the invisible induces us to use that visibility as the measure of our thought and action, ignoring ‘the power of blanks, holes, silences, and empty spaces’.60 My readings of selected nineteenth- and twenty-first-century representations of Gypsy women form a strategy for reconfiguring the strangeness of othered women to male eyes seeing with a white gaze, finding sources of power in being unknown in systems of knowledge that privilege masculinity, and being unseen as part of restrictive essentialist categories. Judith Wilson reflects on ‘having come to believe that race, gender, and the visual structure one another in a complex set of epistemological feedback loops’, and thus losing ‘faith in the explanatory power of singular approaches to cultural constructs’.61 In each textual encounter reflected on in this book, race, gender and the visual are co-implicated, with (as Wilson describes and Leland enacts here) written descriptions deploying the register of the visual and the visible, intimately connected to the images found on the same page or elsewhere in their readers’ experience. Centuries apart, yet wishing to make the invisible and/or unknowable Gypsy visible, are Leland with his wren in the shadow of the unknown and Channel 4’s chief executive

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The Gypsy Woman describing Big Fat Gypsy Weddings in 2012 as ‘shining a light on marginal communities’.62 I do not suggest that Leland’s writing and a reality television programme find the same audiences or act on their readers and viewers in exactly the same ways, but it is a tactic throughout this book to point to instances when the images with which we are confronted in the twenty-first century mark out the Gypsy woman as strange with remarkably similar themes to those of texts and images from the past, putting the Gypsy woman of today in dialogue with her foremothers, whether the text’s producers intend that or not. The idea is, as Anca Pusca suggests, ‘to move beyond overly simplified discourses of ‘‘negative’’ visibility bad, ‘‘positive’’ visibility good, or ‘‘metaphoric’’ stereotypical depictions of Gypsies bad, ‘‘real’’ depictions of Gypsies good’. However, while Pusca points to ‘a new turn in modern representations of Romani Gypsies and Traveler groups at a time when increased visibility and access to these communities through different technologies of seeing are making it difficult to sustain old stereotypes’,63 I suggest that many representations converge on the same themes and run the risk of repeating stereotypes. To ‘turn the strangeness around’ is thus not the same as saying that representations of strangeness lose their power to harm; the textual encounters that recognise the Gypsy woman only as exotic, untrustworthy, mystical, dark and rootless are as pernicious as ever. Ahmed’s work considers ‘how the particular encounter both informs and is informed by the general: [. . .] the framing of the encounter by broader relationships of power and antagonism’.64 This informs one of the central questions of this book: how do particular textual encounters with the Gypsy woman inform, and how are they informed by, historical and contingent relationships of power and antagonism? The painting on the cover of this book is an exemplary instance of visual culture playing out relationships of power and antagonism between Gypsy women, non-Gypsies and the artist who represents them. The way I describe my encounter with the painting is symptomatic of encounters throughout the book, following Pollock’s questions about readings that slip from ‘image to image, trope to trope’. She asks: ‘are they the kind of movement made possible by the critical reflexivity on issues of race, class and sexuality characteristic of contemporary [1999] feminist theory?’ She concludes that ‘such interrogations of the archive provide access to a possible historical unconscious revealed through the patterns of

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Timely Introductions repetition, return, repression and displacement’.65 It is with these patterns that I engage. The Gypsy, an 1865 painting by Thomas George Webster, hangs in the Smith Art Gallery in Brighouse, West Yorkshire. Opposite it hangs Outside Cairo by the well-known Victorian painter Frederick Goodall, the result of Goodall’s visits to Egypt in 1858 and 1870 in search of an authentic vision of the East. Goodall also considered Gypsies an artistic subject: in 1848 he exhibited at the British Institution Exhibition a painting now titled Gypsy Encampment by the Towner Gallery but originally given a verse in lieu of a title: ‘In sheltry nooks and hollow ways / We cheerily pass our summer days’. Retitled Gipsy Family in Three Generations, this reached a wide audience when it appeared in the Illustrated London News, rendered by the skilled engraver George Dalziel.66 Webster’s Gypsy painting also hangs next to a work by Henry Nelson O’Neil, whose painting of a picnic is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. In 2017, then, the experience of seeing Webster’s painting in a gallery was to see it in dialogue with Goodall’s alluring and Orientalist image of Egypt – a place which pours into the title of Webster’s painting – and work by an artist who had earlier sought out a Gypsy subject. The Smith Gallery’s O’Neil painting, My Native Land Goodbye (1879), explores migration, national identity and melancholy. Webster could not know that ideas about Orientalism and nation would hang in the air in front of his painting, less still that they would be accessible to viewers around the world via high-quality digital reproductions online. Nonetheless, it is near-impossible to see The Gypsy without this contemporary context. Webster’s sharp-faced Gypsy woman, seemingly emerging from the foliage outside the open window, wears a yellow patterned scarf around a black hat, and a bright orange cloak. The bright colours are familiar from many other depictions of Gypsy women, and contrast with the muted interior and pastel shades of the room and its pale occupant, surrounded as she is by the accoutrements and furnishings of middle-class life. The colour that ends up catching the viewer’s attention most, however, is the scrap of blue in the Gypsy’s wicker basket. This flash of blue draws the eye horizontally from the centre of the painting, where the pale girl sits sewing, to the Gypsy on the right. One’s gaze shuttles back and forth between the sewing woman and the Gypsy. On the centre point of this blue axis sits a small white pot on the windowsill. This pot is easily reachable through the

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The Gypsy Woman window, and placing it right in the middle of these two women centres their encounter on the suspicion that the Gypsy woman will steal from the other. The latter’s expression suggests that the wide-open window suddenly seems a mistake, that she may have to drop her delicate sewing in a hurry. We do not know the Gypsy woman’s intention, of course. Her hand is raised with a pointed finger, perhaps an interpellative gesture. One of the most interesting things about the Gypsy woman in this painting, however, is where she does not appear. On the far wall of the painted room hangs a convex mirror. In that mirror one can see the artist at the easel, the woman inside the room, but not the Gypsy woman. The inclusion of a mirror in a painting that relies on three-dimensional monocular perspective always raises two complicated questions: what is the place of the artist in relation to her- or himself and the painted object? And where is the viewer positioned? In a reading of Manet’s selfportraiture, Gregory Galligan reminds us that the figure of the artist in the painting ‘represents the act of making the painting itself, with the result that the image seems to be perpetually constructing its own parameters’, meaning that Webster’s room and the encounters taking place in it are not solid and fixed: the world of the painting is never finished – a reality experienced when I put it in dialogue with its changing context outside the world of the painting, in a Brighouse gallery. Galligan also suggests that by the mid-nineteenth century, as Webster was painting, ‘the mirror had acquired the status of the thinking painter’s paradigm’. Exceeding its function as a metaphor for painterly mimesis, a mirror could indicate ‘the essentially reflexive condition of all looking’.67 In other words, the presence of the mirror in Webster’s painting is an indication that the viewer should question the power and antagonisms of the visual encounter. The mirror ‘abducts’ the viewer’s gaze, drawing one’s eye away from the blue axis and in to the painting’s top-left corner so that the beholder becomes an unwitting ‘trespasser’ in the space of the painting, ‘becoming an intrinsic participant within it’.68 The convex nature of the glass means that the Gypsy woman is beyond its plane, but the place where the painting’s viewer should find her- or himself bulges towards us. As I look at this painting, I find myself an invisible yet intrinsic participant, trespassing in the room, a position that demands I account for the representation of the present-but-disappearing Gypsy woman. As the painting is continually remade by the artist in the mirror, the Gypsy woman plays no part in that

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Timely Introductions process. Framed by the window and the transgression of which she is preemptively suspected, framed by the painting, but crowded out of the mirror, she might be understood as represented but losing out in the artistic encounter triangulated by white model, viewer and artist positioned in the mirror. On the other hand, she cannot be seen from every angle offered by the painting, eluding the imperative of the visible as described by Trinh T. Minh-ha, resisting full recognition of her in a worldview that suspects and excludes Gypsy women.

Time and the transhistorical This engagement with the painting reads the work of art today, in the twenty-first century. As Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey-Sauron note, the past, whether in the form of visual or literary culture, myth or personal history or trauma, interacts with the present in the formation of a space both deeply personal to the creative artist, writer or academic but also able to negotiate much wider questions.69

This book as a whole moves habitually between textual encounters with Gypsy women from the nineteenth century (and, in some cases, earlier) to the present – as with my comparison of The Graphic to Pinterest. This is not a gesture designed to elide the differences between the past and the present, nor to suggest that all recent representations of Gypsy women simply repeat those that came before (though some are guilty of this). Rather, I emphasise two key ideas about the temporal relationship between these representations of Gypsy women. The first is that the only way of accessing nineteenth-century culture is from our twenty-first-century perspective. This is, in part, a response to Pollock and Turvey-Sauron’s sense of an academic writer’s ‘personal engagement’ with her or his subject matter, an element of analysis ‘concerned with the tension between interior spaces and the nature of their interactions within culture’. I engage with the texts that are available to me, a non-Romani woman in the twenty-firstcentury West/Global North. An image from the Victorian Graphic or Illustrated London News may now be digitised and searchable, or it may be

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The Gypsy Woman retrieved from a dusty library shelf. Either way, it can never again be read by a middle-class nineteenth-century (male) reader with no knowledge of the proceeding decades. Every article is in dialogue with what came afterwards, with what the reader knows. Every visual and literary encounter opens out on to previous ones. What I try to do throughout the book is to make clear the way these Gypsy women of the text are encountered today, rather than trying to recreate a living history of nineteenth- or twentieth-century readers and viewers. I also note that, while many of the historical texts examined here assumed a male reader or viewer (with some exceptions), the textual Gypsy women of today have often been produced with a female audience in mind.70 This is not to introduce a history of gendered audiences, but to emphasise that even contemporary media directed towards women makes derogatory assumptions about non-white womanhood (relating to intelligence and impetuosity, sexual availability or bodily display, for instance), often speaking to women in ways that uphold masculinist conceptions of women in part because these textual encounters between women open out onto encounters controlled by men. Neither is there space here to fully map the social landscape in which today’s encounters take place. For instance, race and gender are understood in different ways today from how they were in earlier centuries – this almost goes without saying. Twenty-first-century depictions of Gypsy women are not privileged here above their historical counterparts because of their ‘nowness’; instead I prefer to see the historical, especially nineteenth-century, texts of my academic specialism in constant dialogue with those I – and many other cultural consumers – encounter today. Twenty-first-century texts are used to situate my standpoint for rereadings of texts from the past. Undoubtedly, this cannot, by the nature of cultural consumption, be a universal experience, and my emphasis on ‘encounters’ hints further at the subjective mode in which these representations are read. Again, the way I encounter these texts is as a white British academic: I ‘fully acknowledge’, as Felski advises, ‘the coimplication and entanglement of text and critic’.71 I am also of a generation of academics who were trained using almost entirely analogue methods of research, and I am not a digital native like the undergraduate students I teach. I am often still astounded by the power and possibility of the digital, of the lack of dust – to revisit Carolyn Steedman’s encounters with particles in the archive – of the potential to put the old and new side

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Timely Introductions by side.72 This old-fashioned wonder at the digital increases, I suggest, the visibility of digital and analogue parallels. This brings me to the second idea about the temporal relationships between representations of Gypsy women that I want to call on. That is that digitisation and online image-sharing are analogues of reproduction technologies in the nineteenth century that enable particular images to make a deeper impression on the culture in which they are embedded, lending them the appearance of ‘truth’ because of their wide circulation and frequent reappearance. An image of the Gypsy woman as Oriental, dark, romantic, free and impetuous comes around again and again. To compound this, the nineteenth century’s favourite images are often those that reappear online today as people share them on their blogs and on sites such as Pinterest. The reappearance of exactly the same or very similar images and descriptions across different media and time periods loosely fits the description of ‘convergence’ that Henry Jenkins (together with other media scholars) uses to describe media in the twenty-first century. It is ‘the flow of content across multiple media platforms’, he says, but combined with ‘cooperation between multiple media industries’ as well as the ‘migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want’.73 Textual encounters with the Gypsy woman in the nineteenth century and today converge on particular themes because of the way those textual encounters open out onto others through circulation and repetition, because of the way people feel and talk about or share their encounters, and because of the fear and desire provoked by the exotic difference in those representations. In thinking more about that first idea, that the only way of accessing nineteenth-century culture is from our twenty-first-century perspective, and about my critical attention to texts, Felski’s The Limits of Critique is a useful guiding light. I am still, perhaps more than Felski, wedded to the idea that a text bears the marks of the context of its production, but I no longer think it is enough to read a text in that way: there is more to be said about the relevance of texts as they are read today, the other texts with which they are in dialogue. The same themes come around again and again in textual encounters with the Gypsy woman, but that does not mean we experience them the same way twice. ‘History’, Felski reminds us, ‘is not a box’. What she means by this is that ‘standard ways

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The Gypsy Woman of thinking about historical context are unable to explain how works of art move across time’. She asks for ‘models of textual mobility and transhistorical attachment’ because ‘texts are objects that do a lot of traveling; moving across time, they run into new semantic networks, new ways of imputing meaning’.74 I therefore take a presentist approach to convergent textual encounters: a method which requires a little further unpacking. In many of the examples here, I do not read between the lines of these textual encounters, nor deliberately against the grain: I mainly examine what the texts say, and what they say to each other. I am not, however, averse to pointing out contradiction and omission where it is obvious, for instance when reading a nineteenth-century text in 2017. The question of what is ‘obvious’ changes over time, of course, and there is no denying that as an academic of a certain age I am fully schooled in deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, feminist, postcolonial and new historicist ways of reading. But these ways of reading are now also, in many ways, engrained in various forms of popular culture, so that they inform how many audiences, not just academic ones, encounter a text. For instance, the popularity of the neoVictorian novel or television series, as described by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, demonstrates just how willing mainstream audiences are to revisit textual relationships with the past, eschewing a faithful (and impossible) reconstruction of nineteenth-century subjectivity for an experience that re-examines the past from a self-consciously twenty-firstcentury viewpoint.75 An example of what Heilmann and Llewellyn call the metahistorical is Sally Wainwright’s Bront€e television biofiction, with its knowing treatments of gender, domestic labour, artistic creation and addiction underscored by ending scenes in the Bront€e Parsonage museum that emphasise both the enduring appeal and the commercialisation of the Bront€es. Another example of the metahistorical and metatextual is Laura Fish’s novel Strange Music, which returns to the effects of slavery via the life of the poet Elizabeth Barrett.76 Twenty-first-century cultural consumers are adept at recognising the ways in which their contemporary moment affects their encounters with the past. In short, the prevailing discourses about Gypsy women in the texts I examine are of distrust and displeasure, desire and fear of the exotic: I am not making these texts speak with a different voice, but I am looking at them in a twenty-first-century light. The exploration of encounters in these pages are not in the service of

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Timely Introductions the text, though: many of the works are damaging, demeaning, disrespectful and racist. As texts, they do not require veneration. These are, simply put, transhistorical encounters. What is a transhistorical encounter? It is an encounter with an historical text in the present with an explicit acknowledgement of the present moment. Historical representations of Gypsy women are not sealed off in the century of their production and initial reception as if in a museum’s glass case without any visitors. Transhistorical readings throw open the museum doors and think about what those visitors watched last night on television, read at school, saw on the newsstands or heard on the radio on their way in. As visitors look at the texts of the past presented in this imaginary museum, they might hope to gain insight into historical representation, but also into thematically similar texts of the present and the attitudes that inform and are informed by them, producing a transhistorical dialogue. As Charles Martindale notes, in considering the reception and re-use of Classical texts: ‘‘‘Our’’ moment is not insulated from other moments. [. . .] That is one way the human mind can work, within constantly changing contexts of production and reception: it can move easily and fleetly about in time’. Indeed, Martindale sees the transhistorical as ‘a crucial part of the experience of being human as well as necessary to the understanding of the great texts of the past’. He argues for the transhistorical, not the universal. A text from (in my work) the nineteenth century neither has the same meaning nor produces the same resonances today as it did when it was first made. However, ‘illumination can come from the friction between different historical moments in our aesthetic perception of, our receptivity to, different objects from the past’. Martindale argues that ‘our encounters with the past are best conceptualized’ by seeing the ‘implication of the historical and the transhistorical’ and recognising ‘the importance and relevance for us of the past and its monuments’ (emphasis added).77 This book uses twenty-firstcentury representations of Gypsy women in order to recognise the importance and relevance for culture today of those representations of the past. In other words, racist depictions of the Gypsy woman, depictions that see her as a hyper-sexualised, exotic Oriental or dangerous witch, are not safely held in the past but must be understood in dialogue with fictional representations of Gypsy women today in order to inform and change future representation for the better. The racism of the nineteenth century is

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The Gypsy Woman not the racism of today, but in order to break free of Gypsy stereotypes it is necessary to understand the ways in which television programmes, novels, digital image-sharing and music videos interact with the past – in particular, here, with the nineteenth century. The way I move towards this understanding is by seeing contemporary cultural texts as evidence for our receptivity to (or denial of) historical prejudices about the Gypsy woman. This is the ‘transhistorical’ not as immutable form, but as crossing rigidly imposed historical boundaries, as breaking out of a strict periodisation of cultural texts. I am, like Eric Hayot, ‘sympathetic to the project of denaturalizing the literary institution’s preferred contextualizations’ with the political project of unlocking the glass museum cases that make past racisms seem safe objects of study.78 The Gypsy women in The Graphic and on Pinterest are not the same, but I cannot ignore having seen Pinterest when I go back to The Graphic, and what I know of The Graphic in the nineteenth century informs the way I look at Pinterest. Linda Hutcheon necessarily examines the transhistorical when she considers the adaptation of stories from one form to another (or the same form multiple times). In ‘learning from practice’ in her Theory of Adaptation, she actually points to two examples which appear again in this book: the vampire narrative, and the ‘gypsy woman, Carmen’, perhaps one of the two most famous fictional European Gypsy women of all time (Dumas’s Esmeralda being the other). It is Carmen she chooses to explore in some detail and which I want to note here. Hutcheon asserts that Carmen is ‘culturally stereotyped yet retrofitted in ideological terms for adaptation to different times and places’, but also has a ‘confusing range of political reinterpretations’ and often ‘conflicting stereotypes’, something that has ‘made for the story’s continuing fascination for adapters and audiences alike’.79 It is useful to engage with Hutcheon’s reading of Carmen(s) to locate my own transhistorical reading here. ‘Whether the adaptation portrays Carmen as victim or victimizer’, Hutcheon says, ‘depends on the politics of the particular contexts of creation and reception’. So far, so historicist, but the adaptations cannot be so easily disentangled. Hutcheon points to the ways in which Prosper Merimee’s story, the source of Bizet’s opera, was itself a tissue of other quotations: George Borrow’s The Zincali (1841), stories people told him and the Orientalised Spain written about by Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert. In neither of the two operatic Carmens that followed is she ‘the vicious and

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Timely Introductions devious’ woman of Merimee’s text; she becomes a ‘sanitized’ version that the librettists made into a ‘liberated woman’, sensuous and celebrating her own otherness. Through to Jean-Luc Godard’s Prenom Carmen (1983) and a 2001 MTV ‘Hip-Hopera’, Hutcheon considers the haunting palimpsests of each Carmen. ‘When this narrative changes context’, she concludes, ‘it is both different and the same’. Encounters with Carmen are never simply one-offs: even in their difference from other versions, each new performance or text sees a cast of other writers and directors lurking in the wings (Merimee, Borrow, Bizet, Flaubert, Godard et al.), and a crowd of other Carmens elbowing their way on stage. Similarly, we cannot see paintings of Gypsy women other than alongside their gallery-mates, whether physical or online.

What, why and how As I edited this introduction, an article in my local newspaper, the Huddersfield Examiner, described a ‘travellers site’ that had been refused planning permission.80 When the newspaper posted this story on Facebook, one commenter clearly felt no compunction about bemoaning ‘bloody gyppos’ in response. Such comments are not unusual either online or ‘in real life’. Conversely, when summarising my research (to a nonRomani audience) I have heard ‘Oh! I love Gypsies!’ I think they mean Gypsy skirts, dancing and headscarves, as there has never been any elaboration about their esteem for Romani life. The novels, paintings, TV programmes and music videos discussed here matter, are worth considering, because people like(d) them, and because other people (or sometimes the same people) voice racist views about ‘bloody gyppos’. The novels are enjoyable narratives, a good read. As Felski notes, ‘texts cannot influence the world by themselves, but only via the intercession of those who read them, digest them, reflect on them, rail against them, use them as points of orientation, and pass them on’. In this way, this book constitutes just such an intercession. What Felski calls ‘textual actors’, those texts and people I would say are involved in the textual encounter, are caught in ‘networks of cooperation, conflict, control, and cocreation’. Readers, says Felski, ‘can be touched, troubled, perhaps even transformed by the texts they read’.81 The encounters here are sometimes touching, often troubling and transformative in the effect they have on expectations of and attitudes 33

The Gypsy Woman towards Gypsy women. Not all the forms of text should be thought of as having the same effect or value. We make choices about what we consume, choices partly determined by class, education, gender, politics, community, family and other social formations. I, for instance, would rather go to an art gallery than read a tabloid newspaper. However, the digital versions of those newspapers often appear in my internet searches for other sources, so I could easily do both, accidentally, on the same day. The tabloid story may trade in anger, fear, disgust and disappointment, and the painting I sit in front of may be designed to elicit reverence, joy, awe and hope (these are deliberate generalisations towards accepted mainstream discourses of media and art). Representations in these contexts are not equal, but various cultural forms act on us in countless complex combinations to produce a sense of the represented Gypsy woman. Some years ago, I went to a Tate Britain exhibition about Orientalism. Tate curate blockbuster exhibitions and Orientalism, they knew, would be busy. I made the journey and bought the ticket not to sneer at imperialist ideology with my nose in the air, like the good student of Edward Said that I was. I knew (or thought I knew) what my encounter with these paintings meant in a postcolonial context. But I went because I thought I would like looking at the paintings. I wanted rich colours and beautifully captured light effects, sumptuous fabrics and peacocks. In the representations of Gypsy women in this book, many of the narratives are diverting and the paintings arresting. At the same time, they are often uncomfortable and distasteful. For others, it may be important and gratifying to see Gypsy culture represented but still slightly troubling to see the way this is done. For still others, they may be funny because they are so inaccurate. Or they may be inspiring, because they present a spirited heroine to live up to. There is no singular explanation for these texts, but the book attempts to account for the textual encounters that persist in presenting the Gypsy woman as circumscribed by race, exoticised by Orientalism, inauthentic if she does not conform to stereotype, witchlike and unhomely. I have described the ways in which this work takes an affective approach to Romani Studies, the felt responses to the Gypsy woman as she is described and the way one feels about representation of her. This is, I have asserted, the interface of history, the female Gypsy body in these texts and traditions of representation legible in each textual encounter. This is a methodological departure for arts and humanities-focused

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Timely Introductions Romani Studies, a new contribution to the field which, I hope, will also provide insight for scholars of affect theory in terms of new applications, and the political implications of each application. I have also suggested that the descriptions of encounters with the Gypsy woman do not lose sight of the role of the discursive, the ideological and the semiotic in those reactions. Meaning, explains Catherine Belsey in her landmark Critical Practice, is ‘public and conventional, the result not of individual intention but of inter-individual intelligibility’. We do not make sense of our encounters alone. Drawing on the semiotic studies of Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Lacan’s engagement with Saussure, Belsey argues that ‘in so far as language is a way of articulating experience, it necessarily participates in ideology, the sum of the ways in which people both live and represent to themselves their relationship to the conditions of their existence’. Ideology, she adds, ‘is inscribed in signifying practices – in discourses, myths, presentations and re-presentations of the way ‘‘things’’ ‘‘are’’’.82 The ideologically constructed fictional Gypsy woman is inscribed in the signifying practices I examine in the written and visual forms in this book. I have also marked out this work as ‘feminist transhistorical’, following Pollock’s suggestion that breaching conventions of time and history might allow us to properly consider the difference of the feminine as part of feminist practice. As Chris Weedon noted in the late 1990s, ‘the problem of conceiving difference in ways which are not restrictive but liberating remains a key theoretical and political question for contemporary feminism’. She adds that ‘discourses of sexual and racial difference – which take bodies as their referent and guarantee – continue to be implicated in relations of power which both assume and produce structural relations of privilege and disadvantage’.83 To return to Ahmed: we might ‘consider how such differences are determined at the level of the encounter’.84 It is the contention of this book that by conceiving of the textual Gypsy woman via the encounter, one might read the ways in which she avoids recognition within restrictive and disadvantaging categories of otherness, keeping some of her strangeness to herself for her own ends. As a gendered discourse, race appears to be able to guarantee the behaviour of the Gypsy woman. As an allied discourse, Orientalism, too, suggests that she will perform a particular sexualised, objectified role. The complexity of the encounter, in all its textually networked, transhistorical reality, means that

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The Gypsy Woman the Gypsy woman can be seen resisting these taxonomic limitations, and readers, viewers and audiences catch glimpses of representations that exceed these discursively produced expectations. It is true, as Alexandra Oprea explains, that ‘feminist discourse in Europe effectively ignores the existence of Romani women and other minority women while preaching a universal doctrine of gender empowerment’. This is a familiar criticism of white Western feminism. Oprea adds that ‘the two terms ‘‘Roma’’ and ‘‘women’’ have effectively been constructed as mutually exclusive’, whereas this book labours to consider the terms ‘Gypsy’ and ‘woman’ intersectionally. As Oprea makes clear, ‘one cannot separate being Romani from being a woman for Romani women who live at this intersection’, and the same can be said for encounters with the fictional Gypsy woman: she exists at this intersection, and both her gender and racialised Gypsiness are differences (from the white male) that matter. ‘Without confronting racism’, Oprea confirms, ‘feminist discourse in fact serves only to advance the rights of privileged white women’.85 In the proceeding chapters, I take this feminist transhistorical affective approach to the textual encounter in relation to the features of the Gypsy woman stereotype on which representations converge. In Chapter 2, ‘Race and Recognition’, I use encounters with an eighteenth-century legal case to think about how the Gypsy woman is racialised in a specifically gendered way, referring to her appearance and with texts implying that she engages in witchcraft. The chapter then expands on this to consider the ways in which Gypsies were and are framed as a non-white race in literary, nonfiction and visual examples (including the infamous Big Fat Gypsy Weddings) – but also points to the vacillations in these encounters between hereditary and cultural characteristics. It explores the ‘complex romance/ revulsion’ of the racialised other, described by Homi Bhabha as the ‘ambivalence of desire’.86 The dark female Gypsy body is figured in my examples as uncontrolled and primitive, an indication of passions running wild. This racist stereotype circumscribes the possibilities for a Gypsy woman to be seen as intelligent, scholarly, quiet, forward-planning, civilised, upright and restrained, though my analyses are always on the lookout for the ways in which the encounter belies this expectation. As Chris Weedon explains, ‘primitivism variously sees non-Western, non-White Others as more spiritual, more intuitive, more physical, more

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Timely Introductions sensual and more sexual’. This also means that ‘they are defined as less rational and less sophisticated than their white Western counterparts’.87 The chapter ultimately reminds us that different encounters respond to historical conceptions of race in different ways, with varying degrees of affirmation, denial or a combination of the two, yet those conceptions form the backdrop to every textual encounter with the Gypsy woman. Chapter 3 focuses on one particular manifestation of racism and imbalances of power engendered by difference: Orientalism. It teases out this discourse in written and visual examples from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, following up on the promise of the transhistorical to move between Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It also considers a form of Orientalism that is comparatively rarely discussed but central to textual encounters with Gypsy women: EuroOrientalism. That is, the Orientalising of Eastern Europe, in particular a turn to this East – especially Romania – when imagining Gypsy culture, whether it is relevant to the British experience or not. The Gypsy woman is supposed to be Oriental, recognised as a Gypsy woman when she conforms to this coin-fringed, barefoot, mystical stereotype. Ironically, the more she fits the a priori mould, the more authentic the representation is judged to be, and it is this authenticity that Chapter 4 considers. It feels right; she looks right; she looks as expected. The paradox of authenticity is explored, particularly the concept of authenticity as used in the study of folklore. The politics of writers celebrating a Gypsy culture that remains authentically other, a people in the role of perennial strangers, is examined. Artistic and literary representations of the Romani women Keomi Gray and Esmeralda Lock are highlighted as particularly strong examples of encounters opening out on to each other. The chapter concludes that authenticity purports to be about truth, though the location and ownership of that truth is at issue when these representations are reconsidered as textual encounters. Not only can we see the Gypsy woman resisting the claims to authenticity made by depictions of her, her resistance undermines discourses of authenticity when they profess to speak the truth of racialised female bodies and behaviour. In keeping with this theme of resisting knowledge about her held by the white male ‘expert’, Chapter 5 turns to a powerful form of knowledge outside the experience and control of the non-Gypsy: fortunes and curses. The fortune-telling Gypsy is, of course, part of many negative or

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The Gypsy Woman romanticised stereotypes, but this practice has also proved to be an important feature of female Romani economic power, and here also displays the potential for discursive power, a liberating form of strangeness. Examining representations of fortune-tellers transhistorically, rather than chronologically, hints at the possibilities of the liberatory power that this alternative, female-centric knowledge system offers. In some corners of the internet, female bloggers, Pinterest users and Instagrammers believe that adopting a ‘gypsy’ (with a lower-case ‘g’) mantle to describe their free-spiritedness and desire for off-the-beatentrack travel is similarly liberatory. Chapter 6 contends that this gesture draws on but also contradicts the ways in which the authentic Gypsy desire for travel is perceived as ‘in the blood’ and thus connected to the discourse of race. The chapter uses Sara Ahmed’s assertion that the idea of the stranger delegitimises certain forms of mobility or movement to consider perceptions of the travelling life of Gypsy women. If a non-Romani person hires a van or vardo for a week’s holiday, this is considered legitimate; if a Romani family travels with living and work vans, this is delegitimised in newspaper headlines, neighbourhood watch meetings, local authority legal action and online comment – this is what is at stake in Ahmed’s assertion. Looking back to the nineteenth century, a period in which Gypsy travel was equally romanticised and denigrated, while still being a more common and regular reality for Romani people, the travelling Gypsy woman is: a) part of a nation that economically relied on travel; b) expected to travel because of a racially defined imperative; c) delegitimised in her travel as a Gypsy stranger; and d) desired and feared as a transgressive figure because of that delegitimation. While both men and women lived mobile lives, there is a particular association between mobility and sexuality in relation to the Gypsy woman. These ideas about travel are intimately connected to ideas about ‘home’: where one may establish a home, what it means, who has a right of access to it, what its boundaries are. Indeed, many of the nineteenth-century writers who create encounters with Gypsy women equate home with nation. The chapter concludes that the texts examined wrestle with the possibility of a travelling domesticity, insisting that one should always have somewhere permanent to return. To close the encounter with the Gypsy woman, the conclusion explores the types of twenty-first-century issue at stake in textual encounters with this figure via an eight-part British drama series from 2014, Glue. Having

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Timely Introductions looked deliberately at the twenty-first century, I reflect on the insight engendered by the transhistorical approach to encounters with the Gypsy woman in texts from earlier centuries, and what that focus might mean for representations of Gypsy women in the future. I suggest that more encounters shaped by Romani women themselves on their own terms, as actors, directors, producers, writers, editors, curators, artists – in every creative cultural role – would make a difference to the representation of Romani experience, and that representations made by non-Romani people should depart from or comment on stereotype, acknowledging the complexity and diversity of Romani experience. This is not to reject the representational past; indeed, my insistence on the transhistorical encounter means that we might return to the fictional, exaggerated or overdetermined Gypsy woman that exists in literary and visual culture with new eyes, seeing how she is connected to other encounters and uses a discursive strangeness as a form of feminist liberation.

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2 Race and Recognition

On New Year’s Day 1753, a teenage maidservant called Elizabeth Canning was apparently kidnapped from the City of London to be forced into prostitution in Enfield, some miles away. After several weeks in starving captivity, she claimed to have escaped through a window. The woman who owned the brothel was sentenced to branding of the thumb, and a woman who assisted her was sentenced to death by hanging. This latter suspect had an alibi, however, and she received a full pardon. Canning was tried for perjury and transported to America. It was a sensational legal case, the O. J. Simpson trial of its day, and keen interest in it has persisted through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and well into the twenty-first. The story has been retold many times as both ‘fact’ and fiction, including much later assessments of the case and a crime novel, The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey (1948). Debate has raged for centuries about the possible motivations for Canning’s lie (perhaps to disguise a pregnancy, for instance), or whether she was really telling the truth. Canning is not the person in this case who holds the most interest for this chapter, however. Here, I want to think about the woman Canning encountered; who, it was alleged, cut off Canning’s undergarments and assisted the brothel keeper; the woman who protested her innocence and claimed to have been in Dorset at the time of the kidnapping. Her name was Mary Squires, and she was a Gypsy. 40

Race and Recognition As a way into thinking about how race informs encounters with the Gypsy woman, I want to describe the way it has informed textual encounters with Mary Squires, in particular from 1753 to the present. This chapter examines the way certain textual encounters – for instance, the reader or viewer meeting Squires in a text, and the way Canning and Squires are pitted against each other – are connected to others, and how they speak to each other about race. These encounters with Squires (and the other racialised Gypsy women of the chapter) are not discrete, and the ongoing interest in this case demonstrates the way in which the ideas that helped convict Squires are convictions that come around again and again. We cannot safely put them back in 1753 and consider antiGypsyism a thing of the past. Squires was subject to shaming descriptions of her appearance long after everyone involved in the case was dead and buried, descriptions that can be shocking (but not necessarily unheard of) to twenty-first-century readers. ‘Racial hierarchy’ is, of course, an outmoded scientific idea, long recognised as a ‘fiction’, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. notes, but one whose effects continue to organise our social and cultural lives as a relationship of power and antagonism.1 It is a concept that is inherently racist and based on a hierarchical human taxonomy. Writers, commentators, scientists and artists used such categorisation openly and seriously in the nineteenth century to predict behaviour, to justify colonisation and the ill-treatment of indigenous peoples and to attempt to understand the human world they inhabited. Many people in the twenty-first century wish to distance themselves (at least ostensibly) from racist discourse, but more recent textual encounters with Gypsy women are still informed by race, whether that ideology is reproduced or challenged. Indeed, a marked swing to the political right in Europe (with some national exceptions) and the USA, a right wing defined by crude racism and xenophobia, strongly argues against seeing the race-thinking of contemporary representation as a mere inheritance of the vestiges of earlier racisms in a more liberal, connected and open world; instead, these centuries-old figurations of Gypsy women that rest on racist assumptions are of a piece with racist Western twenty-first-century life. In other words, ‘race’ lives on in our encounters with others. After Mary Squires, the chapter describes the concept of race as it was elaborated in the nineteenth century (with close attention to the characters Meg Merrilies and Fedalma), and the ways in

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The Gypsy Woman which it lingers in contemporary culture through encounters with Gypsy women. Through literary, non-fiction and visual examples, it draws attention to the ways in which Gypsies were and are framed as a nonwhite race. This chapter heads up the book because every stereotype unpicked in the proceeding chapters is a variant of racist ideas about Gypsy women, or is inflected by the racist stereotypes introduced here. Prejudice against Gypsies pre-exists the crystallisation of race as an idea, but it is most often this fixed racialised image that forms the backdrop to contemporary textual encounters with the Gypsy woman. Seeing the ways in which historical and contemporary encounters open out on to each other is a weapon in the armoury required to dismantle racism amongst white readers and viewers. Canning referred to Mary Squires in her testimony to the Old Bailey in February of 1753 as ‘the gypsey woman Squires’. A key witness in the case, the aptly named Virtue Hall, recalled that Squires’s son, John, was one of the men who initially kidnapped Canning, arriving with her at Susannah Wells’s house in the early hours of the morning saying ‘mother, I have brought you a girl, do you take her’. Another witness, a fish and oyster seller, claimed that Squires was often to be seen around Susannah Wells’s house ‘pretending to tell fortunes’.2 Squires is identified as a Gypsy woman, and said to be engaged in two practices associated in the period by nonGypsies with her people: fortune telling (discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5) and kidnapping. Lou Charnon-Deutsch has noted that baby snatching by Gypsies has been a motif in European literature since as far back as the sixteenth century, for example, in Luigi Giancarli’s La Zingana (1545) and in Cervantes’s novella ‘La Gitanilla’ (1613) where the blonde Preciosa turns out to be the kidnapped daughter of a wealthy magistrate.3 One of the most famous racist non-fiction works about Gypsies is Heinrich Grellmann’s Dissertation on the Gipsies, first published in German in 1783. In that work, as well as many other extraordinary assertions discussed further below, Grellmann draws hysterical attention to this European kidnap accusation (and even associations with cannibalism) at the same time as ostensibly refuting it, suggesting that ‘perhaps in this, as in many other instances, the calumny invented against the Jews might be afterwards transferred to the Gipsies’.4 The libel persists in The Franchise Affair. The witchy, gypsy-like Marion Sharpe – Squires reimagined, complete with a ‘bright silk scarf round her neck’ – has her life made miserable by the kind

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Race and Recognition of textual gossip that proliferated around the Canning affair and that exists in othering tabloid headlines about Gypsies today.5 In the novel, Tey masterfully manipulates the suspicions of characters and readers, pulling in a history that the reader may not even know that he or she knows. Tey deliberately breaks a path between the Canning case and her narrative. In that eighteenth-century case, with Squires labelled as a Gypsy, the accusation that she has kidnapped someone is easier to believe because the accusation has also been widely made against her race. Her recognition as a member of that race predetermines her actions, according to those minded to believe Canning. She is judged first as a Gypsy. There was, as Bevis Hillier has described, an excited public response to Canning and Squires, with two factions known as ‘Canaanites’ (Canningites) and ‘Egyptians’ (those who supported the Gypsy woman).6 Such labelling places the case within a Biblical framework but also, beyond its clever wordplay, emphasises an ancient difference of clan, what would in 1871 be described as ‘bitter partisan divisions’.7 In the book of Genesis, the postdiluvian sons of Shem, Ham and Japheth are divided and subdivided ‘in their nations’, with Egypt and Canaan both sons of Ham – though, to confuse the issue, a theory had been advanced that Gypsies were originally Canaanites whom Joshua dispossessed.8 As described in the Introduction, Gypsies in Britain had long been called ‘Egyptian’, and this eighteenth-century repetition of the misnomer reinvigorates a sense of the Gypsy as an outsider, of a distinctly different bloodline from most people in Britain. As Judith Moore pointed to in her book-length study of the Canning case (in which she ultimately takes the ‘kidnapped’ girl’s side), the apparently ‘deviant character of gypsies’ was repeatedly described in the pro-Canning press in 1753, such as a story about a street-seller of sticks beaten and robbed by Gypsies: ‘a further instance of their Barbarity to our Subjects, [which] shews the immediate Necessity of rooting these Villains out of their Dens’. They are not, in this rendering, ‘our’ subjects and must be rooted out of the nation. Elizabeth Canning’s eventual sentence mirrored the Elizabethan transportation of Gypsies in that genocidal attempt to remove all ‘Egyptians’ from England – though, of course, those individuals removed under Elizabeth’s reign did not have the benefit of travelling in comfort thanks to friends in the East India Company, as did Canning. In a notice in the Gazetteer for 3 April 1753, ‘Gipsies’ and ‘Fortune-tellers’ are lumped in with ‘Imposters, Bawds, Whores, Thieves,

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The Gypsy Woman Robbers, Smugglers, Murderers, and Plunderers at Shipwrecks’.9 According to this way of thinking, a Gypsy is a type of person who engages in a set of criminal behaviours, but one is assigned to that ‘type’ based on one’s body. A contemporaneous illustration of the Canning case for the London Magazine now resides in the collection of the British Museum. It is a double portrait of the two women, and could not emphasise their physical difference more. Simply put, Canning is white and Squires is not, and here lies the most significant otherness that resonates through centuries of representation of Gypsy women. The image of Canning appears to draw on Thomas Worlidge’s portrait from life, while the artist drawing Squires clearly took inspiration from Richard Edgcumbe’s fulllength portrait, which was itself etched by Worlidge after Squires received a pardon. Putting the London Magazine engraving in dialogue with other images of Squires from the period demonstrates the choices illustrators made to accentuate or limit the portrayal of particular physiognomic differences between the women. In the double portrait, Canning has a very broad forehead, a long straight nose, small tight lips and pale skin. Squires, meanwhile, is deliberately a study in the grotesque – much like Sylvia Ganush in Drag Me to Hell (2009), discussed in Chapter 5. Squires is shown with a very large beaked nose, exaggeratedly full lips and a receding chin. She has dark skin, and sideby-side with the pale Canning is made to seem her negative, leering at her across the frame. The implication of the illustration is that Squires is guilty, Canning her victim – with the racist association between dark skin and criminality on which this implication depends. More than this, Squires’s face becomes the nose and lips in a racial caricature – there is barely anything else to look at. Going further in A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning (1753), the novelist Henry Fielding, also the magistrate who found Squires guilty, described Gypsies as having ‘scarce the Appearance of Humanity’.10 Beneath her portrait, she is labelled ‘Mary Squires the Gypsy’. Beneath Canning is a banner with just her name, no other description. Her racialisation is effaced: as a white woman, the English norm and racial standard, no description is deemed necessary. For Dana Rabin, ‘Squires’ conviction and death sentence reflect a cultural consensus that Gypsies were inherently criminal, dishonest, promiscuous and cunning’.11

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Race and Recognition Squires is made to look very similar to caricatures of Jews from the same period. Eighty years later Samuel Roberts (who believed the Gypsies to be descendants of the Egyptians scattered among the nations by Nebuchadnezzar) saw the Gypsies and Jews as Parallel Miracles, God having ‘judged it right to preserve them both distinct people, and to disperse them through every nation’.12 Heinrich Grellmann saw, in the eighteenth century, similarities in the treatment of the two races (as they were understood). Grellmann makes reference to another theory positing Gypsies as German Jews who disguised themselves to escape persecution. Grellmann, using the Oriental origins of both peoples as support, describes their rigidity, their resolve, in maintaining a separate culture and facing ill treatment.13 This implies criticism of both groups’ unwillingness to assimilate with a larger population, but at the same time a strong belief in inherited racial characteristics held by many in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made assimilation both impossible and undesirable. Race will out, the thinking went. To return to Sara Ahmed, ‘bodies that cannot be assimilated into a given social space are, in some sense, already read and recognisable through the histories of determination in which such bodies are associated with dirt and danger’.14 In other words, Grellmann recognises Jews and Gypsies as dirty and dangerous because they are unassimilable, not the other way around. The similarities drawn between Gypsies and Jews in 1753 in particular are perhaps not surprising, as this year also saw debate about the Jewish Naturalization Act. As Rabin makes explicit, and making sense of the quotation above about Gypsies being rooted out, ‘Jews and Gypsies embodied the fears of British people worried about the infiltration of their nation by ‘‘Hebrew’’ and ‘‘Egyptian’’ interlopers’.15 The native-born Anglican English are at risk from others: Jews and Gypsies. Romani people were not, of course, the first or only ‘others’ white Britons encountered. People from various parts of Africa lived in Britain from Roman times, and ‘by the late eighteenth century between fifteen and twenty thousand persons of African descent lived in England’.16 This puts the described blackness of Squires and other Gypsy women referred to in this chapter into context, highlighting the figural, rather than literal, nature of descriptions such as ‘black’. As Griselda Pollock notes, ‘‘‘She is black’’ is not a description. It is a heavily encoded historical representation which says both more and less than it appears to’.17

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The Gypsy Woman In another satirical print, Squires is shown flying on a broomstick, and in another pane of the print converses, looking, once again, like a witch, with the Inspector General of Great Britain. The witch conceit returns in an illustration for The Gentleman’s Magazine, mocking Squires even after her pardon – many images of Squires as a witch in the 1850s are intended to satirise not just her but also Sir Crisp Gascoyne, the Lord Mayor of London who was instrumental in overturning her sentence.18 To reiterate: Squires does not look like this in every portrait; this is not an interpretation of a portrait that attempts verisimilitude. An illustration for the New Universal Magazine clearly takes inspiration from these other sources but rehumanises her face by making the features less dramatic.19 Her skin is also lightened. Another print, depicting the moment of Squires’s guilt as she threatens a bare-breasted Canning with a knife, clutching Canning’s stays, gives Squires an averagely large nose and normal-sized lips and does not darken her skin. Squires appeared in a number of other satirical cartoons that were nothing to do with the case, but showed what a ubiquitous story it became. It was so well known, it could become a proxy for telling other stories.20 What I want to note is that some images of Squires assign her to a particular category of appearance and make an association between the way she looks and the way she should be judged. Others emphasise her Gypsiness, but do not connect it to her guilt or innocence. Yet more images show her as a woman implicated in a crime, but do not represent her with dark skin and exaggerated features. Squires was racialised in some visual representation in the 1750s, but not in all of it. Although, as Rabin notes, ‘the processes of making race in the eighteenth century depended on visual images that communicated cultural, economic and religious differences in bodily or material terms’, the most obviously racialised image reared its head about fifty years later, at a time when race as an ideology had crystallised.21 Reviewing the case over 100 years later, John Paget, writing anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine, returned to the still-extant house where Canning was supposed to have been imprisoned. He notes the absence in the nineteenth century of ‘Mother Wells and her gang of tramps and gypsies’, giving a pretty clear indication of his view of Squires. Paget describes Squires’s face as being one that ‘once seen, could not be forgotten’; whether her face really was like those depicted in the

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Race and Recognition eighteenth-century engravings or not, Paget is keen to revivify the focus on it, and its ‘swarth[iness]’.22 Not only was she, apparently, ‘singularly hideous’, she bore the scars of disease (which do not feature in the illustrations discussed). The descriptions call on how a white reader is supposed to feel about an ugly Gypsy woman. This is an affective, as well as discursive, framing of the textual encounter with Squires. Paget does not mention that Canning also bore the marks of smallpox, a detail supplied to nineteenth-century readers by G. H. Pike in 1871. Indeed, Paget emphasises Squires’s looks to give credence to Squires’s alibi – witnesses to it are bound to remember her. From one of its earliest uses as an equivalent to ‘species’, in Francois Bernier’s 1684 essay ‘A New Division of the Earth According to the Different Species or Races of Men’, race has been identified via facial characteristics.23 Though Paget might not be so explicit, I think his close attention to Squires’s face repeats both the efforts of the double portrait and Bernier’s work to divide humanity up according to racial categories marked by physical, facial difference. Bernier also relied on gradations of female beauty, and Paget’s insistence on Squires’s ugliness seems to confirm this early modern conception of race. Pike, in 1871, is more explicit about race than Paget, though it seems likely that Pike had read Paget’s essay, as he makes reference to a ‘judicial puzzle’, the title of Paget’s piece, and he also alludes to the 1754 broomstick illustration described above.24 In a case like that of Elizabeth Canning and Mary Squires, the slew of mass-consumed images means that every representation of the women from 1753 onwards is informed by many others. If someone wanted to talk about Gypsy predisposition to criminality, or the suspicion of Gypsy women being witches, they called on the Canning case. Analogously, no twenty-first-century depiction of Gypsy women can avoid Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, either to affirm or challenge its portrayal. Every period has its headline Gypsy stereotype. The latter may be ‘high-concept and multi-media’, but the Canning case was an earlier version of this because of the deliberate pervasiveness of uncomplimentary images of Squires, designed to make the case a talking point from the street to the drawing room and picked up by newspaper writers, pamphleteers, engravers and cartoonists.25 In the dock in 1753, the public looked likely to be won over by Canning, Pike says, with ‘romance and youth united’ to plead her case. Defending counsel had a more difficult job, he suggests, convincing a jury as to the merits of testimony from one woman of

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The Gypsy Woman ‘disreputable character’ and another belonging to ‘a despised race’. In apparent contradiction to his views on her bearing and countenance, he calls Squires ‘the ugliest member of her species’ and ‘the unsightliest member of her sex the spectators had ever beheld’. Her daughter, Lucy, was, he claims ‘a pleasing contrast’ to the mother and, at the conclusion of his retelling, he hopes that Lucy ‘long survived to gladden the tent of William Clarke [her husband, and that] their descendants may yet light camp-fires on the confines of Enfield Chase’. In being a not-hideous Gypsy woman, Pike suggests, Lucy can achieve her sexual and racial destiny by producing more Gypsy progeny. This is not to say that the engravings of Squires made at the time of the case are mere representations of an ugly individual, rather than a racialised depiction; note Pike’s insistence on her as an example of her ‘species’ as well as an unsightly woman. The description of ugly Gypsy ‘crones’ and comely young Gypsy beauties is regularly deployed in nineteenth-century representation. One must remember that Pike writes as an apparently enlightened Victorian, casting a view back on a case that ‘disgraced the past’, but he revels in the idea that Squires’s looks helped sentence her to death. As for Canning, ‘neither from her pale features nor from her timid mien could any have judged her to be entangled in crime’.26 The year 1876, five years after Pike’s publication, saw a curious article referencing the Canning case by Walter Besant in Temple Bar Magazine. It is half racist assertion about the character of the Gypsies, half enthusiastic yet supercilious review of the work of American ‘Gypsy lorist’ Charles Godfrey Leland. Besant admired Leland in many aspects of public life, and was inspired by his work in Philadelphia to start the Home Arts Association for the promotion of handicrafts. In his Temple Bar article on Gypsies, Besant asks ‘in what country was the cradle of this race of wanderers?’ seeing them as a ‘separate, distinct, and persecuted race, like the Jews’.27 This persistent equivalence between Jews and Gypsies, especially when pointing to persecution, goes some way to supporting Sander Gilman’s 1985 assessment that the racial other in Western culture is ‘so conditioned by images of the black and the Jew’ that other others (such as Gypsies) are defined within the categories ‘black’ and ‘Jew’.28 I would modify this proposal, taking into account Ahmed’s insistence on the particularity of encounters with ‘the other’, and say that Gypsies are constantly defined in relation to those categories rather than within them.

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Race and Recognition Besant, one of the writers keen to deploy that relational definition, describes the arrival at L€uneburg in Germany of a people with dusky skin and jet-black hair and eyes. He reports that the group duped the local residents in order to steal from them: ‘this was the first historical appearance of Gipsies’. Besant deliberately opens his history of Gypsies in Europe with an incident of alleged theft to conclude that ‘from the very first, their real character was apparent; [. . .] they lie and steal everywhere’.29 A quarter-of-a-century later, in 1901, the authors of The Living Races of Mankind (or, rather, H. N. Hutchinson, who wrote most of this work) reported that ‘the Gypsy’, wherever he may be found (and the emphasis here is male) ‘leads a shiftless, vagrant life, and his propensity for thieving is ineradicable’.30 These textual encounters suggest that all Gypsies in all places and for all time conform to this negative characterisation: the very definition of racism. Even when discussing their persecution in Europe (having described the death and torture some endured), Besant asserts that it was, in general, ‘a bloodless one’. He dwells on the suspicion that Gypsies steal children, using the Canning case as an example; Canning herself drifts in and out of the category of ‘child’ depending on each author’s stance on the case. Like Grellmann about a century before him, he lightly dismisses the accusations against the Gypsies as false, but does so in such a way that suspicion might persist. After all, unlike the ‘aristocratic’ Jew with whom Besant likes to compare the ‘Rommany’ people, the Gypsy is a ‘pariah’, descended from pariahs, and if the people ‘ever had a place of their own in the world it has been forgotten’.31 This philosemitist view, to the detriment of Gypsies, is probably coloured by his involvement with the Palestinian Exploration Fund from 1868.32 Despite his assertions as to the eternal nature of the Gypsy, Besant laments, like the Gypsy lorist he admires, the fact that ‘the old black blood has been crossed and recrossed; the pure Gipsy is as scarce as a black swan’.33 Such concern about racial ‘degeneration’ was common in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and I return to this later in this chapter and in Chapter 4. Regenia Gagnier has described Besant’s belief in the power of ‘culture’ to reform the individual, exemplified in his 1882 novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men.34 One is not constrained, in that case, by the circumstances of the body one is born into. His thought in 1876 seems closer to the racially fixing strategies of the famous Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, who used the taxonomy of race to

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The Gypsy Woman categorise ‘criminal man’ in L’Uomo Delinquente, first published that same year. Lombroso claimed that certain races, such as Gypsies, were more predisposed to crime than others, and certainly Besant’s view of continual Gypsy criminality from their first appearance in Europe to his present fits with such racial determinism more than it does the concept of cultural reform. Towards the end of the century, Lombroso asserted – with reference to Grellmann – in Crime: Its Causes and Remedies (the later English title is cited here) that Gypsies ‘are the living example of a whole race of criminals’.35 Lazy, vain, vengeful, shameless, superstitious and incapable of intellectual development: Lombroso paints a dreadful picture. As so many of the images described so far have been shown to influence each other, so the appalling racist stereotype described by Lombroso has persisted into much later attitudes towards Romani people. But what is ‘race’? Race is not natural. It is a set of ideas; a discourse. It came about as a result of developments in the disciplines of biology and anthropology. This is not to say that people did not notice physical differences between themselves and others before the eighteenth century, when the concept was fully elaborated, but rather that the idea of ‘race’ as we understand it today has a particular history. Describing race as a construct is not to deny its reality or the experience of it. Anyone consuming twenty-first-century culture – especially those who are not part of a powerful racial or ethnic group – must know that it is experienced as real on a daily basis. At its most extreme, racism is still fatal. The proceeding sections of this chapter are concerned both with the ways in which nineteenth-century ideas about race informed textual encounters with Gypsy women, and with the ongoing significance of these ideas in contemporary representations. It examines the effects of representing a Gypsy woman marked as the subject of race. Race as an idea served a number of discursive purposes. It helped provide a narrative to account for human diversity that did not contradict the Biblical concept of monogenesis (which proposes that all of humankind descended from one couple). It helped Enlightenment theorists explain the apparent ease with which Europeans conquered other peoples. It seemed to its early proponents to offer continuity with ancient Greek suggestions about rigid social hierarchies. It developed as part of a great age of classification as Europeans made sense of the new specimens of plants, animals and humans that voyages of discovery

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Race and Recognition brought home. Robert Bernasconi and Brian Niro have pointed to the fact that early examples of statements resembling racial thought were not sustained by the galvanising ideas of scientific racial discourse until the eighteenth century.36 Quasi-race thinking existed, but it tended to be isolated, waiting for the ‘right’ environment in which to take off in the way we see in the late eighteenth century. For instance, as Niro (quoting Anthony Kwame Appiah) observes, Elizabethans saw race as a natural or inherited disposition, but that is not quite the same as the strict taxonomy of inherited racial characteristics elaborated in later centuries.37 Elizabethan categorisation of people (indeed of all things) relied on faith in the Great Chain of Being, a hierarchical order imposed by God. The Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, was grappling with this order when he developed his Systema Naturae (1735). This work was extremely significant in applying a hierarchical taxonomy to racial categories. His argument bound ‘simple physiological difference with more substantive differences of human potential, personality, and character’.38 Half-acentury later, Grellmann made just this association, describing the Gypsies’ ‘volatile disposition and unsteadiness’, the reason that ‘the Gipsey race has never produced a learned man, nor ever will so long as these principles are retained’.39 One Dutch scholar, Wim Willems, has been accused of controversially claiming that Gypsy identity as such was invented by Grellmann at the end of the eighteenth century, that the construction of this particular race can be traced to one text rather than being a fact of ancient lineage.40 Grellmann, as do many other writers, emphasises the ‘blackness’ of the Gypsy, but this also posed a problem for writers convinced by race. They were never sure how much skin colour was an inherited characteristic, and how much was a product of an outdoor, smoky, dirty life. Time and again, writers anxiously vacillate between inherited skin colour and acquired tawniness. Though these ideas were developed centuries ago, we continue to see them in the twenty-first century, as representations grapple with whether they are portraying a race (or, more commonly today, ethnicity) or ‘gypsy lifestyle’. With what kind of other is this an encounter? Am I supposed to understand it in terms of the other’s cultural practice or inherited characteristics of race? One portrait within photographer Iain McKell’s The New Gypsies (2014) collection evokes this tension between race and culture in the viewer’s experience of the photo. The people featured in

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The Gypsy Woman The New Gypsies are not Romani, and the publicity for the book goes out of its way to make this clear. So far, this seems to offer an image of cultural practice, not race. However, the book deploys a term (Gypsy) associated with and claimed by many Romani people, and the Romantic ‘gypsy’ aesthetic, explored throughout the chapters of The Gypsy Woman, is part of the photography’s appeal. What kind of ‘gypsy’ is the viewer supposed to be looking at, then? Is this a stranger who can be understood via racial categorisation, or will that lead to misrecognition of the pictured subject? The encounter with McKell’s New Gypsies seems to open out on to pictures of old Gypsies, but the racial characteristics that the term ‘Gypsies’ implies are rather troubled by the adjective ‘new’. What kind of updating is going on? The Daily Mail, so quick to demonise Gypsy communities, as I will demonstrate several times throughout these chapters, likes McKell’s book: the subjects are ‘not the gypsies of the sort made famous by My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding’, a ‘sort’ the Mail compulsively defines and points to.41 These are New Travellers, sometimes known as ‘New Age Travellers’, a group whose roots McKell posits as 1980s post-punk, anti-Thatcher anarchism. These are not people defined as a group on racial terms. But one of McKell’s shots hints at continuity with the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anxiety about locating a person in the Gypsy category because of her skin colour. In the background of the photograph are signifiers of a horse-drawn life. In the central foreground stands a young woman holding a blonde-haired, blue-eyed toddler. Her low-cut, fullskirted emerald dress might have been worn by Victor Hugo’s Esmeralda. The top of her bodice reveals a stark tan line, however. This young woman’s dark skin comes from spending a lot of time outdoors, not simply her ancestry. She may be Romani, she may not: my point is not to try to identify the race of someone by her skin colour in a photograph (quite the opposite in fact). This white skin is at the centre of an image largely constructed with a green palette, a whiteness emphasised by the white vest of the child she holds. In the titular and aesthetic context of ‘Gypsiness’, the presence of her white skin replays some of the anxiety emerging from the solidification of race as a discourse about whether people behave and live the way they do because of their race or because of other factors, and how one can guarantee that someone belongs to one race and not another. Above all else, race as taxonomy is supposed to position people and fix what that position means. By using the term ‘New Gypsies’,

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Race and Recognition McKell appropriates (or echoes an appropriation) that some Romani people might find problematic, but he also casts light on how porous skin colour is as a marker of identity. The discourse of race is incoherent. But this did not stop writers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century insisting on those guarantees as scientific, an insistence that continues to frame how people talk about and treat Gypsy women today. This ‘problem’ of skin tone, one that McKell’s photo visualises, destabilised the apparently rigid categories of race more generally as they were still considered seriously as bodily guarantees of morality and behaviour – so much so that Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring (b. 1755) shifted the attention of racial science from the study of skin colour to skeletons and skulls because these were not affected by climate in the same way as skin. By 1850, says Gates, the incoherencies of the discourse were continually worked over and ‘ideas of irresistible racial differences were commonly held’ in Europe and the USA.42 Arthur de Gobineau, for instance, in The Inequality of Human Races, written in the aftermath of the tumultuous European Revolutions of 1848, sought certainty in this human taxonomy. Race held the key to all other questions of history, he asserted, and ‘the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny’, though even here distinction and fusion of races are inseparable.43 Popular representations of race, in novels for instance, also sought out that apparent certainty, the idea that skin and hair could guarantee who a person was. For example, in Robert Smith Surtees’ 1860 novel, Plain or Ringlets?, picnickers are treated to the appearance of one of the ‘dark-skinned, black-eyed, black-ringletted race’ who will tell their fortunes.44 I return to this particular encounter with a ‘real’ Gypsy woman in later chapters, but it is clear here that the woman’s face with its racial markers seems to tell the truth of her identity. To think again about how the racialisation of the Gypsy woman is encountered today, Val Wood repeats this sort of recognition in her neoVictorian The Gypsy Girl (first published as The Romany Girl in 1998) when Mrs Pincher identifies Polly Anna/Paulina as a Gypsy despite not knowing about her parentage.45 For a mainstream female romance audience, Wood artfully repeats the immediate categorisation of a strange dark girl as a Gypsy that can be found in multiple Victorian novels. She describes not only nineteenth-century romance, but also nineteenth-century racism. Lest the hierarchical nature of race thinking in

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The Gypsy Woman that period should be underestimated, Gobineau makes explicit his view that ‘there are real differences in the relative value of human races’, with some groups ‘incapable of civilization’.46 As Becky Taylor records, ‘now the centuries-old mistrust of Gypsies and presumptions of illegality could find a pseudo-scientific cloak’, especially as preoccupations with race were ‘directly translated into how Gypsies, migrants and outsiders were treated and recorded by police’.47 Questions of representation, of the development of a discourse, had a real impact on lived experience. As scientific theories of race came and went, each in turn discarded as it crumbled under its own contradictions, cultural and aesthetic arguments persisted, and it is these that are reinvented in relation to Gypsy women in the twenty-first century, long after ‘race’ as a serious scientific anatomic (rather than social) categorisation has been rejected. In terms of privileging particular bodily (usually facial) characteristics, many of the key early developers of race as a fused scientific and aesthetic concept focused first on female beauty, and second on deviance from the group in which they themselves could be placed. Female Gypsies as either exotic beauties or wizened crones, a dichotomy found in textual encounters with Gypsy women across the centuries, exemplifies this masculine development of racial science: nineteenth-century racial scientists tended to compare male examples, with females equated with ‘lower’ races. When they did compare women, it was sexual traits that captured their interest, such as ‘feminine beauty, redness of lips, length and style of hair, size and shape of breasts or clitorises, degree of sexual desire, fertility, and above all the size, shape, and position of the pelvis’.48 These traits can be seen as markers of racial difference over and over again in representations of Gypsy women, especially beauty, hair and sexual desire. Women, thought of as ‘innately impulsive, emotional, imitative rather than original, and incapable of the abstract reasoning found in white men’ were reduced by racial scientists to a set of anatomical features useful for reproducing humans of the same race.49 Mary Squires’s daughter, for instance, meets her racialised sexual destiny when she marries another Gypsy. Richard Dyer affirms: concepts of the racialised body are also always conceptions about heterosexuality because ‘race is a means of categorising different types of human body which reproduce themselves’. Heterosexuality becomes ‘the means of ensuring, but also the site of endangering, the reproduction of [racial] differences’.50 It is for this reason

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Race and Recognition that themes of parenthood and sexuality are also always about race in the representations in this book. The discourse of race is always inflected – importantly for a book about Gypsy women – by ideas about sexuality. Separating people into distinct races relies on knowing who is having children with whom, and what those children will be like. As Robert Young so comprehensively explored in the 1990s, fantasies of race and desire are deeply implicated in each other. Young also points out that the racial hierarchy placed a ‘feminized state of childhood (savagery)’ at the bottom and ‘full (European) manly adulthood’ at the top.51 The stereotype of the Gypsy woman, as non-white, non-European and savagely close to nature, fits into this model perfectly. But this was a savage for the white man to desire – and the white man is usually the assumed viewer or reader of the representations in question; he encounters her. Whoever the actual viewer may be, a patriarchal culture assumes the male gaze. As Jessica Reidy movingly and with rightful anger writes in the context of a modern identity still framed by European literary representation from another century: When I was a child, I expected I would grow up to be Victor Hugo’s Esmeralda, a sex object abused by the men who owned her because they wanted her, because her body was not her own, and ultimately destined for tragedy.

Reidy recognises that her body is mapped by the male gaze on to a longstanding fantasy of race and desire. She goes on: ‘I knew that all of Esmeralda’s power and all of her undoing came from her fuckability, the hellfire of desire she inspired in the white men who wanted to possess and break her, and did’. Reidy refuses to be complicit in Esmeralda’s afterlife, however: ‘I won’t play your Gypsy girl going up in flames’.52 Young explains that ‘the link between culture and race theory in the nineteenth century involved sexuality as its third mediating term’, and Reidy’s experience shows those linkages to be as strong as ever. ‘In the relation of hierarchical power’, Young adds, ‘the white male’s response to the allure of exotic black sexuality is identified with mastery and domination’.53 The implied white male looking at Esmeralda and looking at Jessica Reidy identifies and desires the wild Gypsy of the stereotype but seeks to control the encounter and what it means.

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The Gypsy Woman It is perhaps no surprise, given this discursive relationship between race and sexuality (a relationship that develops because of what race means to bodies and what bodies mean to race) that one of the most talked-about representations of Gypsy women in the twenty-first century is about brides. Since Laura Mulvey’s description of the male gaze in 1975, alternatives and resistances to this positing of the male as the subject of the cinematic gaze, and woman as its object, have been described.54 Big Fat Gypsy Weddings offers no such alternative: it revisits a white male gaze, triangulating culture, race and sexuality as Young might predict. This series, which also inspired a spin-off in the USA, has been controversial for a number of reasons. First, the title is misleading but tells us something about the loose exonymic category ‘Gypsy’: the families who feature in the programme are mostly Irish Travellers rather than Romani people, an ethnic group that has its own history, traditions and civil rights struggle distinct from Romanies in Britain. Using the term Gypsy merely calls on the stereotypes and images this book interrogates, in order to titillate public interest in the same way that, for instance, the Illustrated London News did with Tom Taylor’s ‘Gypsey Experiences’ columns from 1851, a subject the newspaper would repeatedly return to because it sold well.55 In fact, media interest in Gypsy weddings in particular as a spectacle can be traced to at least the nineteenth century, with an 1890 edition of the Guernsey Star reporting on the ‘interesting’ wedding of two Gypsies (a Smith and a Lee), describing the bride’s dress, ‘broad satin sash’, ‘wreath of orange-blossoms’ and white tulle veil, and bridesmaids replete with ostrich feather-trimmed hats.56 Second on the list of controversies, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings has left both Romanies and Travellers feeling ‘cheated, dirty and abused’ because of its exploitative, patronising, hysterical and exaggerated portrayal of both communities.57 Third, the show purports to be factual, mobilising a documentary style, while simultaneously engineering drama and accentuating otherness to maintain viewer interest. In a working paper as part of the University of Manchester RomIdent project, Alex Robertson and Marie Wright describe how, prior to the show’s production, Jenny Popplewell posted on www.journeyfolki.org.uk to ask if any Travellers would be happy to talk to her about a documentary on Traveller culture. That this innocuous-sounding ‘documentary’, purportedly ‘lift[ing] the veil’ on culture and traditions, ended up being the sensationalised Channel 4 programme must have been a shock to those

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Race and Recognition Romani and Traveller contributors who responded on the (now inactive) online forum seeing the initiative as ‘interesting’ and showing ‘positive attitudes about us’ for a change.58 Roman, a Romani woman in her sixties interviewed by the BBC in Warwickshire after the programme aired, dismissed the behaviour represented: ‘they put it on [for the cameras]’.59 Finally (for this list – the controversy will run as long as the show is aired), non-Romani and non-Traveller viewers have been, so they say, shocked by what is portrayed by the programme as Gypsy culture.60 The show sets out to investigate a hidden, exotic community and, despite the emphasis on Irish Traveller families, the voiceover of the initial documentary that aired in 2010 refers to Romani Gypsies coming to Europe from India, over shots of the centuries-old Romani horse fair at Appleby. Annabel Tremlett has identified this as ‘a notion of an ‘‘ideal’’ or ‘‘true Gypsy’’ that has been an influence on the representations of Gypsies since it was constructed in late nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury romantic art and literature when Gypsy folklore was popularized’.61 The voiceover informs viewers that this is ‘a community still at odds with a world that judges on face value’, as we are shown scenes of young women dancing in short skirts, their faces cut from the shot so that the focus is on their groins and bare legs.62 It thus sets up one of the ‘moral and cultural antagonisms’ ubiquitous in the genre of reality television.63 One of the running themes of the series, across several years, is about girls becoming women, about when they can have sex. The images and voiced narrative produce layers of contradictory meaning on this subject. They call on stereotypes of Gypsiness while focusing on Irish Travellers, reinforcing and dismantling the concept of ‘race’ in the same gesture. They seemingly condemn a wider society that ‘judges on face value’ for the conflict that ensues, while asking viewers to do just that and moralise about sexualised young girls. They set up the context of marriage as the proper, controlled site for female sexuality (and the reproduction of race) while inviting the viewer to gaze at objectified ‘Gypsy’ bodies. This is the ‘complex romance/revulsion’ of the racialised other, famously described by Homi Bhabha as the ‘ambivalence of desire’ and, as Jensen and Ringrose put it in a nuanced reading of the show and its effects, ‘the sensationalist voyeuristic footage from inside the communion and wedding parties and the accompanying voiceover about Gypsy and Traveller morality deliberately creates a space of contestation’.64 One is

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The Gypsy Woman supposed to tut at the sight of tanned, happy girls in colourful clothes imitating the dancing of mainstream pop culture, but one is also implicated in a lascivious gaze. For instance, in an episode from series 5, ‘School of Hard Knocks’, the camera lingers on a young woman cleaning in a low-cut vest top. The programme persistently uses visuals to undermine the (in this case) Travellers’ insistence that they have strict rules about female sexuality, high morals and high standards. In fact, one interviewee in a qualitative study in Yorkshire used these standards as a determining factor in Gypsy identity: ‘[if] my girls start going at that age of 11 or 12, start hanging around corner shops and smoking and drinking, she wouldn’t be classed as a Gypsy. She’d be indecent and she wouldn’t get in a family’.65 Jensen and Ringrose point to the fact that the programme establishes practices such as little girls in communion dresses that prefigure their enormous wedding dresses as exceptional, a ‘Gypsy’ thing, rather than a wider social issue of gender.66 And those wedding dresses, by the way, have as much in common visually with dresses of the 1860s and 1870s as they do with celebrity/glamour model Katie Price, though they are rarely, if ever, described as ‘Victorian’. To see these Gypsy weddings as implicated in Victorian morality fits neither the stereotype of conservative Victorians nor that of Gypsies. For instance, James Hayllar’s painting Going to Court (1863) shows two frocked debutantes crammed into a coach with layers of material rising up around them like the stereotypical shot of a bride or party-goer being pushed into a Cinderella-style coach or stretch limousine in Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. The show may feature real people and real events, but the story it sells is a Gypsy fiction, one that repeats earlier centuries’ binding of sex and race in ambivalent desire for the other. G. H. Pike foresaw Mary Squires’s daughter married and in her Gypsy tent, and implied that this was the perfect place for her. The racialised male gaze of Big Fat Gypsy Weddings does just this, but also loves to exoticise the spectacle of the Gypsy on the cusp of her womanhood. It points out and judges male control of the Gypsy woman in such communities, but the camera lens and RP voiceover, proxies for the white male gaze, respond to the allure of exotic Gypsy sexuality by producing meanings of ‘Gypsy woman’ in this reality television setting that conform to white male heterosexual mastery and normality. In terms of Big Fat Gypsy Weddings’s forebears in determining Gypsy exceptionalism, for the most part, the Gypsy’s body is represented in the

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Race and Recognition 1800s as being fundamentally different from that of the Anglo-Saxon or the Celt. One of the key nineteenth-century proponents of racial science, Robert Knox, wrote in 1850 that the Gypsies’ ‘own feelings connect them with the dark races’. Race, he asserted, ‘determines everything in civilization, from art to science’. Demonstrating with startling clarity the idea that ‘race’ is always racist, Knox concluded that the Gypsy was ‘a race without a redeeming quality’, actually questioning the Gypsies’ right to share the planet. Knox self-consciously presented his vision of race as a novel way of ordering the world, and this coincided with his assumption that the Gypsies’ ‘ancient history is utterly unknown’.67 He deliberately locates the beginnings of ‘the Gypsy’ as a known entity in the nineteenth century and as the discursive product of scientific disciplines, just as some suggest Grellmann did in effect decades before. Despite its apparent rootedness in the eternalities of nature and the body, the discourse of race is represented as something historically new, demanding an original object of study. The Gypsies may be so ancient that their origins are lost, according to this discourse, but at the same time they did not properly exist as a group until racial science apparently ‘invented’ them. Knox describes a group of Gypsies in Scotland who live in a village during the winter and decamp in the summer ‘like the Arabs’ but also ‘like migratory birds or quadrupeds seeking other lands, to return again with the first snows to their winter dormitory’. He goes on: ‘they neither toil nor think; theirs is the life of the wild animal’.68 These bestial images of instinct and freedom will become familiar as the language of nineteenth-century texts featuring Gypsies is examined throughout the chapters of this book. One of the most striking things about Knox’s depiction here is his presumption about the similarity between Arabs and Gypsies in their nomadic habits. Even as he hopes to establish a precise conception of the Gypsy he refers to something beyond it; this racial classification can only be established in terms of similarity to and difference from other races, being nothing in itself. Distancing himself from the romanticism of other writers, Knox prefers to state ‘calmly the facts’ he has witnessed about this race: ‘timid and sensitive, like wild animals, they shun the contact of the Saxon’; ‘the gipsy has made up his mind, like the Jews, to do no work, but to live by the industry of others’.69 Walter Simson, in his 1865 History of the Gipsies, works to undermine the racial guarantee of physical traits by pointing to diversity within a ‘race’

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The Gypsy Woman group. He notes that ‘every author who has written on the subject of the Gipsies has, I believe, represented them as all having remarkably dark hair, black eyes, and swarthy complexions’; David ‘the nephew’ Hume even thought that ‘black eyes should make part of the evidence in proving an individual to be of the Gipsy race’. Simson, however, reckons on ‘one-half of the Gipsies in Scotland’ having blue eyes rather than black. He concludes (as a philologist): ‘language is the only satisfactory thing by which to test a Gipsy, let his colour be what it may’.70 Those who favoured strict racial categorisation, particularly those who advanced the polygenetic view of races (that these were, in fact, different species) saw the diversity Simson points to as the catastrophic result of miscegenation, the mixing of races through sexual reproduction, a term first mooted in 1864. Later, in anthropological and folkloric circles, the risk of miscegenation was described as a threat to the non-white race rather than the worrying yet allied degeneration of whiteness. All that was desirable about a race, all that was exotic and different, bodily and culturally, would be lost as its members produced children with others from a different race. Race and sex are forever discursively conjoined. Staying in Scotland, one of the most famous literary Gypsy women is Meg Merrilies from Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815). The Orientalism of Scott’s Gypsy character will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter, but here I want to think about her as a woman and as a racialised Gypsy. In Guy Mannering, the young laird of Ellangowan, Harry Bertram, is kidnapped and smuggled abroad. Suspicion for his kidnap falls on a local group of Gypsies who have been displaced by Harry’s father. Meg Merrilies, the leader of the group, is a strange and striking figure with ‘wild dress and features’, beturbaned and dark.71 Similarly, the Jewish Rebecca wears a turban in Scott’s Ivanhoe which ‘suited well with the darkness of her complexion’ and the Gypsies in his 1823 novel Quentin Durward have complexions ‘nearly as dark as that of Africans’ and also wear turbans. Eventually, Meg helps Harry understand and prove who he really is. She is, as Deborah Epstein Nord notes, the ‘symbolic maternal presence in [his] life’.72 Constant misrecognitions motivate the narrative until a final series of disclosures resolves the plot: true identities are revealed and legacies restored. To describe the anticipated behaviour of Gypsies, Scott uses a gesture similar to that made by Grellmann when he describes a rumour about

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Race and Recognition Gypsies being kidnappers. The representation of the Gypsies via the prejudices of the local community is deployed to strong effect in Guy Mannering. The text consistently locates negative attitudes towards Gypsies beyond the narrative voice. For instance: Although the origin of those gypsy tribes, which formerly inundated most of the nations of Europe, and which in some degree subsist among them as a different people, is generally known, the reader will pardon my saying a few words respecting their situation in Scotland. It is well known that the gypsies were, at an earlier period, acknowledged as a distinct and independent people by one of the Scottish monarchs. [. . .] The patriotic Fletcher of Saltoun drew a picture of these banditti about a century ago, which my readers will peruse with astonishment.73

The novel plays on the way that the reader (consciously or unconsciously) uses the novel’s cultural and historical context to fill in the gaps left by narrative suggestion. Scott uses Andrew Fletcher’s image of the Gypsies, and Thomas Pringle in turn drew heavily on Scott’s work (as well as poetry by James Hogg and James Leydon) for his racist description of Gypsies in 1817 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: they are, for Pringle, a ‘dark, deceitful and disorderly race’.74 In the extract from Guy Mannering above, ideas about Gypsies are referred to as ‘generally known’ and ‘well known’ within a few lines, suggesting a common sense available to all. This knowledge refers specifically to the Gypsies’ origins and early history in Scotland, but its juxtaposition with a quotation from Andrew Fletcher’s harsh description of them means that it is all too easy to interpret Fletcher’s image of ‘men and women, perpetually drunk, cursing, blaspheming, and fighting together’ as part of general knowledge about Gypsies.75 Through a wilful blurring of attitudes, the text constructs a picture of the Gypsies as bad people without having to say so explicitly. Ambivalent ‘knowledge’ has, as Homi Bhabha theorises, no need to be proved (everybody knows it) but remains ‘in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed’.76 Meg’s eyes have ‘a wild roll’ that indicates ‘something like real or affected insanity’, an equivocation that leaves open the alternatives that she might be capitalising on her reputation or that she may actually be mentally

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The Gypsy Woman ill.77 The narrative voice refuses to commit to one interpretation or another, but the racial stereotype lets the reader fill in the gaps. Dominie Sampson describes Meg as ‘Harlot, thief, witch, and gypsey’.78 Other characters express more ambivalent feelings. One of the most interesting things about Meg is the ambiguity of her gender: She was full six feet high, wore a man’s great-coat over the rest of her dress, had in her hand a goodly sloe-thorn cudgel, and in all points of equipment, except her petticoats, seemed rather masculine than feminine. Her dark elf-locks shot out like the snakes of the gorgon, between an old-fashioned bonnet called a Bongrace, heightening the singular effect of her strong and weather-beaten features, which they partly shadowed.79

On the one hand, the description seems to tell us a lot. It gives details of her height, face, hair, dress, equipment and attitude. On the other hand, it poses more questions than it answers. Like her hat, the description heightens the effect of Meg’s appearance whilst casting a shadow over it. Taking her apart, piece by piece, allows both Mannering and the reader to understand Meg as a composite of recognisable features, yet her ambiguous gender, origin and intent remain unexplained. Is Meg man or woman or a little of both? Is she mad or sane or something in between? Her snake-like hair associates her with that most famous of the gorgons, Medusa, the representation of which is discussed in Sigmund Freud’s short essay, ‘Medusa’s Head’.80 In a Freudian schema, Medusa’s snakes are linked to the castration complex, mitigating the horror of castration by replacing the penis with this phallic symbol, but at the same time drawing attention to the absence that causes horror. Meg, ‘rather masculine than feminine’, is even more terrifying than most ‘castrated’ women because her pseudo-masculine traits make her absent penis doubly significant, with her hair standing in for it. I am not necessarily proposing a psychoanalytic interpretation of Meg Merrilies, but rather suggesting that it is difficult not to see the snakes as phallic in a post-Freudian cultural landscape; ignoring the fact that a gender-ambiguous character has an abundance of phalluses winding around her head would be perverse, and these penis-snakes have previously been associated with anxieties about sexual difference. Freud lurks in the background of any encounter with Meg Merrilies. Scott is by no means the last author to associate the Gypsy 62

Race and Recognition woman with serpents: in his travelogue In Gipsy Tents (1881), the Gypsy lorist F. H. Groome asserts that Gypsies’ eyes apparently have ‘a veiled fire peculiar to the race, a sort of filmy languor that blazes up with passion but which, even while unexcited, exerts still a strange, serpent-like power of latent fascination’.81 Groome’s fascination with the female Gypsy’s eyes, fascination he blames on the objects themselves rather than on his fetishisation of her body part, is connected, as before, with the snake. In a contribution for Chambers’s Encyclopædia, Groome describes the Gypsies’ history as ‘magicians, soothsayers and serpent-charmers’.82 The woman in In Gipsy Tents is ambiguously both snake and charmer, entrancing and entranced, languorous and passionate. The Victorian children’s author Juliana Horatia Ewing makes a similar gesture when describing a Gypsy woman, Sybil Stanley, from the perspective of a hedgehog: ‘she moved like a snake’.83 Without adopting wholesale a psychoanalytic approach, there is some scope for deploying Freud’s theory to understand this encounter. In these texts, the viewer’s first sight of the Gypsy woman presents her as strange, confusing and ‘other’. Rather than negotiate that strangeness, a symbol stands in its place and parts of the Gypsy woman’s body are fetishised. George Borrow’s Lavengro (1851) and its sequel, The Romany Rye (1857), are two of the most famous (though unfashionable) works on British Gypsies ever written. Ken Lee has suggested that Borrow’s take on the Gypsies’ desirable mobile exoticism in these works ‘reinforced and ossified’ their strangerhood.84 Borrow is also known for The Zincali (1841) and The Bible in Spain (1843), and his Romano Lavo-Lil: Word-book of the Romany: or, English Gypsy Language (1874) is still quoted today (though its linguistic inadequacies have been identified). Like Guy Mannering, Lavengro also employs fetishistic images of a female Gypsy. Borrow was an explicit influence on Groome, and Scott and Borrow’s textual encounters with Gypsy women no doubt open out on to each other. Borrow ‘produced a kind of picaresque fiction that invites readers to expect both autobiography and bildungsroman, but delivers neither’.85 The work was seen as anachronistic and/or timeless by mid-century, with George Saintsbury commenting that he ‘might have belonged to any period’.86 Influences on Borrow’s imagery ‘undoubtedly [include] the Waverley Novels, despite Borrow’s hatred of their author’.87 In The Romany Rye, for instance, an eccentric Hungarian derides Scott’s examples in Ivanhoe of the

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The Gypsy Woman Gypsies’ language, brought to Britain via the Saxons, as ‘one horse-load of nonsense’.88 But in another first encounter, the character Lavengro’s childhood image of a Gypsy woman is as fragmented as Scott’s: The woman was a stout figure, seemingly between thirty and forty; she wore no cap, and her long hair fell on either side of her head like horse-tails half way down her waist; her skin was dark and swarthy, like that of a toad, and the expression of her countenance was particularly evil; her arms were bare, and her bosom was but half concealed by a slight bodice, below which she wore a coarse petticoat, her only other article of dress.89

The young Lavengro is attributed a lascivious gaze, taking in the woman’s state of undress, visible bosom, animalism (at once horse- and toad-like) and her long hair that draws his eye down to her waist. We see her as an amalgamation of fetishised body parts. In the same decade that saw the publication of Groome’s In Gipsy Tents, the Illustrated London News regularly featured images of Gypsy women, whether portrayed in Britain or in more exotic locations. These representations were often engraved reproductions of paintings or customproduced illustrations used to accompany written descriptions of Gypsy life. Their inclusion demonstrates that Gypsy life was considered as both suitable material for the artists producing the painting and an appropriate example of what the Victorian public appreciated in terms of art. In addition, it was clearly thought interesting enough to increase the newspaper’s circulation. Women of the ‘‘‘Rommany’’ race [with] their dark complexion, large black eyes, lithe figure, strongly-developed features, and profusion of thick black hair, hanging loosely and wildly around the head’ may not have been, through Victorian male eyes, appropriate partners for ‘intelligent conversation’, but they made ‘a fine specimen of the human wild animal, and a very good subject for an Artist’s sketch-book’.90 The desire for the female Gypsy is in evidence here, with clear connections between artistic representation and racist zoomorphism. From its inception in 1842 (already discussed in the Introduction), the Illustrated London News hoped to ‘give wealth to Literature and stores to History’, instituting a Victorian archive.91 Such archivisation is not, Jacques Derrida makes clear in Archive Fever, just a recording of what has passed, but also a ‘movement of the promise and of the future’, the 64

Race and Recognition opening-out of an encounter in one time period with a later one.92 The Illustrated London News asks itself ‘what will it do for the future?’93 The publication was deliberately setting up the conditions for people to encounter the representations on its pages long into the future. The engraving of Nathaniel Sichel’s The Gipsy Queen of March 1888, for example, was accompanied by text that asserted that ‘Romance’ has exaggerated ‘the physical beauty of the pure Gipsy race’ but that the Gypsy in Sichel’s painting ‘bears her native dignity’.94 The Victorian reader at home encountered Sichel’s Gypsy woman via the Illustrated London News. Its narrative placed her quite categorically as a Gypsy, and asked the reader to assess her beauty by racial standards, despite having just remarked that these standards are exaggerated. But the Illustrated London News also knew that by putting this image to the press, it opened the way for future encounters with both the image and its racial categorisation. This and other examples of the Gypsy ‘race’ as pictured in the Illustrated London News articulate quite clearly the bodily conception of race elaborated by scientific racial discourse from the eighteenth century onwards. George Eliot’s nineteenth-century take on race was, however, somewhat different. In ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, an essay in her last published work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), Eliot discusses the specificity of Jewish cultural inheritance, a continuity of ‘national education’, creating in the Jews ‘a feeling of race’ and ‘the ties of inheritance both in blood and faith’, a way of ‘remembering national glories’.95 When Eliot uses the term ‘race’, it is understood that she refers to a collective tradition reinforced by blood ties rather than a solely biological category.96 Set in fifteenth-century Andalucía, Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy tells the familiar Gypsy story of a protagonist adopted by a family of a different race. This character, like her later eponymous Daniel Deronda, is posited as a messianic figure who will lead the race to a new, unpersecuted future in a distant homeland. Fedalma, raised in luxury and as a Catholic by her fiance Don Silva’s family, was ‘born beneath the dark man’s tent’.97 In a reversal of the usual child-stealing plot involving Gypsies, she was snatched from her Gypsy parents by ‘marauding Spaniards’ during a raid against the Moors.98 When her father, Zarca, is also captured by the Spaniards, he recognises her, contrives a meeting and discloses her heritage. With the acceptance of this heritage comes a commitment to leading her people, a role that means leaving her lover behind. When Fedalma’s lineage is

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The Gypsy Woman revealed she asks whether she could really have been born ‘of a race / More outcast and despised than Moor or Jew’, a people ‘crushed underfoot, warred on by chance like rats’.99 The physical descriptions of Fedalma using the terms in which Gypsies were typically visually figured in the nineteenth century are surprisingly sparse, other than some references to her darkness. This is an indication of Eliot’s portrayal of race as a shared experience that goes beyond mere physical resemblance. A similar construction can be found in her The Mill on the Floss (1860). Tom excludes Maggie from a game in favour of their cousin, Lucy, and, in an oft-quoted passage, Maggie, ‘with a fierce thrust of her small brown arm, was to push poor little pink-and-white Lucy into the cow-trodden mud’.100 The incident, something Alicia Carroll terms ‘brown on pink-and-white violence’, encapsulates the early differences between Maggie and Lucy and draws particular attention to their different complexions.101 It clearly has the same effect on Maggie as it does on the reader, for she decides, in the ensuing chaos, to flee to the Gypsies with whom she has so often been compared. Maggie, apparently, ‘always looked twice as dark as usual when she was by the side of Lucy’ and has, in a familiar image, ‘gleaming black eyes’.102 There is no suggestion that Maggie actually has Gypsy blood to which both her colouring and wildness could be attributed. Rather, the figure of the Gypsy is used to inform a vocabulary in The Mill on the Floss with which the novel describes difference: of beauty, of moral code, of relationships with the other. Aunt Pullett laments to her sister, Maggie’s mother, that Maggie is ‘more like a gypsy nor ever’ in the way she looks, but doubts that ‘it’ll stand in her way’ in the future.103 The key word in this observation is ‘like’: the use of the Gypsy as a simile demands a priori knowledge from the Pullets, Tullivers and the reader about what this signifies. An encounter with a Gypsy-like girl has certain expectations of colouring and behaviour. In this case, the unspoken expectation is that having brown skin will hold Maggie back, but that the gap between the real Maggie and whatever it is that ‘Gypsy’ signifies is great enough for her to be able to fall back into line with what her family and community expect of her. When she sets off to find the Gypsies she is looking for confirmation of the things that the term has come to mean to her, the part of herself that is caught in its web of meanings. The chapter in which her escape takes place is titled ‘Maggie Tries to Run Away from Her Shadow’. She is running from her own

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Race and Recognition darkness, away from her comparatively fair cousin and brother, away from difference and opprobrium and towards an environment with which she will be in harmony. Her identification with the Gypsies fails, however, and she ends up running away from them too. Her shadow comes to stand for her comparative darkness in a white world, the dark reflections of herself she expects to find, and the futility of trying to escape from something produced, as a shadow is, by her own body. Despite the fact that the face of a Gypsy woman she encounters ‘with the bright dark eyes and the long hair was really something like what she used to see in the glass before she cut her hair off’, she does not feel at home with her: physical resemblance is no guarantee, in The Mill on the Floss, of racial identification.104 When Fedalma returns to her Gypsy life in The Spanish Gypsy, her black hair is pointedly contrasted by a white turban.105 In a song, Juan sets up Fedalma’s attractiveness as a peculiarly dark and exotic kind of beauty, coming from some ‘unknown afar’. He proclaims that ‘in her dark she brings the mystic star’, an intriguing feature to be drawn out considering the poem’s Spanish context and the likely appearance of Fedalma’s countrywomen.106 Dark hair and olive skin would not have been particularly unusual, let alone mystically different. As Carroll notes, however, ‘Eliot twice records the skin colour and racial origin of the tribe of Gypsies she has chosen to represent’, a tribe descended, according to her sources, from Africa.107 The setting may be Spanish, but the text is resolutely English in the projection of darkness as remarkably other. There is a recurrent theme of feline imagery throughout the poem. Another song of Juan’s describes Fedalma as ‘lithe as [a] panther forestroaming’, and he refers to a group of Gypsy girls as ‘wild-cats’. The narrative voice labels them ‘human panthers, flame-eyed, lithe limbed, fierce’. The Prior says that Fedalma’s blood is ‘as unchristian as the leopard’s’. Fedalma describes the blood-tie between herself and her father as being like when ‘leopard feels at ease with leopard’. The image reinforces the notion of the Gypsy as overwhelmingly physical and efficient in that physicality and directs attention, once more, to the Gypsies’ eyes. Zarca himself names his ‘Zíncali, lynx-eyed and lithe of limb’.108 We can see this nineteenth-century feline image once more in G. J. Whyte-Melville’s Black But Comely (1879), right at the beginning of the tale when Jane Lee as an infant is held in her mother’s arms. The pair are described as ‘so uncommon, so picturesque, and so comely withal; sleek and supple as a leopardess and her cub, with

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The Gypsy Woman something of the wild-beast’s watchful restlessness, half suspicious, half defiant, its lithe and easy movements, its sinewy, shapely form’.109 To be clear: the persistent association between Gypsies and animals is a product of a racial hierarchy that places white, civilised peoples at the top and darker, animal-like races at the bottom. Eliot may not see the body as a guarantor of racial identification, but has recourse to a racialised set of images in representing her Gypsy woman. Henry Hotze’s Analytical Introduction to Gobineau’s work described the ‘animal propensities’ of the ‘black races’ (into which category Knox firmly placed the Gypsies) as ‘very strong’, countered by ‘partially latent’ moral manifestations.110 This is not just a metaphor: despite Eliot’s view on race as cultural association, with this imagery she echoes the idea that some races are literally more animalistic than others. To return to Knox: ‘they neither toil nor think; theirs is the life of the wild animal’.111 Animalistic imagery worked for both monogenetic and polygenetic racial frameworks (different races descended from a single source, or different races as different species). Race-thinking categorises a woman as a Gypsy because of her body, and uses that categorisation to predict, judge and respond to her behaviour. On hearing music in the square, Fedalma, cautiously disguised so that she might witness the activities of the people of Bedmar outside her normally cloistered existence, is ‘swayed by impulse passionate’ and begins to dance, moving ‘in slow curves voluminous, gradual, / Feeling and action flowing into one’. Her behaviour is, apparently, unthinking, ‘knowing not comment’. An ‘impetuous joy hurrie[s] in her veins’. Fedalma was nurtured in a restrained, aristocratic home, so the urge to dance so sensuously and indecorously in public comes, seemingly, from within: it is an instinct that she can no longer fight. Even her hair escapes from her scarf, the wreathing ‘delicate tendrils’ symbolising her finally irrepressible sensuality.112 The verse explicitly describes her as being ‘like a goddess’, but the impression made by the snake-like movement of her hair is full of the resonances of Scott’s Medusa-like Gypsy, Meg Merrilies, and Eliot’s own Gypsy-like Medusa, Maggie Tulliver, whose thick, dark hair is her mother’s shame and twirls about ‘like an animated mop’. Even after she hacks off her own locks, Maggie looks ‘like a small Medusa with her snakes cropped’.113 Something other than her hair means that Maggie resembles Medusa, something that puts her in common with the Gypsies in a Victorian racial scheme of imagery.

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Race and Recognition Fedalma’s dance is cut short by the tolling of the prayer bell, during which the Gypsy prisoners are led into the square. These events seem to happen, unbidden, to Fedalma, like the occasion on which her husband-tobe ‘wished [her] once / Not to uncage the birds’ they kept in the castle. She ‘meant to obey’ she tells him, ‘but in a moment something – something stronger, / Forced [her] to let them out’.114 Fedalma’s emotional access to her Gypsy identity echoes the image of a wild race constructed throughout the nineteenth century and on into the twenty-first. The other-worldly Meg Merrilies, the bewitching, childishly impulsive Gypsies written by George Borrow and the Gypsy Lore Society members he influenced, the wild Gypsies found on the pages of the Illustrated London News and Val Wood’s Polly Anna, who cannot bear the encircling walls of the workhouse, compose a picture of a romantically mystical people, ruled by their passions and closer to the ‘nature’ that their self-fashioned, civilised commentators have left behind. For instance, in Theodore Watts-Dunton’s Aylwin (1898), a novel Catherine Maxwell describes as ‘a strange amalgam of gypsy lore, the occult, mesmerism and Romanticism’ and which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5, Henry Aylwin’s mother associates ‘the word ‘‘Gypsy’’ with everything that is wild, passionate, and lawless’.115 While the sympathetic characters and the narrative voice are distanced from this attitude, the imagery nonetheless helps constitute the figure of the Gypsy available in the text. Watts-Dunton’s writing does not work particularly hard to subvert the ‘wild and passionate’ stereotype. The Gypsy woman as wild and passionate is a racist stereotype. It circumscribes the possibilities for a Gypsy woman to be seen as intelligent, scholarly, quiet, forward-planning, civilised, upright and restrained. Fedalma’s passions are grounded in her racialised, gendered body, and another episode in The Mill on the Floss also demonstrates how Eliot constructs a notion of morality in St Ogg’s that is somehow bodily. Comparisons between Maggie and the Gypsies in the novel are based on the expectation that the Gypsy is ruled by his or her passions, just as Maggie suffers a life-long struggle between her emotional drive and what her family and the wider community consider to be correct. When Maggie returns, unmarried, to St Ogg’s following Stephen’s bizarre pseudo-kidnap of her, the narrative observes, voicing the feelings of the townspeople, that ‘there was always something questionable about her. [. . .] To the world’s wife there had always been something in Miss Tulliver’s very physique that

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The Gypsy Woman a refined instinct felt to be prophetic of harm’.116 The comment takes the reader back to Maggie’s early life, and the loose connection between the darkness of her colouring and the potential darkness that inhabits her decision-making. The moral problem of spending nights unchaperoned with a man is not associated with the literal behaviour of the Gypsies living on the outskirts of town, but it does have everything to do with sexual, and therefore bodily, transgression. Anxious attempts are made to identify when and where behaviour that does not fit the narrow boundaries of acceptability as defined by the social norm may erupt. The logic that the St Ogg’s community applies when attempting to understand Maggie is the logic of racial discourse; physical difference is a visible signifier of moral difference. Writing the Foreword to A Book of Gypsy Folk-Tales in 1948, Rupert Croft-Cooke’s description of Victorian authors who wrote about Gypsies reinscribes their attitudes to race even in a relatively recent context. Via Croft-Cooke, later readers reencounter race: the Gypsies are a ‘strange and interesting race’ and, later on, ‘the Dark Race’.117 Authors such as CroftCooke seem unable to decide whether the Gypsy is other because of his or her travelling ways or because of his or her race, or whether cultural practices are a product of race. Despite this uncertainty, whatever it was that made the Gypsy different from them also made him or her exotic. The encounters that some writers had with the Gypsies, Croft-Cooke says, ‘added salt to a life which might have been monotonous’, the kind of position critiqued by bell hooks in her essay, ‘Eating the Other’. In this work she assesses the commodification of race, saying that ‘ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is white mainstream culture’.118 Despite Croft-Cooke’s assertion that the writers he discusses ‘never played up the Gypsy as a spectacle or a phenomenon [or] cashed in on the subject of their researches’, the Gypsy is still, from this perspective, an exoticised and racialised commodity, seasoning bland, white, middle-class Britain.119 I have described how, in a novel set in the nineteenth century, Val Wood points to the way race informed attitudes to Gypsy women for a modern audience. An example of a deliberately offensive revivification of the Gypsy woman stereotype was performed in 2016 with the release of a ‘mockumentary’ featuring Ricky Gervais’s long-lived David Brent character. I draw attention to it here as evidence for the ways in which

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Race and Recognition the codes of sexual morality projected on to the female Gypsy body can still be easily interpreted by an audience today – so easily that it becomes a ‘joke’. As part of the David Brent film, a music video titled Lady Gypsy was released.120 Gervais’s use of Brent revels in hackneyed genres, deploying excessive signifiers of that genre alongside bathos, as if the instruction to writers and directors was: ‘lay it on thick’. In this case, the whimsical, romantic Gypsy figure of pop musical legend (think Cher’s ‘Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves’, for instance, or 1980s Stevie Nicks) exists in a video where Brent holds the camera’s gaze for an uncomfortably long time, where there is an intentionally excessive number of shots between trees, where the costumes are fancy-dress ridiculous and the setting is a lakeside just south of the sadly unromantic Didcot. A dark-haired woman is pictured next to this lake (or, rather, pond), washing her hair – a sexy seasoning for bland old Didcot. She wears dark red, long skirts, and a fringed shawl tied around her waist. When she dances in a misty woodland setting, emphasising the wild Gypsy impulse, she is seen wearing the stereotypical white gathered blouse and a corset laced under her bosom. Brent, in his musical persona, lost his heart to this ‘Lady Gypsy’, but so long ago that he has forgotten her name – her identity is lost to the stereotype. In this, he successfully echoes the many painters and photographers who have captured simply a ‘Gypsy woman’ without leaving archival clues as to her individual identity. Brent’s Gypsy woman is sexually assertive, to the extent that the singer ‘comically’ mistakes her for a prostitute. No doubt one can argue that this is a humorous attempt to point out the ridiculous stereotypes of Gypsy women that persist in popular culture. Not all Romani women saw it that way, including some who took to Twitter to label the portrayal as offensive. The joke, it seemed, was still on them, not those who peddle stereotypes, and so it made little difference that the intent was satire. Whether lampooning or emulating racism, ‘Lady Gypsy’ is in dialogue with all the texts mentioned so far in this chapter. She condenses and makes ridiculous what many of the historical texts do with racial discourse, but grants no power to the Romani woman with that gesture. Since Grellmann, particular racialised qualities have been emphasised in visual and literary representations as artists and writers attempted to capture good examples of the Gypsy ‘race’. They wanted to reflect this taxonomy so that their work could be deemed to evince the ‘truth’ of

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The Gypsy Woman Gypsiness. This continues in a perception of the Gypsy today as exclusively dark-skinned, dark-haired and glittery-eyed, perpetuated across numerous media. Encounters with Gypsy women that define them as either exotic lovelies or wizened crones take their cue from a racial science that focused on feminine beauty, length and style of hair, visibility of breasts and degree of sexual desire. Some textual encounters described in this chapter reinforce Bhabha’s suggestion that race is implicated in the ‘desire to see, to fix cultural difference in a containable, visible object’: encounters with Mary Squires, Gervais’s ‘Lady Gypsy’, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings and the women in the Illustrated London News.121 Others straight-out challenge that desire and make the race of the Gypsy ‘uncontainable’, producing an altogether less pre-ordained encounter: Iain McKell’s ‘new gypsy’, Jessica Reidy’s anti-Esmeralda. Still others simultaneously reinforce and dismantle the expectations of ‘race’ brought to the encounter: Meg Merrilies and Fedalma. Different encounters respond to historical conceptions of race in different ways, with varying degrees of affirmation, denial or a combination of the two, yet those conceptions form the backdrop to every encounter with the Gypsy woman. One very particular manifestation of the racist stereotype is Orientalism, and so it is to the East that the next chapter turns.

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3 Orientalisms and Inheritance

Gypsies were associated in the nineteenth century, quite categorically, with the East. An encounter with a Gypsy woman was an encounter with the Orient. This was obvious as soon as I began researching the representation of Gypsy women, but startlingly so in my encounter with one book in particular. When leafing through the thick and yellowed pages of nineteenth-century texts, I can never resist imagining the life of the book itself. We can so easily search within a digitised copy, but the allure of the physical remains. In the Special Collections Reading Room of the British Library in 2005, I had my hands on Charles Godfrey Leland’s Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling, first published in 1891 and something of an internet favourite for fans of the occult. It is a strange book, filled with engravings of paganistic designs, deliberately drawn to look like roughly carved engravings in wood. This skeuomorphism – a deliberately oldfashioned design in a technologically updated object – presents a sense of authenticity to the content, and a feeling that Leland is delving into ‘oldworld’ beliefs. I had spent several days reading Leland’s work and a biography by his niece, and was by turns inured to and irritated by his writerly tone as time went on. One hundred pages in, Leland made a typical (for him) assertion that ‘like all Orientals the gypsy desires intensely to have a family’.1 It echoed many similar characterisations I had read, such as one by Tom Taylor forty years earlier in the Illustrated London 73

The Gypsy Woman News. In his ‘Gypsey Experiences’ column he described a Gypsy woman named Sinfi who was ‘piquant in the little touches of savagery that crossed her Oriental and lazy courtesy of manner’.2 Ready for a break from the Reading Room, I turned to the inside cover of Leland’s book and found that a stamp revealed it to have previously been the property of the India Office. The accidental life of that particular copy alerted later readers to the Orientalism of representations of Gypsies, if they had not already noticed it. European and American portrayals consistently refer to the Eastern origins of the Gypsies, agreeing in the nineteenth century on India as the source of the diaspora, though with frequent reference to Arabs or Bedouins. For instance, Horace Smith’s poem ‘Arabs of Europe’ was originally published in Smith’s Miscellaneous Poems of 1846 and finds its way into Sampson’s Wind on the Heath anthology. Smith deliberately blurs the geographical boundaries of the Gypsies’ origins, saying that whether they really did come from ‘India’s burning plains, / Or wild Bohemia’s domains’ or from Egypt, their ‘Eastern manners, garb, and face’ are immediately recognisable. They are ‘Romantic, picturesque, and wild’ in a ‘prosaic era’. The Orientalism of representations of Gypsies participates in this generalisation of ‘the East’, conflating the Far East, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, even when representations appear to be locating the Gypsy in a specific locale. Smith’s poetic voice creepily invites the ‘black-eyed lass’ he observes into his ‘friendly cottage’; the allure of the sexualised Oriental female is taken almost for granted.3 Earlier, in the Elizabethan period, as Paula Pugliatti attests, encounters with Gypsies as part of street theatre marked them out as immigrant strangers: ‘from that outlandish elsewhere they had brought obscure rituals, a reprehensible way of life, the suspicion of atheism, new tricks and guiles, the gift of divination and an impenetrable language’.4 By the nineteenth century, rather than simply being from ‘elsewhere’, Gypsies were Oriental, and Britain’s colonial ambitions in that century inflect the ‘Indianness’ of many (but by no means all) descriptions and images of European Gypsies, while also relying on the imagery of a mysterious and non-specific east. It is tempting to say, when encountering some of these Orientalised nineteenth-century Gypsy women, that Gypsies ‘stand in’ for India in many of these texts, but this is a simplification and tends to ignore the deliberate vagueness of the locus for Gypsy romance. They are often a

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Orientalisms and Inheritance prompt to think about the subcontinent, but the Gypsy woman is more than just that prompt. While the political relationship between Britain and India has obviously changed radically in the intervening centuries, the Orientalism of Gypsy representation has, in many cases, not. For instance, even when Timothy Neat in The Summer Walkers (2002) aims to differentiate between Gypsies and other Travelling People in Scotland, he uses race and Orientalism to make the distinction. ‘These Scottish nomads are not Gypsies’, he emphasises. ‘They are indigenous, Gaelic-speaking Scots who, to this day, remain heirs of a vital and ancient culture of great historical and artistic importance to Scotland and the world beyond’.5 Though a vital project in its portrait of this distinctive Scottish culture, the value placed on indigeneity cannot help but draw attention to the otherness of the Oriental, migrant, outsider Gypsy. Neat’s distinction may also be inflected by a desire to distinguish between Scottish Travellers and more recent Roma migrants from Eastern Europe. Neat appends to his work a section on ‘Gypsy History and Traveller Origins’, which makes use of Eugene Pittard’s race-based ‘historical Gypsy ‘‘physiognomy’’’ to describe differences in physical characteristics between Gypsies and other travellers. The appendix concludes that ‘the fact that the Oriental Gypsies are the most conspicuous and widespread nomadic people in Europe, does not make all European nomads Gypsies’.6 It is quite true that not all European nomads are of Romani ethnicity, but to continue to deploy the category of ‘Oriental’ into the twenty-first century demonstrates just how successful and pernicious an image of the Oriental Gypsy has been constructed over hundreds of years in Europe. Deborah Epstein Nord described the critical perspective on Orientalism that I also deploy here as ‘especially useful in regard to the Gypsies’ because it brings to light ‘the importance of imagination, identification, and desire, as well as of relations of power, domination, and repression’ in an Orientalist mentality.7 This chapter returns to the interest the book as a whole takes in identification and recognition in the textual encounter. There are clear theoretical connections with the racism described in the previous chapter, in particular the interconnectedness of desire and power, but Orientalism has a distinct character. Ken Lee has suggested that ‘while Romanies have never been colonised through dispossession of land in the same way as indigenous peoples, in many other

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The Gypsy Woman respects they can be considered as colonial subjects’, and it is this postcolonial cue that is taken up in the interpretation of visual and literary culture here.8 Just as Gypsies cannot be seen to simply ‘stand in’ for India in creative works, neither can they be seen straightforwardly as colonial subjects, because their diasporic history is not one of settler domination: this is a different kind of encounter. The Gypsy/non-Gypsy encounter recalibrates Orientalism as a critical perspective and offers an opportunity to rethink the ways in which communities are known and represented. I would add that the work of critiquing the authorial/artistic power imbalance between white (usually) men and Gypsy women, and the fact of representation as domination, remains unfinished, despite the decades that have passed since postcolonial theory seemed to offer an emancipatory critical practice in academic and wider study. We know this because Orientalist representations of Gypsy women are reproduced every day, contributing significantly to the concept of an ‘authentic’ Gypsiness (explored in the next chapter) to which Romani women are expected by mainstream society to conform. This expectation effaces their own contradictory, diverse, modern experiences with the looming presence of the Gypsy woman of myth. Each textual encounter one has with the Gypsy woman today, in Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, in a tabloid newspaper, in Val Wood’s novel Gypsy Girl, in a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in a joke or a song, reopens – as Sara Ahmed notes – ‘the prior histories of encounter that violate and fix others in regimes of difference’; the encounter comes loaded with the Orientalism of the nineteenth century, motivated as it was then by imperial antagonisms that have little to do with the Gypsy herself.9 I proceed from Ken Lee’s turn-of-the-millennium articulation of the Orientalism built into the study of Gypsy culture, an important marker in critical Romani Studies, to focus on Gypsy women and the effect Orientalism has on textual encounters with them.10 The chapter, then, offers a brief reintroduction to the concept of Orientalism for purposes of context and teases out this discourse in written and visual examples from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries – with particular focus once more on Meg Merrilies from Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering – via a language of encounter provided by Ahmed. It then turns to consider a form of Orientalism that is comparatively rarely discussed but central to textual encounters with Gypsy women: EuroOrientalism. That is, the Orientalising of Eastern Europe, in particular a

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Orientalisms and Inheritance turn to this East – especially Romania – when imagining Gypsy culture, whether it is relevant to the British experience or not. This section considers Jenny Calendar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the light of a reading of inheritance in George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy. Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, profoundly altered the ways in which literary and cultural scholars approached Orientalist representation. In the twenty-first century its central ideas are as relevant as ever, though they are frequently modified to take account of new political and cultural conditions, and intersecting concerns such as gender. Orientalism has been criticised for homogenising Western scholarly and cultural attitudes to the Middle East, but in the four decades since its publication this method for scrutinising constructions of otherness has been adapted and refined in its specificity to consider India, the Far East and, here, the Gypsy woman in Britain and the USA.11 As Ziad Elmarsafy and Anna Bernard note, ‘too much ink has been spilled on what Orientalism got right or wrong [. . .] and too little on taking stock of its impact and building on that to appraise its significance to current debates in multiple fields’.12 It is certainly significant to an analysis of how and why representation of the Gypsy woman persistently hails an earlier context of cultural production so mesmerised by the exotic East. The Orientalism of the British Gypsy harks back to supposed Indian diasporic origins but also Orientalising gestures towards Eastern Europe, as if the diasporic journey were teleological, with Britain always intended as its end point. In summary, the Orient is seen as a ‘system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire’.13 In Orientalist representation, the Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. Orientalism is ‘a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient’.14 It is the image of the ‘Orient’ expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship. The Oriental is the stereotyped figure represented by such thinking: the man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because he poses a threat to white, Western women; the woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. For the most part, the nineteenth-century representations explored in this chapter are examples of what Said calls latent Orientalism: an untouchable certainty about what and who the Oriental is. As this chapter

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The Gypsy Woman demonstrates, that certainty is misplaced. The basic content of the stereotype of the Orientalised Gypsy woman is static and unanimous. The Orient – and, in this instance, a culture understood as emanating from the Orient and unchanging in its portability – is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability.15 My examples (for the obvious reason that they are based in Britain or the USA) all focus on Oriental as a quality, rather than the Orient as locale. The nineteenthcentury Orientalism one encounters in representations of Gypsy women is a product of Western imperial ambition in, and romantic obsession with, the East as Said describes it, partially transferred to an ‘Oriental’ people at home. It also takes on its own characteristics because of this transference, and becomes even more disassociated from an interest in the realities of the east as a setting (though no less interested in ‘Oriental’ as a quality) as centuries pass. As described in the Introduction, the use of the term ‘Gypsy’ in English comes from the word ‘Egyptian’, which may have referred to the Middle East or to Little Egypt in Greece. Christian Schmitt-Kilb has noted that ‘as late as 1999, claims to Egyptian roots of the gypsies were made in scholarly papers’, so the blurriness of a wide-ranging Oriental origin for the Gypsies became almost an essential part of the narrative.16 However, as Becky Taylor describes, ‘scholars in the eighteenth century [. . .] made the links between Romani and the Indian group of languages’, leading to the pursuit of ‘exactly which tribe or from which region Gypsies originated’. Taylor makes explicit one of the theories in later scholarship of the diaspora: ‘it is now accepted that the Romani people formed outside rather than inside India’.17 She draws on the work of Donald Kenrick, who cites M. J. de Goeje’s 1875 lecture as his original source in the indicatively titled Gypsies: From the Ganges to the Thames.18 DNA sampling and linguistic evidence has been used to advance a theory that ‘proto-Gypsy groups originated in what is now north-western India and Pakistan, probably migrating from this region around 1,500 years ago’.19 It was Heinrich Grellmann who brought together his contemporaries’ linguistic research to make the first strong case for Indian origins. Despite their making ‘a secret of their language’, and inattentiveness when being questioned about language, one might still research ‘true Gipsey’ language and find in it ‘Hindostan words’.

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Orientalisms and Inheritance Attempting to strengthen the linguistic case, Grellmann insists that ‘the Gipsies, and natives of Hindostan, resemble each other in complexion and shape, also that they are equally timorous and cowardly is undeniable’. He also suggests that the ‘excessive loquacity of the Gipsies’ is Indian – though many other sources emphasise Gypsy taciturnity. He notes that a Gypsy name, Polgar, most well known as the name of a Gypsy leader who obtained safe conduct in Hungary in 1496, originates in India as the name of a deity. Grellmann, on the basis of evidence provided by the French explorer Pierre Sonnerat, says that the dancing of Gypsy girls, with its ‘indecent and lascivious attitudes and gestures’, is like that of the girls of Surat. Fortune-telling, discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5 of Gypsy Woman, ‘is universal all over the east’, but the version practised by Gypsies is found ‘no where but India’. Somewhat bizarrely, Grellmann points to an apparent fondness for saffron as evidence of the Indian descent of the Gypsies – though this distinctive ingredient in a community’s cuisine is more likely to point to trade and travel routes than genetic descent. Grellmann asserts that, more specifically, Gypsies come from a pariah caste, or Suders. He uses this categorisation to cast further aspersions: they are fond of brandy because of the speed of intoxication it produces; the women will prostitute themselves to anyone; they are voluptuous; children are neglected.20 It is not a pleasant read. David Mayall ties the attempts to discover the Sanskrit roots of Romani to the development of comparative philology in Europe more generally, as well as a ‘general vogue for Orientalism’.21 Rather than suggest that philology inspires the Orientalism found in European representations of Gypsies, it is safer to say that Orientalism and philology find a confluence in scholarly and popular interest in who Gypsies were. For instance, in the second volume of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Francis Hindes Groome suggests that readers will be interested in an 1823 account by William Ouseley of his Travels in Various Countries of the East in order to know more about non-European Gypsies. Ouseley describes some of the people he meets as resembling ‘our Gypsies’. He comments that the puppet show this ‘tribe’ displayed used a similar voice to Punch in English puppet shows, and Groome cuts in to affirm that Henry Mayhew’s still-studied 1851 London Labour and the London Poor gives evidence for the slang of Punch and Judy shows coming from the Romani language. Groome and Ouseley labour to demonstrate the simultaneous foreign Romaniness and

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The Gypsy Woman native Englishness of this popular performance – Gypsies bring the East to England in forms that are not visible to the average audience member, and Groome and his colleagues see it as their responsibility to detail those forms. Groome also appends a ‘Syriac-Gypsy vocabulary’, collected for him by a Miss G. G. Everest of Beirut. He ends by saying that ‘we may look for information from some Orientalist more qualified to speak than myself’.22 We see Orientalism, colonialism (with Miss Everest’s presence in Beirut) and philological and Romani research combined here to produce the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (a combination further explored, as noted, by Lee). The Orientalist discourse runs deep: when Paul Bataillard describes the arrival of Gypsies in Paris in the very same volume, he suggests that even ‘the sun shone out with Oriental warmth’.23 Despite keen cultural interest in the origins of the Gypsies, Sarah Houghton-Walker suggests that by the end of the eighteenth century in England, people stopped seeing them as literally foreign and started to understand them as a strange group that was nonetheless part of the English population, properly part of the English landscape.24 It is important to keep this shift in mind when considering the ways in which Gypsies are figured as Oriental. They are seen as being from India, but now part of Britain. I do not fully share Houghton-Walker’s view that the figure of the Gypsy loses ‘foreignness’ as her dominant characteristic from the early nineteenth century, because many representations of these ‘familiar others’ continue to emphasise the foreign as part of their Orientalist mode.25 Nevertheless, the suggestion of a kind of foreignness that belongs in Britain is a fruitful one when making sense of the ambivalent image constructed by writers and artists. For instance, Adrian Marsh has chased down the sources in order to point to an 1830 article by scholar-soldier Colonel John S. Harriott as an important staging post on the road to Orientalising Gypsies as part of scholarly Orientalism. Observations on the Oriental Origins of the Romanichal ‘suggested the possibility of being able to ‘‘institute new areas of specialisation’’ [. . .] about an Oriental population at Europe’s heart, the Gypsies’. The heart is, of course, part of the body proper, as English as Punch and Judy. Gypsies are part of the body of Europe in Marsh’s direct reading of Harriott – but this metaphor appears in a text emphasising the heart as transplanted (and at risk of rejection). Harriott’s theory, about the appearance of a group of itinerant musicians and thieves in the work of

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Orientalisms and Inheritance Persian poet Firdawsī, was that this episode demonstrated the connection between English Gypsies and the Indian origin of their language. However, ‘upon examination, the translation by Harriott displays a number of aspects that throws doubt upon any connection with Gypsy origins’, and Marsh suggests that its presence in an Orientalised Romani historiography has the effect of mythologising Romani history with an Orientalist spin. It is, Marsh suggests, ‘part of the discourse of colonial imperialism, justifying European rule in India and interference in Persia and elsewhere in the region’.26 Britain’s interference in India can be seen as beginning in earnest with the founding of the East India Company by royal charter on the last day of 1600 as the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies, obtaining a fifteen-year monopoly over trade to the East and the right to ‘wage war’ if necessary (most likely with their Dutch competitors). Rapidly, the East India Company transformed (as William Dalrymple lucidly summarises) into an aggressive colonial power, a dangerously unregulated company requiring British state support to operate, yet answerable only to its shareholders, its rule in Bengal becoming a policy of pillage.27 The early Directors of the Company had envisioned a series of interlinked island and coastal plantations and trading stations rather than the possession of territory inland, a conceptualisation of empire that followed previous European imperial experiments. The reality was, of course, somewhat different. By 1750, Indian silks, cottons and calicoes made up sixty per cent of the Company’s sales, and by that time the wealthy and powerful Mughal Empire with which the Company had traded was in a state of collapse, in part thanks to the removal of imperial wealth by the Persian Nadir Shah. European powers exploited the resulting power vacuum. By the later 1750s, Company civil and military officers enjoyed unprecedented access to Asian goods, through bribes, gifts, commerce and the spoils of war. Together with official cargoes of Indian and Chinese commodities, these goods helped to foster a British material and domestic culture ripe for literary Oriental themes, in particular the Orient finding its way into the villages, lanes and open spaces of Britain itself. The famous Gypsy character of Walter Scott’s India-obsessed Guy Mannering (1815), Meg Merrilies, has already made an appearance in this book. She matters to conceptions of the Gypsy woman because Scott’s

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The Gypsy Woman work was so wildly popular and regularly performed in stage adaptations, literally setting the scene for a generation’s visual experience of the Gypsy woman. Daniel Terry’s adaptation of Guy Mannering was first performed in 1816, but continued to find audiences throughout the nineteenth century (in Belfast the year after its Covent Garden premiere; in the 1830s with the African-American actor Ira Aldridge in the role of Dirk Hatteraik; and at the Pavilion Theatre on Whitechapel Road in London in 1860, for instance). Meg is sometimes seen, because of the novel’s colonial historical context, as a manifestation of cultural anxieties about how to manage a wild and distant territory. The novel’s narrative attempts to repress or fetishise the Oriental chaos encroaching on its borders. It ultimately imposes the order of home and of the centre, disempowering those on the social periphery, such as the Gypsies. Following his kidnap, Harry Bertram has various misadventures in Holland, then goes to India to serve in the army under the name of Brown and the command of Guy Mannering. Narratively, then, Mannering and Brown are both lately from the subcontinent, allowing them to draw personal connections between the Gypsies and the East and, for the reader, bringing images of colonialism home, a ‘dislocation of imperialism’ in some readings.28 As the Gypsies of Ellangowan are dislocated from their former home by the Laird, so ideas about India, which they prompt through a process of Orientalism, move location; something of India comes to Britain; the empire returns. For example, Bertram’s first sight of Meg brings him to wonder if he has ‘dreamed of such a figure?’ or if ‘this wild and singular-looking woman [recalls to his] recollection some of the strange figures [he has] seen in an Indian pagoda?’29 Meg seems to be a visitor from a site of colonialism that only appears in the narrative via memory, the source of dreams that confuse the figure of the Gypsy with an Indian scene. The Gypsy woman does not stand in for India, but hints at it in Orientalist encounters. Scott’s choice of headwear for Meg, the turban, may not simply be part of orientalising Gypsies, but also a reference to the fertility goddess, Cybele. She was the great mother-goddess of Anatolia, responsible for her people’s well-being. Not only does Meg have this maternal role amongst her ‘tribe’, she is a maternal figure to Harry. Cybele makes her way into English literature via Virgil in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, where Thames wears a crown like that of ‘Old Cybele’ that is ‘like a Turribant’. According to Peter

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Orientalisms and Inheritance Hawkins, this image of Spenser’s, in the way it echoes Virgil, has the effect of transferring ‘the crown of civilization’ from the East to the West, signifying ‘Britain’s new ascendancy’.30 Meg’s turban thus not only brings the east to Britain in the figure of the Gypsy, but suggests via this tissue of quotations that it might also be a comment on British civilisation and colonialism. While there is no shared etymology for Cybele and ‘sibyl’, meaning prophetess, the homonym in English translation is another tantalising connection between the Gypsy woman and the goddess’s turban – one by which Scott may also have been tempted. In India, Brown, a man without knowledge of his childhood kidnap, was encouraged by Mannering’s wife to pursue their daughter, Julia. Mannering mistakenly believed that Brown was trying to cuckold him because of the secret nature of the assignations. In India, and on his immediate return to Britain, Brown/Bertram does not know who he is and nor does anyone else. Consequently, his inheritance and the closure of the narrative are reliant on the repression, through Meg’s death, of these disorientating ideas about a place where his identity is unclear and his actions misinterpreted. Strange, transgressive visitors enable the plot while drawing attention to Britain’s figuring of the East as a chaotic place on which to impose colonial rule. As Alyson Bardsley notes, ‘Britain’s overseas relations contribute to the instabilities depicted in the novel’.31 The characters’ lives do not quite make sense in India, until they return to the colonial centre as the locus of order and control. For Katie Trumpener, the ‘novel understands the relationship between national and imperial history in ways its characters do not’.32 The text persistently reminds the reader about India, while its characters are strangely ignorant of its recurrence. Both Trumpener and Peter Garside point out the similarities between Ellangowan’s Gypsy displacement and the implementation by the East India Company of a system of land occupancy in Bengal resulting in the displacement of labourers as villages were parcelled into estates.33 Lest these suggestions about connections between India and Gypsies in Britain should seem like a postcolonial reading too far, we should not forget the ways in which Orientalist travellers and researchers made comparisons, like that of Ouseley above, between Eastern contexts and ‘our’ Gypsies. The ways in which non-fiction writers wrote about Gypsies in Britain makes it impossible to ignore the Orientalism of literary and artistic representations. These comparisons

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The Gypsy Woman worked the other way, too. When British artists looked for suitable scenes and figures to paint in India, they not only sought out local rulers or sites of cultural difference, but also looked for the authentic ancestors of the Gypsy women at home. For instance, in 1855 William Carpenter painted a bright watercolour – now in the V&A collection – of a young woman from a ‘wandering Gypsy tribe’, detailing her many bangles, cuffs, necklaces and nose ring (but no turban). ‘In the drama of homecoming’ in Guy Mannering, Trumpener complains, ‘India is forgotten, and the Indian interlude comes to seem irrelevant’; a troublesome influence is contained.34 The colonisers’ anxiety about the possibilities of rebellion and resistance is hinted at, as Garside notes, by reference in the text to the formidableness of the ‘native Indian army’ and resistance fighter Tippoo Saib.35 With Meg’s death, though, as a connection to her Indian ‘relations’, these fears are put to rest. She helps Bertram to inherit his fortune by identifying him, but this also means he can forget all about his disordered colonial experience. Trumpener describes Scott’s novel as a rewriting of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, but sees Scott as nominalising the connection that Austen implies between the imperial and the domestic: ‘where Sir Thomas Bertram returns home from Antigua tired, tanned, and somehow transformed, Harry Bertram returns home from India simply as Brown’. Bertram returns home to re-establish the status quo. But if, as Trumpener notes, Scott marks the Gypsies as ‘nonindigenous and nonwhite’ and makes a connection between them and colonial natives, Harry Bertram manages to export some of this exoticism with him to India, having been practically raised as a small child by Meg.36 The Orientalism of the Gypsies does not just originate in India but is repeated there. This disrupts a Romani diasporic chronology, but also seems to predict a very particular female colonial relation, the white British (or Anglo-Indian) child raised by the ‘native’ ayah, but expected to relinquish any linguistic, social or affective relation when s/he came of age and assumed a place as a pillar of empire.37 Meg, it is reported, is ‘reckoned in the vulgar phrase, no canny’.38 According to Freud, the uncanny (‘unheimlich’, literally ‘unhomely’) is the ‘class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’. The uncanny is also that which ‘ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’.39 To reiterate, Freudian psychoanalysis is not the core methodology for exploring textual encounters with Gypsy

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Orientalisms and Inheritance women in this book, but when dealing with a novel so interested in repressions both psychic and social, with the strange, and where home is a contested space for every character, his ideas help to link some of these important themes together. Meg appears strange to Bertram, but her strangeness is familiar both because he knew her of old but cannot place her and because it brings to mind the strangeness of India for the young soldier. The familiar becomes frightening and her presence reveals a secret about his past. The narrative tries to repress India (as the colony was suppressed by British rule) by moving the action back to Britain for the period in which the novel is set. India remains firmly in the past, becoming the place of memories and origins. Meg’s Indianness brings to light a location which the text keeps ostensibly hidden, and is itself a synecdoche of India’s resistance against colonial force – it cannot be so easily suppressed, as would be seen forty years later in the uprising of 1857. Her presence also reveals the secret of Bertram’s past, reminding him, uncannily, of himself. She seems to be the safe repository of the text’s Indian traces as a denizen of Britain, the controlled location, but in its reminders of her non-Britishness the text reveals that she cannot be relied upon to contain the foreign. She is at once not-Indian and Indian, displacing the colonial but simultaneously a harbinger of its encroachment. The frightening power of Meg’s ambivalent position between known and unknown, homely and foreign, cannot be tolerated and so as ‘home’ is defined once and for all (an urgent national project for an expanding empire as well as a personal one), she must be removed. As noted in the previous chapter, this is not the only novel in which Scott makes the connection between the Gypsies and their supposed Eastern origins. In Quentin Durward, following the hanging of one of their own, a group of Gypsies abandon themselves to ‘all the oriental expressions of grief; the women making a piteous wailing, and tearing their long black hair, while the men seemed to rend their garments, and to sprinkle dust upon their head’.40 But it is Meg Merrilies who captured the public imagination. When Sarah Egerton played her in Terry’s musical adaptation, she was painted in costume by an artist known for theatrical portraiture, Samuel de Wilde, and this was reproduced by James Thomson in 1817 with a large red turban, with that Medusa hair escaping from the top. The original painting of the costume features much longer, but less wild, hair. She also wears tartan and a tattered red cloak. The image was

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The Gypsy Woman produced for the Theatrical Inquisitor, a publication that described Egerton’s performance as ‘surpass[ing] the expectations of her admirers’, played with a pathos that touched even her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte.41 The British Museum has a Cruikshank version of this portrait dated 1821, showing (if the date is correct) the longevity of even this actress’s version of Meg, reproduced at least three times for wider circulation in the nineteenth century and now available digitally via the National Portrait Gallery and the British Museum.42 This is not to mention the many illustrated editions of Guy Mannering that were produced featuring images of Meg. In one of these illustrations with a cave setting, drawn by Henry Richter, the turban has morphed into a witch’s hat, making Meg rather like Mary Squires.43 In another, dated around 1823 by the British Library and credited to Charles Leslie (about whom there is more in Chapter 5), Meg’s turban is Indian, her skin is dark and her hair coiled.44 The theatrical portraits, book illustrations and an 1879 painting by Heywood Hardy inspired by John Keats’s Meg Merrilies poem all find digital afterlives on Pinterest, pinned to boards about history and literature and alongside images of ‘vintage’ vardos, tarot cards and guides to palmistry. Meg Merrilies, Scottish-Oriental Gypsy, is everywhere, even now. Nicholas Saul turns to nineteenth-century sensation fiction in his analysis of an androgynous Gypsy-like character, Ezra Jennings in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868). Saul has also written about the Orientalism of the representation of Gypsies in the German tradition, a tradition from which Grellmann emerges and which he informs.45 With Grellmann casting such a long shadow on the representation of Gypsies in German and in any other language into which his Dissertation was translated, the Orientalism of this work forms the back story of almost every textual encounter with the Gypsy woman. Like Guy Mannering, Saul says, The Moonstone is a text ‘intimately concerned with the problem of Orientalism in British colonial India’. Jennings is of dual heritage, but with a nose that has ‘the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East’ and his skin ‘a gipsy darkness’. Jennings is unlike the Indians in the novel, and unlike the other English characters, but he is like Meg Merrilies: he ‘would appear to join in his own person Occident and Orient, gadjo and Gypsy, light and dark, male and female, old and young’. Saul suggests that Jennings is ‘the agent of the text’s

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Orientalisms and Inheritance engagement with the Orientalist tradition’ and that even his androgyny is part of this role, given the ways in which Oriental cultures are feminised in Western representation. Jennings solves the riddle at the centre of The Moonstone’s diverting plot, using Western ‘analytical scientific knowledge and the Gypsy tradition of privileged intuition’, a form of knowledge explored further in Chapter 5. Like George Borrow’s Lavengro, Saul points out, The Moonstone makes heavy reference to that supremely colonial text and novelistic propaganda for Western dominance, Robinson Crusoe. Jennings resists Crusoe’s discursive power, however, a resistance that is part of The Moonstone’s ‘subtle attack on Orientalist Gypsy discourse’. As a tragic wanderer, fatally ill, Jennings is seen by Saul as ‘an emblem of the Romany fate’.46 Meg Merrilies, Ezra Jennings and, as I describe in the second half of this chapter, Jenny Calendar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer invoke, complicate and critique the Orientalist vision of the European Gypsy, but none of these characters may personally prosper, even if they facilitate the happiness and success of others. Theirs is a tragic position as presented by these texts, one of personal suffering and symbolic pain. Ezra Jennings is not the only half-Gypsy male in Collins’s work: Ozias Midwinter appears in Armadale (1866). Born Allan Armadale (a name shared with three other men in the narrative), Midwinter renounces this appellation as a young man, assuming instead the name of a ‘half-bred gipsy’ by whom he is unofficially adopted following his escape from a miserable home and school life.47 Intriguingly, both the ‘gipsy’ label and some of his vagrant ‘father’s’ characteristics transfer on to Midwinter along with the curious name. It is no coincidence that The Moonstone’s Ezra and Armadale’s Ozias have first names containing an exotic-sounding ‘z’. It is not a common letter in English, and has long been used to evoke a gothic foreignness, for instance in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor (1806) and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Zastrozzi (1810) – though both of Collins’s character names are Biblical. The ‘Z’ also invokes Grellmann’s ‘Zigeuner’ in the German original. Midwinter’s second name ties him resolutely to the English seasons, an experience of the land, the Orient in a new context. Like Ezra Jennings, Ozias Midwinter is a hybrid figure. As other examples in the next chapter explore, whether Midwinter is born a ‘true’ Gypsy or not makes little difference to the production of authentic Gypsy stereotypes. His ‘tawny complexion, [. . .] large bright brown eyes, [. . .]

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The Gypsy Woman black mustachios and beard, [give] him something of a foreign look’.48 The ‘truth’ of his non-Gypsy identity continually breaks through the Gypsy veneer, threatening the safety that would be maintained by keeping this information hidden (Midwinter believes that he and his friend, the other living Allan Armadale, cannot escape the fate of repeating the deadly relationship of their fathers). I suggest that Meg Merrilies, as an Orientalised and hybrid figure, has the potency to inform encounters with ambiguous male Gypsy-like characters such as Ezra and Ozias. The fact that Gypsies in Britain had made their journey west (whether from Egypt, India or some other vaguely eastern territory) but retained identifiably Oriental cultural characteristics – like Ezra Jennings’s ‘ancient’ nose – is of a piece with the idea of the timelessness of the Orient. For instance, in his editorial introduction to A History of the Gipsies (1865), James Simson says that the Gypsies, ‘being an Oriental people’, have ‘displayed the uniformity of attachment to habit, that has characterized the people of that part of the world’.49 The example for which he first reaches is of a woman, suggesting that the ‘maidens of Syria’ wear the same kind of veil in the nineteenth century as the Hebrew Rebecca. Later, in a note to Walter Simson’s text, James Simson alludes to the despotic Oriental male and oppressed female: ‘neglecting females, in the manner of education, is quite in keeping with the Oriental origin of the Gipsies’.50 Combine the timeless Orient with a construction identified in patriarchal culture by Simone de Beauvoir, the ‘eternal feminine’, and the image of the unchanging, unchangeable, developmentally arrested Gypsy woman is complete.51 Katie Trumpener and Ken Lee have assessed this concept of timelessness in relation to the representation of Romani/Gypsy people, but it should be noted that it acquires particular power when combined with the eternal feminine.52 Though Said’s Orientalism has been criticised for collapsing various forms of Orientalism so that the discourse itself becomes monolithic, Orientalised images of Gypsy women often do just this, drawing on a vaguely Orientalist vision rather than a specific one, calling on Arab, Indian, Hebrew, Romanian and Spanish Orients at once. A March number of the Illustrated London News in 1843 included four engravings of work in the British Institution Exhibition. One of these is engraved as ‘Arabian Gipsy-Woman’s Toilet’ from the painting The Toilet by Irish painter William Fisher. The Illustrated London News’s title and accompanying text

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Orientalisms and Inheritance identifies the woman as a Gypsy, drawing the reader’s attention specifically to the subject’s sex and race, something the title under which the painting was exhibited does not make explicit. The Illustrated London News repeats the heightened exoticism of the woman, featuring the two lines of typically unattributed verse with which the painting was exhibited: ‘For dance, and love, and gipsy wile, / Pride of the dusky band!’53 The engraving of the painting displays nothing of dance, love or a dusky band but these ideas are brought to the bitextual page (and the exhibition catalogue before it), influencing the image’s interpretation. Further, the accompanying text asserts that the woman in the picture is ‘dressing her profuse ringlets during a fit of abstraction’, whilst the engraving shows a woman with straight hair in the foreground with two men in the background.54 She may be listening to the men or even directing them. The proposal that she is in a fit of abstraction is just one potential reading among many, one that disempowers its Oriental female subject but also agrees with the other information provided by the text. According to the Illustrated London News she is not just one female subject experiencing love, but a Gypsy woman who must be always, necessarily, associated with it. She is categorised as part of an Orientalised group, the ‘dusky band’, and this identification brings with it expectations of emotionality, physicality and, most likely, trickery. As a Gypsy woman on the pages of a British newspaper she is exotic, sensual and thoughtless. As an Oriental, she always will be – could be – nothing else, because those female Oriental qualities are eternal. Though Arabian, she is connected by many citations, such as Horace Smith’s ‘Arabs of Europe’, to Gypsies in Britain. Louise Doughty makes retrospective critical reference to this sort of allusion in her historical novel Stone Cradle (2006), as Clementina hears her family referred to by a vicar as ‘roadside Arabs’, a widely used formulation in the period in which the novel is set.55 Clementina’s story is told on her own terms; she narrates the sections of the novel that describe her experience. Doughty draws on research and contacts via her own Romani ancestry – acknowledged in a paratext to the novel. Clementina’s implied listener/reader is deliberately ambiguous: ‘sometimes I wonder who I am telling my story to’. Sometimes she imagines that the listener might be her former self, so the non-Romani reader is partially excluded from this account as she constructs her own temporal echo chamber.56 Clementina is imperfect, hurtful and proud, but she is her own woman.

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The Gypsy Woman In her telling, it is the gorjer girl who becomes her daughter-in-law whose hair ‘would not stay tied’, like a bright red cloud escaping from its velvet ribbon; other textual encounters with Gypsy women included in the current work show dark hair escaping the bounds of sexual propriety. From this auburn colouration, one assumes that it is an impression of Rose (a name that cries of white Englishness) who adorns the cover of the 2006 paperback edition of Stone Cradle, hair loose and shoulder provocatively bared. The codes of female sexuality in a romance novel are by no means subverted here, but the focus is, for a change, not the Gypsy woman. Doughty’s deliberate drawing of attention to terms such as ‘roadside Arabs’ and revisiting of stereotypes marks the novel out as partly neo-Victorian (it adopts an appropriately transhistorical chronology, moving from the Victorian period to the interwar years and 1940s as Clementina and Rose come in and out of focus) according to the criteria laid out by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn.57 Doughty re-visions the nineteenthcentury Gypsy woman and her experiences, operating metatextually via allusions to factual sources of the time, encouraging an intellectual and affective exchange between that period and the contemporary reader. The novel invokes the blood, sweat, desire, gestation, labour, lactation, claustrophobia, pain and tears of the female body – female bodies (one Gypsy, one gorjer) in particularised times and places in the narrative. Those settings condition the expectations, conformity, transgressions and punishments for those bodies – Doughty in no way implies an eternal feminine or timeless Gypsy woman. Following de Beauvoir, if we reject the eternal feminine and the timeless Oriental, one must ask ‘what is a Gypsy woman?’ and the naturalness of the picture painted by generations of white men burns away. This is not to say that either the image itself or its cultural power turns to ash, but it must compete for space with the self-fashioned, the critical, and the new. It is this book’s purpose throughout to dismantle the hegemony of these historical and long-lasting representations in order to make space for more complex and diverse Romani and Traveller representation. One of my favourite recent examples of this newer representation formed part of a low-key exhibition in Doncaster Museum in summer 2016. Tucked away in an upstairs space, next to the museum’s pottery collection, was the Proud Gypsy Traveller display, a glorious peacock of a title. The aim of the exhibition was to record family and individual histories because ‘it is not

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Orientalisms and Inheritance recorded correctly in how the media would like to portray us’.58 One contribution was from Ann, a woman from a Traveller family who lives on a Local Authority Site in Doncaster. In a plain brown frame was a photo of a photo. Fingers with neat coral-painted nails held up an old sepia photograph of a horse-drawn vardo with a man and girl in the foreground. While acknowledging a precious past shared by a community, one which is romanticised by non-Travellers, Ann puts herself back in the picture, holding an image of that past herself, retaining control of its meanings and placement. This is a self-described Traveller woman engaging with her family’s past but not held there, as Orientalist images would hold her. Seeing Ann’s twenty-first-century image ownership causes me to turn an even more critical transhistorical eye back on the nineteenth-century, to the power held by the white male producers of images of what they regularly termed ‘their Gypsies’. Their work is epitomised by that of Charles Godfrey Leland, whose writing regulates ‘Gypsydom’ (to use a term with currency in his writing and that of his peers) to capture it in writing for all time using an organising strategy described by Edward Said, namely synchronic essentialism.59 This way of ‘ordering the visible’, as Jean-Francois Lyotard might describe it, arrests Gypsy culture to describe it at a certain point, removing it from the narratives of history and progress.60 According to Said, the Orientalist attitude has the ‘selfcontaining, self-reinforcing character of a closed system, in which objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once [and] for all time’.61 In order to describe an all-encompassing view of something vast, it must be taken as a freeze-frame; otherwise the project of systematically ordering the vision becomes impossible. Against the stasis caused by an encompassing gaze presses the disruptive detail of history and change, growth and movement.62 Nord notes that the attitude of writers like Leland ‘often limited their ability to acknowledge the Gypsies as independent beings subject to change and possessed of a complex history’.63 The lorist aims to ‘get hold of the whole sprawling panorama before him – culture, religion, mind, history, society’ – producing a conservative Orientalist vision.64 To return to Leland, he paints a ‘pretty picture’ of the people, heightening the Gypsies’ mystique (and, simultaneously, their suggested origins) by alluding to ‘their glittering Indian eyes’.65 His project, as I described in the Introduction, is to bring the Gypsy out of the shadows

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The Gypsy Woman and in to the realm of Western knowledge. He has found the Gypsies ‘more cheerful, polite, and grateful than the lower orders of other races in Europe or America’, an observation that holds the racial hierarchy in place.66 The Gypsies’ impoverished state seems unchangeable in his writing. Leland does not think it ‘worth while’ to explain to the Gypsies that ‘their ancestors, centuries ago, left India’.67 The closed system of scholarship in which Leland participates actively excludes the Gypsies from the knowledge about them that it disseminates; they are barred from their own history. Said describes the disciplinary order imposed on the Orient and the texts that constitute it by the Orientalist, with the reader passing ‘through the learned grids and codes’ the writer provides.68 This disciplinary order is obvious in guides to Gypsy dialect, sorcery and folktales that abounded in the nineteenth century, and in the encyclopaedia entries the lorists produced. Part of this order comes from the reader’s expectations of the form or genre in which they find the material. The reader knows what he or she will find in a guide to dialect such as that compiled by Simson, or in an encyclopaedia. Gypsydom is presented in a manageable fashion. For the learned grids and codes of language, religion and character to retain their authority in this context, the Gypsy must be given as ‘fixed, stable, in need of investigation, in need of knowledge about himself’.69 As Leland elaborates, ‘I knew my friends, and they did not know me’.70 Said goes on: ‘there is a source of information [the Gypsy] and a source of knowledge [the Gypsy scholar], in short, a writer and a subject matter otherwise inert’.71 One method of maintaining an inert subject matter is to use declarative figures of speech, employing the ‘timeless eternal’.72 Leland’s didactic texts are laden with these forms; for example, in The Gypsies (1882), he allies eternality with nature: ‘these people are like the birds and the bees’.73 Another very literal example of synchronic essentialism comes in Samuel Roberts’s earlier Parallel Miracles (1830). His beliefs differed significantly from other scholars of Gypsy culture, but he too employs images of arrested development. In describing the Gypsies he says that ‘to this day, they seem to have continued, from the time we have the first account of them, unchanged in any respect’.74 Roberts’s and Leland’s ability to describe what Leland calls the Gypsy ‘scene’ relies on capturing it once and for all and holding it in a single vision.75 In the twentieth century, prior to the horrors of the Porajmos

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Orientalisms and Inheritance (Nazi genocide of Romani people), Lady Eleanor Smith wrote an article for the Daily Mail on the ‘unchanging lore of Romany’. Smith was a novelist and interested in Gypsy culture – in fact my own copy of the Wind on the Heath anthology collected by John Sampson is inscribed by her. The Daily Mail piece is a curious mixture of personal and collected anecdote, and she describes the narrative of Black But Comely (discussed further in Chapter 4) as if it were evidence of Gypsy behaviour rather than the imaginings of a white novelist. The Gypsies’ ‘various ancient superstitions’, she asserts in the Mail, ‘indicate very clearly the Oriental origin of this race’.76 It is not just that their beliefs are Oriental, but that their timelessness categorises them as such. Following Trumpener, Hancock and Lee, academics have taken up the challenge of identifying and critiquing the notion of the timelessness of Gypsy culture, and the adherence of individual Gypsies to this timeless lore.77 I do not intend to repeat that work at length. What the repetition of Orientalised images effectively shows is the timelessness of Orientalism more than the eternality of the Gypsy; in its insistence on the inert subject, Orientalism shores up its own immoveable discursive foundations so that imaginative texts come back again and again to the characteristics its early anthropologists identified. Ahmed sees cultural translation as being at the heart of the ethnographic project so entangled with Orientalism: ‘the translation of a strange culture into the language of ethnography, the language of the one who knows’.78 The white scholar and follower of Gypsy lore, in the history of Romani Studies, is a kind of literary ethnographer, and most certainly establishes him- or herself as the one who knows, the master of the learned grids and codes. The ‘strangeness’ of the Gypsy must be moved ‘from one system of meaning to another without altering its coherence’. Moreover, strangeness is thought about ‘in terms of the primitive: [. . .] a residual trace of that which was prior to ‘‘our own’’’. Cultural exchange is, in that case, ‘spatial and temporal: from one culture to another, and from (our) past to the present’.79 Fashioning the Gypsy as Oriental was a logical step in the nineteenth century, one that achieves a cultural translation for the non-Gypsy by utilising and solidifying the already-existing codes of Orientalism. The strangeness of the Gypsy retains its coherence – none of these texts wants to make the Gypsy less strange – and an emphasis on the primitive marks the encounter as cultural translation.

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The Gypsy Woman As Alexandra Oprea made clear in a 2002 article about including Romani women’s experience in social justice movements, the historically ‘anthropological’ perspective on Romani culture – the types of writing found in the archives of the Gypsy Lore Society – result in a portrayal of that culture as an ‘unchanging monolith’. There is an ongoing gendered effect within the Romani community too: Patriarchy within Romani communities is either ignored or deemed ‘Romani culture’. Internal problems, such as domestic violence, are not acceptable topics of discussion. [. . .] It silences those who are not part of these communities who seek to critique patriarchal structures [. . .] as well as women from these communities who seek to critique patriarchy. [. . .] The voices of Romani women fighting for equality within and without their respective communities, elaborating a gendered representation of what it means to be Romani, get misinterpreted and muffled.80

These are the social effects of the Orientalised anthropological/ ethnographic monolith, but there is also a complex multi-directional ideological relationship at work in these textual encounters. By insisting on the source of Gypsiness as the East (spatial exchange), on this location as the Gypsies’ never-escapable past (temporal exchange) and the primitiveness of the Oriental Gypsy as one’s own cultural past (another temporal exchange that is the condition for understanding the translation), the labour of the translation is made obvious and legible. Why does the novel with a Gypsy character, the poem, the guide to language, the painting, want to make its cultural translation legible? Because it is then able to offer itself as a text able to grant special access to an encounter with a stranger, an encounter it controls. Even today’s ‘Oriental boho gypsy’ purse for sale on Etsy.com, or the women’s ‘Gypsy’ outfits paraded at music festivals such as Coachella, are an encounter with a tag that performs a shoddy translation, one which offers the promise of consuming strangeness and displaying it on one’s own body. And if the cultural translation is doing all the work, the Gypsy herself is kept inert. The textual encounter on the terms of Orientalism is asymmetrical not just because it insists the Gypsy woman confirm a stereotype, but because that insistence becomes apparently all there is to the encounter; there is no place left and no terms by which the Gypsy woman might exceed or escape the 94

Orientalisms and Inheritance stereotype. The recognition of this asymmetry draws attention, says Ahmed, ‘to the forms of authorisation and labour that are concealed by stranger fetishism’.81 The ‘apparently’ of my description of the encounter becomes, I hope, shaky; there are other things happening in this encounter, but fetishising the strangeness of the Gypsy conceals them. To push this further, and to keep bringing this critique of historical Gypsy Orientalism self-consciously into the twenty-first century, the effect of these Orientalism-mediated encounters is that the mode of that cultural translation also becomes fixed. Not only do we see the same sort of Oriental Gypsy woman appearing time and again (the Halloween costumes, the ‘Eastern’ music on Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, the Instagram posts with ‘mystical gypsy’ eye make-up complete with bindi, the fashion shoot with ‘gypsy’ turbans); the precise way in which the Gypsy woman’s part in a textual encounter is concealed remains the same. It is not supposed to: Orientalism ostensibly allows for the development of Western knowledge while its subject is fixed. However, the continual reappearance of the same residual traces of earlier encounters shows us that we do not experience neo-Orientalism in the twenty-first century, but rather a stuffy translation of the past into the present without enough modification to justify the ‘neo’. As noted at the beginning of the chapter, Ahmed suggests that the prior histories of encounter work to ‘fix others’, but it has also fixed the terms of the encounter.82 In other words, twenty-first-century images of an Orientalised Gypsy woman are, by and large, primitive. They are brought from our representational past to a present that should know better, whenever we hear Oriental music to introduce contemporary British Gypsies on screen, or see the fringed scarf of Ricky Gervais’s ‘Lady Gypsy’, and the coin-bordered garments of Gypsy dress-up. This is not to say that all Orientalisms are the same – and Ahmed herself insists on analysis that emphasises particularity. One of the formations that most obviously has an impact on the representation of Gypsy women is the Orientalising of Eastern Europe by its Western counterpart. I am interested here not so much in the ways in which Eastern European cultures (such as texts produced in Poland or Romania) Orientalise the Gypsy woman, but how Eastern Europe is Orientalised by British and American writers and artists, and the effect this has on representations of the Gypsy – both the notion of the European Roma and the communities of Romani people who have been in Britain for many

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The Gypsy Woman centuries. This Orientalised Eastern European clearly exists in the nineteenth century, as I explain below, but the images produced find new purchase in Britain after European Union enlargement and the accession of countries such as Romania and Bulgaria, who have comparatively large Roma populations. The Daily Mail, fond of veering in the twenty-first century between the sneeringly patronising and the aghast in its representation of Romani, Roma and Traveller people, is full of such stories about ‘Gypsy gangsters who flout Europe’s free movement rules to fleece Britons out of tens of thousands of pounds’ and a ‘Romanian gipsy couple’ who flew into Luton on a budget flight and apparently made £800 begging on the streets of London.83 This discourse contributes, no doubt, to the escalating fear of others from the East preying on the upright British citizen, in turn exploited by those campaigning to Leave in Britain’s 2016 referendum on whether to leave or remain in the European Union. The Daily Express, for instance, posted an article in May 2016 (one month before the EU vote) with the headline ‘Migrant Benefits Boom: Number of east Europeans claiming handouts DOUBLES in five years’, accompanied by a decontextualised image of a crowd of olive-skinned men seeming to push aggressively towards an outline map of the British Isles.84 The only way, the story goes on, of reversing this trend is for Britain to ‘take back control of its borders’. Newspapers considered rightand left-wing described a ‘surge’ of Eastern European migration to Britain after the referendum, deploying an anti-immigrant verb that suggests the country is drowning in new arrivals.85 The fact that some of these easterners are Gypsies, especially those featured in the Mail articles, allows the news stories and opinion pieces to revive and play upon the sorts of anxieties and stereotypes we see in Grellmann’s eighteenthcentury descriptions. The fear, says Pamela Ballinger, ‘of a supposedly diffused and internalized easternness’ results in ‘a reassertion of external boundaries, as seen in Brexit campaigners’ emphasis on sovereignty over borders and control of movement’.86 The migrant Gypsy, an old fear (and whose mobility is discussed further in Chapter 6), becomes once more the discursive victim of prevailing political trends. The message of those Daily Mail articles is that Roma belong in Eastern Europe, not in the West. The similarity of the names ‘Romania’ and ‘Roma’ are sometimes exploited for this argument, though the two have different etymological roots.

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Orientalisms and Inheritance As with the Orientalism Said described, romantic descriptions of Roma invoke many of the same ideas as the denigrating descriptions. In a 2017 Good Housekeeping magazine article, amongst the interior design recommendations and recipes, four female writers contributed to a story titled ‘The Magic of Living Big’, detailing the various ‘adventures that transformed them’. Magic and transformation are, of course, often part of traditional and neo-Orientalist visions. In her contribution to the collection, Clover Stroud told of ‘a trip to Transylvania, the land of myth and legend, with a man she was deciding whether to love’. She chose this destination because ‘even the name sounded romantic. It made me think of gypsies, and castles in the air’. This lower-case rendering of ‘gypsy’ casts a people as part of the landscape, something to look at. They fit Stroud’s romantic conception of Eastern Europe. After travelling the route of the Orient Express – a key marker for a trip to the romantic East of travel brochures – she and her companion stop at a village in the Cindrel Mountains. ‘The stillness of the scene was shattered by a clatter of hooves. A dozen gypsies raced down the street’, and proceed to bet on whose horse will win. Stroud’s lover squeezes her hand: ‘He knew they represented a wildness I couldn’t resist’. This encounter is not, however, all about the Eastern ‘gypsy’ European wildness Stroud covets, but serves the purpose of showing how much her lover understands her. ‘Our adventures were the bedrock of a relationship’, that wildness clearly easier to resist than they thought, once the bourgeois promise of marriage and security hove into view.87 Back in 1992, in his excoriating essay on a hasty German reunification – a question of East and West if ever there was one – that he thought seemed to be burying the nation’s troubled history, Gu€ nter Grass decried Interior Minister Seiters’s keenness to do just that with his agreement with the Romanian Government to repatriate Roma from France to Romania. Powerfully, Grass answers his own question about why ‘gypsies are bottom of the heap’: Because they are different. Because they steal, are restless, roam, have the Evil Eye and that stunning beauty that makes us ugly to ourselves. Because their mere existence puts our values into question. Because they are all very well in operas and operettas, but in reality – it sounds awful, reminds you of awfulness – they are antisocial, odd and don’t fit in. ‘Torch them!’ shout the skinheads.88

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The Gypsy Woman Combining the negative stereotype with exoticism, Grass aligns those who fetishise the Gypsy in fiction but who simultaneously consider the real Roma antisocial with far-right, genocidally minded skinheads. On the one hand, the Orientalised figure of the Gypsy is used to mark out the fault lines in a riven Europe. They belong on that side of the old iron curtain; we, the Westerners, over here. That is certainly the suggestion Grass sees Seiters making. On the other hand, people are keen to romanticise the (often erroneous) Eastern Europeanness of British and American Gypsies. To those minded to celebrate cultural diversity and Roma transnationalism, the presence of a larger population of Roma migrants in Britain seems to suggest that the romantic and exotic aspect of Orientalised European Gypsy culture should once more form part of Gypsy representation, with nods to Romania in particular. This is the case even when talking about communities whose connections to these places are forgotten or irrelevant to their identities as British (and indeed American) Romanies. This strategy homogenises a transnational Romani identity, seeing British and American Romanies as deeply (racially) connected to Roma in or from Europe, failing to recognise the differences between those communities. Jan Grill, undertaking ethnographic work in Glasgow, records the distaste that, for instance, Tarkovce Slovak Roma show towards ‘Hukotske Roma’, and that Slovak Roma show towards the more visible long-skirted and headscarved Romanian Roma.89 There is vibrant debate within the community about the relationship between Romani people and the term ‘Roma’. George Boswell, commenting on an animation and article posted by Adrian Marsh to the Open Society Foundations website in 2013, reiterates that ‘the term ‘‘ROMA’’ commonly refers to the Eastern European wing of the Romani people’. He goes on, more personally: ‘my father is an English Romani/Gypsy, my mother is a German Gypsy (Sinti). We would agree that we are ROMANI, but we do not call ourselves ROMA. That word means, to us, simply our distant cousins from Eastern Europe, the Roma people’.90 To return to Said as well as the project of this book, this is not an attempt to map a British perception of the Easternness of Roma (and by Orientalist implication Romanies in Britain) on to the realities of ethnic, national or village identity. The idea here is to examine the contours of the figure of the Orientalised Gypsy woman, in this European case not just the product of

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Orientalisms and Inheritance interest in the source of the Gypsy diaspora, but also of Euro-Orientalism in the nineteenth century and today. Drawing on research about German sources and his own knowledge of French archives, Ezequiel Adamovsky hypothesises that a concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ as something more than a relative geographic descriptor emerged after 1830, with Europe orientale entering French political vocabulary in the middle years of that decade.91 Political vocabulary was influenced by cultural movements, and some of the key writers conceptualising Europe in the first three decades of the nineteenth century were part of a Romantic movement itself captivated by an Oriental aesthetic and ideas about Eastern passions and beliefs. In the 1840s and 1850s, Europe orientale was used in Russophobic statements, and after that in warnings against Pan-Slavism – once it emerged as a concept it was politically and culturally malleable. The geographic limits of the region were frequently debated with, for instance, Cyprien Robert including Greece in Eastern Europe.92 It was in the 1870s that ‘a proper discourse of Eastern Europe’ or ‘Euro-Orientalism’ started to develop. This ‘received a dramatic reinforcement after World War II as a response to the ideological and political challenge to liberal-bourgeois social order coming from Communist Eastern Europe’ and may be why its formations in the shape of Gypsy stereotypes are so easy to reach for.93 Adamovsky explicitly cautions that Euro-Orientalism is not ‘a mere ethnocentric discourse’, and the direction this chapter takes is not a move to delimit it as such, but to suggest that as a discourse it is implicated in a particular kind of encounter with the Orientalised Gypsy woman, explored here through a return to the work of George Eliot and through Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Academic interest in the American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) has long been enthusiastic, and showed no sign of abating as the show celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2017. Its themes and representations are constantly worthy of discussion, but I would also suggest that it appeals to the scholarly because its characters are so invested in scholarship and texts – both analogue and digital. As a product of the 1990s, it is also metatextually self-conscious, pointing to other fictions such as The Sound of Music and The X-Files, drawing attention to its own status as text. It is joyously of its time, deliberately positioning itself on the cusp of the twenty-first century, just as Buffy, Willow and Xander are on the cusp of adulthood. BtVS is now easily available via streaming services and

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The Gypsy Woman remains part of our cultural landscape. In 2015, Julianna Beaudoin noted that ‘despite over 15 years of detailed academic attention, ‘‘Buffy Studies’’ has yet to explore the consequences of Romani ethnic/racial identities in relation to its fictional Gypsy characters’.94 There are a number of spin-off references to Gypsies in the Buffyverse, catalogued by Beaudoin. The key character on which I wish to focus is Jenny Calendar, played by Robia LaMorte, who appears in seasons one and two and is a part-time member of the ‘Scooby Gang’ – Buffy and her vamp-fighting friends. BtVS is set in Sunnydale, which happens to be located on a hellmouth, causing a mystical convergence of various demons and monsters. Buffy, sixteen when season one opens, is a messianic chosen one, the slayer of her generation. Angel is a vampire who skirts around the borders of the early episodes – looking mysterious, dangerous and sexy – until we learn his story and the Gypsy connection in episode seven. Giles, school librarian, scholar and Buffy’s ‘watcher’, tells her that Angelus (as he was formerly known) left Ireland, wreaked havoc in Europe, and then about eighty years before the action of season one he arrived in the USA but did not hunt human blood. Angel himself reveals that he ‘fed on a girl [Buffy’s] age. Beautiful. Dumb as a post. A favourite among her clan. [. . .] The Romani. Gypsies. The elders conjured the perfect punishment for me. They restored my soul’.95 Jenny Calendar’s presence in Sunnydale is related to this curse, but the audience does not learn this until long after her introduction in episode eight of the first season. At that point, she is presented simply as a computer science teacher with an interest in the occult: a techno-pagan, invested in ‘creating a new society’ online and seeing that the ‘realm of the mystical’ exists somewhere else than ‘ancient texts and relics’.96 The first series explores, through Jenny’s presence, early cultural anxieties and hopes about the internet. There are discussions about online radicalisation – a constant fear of state governments and security forces in the twenty-first century – and disembodied identities. For instance, Xander says in episode eight: ‘who’s to say I’m not [an elderly Dutch woman] if I’m in the elderly Dutch chat room’.97 The first indication that Jenny’s character might bring a different perspective to these issues is when she berates Giles for being a Luddite and snob about digitisation: ‘you think knowledge should be kept in these carefully guarded repositories where only a handful of white guys can get at it’.98 The fact that these technological advances come to define the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and that Jenny Calendar

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Orientalisms and Inheritance ties the promise they offer to race and privilege, demonstrates what an important figure she is in an exploration of the Gypsy woman in literature and visual culture. Jenny Calendar is an answer to the stereotypical figure of the Gypsy woman and provides a different kind of textual encounter – a visual one, one marked by the digital, and one that backs away from the Orientalisms of the past. However, this is not to say that BtVS does not engage in EuroOrientalism, and I want to draw attention to this before retrieving Jenny Calendar as an emancipatory figure, in part through her connections to nineteenth-century literature. Most unusually for a female Gypsy character, she is not recognised as such immediately. She is no more sexualised than the other female characters (and BtVS has a fondness for women and girls in thin vest tops) and only demonstrates an assertive sexuality in episodes where a spell or demon affects many women – such as in episode sixteen of season two where every woman in Sunnydale falls in love with Xander.99 Jenny’s role in this storyline would be void if the stereotypical Gypsy characterisations were in place, because her attentions towards Xander would not seem so unusual. She is a teacher, a love interest for Giles, a supporter of Buffy, a fan of Mexican food and American football: ‘my country’s national pastime’.100 Later in series two, after this assertion of Americanness, a mysterious man in black with a strong accent appears in Jenny’s office and admonishes her for ‘ignor[ing] the responsibility to [her] people’. The man – Enyos, her uncle – refers to her ‘tribe’ and reminds her that she is ‘still Janna, of the Kalderash people, a Gypsy’. Jenny had been sent to Sunnydale to ensure that the curse placed on Angel still held. Enyos reminds her that for her people ‘vengeance is a living thing’; as an Orientalised culture, the Gypsies may act for the story arc as the living memory of Angel’s crimes, repository of old beliefs, arrested in development. Unfortunately for Jenny and all the Scooby Gang, Angel’s orgasmic experience with Buffy has broken the curse and removed his soul. Enyos’s appearance works like many of the narrative motivations in different episodes: despite being situated on a hellmouth, it is often something from a distant and mystical yet earthly elsewhere that brings trouble to Sunnydale: an African mask, a pack of hyenas, an Incan mummy, a book from Italy. The first explicit mention of Romania as a key site for Gypsiness comes in the same episode in which a newly vampiric Angel breaks Jenny’s neck. She has been attempting to translate an ancient

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The Gypsy Woman Romanian text to perform a ritual relating to Angel, but fails when he comes to the school to stop her – but not before she has saved details of the restoration on a floppy disc.101 In episode twenty-one, one that coordinates temporal and spatial exchanges, the audience sees the moment that Angelus is cursed, taking the action to ‘Rumanian Woods’ in 1898, a woman chanting under a tent within a circle of vardos, the scene lit by flickering campfire flames.102 Jenny cannot simply be an American Kalderash, but must be cast as a messenger for ‘her’ people, taken back to nineteenth-century Romania. The popular fictional connection between vampires, Romania and Gypsies is not, of course, initiated by BtVS. Bram Stoker’s Dracula does this a century earlier in 1897 – meaning that Angelus’s Gypsy curse occurs in a fictional post-Dracula world. The Gypsies in Dracula are ‘Szgany’, distinct in Hungary and Transylvania but ‘allied to the ordinary gipsies all the world over’.103 In the midst of his panic and confusion, Jonathan Harker manages to refer these potential abetters in his escape to the ‘notes of them in [his] book’, textual ethnography from the British Museum guiding his lived frame of reference. Indeed, Stoyan Tchaprazov thinks it likely that Stoker based his own understanding of Transylvania, somewhere he never visited, on narratives written by British officials, such as Major E. C. Johnson’s 1885 On the Track of the Crescent. Both this and another apparent source for Stoker, William Wilkinson’s 1820 Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia ‘present the Gypsies in overwhelmingly racist tones’.104 In tracing Stoker’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources, including Grellmann, Mary Burke suggests that attitudes towards having Gypsy blood were akin to Professor Van Helsing’s description of vampiric reproduction. If Transylvania is, as Burke suggests, the ‘gateway between East and West, [. . .] the breach through which ‘‘Oriental’’ degeneration enters the Western European bloodstream’, then Harker begins to sound rather like the Daily Mail articles of today, so concerned about metaphorically vampiric Eastern Europeans coming to suck the lifeblood out of Britain’s welfare state.105 Transylvania is, as Tchaprazov makes clear, a fitting setting for some literary EuroOrientalism, as one of the locales concerning Western Europe when states found independence from the Ottoman Empire. This accentuated EuroOrientalism serves a Gothic terror end ‘by tying Dracula to an Eastern European state’, and ideologically enables the narrative to conclude with

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Orientalisms and Inheritance the reassertion of British/Western hegemony.106 Confirming the perceived link between Gypsies and the Gothic, Burke also notes that Montague Summers’s 1941 Gothic Bibliography lists fourteen entries with a Gypsyrelated title.107 Whether this is because the works fit a literary definition of the Gothic, or whether many more loosely defined works with a Gypsy theme would make it on to this list because of their associations with witchcraft, is unclear. However, the link is clear in Buffy, and on the Etsy and Pinterest pages that make sense of the label ‘Gothic Gypsy’ to market or consume jewellery, clothes and a wider aesthetic. In some ways, then, BtVS revisits – quite deliberately, I think – the location of Dracula in a Euro-Orientalist gesture. Intriguingly, though, it also replays and liberates an important trope from George Eliot’s narrative poem introduced in Chapter 2, The Spanish Gypsy. This section of the chapter also makes use of Eliot’s later novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), to demonstrate the way that Jenny Calendar is a modified and untypical version of the fictional Gypsy woman, when compared to Eliot’s Fedalma and seen through the lens of inheritance. For Eliot, race and inheritance are implicated in each other. As indicated in the previous chapter, Eliot sees Jewish cultural inheritance, a continuity of ‘national education’, creating in the Jews ‘a feeling of race’ and ‘the ties of inheritance both in blood and faith’, a way of ‘remembering national glories’.108 I want to relate this notion of inheritance to Jenny Calendar’s assertion that knowledge should not just be kept in ‘carefully guarded repositories’ to show that she enables a radically different, female-centred inheritance that is not confined to blood and nation but asserts tradition, online community and a greater good. For Jacques Derrida, an archive is ‘a movement of the promise and of the future no less than of recording the past’.109 The writings that Mordecai feverishly works on for the future of his religion in Daniel Deronda, for example, are haunted by a future reader about whom he knows nothing. For Derrida, this is a pledge (in French, gage) to the future that is always also a gamble or a wager (gageure). There is always the risk that the gamble will not pay off, that the inheritor of the archive will not be all the archivist needs him or her to be. This ‘inheritor’ is something like the position that Buffy inhabits, as a fallible teenage girl who does not fit the model of slayer detailed in the dusty tomes collected by centuries of watchers and now presided over by Giles. This watcher archive is a central location

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The Gypsy Woman (the library) and point of reference for the programme. The character Willow Rosenberg, Buffy’s best friend, may not be the central messianic figure that Buffy is, but she manages to ‘get at’ the knowledge bequeathed by Jenny Calendar in a digital form in order to inherit Jenny’s role as techno-pagan. Jenny’s ability to bequeath an archive of knowledge breaks her out of the Gypsy woman characterisation offered by Eliot some 130 years earlier, as this chapter now moves to explain. Daniel Deronda seems, at first reading, to be most interested in male inheritance, but it also comments on what women can inherit in a system of primogeniture, for instance when Catherine Arrowpoint disagrees with her parents about her engagement to Klesmer, the Jewish musician: ‘why is it to be expected of an heiress’, she asks, ‘that she should carry the property gained in trade into the hands of a certain class?’110 Deronda, a political and ethical young man in search of both his parental origins and future direction but still to all intents and purposes ‘an Englishman’, meets the spiritually driven Mordecai and the two men form a relationship with ‘as intense a consciousness as if they had been two undeclared lovers’; Deronda is convinced by Mordecai’s rhetoric about the cause of ‘the unity of Israel, [its] dispersed people looking towards a land and polity’ and ‘the dignity of a national life’.111 Only after his conviction for this cause and a deep interest in the written texts of the Jewish cultural archive have developed with Mordecai’s teaching does Deronda discover that he too is a Jew. Raised from a young age by the Christian Sir Hugo Mallinger, his estranged mother tells him on her deathbed that she was born amongst devoutly believing Jews.112 She gives him the gift of his politico-racial identity symbolised in the passing on of his grandfather’s chest, a family archive.113 As Marguerite Murphy emphasises, social bonds are ‘reinforced through gift and inheritance’ and thus ‘guarantee the biological and cultural continuity of the ‘‘race’’’. She adds that ‘Eliot won’t let the reader forget that even seemingly essential social practices have their victims, especially when the culture is a patriarchal one’.114 The differences between Deronda’s inheritance and Fedalma’s are key to understanding an element of the literary female Gypsy’s lot, and to understanding how an encounter with Jenny Calendar is more than just a Euro-Orientalist one. Like Buffy, like Deronda, Fedalma in The Spanish Gypsy is posited as a messianic figure, one who will lead her race to a new, unpersecuted future in a distant ‘homeland’. As noted in the previous chapter, Fedalma is raised

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Orientalisms and Inheritance in Don Silva’s family. Her father, Zarca, recognises her and discloses her heritage. The Gypsy race, Zarca says, has ‘no great memories’, no ‘dimmest lore of glorious ancestors’. The Gypsies’ faith is ‘taught by no priest, but by their beating hearts’: the ‘mystic stirring of a common life’ is inspired not by shared texts but by ‘silent bodily presence’.115 While this seems to conform to many stereotypes of Gypsies as illiterate and unthinking, there are other forms of writing in The Spanish Gypsy. For instance, the ‘twisted lines’ of a gold necklace seem to speak to Fedalma ‘as writing would, / To bring a message from the dead, dead past’.116 Fedalma feels an emotional yet unidentifiable connection to the jewellery and it transpires that she played with it fifteen years earlier, when it adorned her father’s neck. Fedalma appeals to ‘mother life’ as she agonises over her commitment to her people and the love she will leave behind. She says, ‘even in the womb you vowed me to the fire’.117 Fedalma feminises life, and in making such a construction she talks of her own foetal role as part of a ‘people’. She reminds the reader that she, too, is a woman with her own womb. She is expected, in her maturity, to carry life to a new homeland. The acquisition of this homeland comes at the cost of her personal ‘procreative future’, Nord asserts – assuming that this is, of course, a cost.118 Analogously, she is represented as ‘the funeral urn that bears / The ashes of its leader’, and pledges her life as the temple of Zarca’s trust.119 In terms of an antenatal and post-mortem commitment to her people, she is seen as an empty vessel, both the engendered space of possibility but also absent of content. She shapes the future, but cannot fill it herself. As she leads the people whose continued union is necessary to the maintenance of the cultural memory of the Gypsies, she recognises that they will likely ‘propagate forgetfulness’. The young men, missing the command of her father, have already sold their service to the Moors and will soon disperse.120 Zarca informs her that even with her infant breath she swore to take heirship, pledging to be, like Deronda, the hope of her race. She is to be ‘the angel of a homeless tribe’.121 Fedalma’s promise to the future of her people sets her apart from the usual restrictions of her sex. She belongs, he tells her, ‘not to the petty round of circumstance / That makes a woman’s lot, but to [her] tribe’.122 In her notes on the poem, written in 1868, Eliot describes how she wanted to tell the story of a ‘young maiden, believing herself to be on the eve of the chief event of her life – marriage – about to share in the ordinary lot of womanhood, full of young hope’, who discovers

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The Gypsy Woman that ‘she is chosen to fulfil a great destiny, entailing a terribly different experience to that of ordinary womanhood’.123 The concerns of gender and race intersect. Fedalma suggests that she might obtain a degree of agency and the ability to help her people by marrying Don Silva and then publicly proclaiming her heritage, prompting her father to ask whether she will enslave herself in order to use her ‘freedom’.124 Eventually, Fedalma resolves to ‘wed / the curse that blights [her] people’ rather than the man she loves.125 Reading this theme transhistorically, it may be that in BtVS Jenny’s romantic attention to Giles distracts her from her commitment to her people, but she attempts a solution that resolves the tension between a relationship with Giles and the maintenance of the Kalderash vengeance curse: performing a ritual that will bring Angel a soul once more and enable Buffy and Angel to love each other again. Fedalma’s promise to ‘make a nation – bring light, order, law’, Jenny’s work and Mordecai and Deronda’s promises all come without guarantees of success.126 As Zarca asserts in The Spanish Gypsy: ‘no great deed is done / By falterers who ask for certainty’.127 Because of the textual nature of Deronda’s inheritance, his mother can break the link in the family chain without dismantling the archive. Fedalma, meanwhile, has to accept the metaphorical torch of her race’s hope as it is represented in the Gypsies’ symbolic badge: a ‘pine-branch flaming, grasped by two dark hands’ – exactly the kind of motif one might imagine Buffy’s watcher, Giles, uncovering in an ancient text.128 If Fedalma drops the torch, it will be snuffed out. Deronda can inherit from his grandfather, despite the skipped generation. He accepts both the chest, a physical archive, and with it an obligation to the future of his people. Because of the ways in which Eliot presents their different relationships to history, the Gypsy archive (in the sense of historical cultural transmission) is very different from the Jewish one. Deronda inherits Jewish writing, while Fedalma must collect up the past from her father’s spoken words. The written word is not entirely absent from Eliot’s Gypsy world, though. Apart from the letters guaranteeing land for the Gypsies in Africa that he hands to his daughter as he dies, Zarca first makes contact with Fedalma via letter. It is written on linen with his blood; the condition of inheritance is the physical experience of the blood they share, the textual and the bodily merge. Fifteenth-century letters written in blood function in very different ways to digital texts of the 1990s, clearly, but reading across the centuries

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Orientalisms and Inheritance enables one to examine what it is that makes Jenny Calendar a modern Romani heroine for the digital age. In BtVS, Xander’s concern that if he pretends to be an elderly Dutch woman he can, in effect, be encountered as one in cyberspace seems suddenly and strangely relevant to Jenny Calendar’s archival bequest to Willow. The disembodied possibilities of the digital mean she can download her translation of the Romanian text and make it available to Willow after her murder at the hands of Angel. Jenny places Willow in her position as teacher while still alive, needing Willow to fill in for her computer science classes. Willow keeps this position after Jenny’s death, finding herself able to fulfil the role because of all the files Jenny has prepared and left behind. Willow is seen physically handling Jenny’s possessions when she gives Giles a keepsake.129 In the final confrontation between Jenny and Angel, he smashes her computer to prevent her being able to tell anyone how to retrieve his soul, but does not notice that a floppy disc falls into a narrow gap between the desks, unseen until Buffy experiences a deja vu and fishes it out. Jenny is unable to stop Angel herself, or to find happiness with Giles. Having placed Willow in the position of her inheritor, she is able to pass on vital knowledge, on which Willow builds to become a powerful (and, later, dangerous) user of witchcraft. That Willow is Jewish and Jenny Kalderash signals the possibilities for rereading their relationship in the light of Eliot’s inheritances. Instead of the racially inflected ‘dignity of a national life’ by which Daniel Deronda is convinced, Jenny insists on the ‘new community’ being forged online and enables Willow to claim a place within it. While BtVS, especially season two, seems, on first viewing, to be a prime example of contemporary Euro-Orientalism of the Gypsy, a long-lasting and specific form of an Orientalism that locates Europe’s Gypsies as properly belonging in the East, Jenny Calendar’s techno-paganistic bequest to Willow subverts such Euro-Orientalism and allows her an afterlife as a woman whose identity includes, but is not defined by, being Kalderash. The textual encounter with Jenny Calendar is loaded with the history of that encounter, Dracula and Fedalma lurking in the background. They do not serve to fix her in place, however. She offers a glimpse of a less fetishised Gypsy woman. It is just a shame she is not allowed to live. Though Jenny Calendar resists a straightforward Orientalism, the theme retains its appeal in representations of Gypsy women, in part because of the authenticity it seems to offer, a concept with which the next chapter grapples.

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4 Encountering Authenticity

In his Preface to English-Gipsy Songs (1875), a work dedicated to Alfred Tennyson, Charles Godfrey Leland noted that he had also wanted to include some songs in his earlier The English Gipsies and their Language (1873), the content of which ‘was gathered directly from Gipsies themselves’.1 He believed in the direct – and, he claimed, accurate – method of recording an old and threatened culture; the close encounter was best. In all his travels with Gypsy people around the country, however, he could ‘obtain [no songs] possessed of interest except as indifferent illustrations of the tongue’.2 There were Gypsy songs, he patronisingly acknowledged; they just weren’t good enough for his book. Instead, his friends suggested a fudge: that ‘poetry, impressed with the true Gipsy spirit, and perfectly idiomatic, might be written and honestly classed as Rommany, even though not composed by dwellers in tents or caravans’. Leland and other non-Romanies could make up the songs and still call them Gypsy poetry, as long as they kept it real. This statement of honest pretence indicates the belief that an apparently true Gipsy spirit can be manufactured by a non-Romani. Leland and his colleagues decided to pursue the idea, taking care to ‘avoid anything like theatrical Gipsyism, or fanciful idealisation’. They would keep strictly to ‘real English Rommany’.3 They would be strictly authentic in their inauthenticity. They denied performance in the very act of presenting one. The contradiction of 108

Encountering Authenticity manufactured authenticity is at the heart of representations of the ‘true’ Gypsy woman in the nineteenth century and today. This chapter examines three types of claim to authenticity in representations of Gypsy women and the inescapable contradictions they contain. The first is the authentic and recognisable otherness of the Gypsy woman, apparently identifiable through dress, behaviour and racialised physical appearance. For instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1846 ‘Romany Girl’ proclaims to ‘pale Northern girls’ that ‘her swarthy tint is in the grain, / The rocks and forest know it real’.4 She is so authentically Romany, so different from white women, that the very earth vouches for it. Her swarthiness comes not just from an outdoor life, but goes deep. Were she of a later century, she might have said that her darkness was ‘in her DNA’. Second, there is the notion, propounded by many writers, artists and other cultural producers, of an authentic spirituality or naïve and untainted selfhood supposedly retained by the Gypsies’ pre-modern, insular culture: the reason people want to run away and join them. Finally, there is the stated effort towards authentic representation, to faithfully capture the essence of Gypsiness on the page, stage or screen in contrast to the popular ‘fake’. In 1817, Thomas Pringle demanded that these authentic artistic representations of Gypsies should lead culture’s conception of historical veracity. He thought that the ‘strange, picturesque and sometimes terrific features of the gypsey character, have afforded to our poets and novelists a favourite subject for delineation’. They have, he went on, ‘executed the task so well, that we have little more to ask of the historian, than merely to extend the canvass, and to affix the stamp of authenticity to the striking representations they have furnished’.5 Historians will merely rubber-stamp what poets and novelists have produced, because those texts have truth to them. What is authenticity? It is a much more complex idea than one might first credit, and intricately woven into much of our mediated experience of culture. The sense in which I am using it is that of the genuine, original, traditional (often coded as ‘old’ in relation to Gypsy culture), singular, spontaneous and unfeigned. For instance, a Cornhill Magazine article of 1865 notes the ‘singular’ customs of ‘gipsies’.6 Sir Richard Phillips, founder of the Monthly Magazine, described his meeting with a ‘colony’ of Gypsies on the road to Kew in 1816 and repeatedly used the word ‘singular’ to do so. ‘Policy so singular, manners so different, and passions so varied have

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The Gypsy Woman for so many ages characterised the race of Gipsies, that the incident of meeting with one of their little camps’ woke him from a reverie: he is delighted to meet a version of the ‘singular race’.7 Tautologically, this singular, original, spontaneous trait is identifiable because it looks how it is supposed to look, and is reproducible via word and image, according to the sources in this chapter. Despite the prevalence of ideas about the ‘true Gypsy’ in popular culture and investigations into the social construction of Gypsy identity in the social sciences, the paradox of authenticity in representations of Gypsy women has not yet been given the sustained critical attention it deserves.8 The assertions of authenticity I draw on in this chapter are those usually articulated and problematised within discourses of identity, folklore and tourism (because many cultural consumers of texts featuring Gypsy women are expected to do so in a way that is analogous to tourists consuming a place or culture). Many of these conceptions pivot on French Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s understanding of man in an authentic, natural, uncorrupted state. Authenticity is bound to ideas about truth, originality, purity and changelessness. When applied to racialised or community-specific representations such as those of Gypsy women, it is thus inherently primitivist (valorising the pre-Industrial and the ‘noble savage’) and essentialist (assigning fixed traits). Indeed, the descriptor ‘authentic’ is often code for simplified and generalised non-white or non-Western ethnicity when applied to food, dress, music or cultural practice to be consumed (think ‘authentic African music’; ‘authentic Indian food’). The question of the ‘authentic Gypsy’ has a history as long as, and symbiotic with, the representation of Gypsies in Britain. Some of the earliest texts relating to this group, Elizabethan legislation, looked to control not only ‘Egyptians’ but also ‘counterfeit Egyptians’. The 1562 Egyptian Act relates to ‘vagabonds commonly called or calling themselves Egyptians, or counterfeiting transforming or disguising themselves in their apparel speech or other behaviour like unto such vagabonds or calling themselves Egyptians’. This wording was probably a move to bring English-born Gypsies under the draconian anti-Gypsy law of the land (as a 1554 Act failed to do by referring simply to Egyptians) and deal harshly with other ‘vagabonds’, but it indicates juridical anxiety about identifying real and counterfeit Gypsies.9 Further, this legislative fact is usually included in primers to British Romani history, so it is one of the first things

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Encountering Authenticity any student of Romani identity or representation will learn. Later in that history, a picaresque 1745 text titled The Life and Adventures of BampfyldeMoore Carew, the Noted Devonshire Stroller and Dog-Stealer was incredibly widely read and, as Sarah Houghton-Walker has detailed, Carew was understood in the public mind as King of the Gypsies, though he was not a Gypsy at all.10 So central is this text to an idea of performing Gypsy identity that there are references to it in (amongst other fictions) Edward Bulwar Lytton’s The Disowned (1842) and Theodore Watts-Dunton’s Aylwin (1898). By the later eighteenth century, those sixteenth-century ‘counterfeit Egyptians’ had become the main story, with doubts about authenticity creeping into most definitions and descriptions of Gypsies. Margaret Russett claims that the poet John Clare, for instance, perceived Gypsies to be ‘wandering imposters’, adept at disguise, citing the 1777 Laws Respecting Women as evidence for this perception. That text, in Russett’s reading, posits all Gypsies as English or Welsh people who blacken their skin and pretend to speak a different language.11 It seems likely that the 1777 work has confused the distinction made by the Elizabethans. However, the threat of the fake in every claim to authenticity is clear. Authenticity is a deeply unstable quality. Questions of authenticity continue to trouble commentators on Gypsy culture today. How often does one hear, as part of a derogatory response to a media story or establishment of a Traveller site, ‘I don’t mean the real Gypsies’, the image of which usually resides firmly in the rural past? For instance, a letter published in the regional Devon, Cornwall and Somerset newspaper Western Morning News confirmed, in response to a Local Authority planning application for a site, that ‘real gypsies are proud, decent and law-abiding citizens’.12 While this appears to be a pro-Gypsy statement, it manages to hold up a concept of authentic Gypsiness formed by outsiders, and anyone who fails to conform visibly to this concept is not a real gypsy (note the lower case ‘g’) and therefore not ‘proud, decent and law-abiding’. David Mayall has described how nineteenth-century ‘Gypsiologists’ adopted hierarchies of racial purity, with contrasting images of the romantic Gypsies on the common compared to the condition of the ‘mixed lot’ in ‘grimy and camped yards’.13 Sir Richard Phillips, mentioned above, immediately connected the Gypsies’ singularity with their physiognomy: ‘lively jet-black eyes –their small features –their tawny skins – their small bones –and their shrill voices’. This, he was sure, marked

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The Gypsy Woman them out as ‘a distinct tribe of the human race, as different from the English nation as the Chinese’.14 Degree of difference from the white English norm serves a claim for authenticity. Aylwin’s Sinfi Lovell reacts angrily when the artist Wilderspin mentions the ‘real Egyptians’ of thousands of years ago: ‘Who says the Romanies ain’t real ’Gyptians? Anybody as says my daddy ain’t a real ’Gyptian duke’ll ha to set to with Sinfi Lovell’.15 Mary Burke notes that ‘according to the commentators of each successive era [whether that of Walter Scott or the twenty-first century], the mythic noble Gypsy has only just receded into the recent past’.16 Phillips, in fact, felt he was looking at ‘a family of the pastoral ages, as described by the book of Genesis’, in the middle of ‘the most polished district of the most civilized of nations’.17 Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, people were and still are ‘asked to prove that they are ‘‘genuine’’ Gypsies in order to receive any dispensation from eviction or harassment’, but the label of ‘Gypsy’ is often also the cause of eviction and harassment.18 While being authentic is supposed to be about originality, it is also necessary that one obviously fits into a particular category marked out by non-Gypsies to claim authenticity. Authenticity in representation is always the object of a quest or search rather than an actuality; it is always out of reach – either in the past or in a future of more precise definitions and detailed research – and thus necessarily fabricated in the present. For Vincent Cheng, that quest is ‘intrinsically hopeless’, trying ‘to ‘‘catch’’ and pin down something already defined as ungraspable’.19 Regina Bendix has outlined this quest in the study of folklore (which incorporates ‘Gypsy lorists’ like Leland and his in/ authentic Gypsy songs); her work has become indispensable in a number of research fields when negotiating the sorts of questions this chapter lays out. Folklore, Bendix explains, ‘has long served as a vehicle in the search for the authentic, satisfying a longing for an escape from modernity’. In uncritical studies of folklore, ‘the ideal folk community, envisioned as pure and free from civilization’s evils, was a metaphor for everything that was not modern’.20 Bendix points to this search as a ‘peculiar longing, at once modern and antimodern’, because the apparent loss of the authentic happens as a result of modernity, but its ‘recovery is feasible only through methods and sentiments created in modernity’.21 The science of ‘modern’ study and modern modes of representation enable a grasping gesture

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Encountering Authenticity towards the just-out-of-reachness of an authenticity seemingly killed by modern modes of life. We can return to Leland to illustrate this (anti)modern longing for authenticity. He was convinced that he was living in an age of artifice, driven by the pursuit of science over art. Leland’s insight, recorded in his Memoirs (1893), came on board a packet from Portsmouth to New York, where he considered the rumour that the only whale now visible to transatlantic passengers was a tame one owned by the White Star line, and that flying fish might actually be ordinary mackerel set with springs. Man, it seemed, was moving further and further away from himself, from his soul, from the Rousseauian truth of his being. For pursuers of the authentic Romani, change meant loss. But Leland’s realisation of this age of artifice was only possible in his ostentatious rejection of a steam crossing of the Atlantic, and communicated to thousands of people via modern printing and distribution.22 Today’s digital technologies provoke a similar nostalgic realisation that the past holds authentic value: images of Gypsy women pinned to boards on Pinterest show a preponderance towards vintage photographs. Many of these images are of non-Gypsy women in costume, but the ‘feel’, the ‘soul’ is what matters – and the presentation of that authentic past is made possible via the digital pin. The markers of authenticity today are sepia and grain. More generally in the nineteenth century, artificiality was criticised in relation to people’s behaviour and appearance and related to impurity, like the ‘artificial’ colouring of food to make it seem of better quality. But the term ‘artificial’ was also bound up with descriptions of technological and scientific advancement, as it is in our own age – think of artificial intelligence, limbs, isotopes, satellites, insemination. The word ‘artificial’ has held the general meaning of something made in imitation or substitution of something naturally occurring since the fifteenth century.23 There were, indeed, numerous specific ‘artificials’ invented in Leland’s artificial age. The first use of the artificial hare we see at a greyhound track today – not a million miles from Leland’s clockwork mackerel – was in 1876.24 ‘Artificial light’ was a description of interior gas and then electric lighting. If everything from gemstones to shellfish, from fertiliser to sweeteners, could be produced in a laboratory, how could Victorians trust even the material world around them in its authenticity? Tied to the aggressive consumer culture of the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a sense that anything

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The Gypsy Woman could be bought, but it might not be the real thing. The nineteenth century was not the last period in which concerns about authenticity informed cultural encounters. Anxieties about genetically engineered food, augmented reality gaming and online human relationships (like those of Xander in the previous chapter) are produced by technological advances in our own time and played out, just like Leland’s in the nineteenth century, in cultural representation. Nostalgic directedness towards the past, a time in which the authentic is projected as unproblematic, is also keenly felt in real life when applied to Gypsy identity. The phrase ‘of Pakistani/Caribbean/Irish descent’ is regularly used in Britain as a perceived polite way of talking about someone’s race or ethnicity. One self-identified Gypsy woman with whom I discussed this issue at a workshop disliked the statement she had heard on other occasions that she was of ‘Gypsy descent’, with the implication that Romani/Gypsy identity cannot be held or fully manifested in the present and is solely a partially retained legacy of the past. Being a Gypsy now was what mattered, she felt, rather than ratification by previous generations. This might be seen as a version of the ‘belatedness’ described by Frantz Fanon in ‘The Fact of Blackness’ and discussed by Homi K. Bhabha, a version where Gypsy culture is already produced by non-Gypsies and placed in the past: this Gypsy woman experienced a double belatedness.25 The emergence of a relic from the past in the present is anachronism, and the term is often tied (particularly in literature and its criticism) to Gypsy culture. Burke, for instance, notes that ‘one of the most striking features of the depiction of the Gypsy in Scottish writings is the veiled, but nevertheless constant, implication that the Gypsy and the Highlander are both wild, colourful, but ultimately anachronistic figures’.26 The effects of this anachronism depend on the writer and the context. Deborah Epstein Nord suggests that ‘Gypsies could conjure an older, preindustrial England’ for the British authors who wrote about them, but I would add that campaigner-writers such as George Smith of Coalville (discussed further in Chapter 6), for instance, did not see this as good thing: modern government had the power to improve the lives of British children, and those families who lived stubbornly (as he saw it) beyond the reaches of modern education and healthcare were to be the subjects of reform.27 This chapter has so far noted a number of paradoxes of authenticity: the antimodern longing understood only in modernity; the originality of

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Encountering Authenticity the authentic thing that must also be reproducible; authenticity as always out of reach and thus fabricated in representation. Bendix notes another seeming contradiction: even ‘the notion of authenticity implies the existence of its opposite, the fake’. She suggests that ‘this dichotomous construct is at the heart of what makes authenticity problematic’, but like Lynn Voskuil I wish to upset the idea that performance/artifice and authenticity are, indeed, necessarily dichotomous.28 As I have already pointed out, the inauthentic constantly invades the authentic, so the opposition does not hold; a number of the sources in this chapter offer encounters with this coexistence. To return to Leland for a moment, his made-up songs with Gypsy spirit align with the nineteenth-century ‘fascination with illusion as an important avenue to truth’, a fascination that is still with us today.29 An ideal truth has to be made legible, and so authenticity (that spontaneous and original quality) must conform to what we already recognise. Voskuil suggests that theatricality and authenticity work dynamically together; this, I suggest, is what enables the tropes of ‘authentic’ Gypsy women as presented by non-Gypsies to survive and thrive – sometimes problematically – in twenty-first-century encounters. Prior to examining in detail more specific encounters with authenticity, one caveat about the politics of this line of inquiry is needed. The problem with interrogating authenticity is the chance it offers for people to say, ‘in that case, there is no such thing as real Gypsiness’, as some responses to social constructionist work have done, or to imply that any manifestation of Gypsy identity is somehow a falsification. This chapter does not in any way question the legitimacy of Romani/Gypsy identity: it examines the claims to and policing of ‘authenticity’ by non-Romanies representing Gypsy women, which necessarily have a bearing on the views that a wider population holds about the Romani/Gypsy community. It shows how these encounters are marked by particular signifiers of authenticity to bolster the authority of the representation, maintaining power with he (and it is often he) who represents rather than she who is represented. To condense the encounters described in previous chapters, then, what was the general picture of the ‘authentic Gypsy woman’ in Victorian culture? She was repeatedly Orientalised: dark, with glinting eyes, and frequently lascivious. She was usually languorous with the capacity to erupt, passionately. She was understood as wild and untameable, with a desire to be ever outdoors and on the move (see Chapter 6 for more on

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The Gypsy Woman this). Such features are understood as inherited, with the purity of Gypsy blood a preoccupation of those concerned with authenticity. All of these expectations are brought to a number of encounters with a Gypsy woman named Keomi, encounters which take place in historical and literary texts, in writing and painting, in fact and fiction. To start, in George Meredith’s The Adventures of Harry Richmond, serialised in Cornhill in the 1870s, the first mention of the Gypsy heroine, Kiomi, in that tale refers to her blood, qualifying her as the ‘true sort’.30 Racial purity, sourced in the blood, and authenticity are yoked by Meredith, in a manner that echoes many, many references to Gypsy racial purity in the later nineteenth century. Kiomi the character takes her name from Keomi Gray (later Keomi Gray Bonnett), a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Frederick Sandys. She appears most famously in Rossetti’s The Beloved (1865 –6), at the far right of the painting holding an orange tiger lily and looking away from the viewer – all the other figures directly meet the viewer’s gaze, understood as a bridegroom thanks to Rossetti’s inscription of the Biblical Song of Solomon on the painting’s frame. As Julia Thomas notes, ‘an intertwining of the visual and the textual’ with devices such as quotations on painting frames, ‘particularly in the context of a painting that tells a story, works to subvert the idea that there is a fixed distinction between these two realms’.31 The flower Keomi holds complicates the association of lilies with the virginity of the bride she attends: the bride holds no flowers; her attendant grasps the stem. The speckled orange of the flowers suits the rich auburns of the painting, in particular accentuating the red of the bride’s hair and the black of Keomi’s by contrast, but its colour suggests the sensuality of the ‘song of songs’ rather than the purity of a white lily.32 She exhibits the typically Rossettian columnar and exposed throat and full lips in a painting designed to display the power of woman’s beauty through contrasting skin tones and rich fabric coverings – Rossetti’s 1865 pencil study of Keomi shows a much softer-featured woman. Stuart Dearing suggests that ‘Rossetti’s use of a Gypsy model [. . .] reflects not only his ‘‘bohemian’’ interest in various marginal, sub-cultural elements but also the changing economic conditions that made Gypsy models more available in cities’, a suggestion motivated partly by the presence of Gypsies in London’s Notting Dale (as it was then known). Dearing’s take on the painting is that the women appear as commodities in a shop window, pressed up against the frame of the painting.33 According

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Encountering Authenticity to the Song of Solomon, though, the viewer should want to kiss the bride ‘with the kisses of his mouth’. The erotic combination of Keomi Gray’s bared, erect neck (like the ‘tower of ivory’ noted in the song) and averted eyes place her, rather than in a shop window, with Rossetti’s many other women who are ‘both indifferent and desirable’, a dangerous proposition for the male viewer.34 The Song of Solomon also includes the words ‘he feedeth among the lilies’: if the aloof attendant holds those lilies, this is a provocative visual statement about the direction of the bridegroom’s desire.35 For Sandys, Gray appeared as Medea (a sorceress and princess of Greek legend) in 1868 and Vivien (the female villain of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King) in 1863. As with encounters described in Chapters 2 and 3, these encounters with Keomi can be seen opening out on to Leland’s English-Gipsy Songs with the book’s dedication as the conduit. These are not deliberate authorial nor painterly connections, but interlinked encounters experienced by the reader and viewer. Gray and Sandys were lovers, having four children together. Christopher Wood posits Keomi as the typical femme fatale who would both inspire and derange artists like Sandys and Rossetti: ‘Jane Morris [another well-known model] was also said to have gypsy blood; Sandys’s Pre-Raphaelite credentials were therefore impeccable’.36 In this description of the artistic movement, both Keomi and Jane Morris find their race (real or imagined) and its sexual, exotic and wild connotations in an artistic bohemia used as capital to acquire or points to score by male artist-lovers. While Sandys’ paintings are not explicitly of a ‘Gypsy woman’, he accentuates and exploits Keomi’s long dark hair, dramatic features and cultural associations made between Gypsy women and particular traits for his paintings’ storytelling. Idylls of the King was eventually a twelve-book poem (though published in sections) narrating the coming of Arthur to his passing, published while Tennyson was poet laureate. The frequent appearance of Tennyson’s poetry as pictures earned him, says Julia Thomas, the label of ‘painter’s poet’.37 Sandys’s Vivien (1863) depicts the earlier version of Merlin’s temptress as written in 1856, prior to Tennyson’s additions to the poem composed in 1874 in the face of criticism of this character – he would flesh out her back story to make her evil intent more believable.38 In Tennyson’s poem, Vivien is serpent-like (opening out onto encounters with Meg Merrilies), sensual, ‘wily’ and ‘mock-loyal’. She performs love to seduce

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The Gypsy Woman Merlin and, though he doubts the authenticity of her feeling, he would ‘half-believe her true’; an encounter with her is a lesson in lust destroying intellect.39 Tennyson’s Vivien is no Gypsy, but Sandys’s choice of model for his pictorial version reiterates some of the stereotypes of the Gypsy woman described thus far in this book, capitalising on the power of that stereotype to communicate dangerous sensuality. Surrounded by peacock feathers, as if they are her own dubious display of ostentatious masculinity, Vivien (like Keomi’s pose in The Beloved) looks away from the viewer, that strong, phallic neck at the centre of the painting once more. The visual experience of Vivien in 2017, apart from in digital reproduction, is to find her hanging next to Rossetti’s sexually challenging Astarte Syriaca (1877) and opposite Charles-August Mengin’s bare-breasted Sappho (1877) in Manchester Art Gallery. She cannot be viewed in isolation from her artistic and literary entanglements nor her contemporary room-mates, and the fullness of those other female bodies demands a second look at the way Keomi’s body appears in the painting: covered, but hinted at by the positioning of an apple in front of her right breast. Standing about a metre from the painting, Vivien’s peacock feathers gleam iridescently; close up, every strand is thickly painted enough to bring a third dimension to the painting’s plane. The feathers, the patterned gold silk and the geometric tiled parapet she rests on all suggest the familiar Orientalism associated with Gypsy figures, and Vivien becomes explicitly anti-Christian in a later iteration of Tennyson’s poem as she anticipates the breaking of both the cross and the Arthurian court. At the bottom centre of the painting is a vermillion poppy, also picked out as an illustration on the parapet. As the source for opium, the poppy is another visual indicator, like the toxic yet headliy fragranced daphne Vivien holds, of her association with charms, potions and poison. However, the poppy also makes a topical link to the East; the opium trade between British India and China was debated in Britain as Sandys painted. The second opium war had only concluded in 1860 and the commodity that sparked it remained controversial. The presence of the poppy in the painting not only connects Keomi the model, the Gypsy woman as artistic commodity, to Tennyson’s charm-stealing Vivien, but places her in an Eastern frame, one in which the ‘Gypsy lorists’ insisted her racial heritage contained her. As part of Tennyson’s imagining of Arthurian legend, Vivien belongs to a mystical past; her role in the story, duplicated in Sandys’s image, is of an

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Encountering Authenticity outsider troubling the kingdom from within – reminiscent of the anxieties felt about Gypsies from Elizabethan legislators to Keomi’s day. Keomi Gray as painted by Rossetti takes us to another popular example of the ‘authentic’ Gypsy, in G. J. Whyte-Melville’s 1879 novel, Black But Comely. The novel takes its title, again, from the Song of Solomon, playing with the lines’ apparent exclusion of darkness from the category of beauty by centralising the compelling beauty of Gypsiness itself. It is a novel to which I compulsively return when citing female Gypsy stereotypes, perhaps because Melville’s work was so popular, and because he as a male author so neatly represents the Victorian establishment, seemingly far removed from the lives of Gypsy women in this period: Eton-educated, a captain in the Coldstream Guards, made a major during the Crimean War and someone who enjoyed the company of country gentlemen.40 In Black But Comely, at a public hanging is ‘a tall handsome woman, with the swarthy skin, soft black eyes, and clear-cut features of real gipsy blood’. She holds a child in her arms ‘whose dark lashes and small highbred face denote no stolen offspring of the Gentiles, but a true little Romany of her own’.41 This is a reference both to that purity of blood mentioned in Chapter 2 and its physiognomic articulation, but also to the myth of Gypsies stealing children. This accusation appears in a number of nineteenth-century bestsellers, including, famously, Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering, Harrison Ainsworth’s 1839 Jack Sheppard, Bulwer Lytton’s 1842 The Disowned and countless books for children, and continues to be played out in twenty-first-century news media. As I (and others) have previously argued, the child-stealing myth is itself bound up with anxieties about knowing precisely who belongs to which race, who is authentically Gypsy or not.42 In a twenty-first-century instance, a legal case in Greece in 2013 saw two Roma adults arrested after a fair-haired girl known as Maria was spotted in their camp, and suspicions were raised because she did not look like her ‘parents’. ‘How could a little blonde girl possibly belong to these Gypsies? She must have been stolen, as Gypsies have always done’ the racist discourse went. The adults insisted that the girl’s Bulgarian birth parents had asked them to take in the girl when they could not afford to look after her, and this account was later verified (though the girl was not returned to either Roma camp). Pictures of the little girl accompanied news stories, not just to illustrate the facts but to highlight her blondness, her pale skin, her

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The Gypsy Woman non-Gypsiness.43 The ‘dark lashes’ described in Black But Comely signify an authentic child of Gypsy blood, and this interest in an original, Eastern bloodline informs judgements today. The outcry in Greece (and British media interest in it) makes a lot more sense when one reads transhistorically to see just how old a story this is, but it also sharpens what one reads from nineteenth-century literature, knowing that the same discourses will tell authorities what constitutes a ‘proper’ parent, an ‘authentic’ family and an appropriate adoption. In that first scene of Black But Comely, the crowd at the hanging surges and the Gypsy woman is trampled to death, while her baby is kept aloft by strangers. Taken in by a Jewish couple (about whose own race the text has much to say), the baby is found to have the letters ‘J. L’. tattooed on her arm, and so is named ‘Jane Lee’.44 Jane’s authentic Gypsiness is written on and by her body. The tattoo enables her later identification by her family, but it is hard for the twenty-first-century reader to ignore the terrible foreshadowing of Romani people tattooed with a ‘Z’ for ‘Zigeuner’ in Auschwitz during the Porajmos. Later in the novel, a duchess in Kensington Gardens calls her ‘a handsome little gipsy’, and, ‘while she bent down to bestow a patrician kiss, scarcely guessed how exactly she had hit the mark’.45 In spite of herself, the duchess has made an authentic identification. Jane is so authentically a Gypsy that, no matter how well it is hidden, the truth emerges. She is an authentic Romani because she looks like an authentic Romani. Later in the nineteenth century, Fergus Hume has Jacob Dix, owner of the eponymous pawn shop in Hagar of the Pawn Shop (1898), marry ‘a pure-blooded Romany’. Hagar Stanley moved to London with Dix, ‘and town killed her; she couldn’t breathe in bricks and mortar after the free air of the road’.46 The Hagar of the title is the dead woman’s niece, and comes from the New Forest. She arrives at the pawnshop one dark night: Her face was of the true Romany type: Oriental in its contour and hue, with arched eyebrows over large dark eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth beautifully shaped, under a delicately-curved nose. Face and figure were those of a woman who needed palms and desert sands and golden sunshine, hot and sultry, for an appropriate background; yet this Eastern beauty appeared out of the fog like some dead Syrian princess.47

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Encountering Authenticity This passage contains the structural tautology of racial recognition also explored in Chapter 2: she looks like ‘a true Romany’ because she has the features and air of one. Because women look like her, an image of the ‘true Romany’ can be constructed for comparison with other individuals. I come to this passage as a reader aware of contemporaries similarly attempting to locate the romantic essence of the ‘true Gypsy’, but in their online scrapbooking and self-image creation, and these digital encounters open out onto the encounter with Hagar because of the ‘spreadability’ of the concept of authenticity. Today, images labelled ‘gypsy spirit’ and ‘boho style’ on Pinterest, Tumblr or Instagram can be seen locating women with long, flowing hair and bright skirts in the ‘proper’ context of desert sands and golden sunshine. It is important to note that, as an exemplary instance, Romani researcher and dancer Kristin Raeesi, a proponent of challenging essentialist Western paradigms, does not tag her Instagram images, often with a beautiful Alaskan rather than desert background, #gypsy.48 Both the non-Romani #gypsy taggers and Raeesi’s self-representation inform a transhistorical reading of the claims to Gypsy authenticity available in the literary archives, a prompt to question who makes such claims, on what basis and to what end. Hume’s purpose is entertainment, literary realism, and readerly desire. His claims to authenticity do not just deploy visual evidence, though; he sprinkles Hagar’s early speech in the novel with Romani words such as ‘Romani chal’ (Romani man), ‘rani’ (wife or woman) and ‘Gorgio’ (non-Romani), authenticating her background and assuring the reader that this is no pretender. Like her aunt, Hagar longs for the ‘free life of the road’, singing fragments of Romani songs to herself: ‘the nostalgia of the wilds, of the encampment and the open road, tortured her’; ‘in the pawn-shop she was an exile from her dream paradise of roaming liberty’.49 In contrast to the literature of the so-called Gypsy lorists, Hume does not generally exploit Hagar’s race for narrative effect: she is good at reading people (often cited as the secret behind a good fortune-teller), but this is a gendered property rather than a racialised one in this fiction. As LeRoy Panek notes, the stories in the collection principally demonstrate Hagar’s sympathy with the persecuted and her upright nature.50 Victorian depictions of Gypsy women veer between painting them as staunchly, even pathologically, moral, and inherently criminal. As discussed in a previous chapter, one of the most widely read examples of Romani authenticity in literature is George Eliot’s Mill on the

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The Gypsy Woman Floss, in which Eliot sets up two versions of ‘the authentic’. First, there is Maggie’s picture of Gypsy life, which is acquired through representation, hearsay and childish naivete. After years of being told she looks like a Gypsy, she expects that a life with this group is where she will find her true, authentic self. She is disappointed to find ‘her people’ in a lane and not on a common, and does not recognise the first few Gypsies she meets as such because they do not match this image. Maggie’s disappointment is Eliot’s opportunity to describe reality, the Gypsy life that is really authentic. Maggie’s gullibility gives way to the narrative’s authentic portrayal. Alicia Carroll records that Eliot kept and annotated books of Gypsy lore – and these would become most useful in constructing her narrative poem The Spanish Gypsy, set in fifteenth-century Andalusia – but it was through books alone that Eliot knew Romani culture.51 In juxtaposing Maggie’s imagined view of the Gypsies with (a still invented) ‘reality’, Eliot’s narrative asserts that it represents authentic Gypsies authentically. The Gypsy lorists, meanwhile, claimed that this was the raison d’etre of their writing. Leland’s proto-anthropological method, the direct encounter described at the beginning of this chapter, insisted that that it is ‘only by entering gradually and sympathetically, [. . .] into a familiar knowledge of the circumstances of the common life of humble people [that one can] surprise unawares those little inner traits which constitute the characteristic’.52 The ‘characteristic’ is used here as a marker of singular authenticity. Such writers based their representations on firsthand experience of Gypsy culture (unlike Eliot) and took their cue from George Borrow, introduced in Chapter 2. The strange form of the latter’s Lavengro and The Romany Rye problematise the authenticity of both the memoir and the novel by blending the two, but in this hybridised text Nord suggests that with English Gypsies, Lavengro finds a template for a different kind of authenticity, an ‘authenticity of being’.53 The two volumes, Lavengro and The Romany Rye, are full of the racism encountered in Chapter 2, with both narrator and reader demanding that each Gypsy be like a Gypsy – no little blonde Marias here. Gypsy skin is almost always dark in Borrow’s writing; women barely cover their breasts; and their long, luxurious hair is provocatively loose. Untied hair was closely associated with female sexuality in the nineteenth century, from the Pre-Raphaelites’ intense interest in flowing locks to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s close association of an unclasped girdle with an untied hair

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Encountering Authenticity band in Aurora Leigh (1856).54 Borrow’s descriptions of Gypsy women see them turning from beautiful girls and young women into crones or hags when they age. When Lavengro meets Leonora, a Gypsy girl of thirteen, he comments on her pretty features, olive skin, jet black hair and scanty dress.55 Lavengro is playing at being a tinker in this portion of the book, and as a fellow traveller the girl hails him as a ‘brother’. Despite the text’s interest in authentic Gypsies, the seductive possibility of passing as a Gypsy himself is offered by their exchange. ‘I am no brother of yours’, he clarifies: ‘I am no gypsy; not I, indeed!’56 Leonora’s grandmother, Mrs Herne, scoldingly tells her about her relatives who are ‘right Romanly, [. . .] they kept to themselves, and were not much given to blabbing about their private matters in promiscuous company’.57 Mrs Herne despises the ‘gorgios’ (non-Gypsies) and attempts to poison Lavengro – he refers to her as ‘an Egyptian sorceress’, conforming to received ideas about older women and Gypsies but also predicting encounters with Sandys’s Medea and those explored in the next chapter.58 By conforming to stereotypes, though, a desire for authenticity demands that the authentic object, sensation or representation not simply be so of itself, but also retain the anticipated qualities of Gypsiness. Authenticity demands that each encounter opens out on to others for verification. The validating claim for authenticity thus comes always from somewhere else and this is, in a further contradiction, what individual writers such as Borrow and his literary progeny use to bolster their authority. As outsiders, they presume that it is they, not Gypsy women themselves, who have the authority to authenticate Gypsy looks, language and culture. To see Borrow’s (and his ilk’s) Gypsy women as characters with whom the reader has a mediated and partial encounter, rather than simply the product of the all-powerful author, loosens his representational stranglehold.59 Laura Bowder has identified similar claims to authenticity in American slave narratives, and Deborah Madsen has noted this phenomenon in relation to the construction of an authentic ‘Indian-ness’ in representations of indigenous peoples in North America. In order to convince the reading public of their authenticity, the slave narratives that Bowder describes had to conform to the expectations of an abolitionist reading community: ‘when abolitionists asked for authenticity, they wanted a specific kind of authenticity that conformed to their stereotypes of slave life, rather than being characteristic of individual experience’.60 She notes, as I have done,

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The Gypsy Woman that this conformity troubles the very concept of authenticity: ‘when a narrative must so faithfully observe the generic conventions of all slave narratives [. . .] what does this say about authenticity?’61 Similarly, the Gypsy women of Borrow’s work must be recognisably, rather than originally, authentic. In the same way, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the uncertain status of ‘self-told’ stories in Paul Kester’s Tales of the Real Gypsy (1897) closely mimics, in its picaresque non-biography, the tales recounted by Borrow and, later, Charles Godfrey Leland. The power to tell appears to be handed over to the Romani individual, but it fits an established narrative pattern and is, of course, tightly edited (and in some cases invented) by the author. Like Leland, Kester was American, but many of his characters reported on their lives in England. For instance, one woman relates that she is of ‘the real old Romany stock’, as opposed to a non-Romani traveller who has married into the culture or joined it by association.62 She authenticates this claim with reference to her family tree: her ‘mother was a Stanley, and her mother a Heron’. Reference to common Romani surnames is a familiar trope of the genre, as is a woman’s claim to actual (rather than performed for profit only) second sight: ‘I was the seventh daughter of the seventh generation, born with the cloak and the veil. So the gift came to me naturally’.63 Records of belief in the special powers of a seventh son of a seventh son (and, more rarely, daughter) date to sixteenth-century folk belief and usually referred to a healer, but also to fortune-telling.64 ‘As a child’, Kester’s reporter continues, ‘I brought many a shilling home to the camp that I’d earned with my dukkerin [fortunetelling/palm reading]’.65 The refrain of ‘I don’t usually trust gorgios (nonRomanies) but you are different’, with distrust giving way to reverence, also appears, as if these gorgio writers have run away like Maggie Tulliver but have found, as Nord suggests, their own ‘authenticity of being’. Because of its apparent longing for the antimodern (and, in the case of Kester, a nostalgia for the old country too), the way that the lorists write about Romani people is often erroneously compared to Romantic-period representation of Romanies. For Kester, the romance which they [Romani people] impress others as possessing, with which they have always impressed those who studied or knew them – and upon which they constantly trade – is real and a part of them, but it is too intangible for pencil or camera.66

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Encountering Authenticity Their sharply authentic romance is unrepresentable, so the nostalgic longing of these texts is also an impossible desire to capture that which all readers should already recognise. The romance of the Romanies is an ‘impression’ – something vaguely drawn but also an imitation. The authentic is, of course, always just out of reach. And this romance that is ‘real’ and ‘a part of them’ strikes the observer because of the race’s direct connection to the pre-modern: Only the remnant of a vastly ancient race would be able to scatter over the world, to separate into small groups, to live in every land and clime, to experience the sway of every form of government of which history has account or which exists to-day, to know the influence of every form of religion, and yet to be at the close of the nineteenth century what they were in the days of their expulsion from India.67

To have stayed authentically other, to be the perennial stranger, throughout history confirms for Kester the strength of this connection to the ancients, and thus his own ‘peculiar longing’ for the antimodern and the recovery of an essence whose loss is realised through late-nineteenthcentury modernity. In 1880, Francis H. Groome published In Gipsy Tents with the Edinburgh publishers Nimmo. Popular enough to find a second edition, it is a curious autobiographical, ethnographic, philological text. Covering such topics as ‘Welsh Gipsies’, ‘Gipsy Music’ and ‘Romani Folk-Tales’, it owes much to Lavengro and The Romany Rye with its ostentatiously eccentric yet declarative style, travelogue nature and interest in folklore and language. It is as much interested in family as folklore, however, being also an account of one man’s close relationships with the Lovells and their relatives, valuing their words and practices. Despite Groome claiming to know them better than they know themselves, the reader does find nineteenth-century Gypsy voices here, albeit edited (to what extent we cannot know), elaborated and explained by a white, comparatively wealthy, middle-class, privately educated, house-dwelling man. The narrator of In Gipsy Tents is usually assumed to be Groome himself, with less slippage between fact and fiction than in Borrow’s work. The title page bears the engraved image of a Gypsy woman staring straight at the viewer, arms crossed. This is a confrontational pose, and reflects the general non-Gypsy 125

The Gypsy Woman reader’s expectations of the 1880s for an encounter with Gypsies. The image’s location as a frontispiece means that the author takes the reader past this gatekeeper to reveal the hidden lives in the habitations of the title. The woman has large, dark eyes, dark plaited hair and dark skin, and wears large, gold-hooped earrings (which would become fashionable for nonGypsy women by the end of the nineteenth century).68 Her neck is laden with beads and a necklace made from coins, and she wears a loose, lightcoloured embroidered shirt and patterned apron. Though not credited, the image may be the work of one of the many popular artists who painted Gypsy subjects, from F. W. Topham to John Phillip. It is less delicate and finely drawn than the portraits such as ‘A Gipsy Girl’ or detailed copies of paintings such as John Phillip’s ‘The Spanish Gipsy Sisters’ that were to grace the pages of illustrated periodicals from the 1850s onwards, but retains familiar tropes; it is more finished than the journalistic ‘sketches’ of Gypsy life popular at the time.69 Given the availability of such engravings, its similarity to those included in contemporary and earlier periodicals, its almost incidental inclusion on the title page and the fact that the subject is not named (as the other portrait subjects in the book are), it is unlikely to have been commissioned purely for Groome’s work. Chapter headers and initial letters are also lavishly illuminated, but with images that do not necessarily correspond to the chapter’s content, suggesting that the publishers were happy to repeat the common practice of re-using expensively produced wood-engraved illustrations to make the text more visually appealing, which also had the effect of connecting Groome’s content with impish figures, mythical beasts and lush flora. Groome may have been sceptical about the tradition of associating Gypsy culture with magic and myth, but the paratexts to his writing serve to strengthen those connections in the reading experience. While she might strike us today as a deeply stereotypical image, the Gypsy woman drawn on Groome’s title page is likely to have been thought much more authentic in a period when many stage depictions and illustrations drew on Walter Scott’s Meg Merrilies from Guy Mannering, dressing them not just in the Orientalised style seen in this image, but in turbans. In fact, early photographs of Romani women, available in Liverpool University’s Scott Macfie Collection, for instance, do not make this woman’s dress seem at all outlandish by comparison.

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Encountering Authenticity 130 years later, the young woman on the 2011 Corgi cover to Val Wood’s The Gypsy Girl holds a similarly confrontational pose to the figure in the frontispiece of Groome’s In Gipsy Tents. This ‘Gypsy girl’ is an update, photographed by Johnny Ring, a photographer with a number of book cover credits to his name. However, she is meant to evoke an earlier age than the context of the photograph’s production, for the story takes place at the beginning of the Victorian period. As a neo-Victorian novel, the text does not quite produce the ‘critical f(r)iction’, a knowing, scholarly perspective on the period, described by Mark Llewellyn in the inaugural edition of the journal Neo-Victorian Studies. However, it is a creative engagement with a Victorian past that consciously ‘writes back to something in the nineteenth century’ in order that late-twentieth (as the book originally came out under a different title in 1998) and twenty-firstcentury readers might revisit the stereotypes of the Gypsy woman.70 In order to appeal to a mainstream audience interested in precisely the exoticism and mystery surrounding the Victorian Gypsy woman, though, the novel must also replay some of those stereotypes. There is danger to this strategy, not least that ‘authentic’ Gypsy identity is once more located in an irretrievable past by this historical romance novel. Designing romance book covers involves treading the careful line ‘between brand coherence and visual distinction’.71 Val Wood’s name serves as a brand, with the same font used across her titles, and her covers feature determined-looking heroines with hands demurely clasped or arms crossed defensively across their bodies to signify the struggles of which we are about to read. Often, it is a shawl they clutch around themselves, an indicator of an historical period but also a gesture of women facing hardship in romance novels. So much for coherence; The Gypsy Girl stakes its claim to distinction by dressing the model in a low-cut blouse (not low enough to place the novel in the category of ‘steamy’, but enough to suggest there will be sex in the storyline) and enormous hooped earrings, and with long, dark curly hair and a dark green scarf tied around her head. She stands in front of a wagon in a dandelion-strewn field with a tethered skewbald Gypsy cob. The clothing might look like fancy dress in the twenty-first century, but the outdoor scene behind her is intended to make the image function like that at the beginning of In Gipsy Tents. The images may be over a century apart, but they both act to tell the reader that he or she is about to encounter an authentic Gypsy woman, face to face.

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The Gypsy Woman Groome, author of In Gipsy Tents, was born in 1851, son of the Archdeacon of Suffolk. After a promising start to an education designed to school him for joining the British establishment, he dropped out of Merton College, Oxford to travel with Romani groups he met in Britain and on the Continent. He eloped to Germany in 1875 with Esmeralda Lock, whose own name echoes that of one of Europe’s most famous fictional Gypsy women, the Esmeralda of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). Lock was still married to the author of Tent Life with English Gipsies in Norway (1873), Hubert Smith, to whom she had been engaged aged just sixteen following that trip to Norway. In that work, the much-older Smith describes sixteen-year-old Esmeralda as ‘wonderfully strong for her age’ with ‘eyes full of fathomless fire’.72 Ken Lee has investigated the ways in which Esmeralda features in different texts and documents, and can make strong claims as to the affective qualities of such investigation as he shares a family connection with Lock. He noted, in a 2017 Harvard address, that her life was represented in two ‘factual’ Gypsilorist works that speak for her: as well as Smith’s Tent Life With English Gypsies In Norway (1873), there is Dora Yates’ My Gypsy Days (1953), a memoir. ‘Both books’, he suggested, ‘present Esmeralda through stereotypical tropes of an essentialised ‘‘Gypsyness’’’ emphasising her freedom-loving nature and racialised body.73 It is not inconceivable that the frontispiece image of Groome’s In Gipsy Tents is a commissioned portrait of Esmeralda rather than the stock image I suggested above. Placing this image side-by-side with an illustration from Tent Life (as suggested to me by Lee) the fuller-faced sixteen-year-old and the woman with her arms crossed share certain facial proportions and hairline – though such comparisons are somewhat tenuous when dealing with engraved images, and there is no knowing how much the earlier image influenced the later one, even if it is not the same woman pictured in both. Francis and Esmeralda settled in Edinburgh after a rather sensational divorce case heard in the High Court of Justice.74 Two contrasting photographs of Esmeralda appear in Tales of the Old Gypsies (1999). They follow a chapter featuring interviews with her niece, Gevoner, so the author has some authority in identifying the woman as Esmeralda. The first portrait shows her in ‘traditional’ Gypsy dress, with a spotted headscarf, another scarf around her neck and a white shirt. Her dog is by her side. The second image shows a younger Esmeralda in Hubert’s garden at Bridgnorth

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Encountering Authenticity looking quite the middle-class Victorian. Her dark hair is parted in the middle and pinned, she wears earrings but not hoops, her long full skirt covers her legs and she holds a hat in her lap.75 Moving in and out of the non-Gypsy conception of ‘Gypsy life’, where she travelled and sang to make a living, and the world of authors and society, her image, too, was sculpted to fit equally the caravan and the house when the situation demanded. She ended her days in a caravan in Prestatyn, North Wales – a 1928 photograph of her, taken by Fred Shaw and held in Liverpool University Special Collections, shows her in hat, scarf and jacket.76 Shaw’s photographs include beautifully evocative portraits of Gypsy women, including Marenni Smith (1909), Fisandia Buckland (1910), Talaitha Cooper (1910), Delaila Heron (1911) and Mizelli French (1912). Unlike her headscarved portrait, were Esmeralda’s picture from 1928 not filed with other ‘Gypsy’ families the casual observer would not label her in this way. The visual performance of all the signifiers of Gypsiness was clearly not something Esmeralda thought a prerequisite for having her photograph taken. Lee has also described aspects of Esmeralda’s life that are either ignored or not available to viewers of visual images of her. She was literate, able to ‘to challenge Gypsilorists and to claim a privileged epistemological stance for herself’. Robert Andrew Scott Macfie, then Secretary of the Gypsy Lore Society, sent various scholars of Romani language, folktales, customs and genealogies to Esmeralda, making her an often uncited and usually unpaid expert on Gypsy womanhood. Those final years in Prestatyn did not see her recognised for the role she had played in the Gypsy Lore Society’s researches. Lee noted that in 1938 Dora Yates organised the Gypsy Lore Society Jubilee Dinner, but ‘in a humiliating rejection, Esmeralda was not invited’ after the mooted invitation elicited a threat from Ithal Lee to ‘spit in her eye’ – Esmeralda’s ‘infidelity to the Romani code of marriage’, as Yates puts it, made her persona non grata. Lee also emphasised that ‘Esmeralda was not invited in her own right, nor even as Yate’s ‘‘Romani sister’’, but as Groome’s widow’.77 Amongst other writing jobs during their marriage, Groome joined the staff of the Globe Encyclopaedia, contributed to Encyclopaedia Britannica and went on to be heavily involved in preparing Chambers’s Encyclopaedia. His definitive Romani contribution to that publication focused on authenticity, by problematically describing ‘the best kind of gypsy’ as the

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The Gypsy Woman ‘gypsy au naturel’; this entry retained its authority (and with it an emphasis on traditional authenticity) into the mid-twentieth century.78 Groome became joint editor of, and enthusiastic contributor to, the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (JGLS) after that organisation’s formation in 1888. The ‘gypsy au naturel’, a gorgio construction of outdoor life that responded to urbanisation and the ‘artificial’ and hitched to a stereotype of racial purity, frequently (dis)graced the pages of the JGLS. The artist Augustus John met John Sampson, Gypsy lorist and librarian at University College, Liverpool, in 1901. This connection, made around the same time as his marriage to Ida Nettleship, put the artist in longed-for contact with the people he had been warned about since his childhood in Tenby: Gypsies.79 John famously painted Ida in the ‘gypsy style’ with which he became associated, in Merikli (1902). In a Romani lexicon, Sampson defined ‘merekli’ as an ornament worn around the neck, especially coral, and in the painting Ida wears a coral necklace.80 She also wears a mustard top with the flared sleeves and a frilled white shirt associated with Gypsy dress, and holds a basket of flowers and berries. Even more famous, however, are John’s gypsy-style paintings of ‘Dorelia’ Dorothy McNeill. In Dorelia in a Landscape (1910), she wears a blue dress, tan shawl and red head scarf. Her direct gaze at the viewer never allows her to fade into that landscape, and the quickly wrought painting is full of movement: she is captured turning mid-walk, and it seems as if a breeze catches the hem of her dress. Dorelia was a model for both Augustus John and his sister Gwen – in fact, Gwen painted her first. A Tate retrospective catalogue of the siblings’ work reflects that ‘the degree of variety in the portraits of Dorelia by the Johns suggests how each artist projected their fantasies onto their model’.81 In Augustus’s case, he projected onto Dorelia the fantasy of Gypsy life, painting her in the outdoor existence in caravans that he insisted he, Dorelia and Ida lead a trois (plus children). For instance, in 1905 they all lived in a vardo and tent on Dartmoor. It seems that John found in these environs a space in which he could construct an unorthodox family with two mothers to his children living in one ‘household’. One painting from this period, Caravan: A Gypsy Encampment (1905) places the viewer inside a dark tent looking out at the sunlit family and John himself at the door of the green-and-blue-painted vardo. This suggests that the viewer who accepts this vision of freedom, of alternative family life, also shares it – and it might be inferred from this that it is amongst a

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Encountering Authenticity community of tent-dwellers that Augustus John expects to find an authenticity of being. That performance of authenticity is, of course, just that: performance; none of the family grouping in Caravan are, in fact, Gypsies. Elsewhere, John is keen to point out the difference between real Gypsies and other travellers, producing charcoal drawings of Wandering Sinnte (1908 –9; reproduced as a frontispiece for the JGLS) and Calderari: Gypsies from the Caucasus (1912), but also titling paintings The Mumper’s Child (c.1912) and The Mumpers (1911–13).82 Another member of the Gypsy Lore Society with which Augustus John was connected was Theodore Watts-Dunton, who wrote both fiction and non-fiction. In a dedication opening The Coming of Love, he suggests that the novel ‘paints the life of the better class of gypsies (the ‘‘Grienroes’’, now so near extinction in this country) with more verisimilitude than does any other work of mine’.83 The link between a nostalgic view of the past, authentic tradition and a truthful representation of that tradition is clear in Watts-Dunton’s work, as it is in that of his colleagues. Perhaps surprisingly, the twenty-first-century TV phenomenon that is Big Fat Gypsy Weddings can be seen making the same connections because, I suggest, the twenty-first century shares with the nineteenth anxieties about the authenticity of encounters in an artificial world. A key phrase of 2017 at the time of writing was ‘fake news’, in which viewers, readers, listeners and, crucially, voters are deliberately misled by manipulation in the media. Leland, Groome and Watts-Dunton purport to report directly from the Gypsy camp, and this is precisely what this television programme also does. The franchise has run for seven years in the UK (so far). The Big Fat Gypsy Weddings programmes all begin with a narration, in some episodes explaining that ‘for hundreds of years, the Traveller life was one of ancient traditions and simple tastes’.84 These words are heard over images of a horse being shod, a man playing a fiddle and a young girl wandering through a fair with a full yellow dress. The narration continues: ‘then their world collided with the twenty-first century’. A horse rears up behind a car; girls are shown gyrating in skimpy outfits and getting a spray tan. The show suggests that it is all about ‘Gypsy’ culture but, like the writers of 200 years ago, the perceived collision of ancient and modern in Gypsy culture is really a metonym for the experience of a wider audience. The nostalgia for a simpler life is felt by the non-Gypsy audience, not the people caricatured by the programme makers. And like Augustus John’s

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The Gypsy Woman delineation between Gypsies and Mumpers, Watts-Dunton’s ‘better class of Gypsies’ and the 2009 letter to a newspaper about ‘real Gypsies’ cited earlier in this chapter, Jensen and Ringrose found that online commentary on Gypsy Weddings made similar distinctions: Naming those on Gypsy Wedding as not really Gypsies works here to sanction anti-Gypsy and Traveller sentiment. These symbolic hierarchies were struggled over in every thread we examined, with distinctions drawn between ‘true’ Gypsies who are nomadic, Romani, and ‘exotic’, and ‘fake’ Gypsies who are settled, are Irish, or are ‘trashy’; between the nomadic communities of the past and those who are seen to be merely ‘claiming’ nomadic identities in order to exploit multiculturalism.85

In both nineteenth-century writing and online discourse in the twenty-first century, the authentic Gypsy is racially pure, exotic, nomadic and representative of the past. The notion that Gypsy identity is so privileged in Britain today as to afford protection to any who might illegitimately claim it, or that multiculturalism is the free lunch painted by the political right, is laughable to anyone with a conception of the prejudice Gypsies and Travellers encounter daily. However, this anxiety about an authentic Gypsiness that must be protected from the onslaught of modern inauthenticity is centuries old. In particular the ‘realness’ of race – indicated by Watts-Dunton when he notes the extinction of the ‘Grienroes’ – draws on fears about racial degeneration, particularly that voiced by the race scientist Arthur de Gobineau earlier in the century. He suggested that a race degenerates when ‘the people has no longer the same blood in its veins, continual adulterations having gradually affected the quality of that blood’.86 Indeed, in Watts-Dunton’s 1898 novel, Aylwin, Sinfi Lovell suggests that marrying within the community will strengthen the race. If ‘the Romany chals [men] would only stick by the Romany chies [women] as the Romany chies stick by the Romany chals’, Gypsy supremacy would result: ‘why, the Romanies would be the strongest people on the arth [sic]’.87 In Aylwin, Watts-Dunton describes a group of Gypsies visited by Henry Aylwin and Wilderspin, artists gently satirically modelled on members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Watts-Dunton was a close friend of Rossetti and is pictured next to the artist in an evocative 132

Encountering Authenticity (but posthumous to Rossetti) watercolour by Henry Treffry Dunn of the sitting room at Rossetti’s home in Cheyne Walk.88 It seems that Aylwin’s Sinfi Lovell – discussed further in the next chapter – acts as artist’s model and is a friend of another Gypsy model, ‘Kiomi’.89 Throughout this chapter, which has pointed to the repetitious nature of authentic representations of Gypsy women, the non-singularity of the singular, nineteenth-century texts can be seen to closely inform each other: from Keomi by Rossetti, Sandys, Meredith and now Watts-Dunton to a ‘black but comely’ Gypsy woman from Rossetti’s frame and WhyteMelville’s novel.90 The narrator, in his conversation with Sinfi Lovell, identifies the authenticity of an authentic Romani’s spirituality in contrast with the fallen culture of the gorgio. In a superlative piece of Victorian ‘mansplaining’, he says: The Romany Sap? You mean the Romany conscience, I suppose, Sinfi: you mean the trouble a Romany feels when he has broken the Romany laws, when he has done wrong according to the Romany notions of right and wrong. But you are innocent of all wrongdoing.91

She does not mean ‘conscience’, and tells him so four or five times. His difficulty in translating ‘Sap’ – a more literal translation is ‘serpent’, but it does not work in this context – contributes to its authenticity, retaining as it does a kernel of Romani culture and selfhood that can never be appropriated by gorgios. Sinfi says, to emphasise profound otherness once more, ‘a Romany’s feelin’s ain’t like a Gorgio’s’.92 The narrative implication is that ‘a Romany’s feelin’s’ are untarnished by the complicating, alienating experiences of modern civilisation. Writers like Leland and Watts-Dunton and their peers can be seen attempting to locate a simpler, truer, more authentic life, outdoors and at one with the rhythms of the natural world, with Gypsy culture. They bolster their own status by performing the venerated ‘other’ amongst the Romani families they visit (in autobiographical, folkloric, anthropological or fictional works), setting themselves up in contrast to a denigrated mainstream culture. Their position outside Gypsy culture enables them to represent it – the ‘recovery of an essence’ made possible by the sentiments and methods of the very modernity they hope to escape. How could such 133

The Gypsy Woman writers maintain the stability of ‘the authentic’ when it is so contradictory a concept, and when the history of Gypsy representation entangles the authentic and the fake so comprehensively? In a chapter on ‘Staged Ethnicities’, Bowder describes one of the attractions in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. They were Native Americans – a frequent racial comparator to Romanies in the Victorian period – ‘simply exhibited as themselves’. But they were not supposed to be quite themselves: ‘Barnum chose the Native Americans, whom he hired from Iowa, for their authenticity’. However, ‘these exotic ‘‘specimens’’ did not understand the performative nature of their lives’.93 In 1886, an entrepreneurial Romani man named (like many others) George Smith staged a similar, but self-conscious, performance with his ‘Royal Epping Forest Gipsy Encampment’ at the International Exhibition in Liverpool. So far, the chapter has highlighted incidents like this: the apparently authentic Gypsy staged for the consumption of the non-Gypsy. It has also touched on the non-Gypsy performing authentic Gypsiness. Both of these scenarios upset a straightforward understanding of authenticity. The chapter takes a look, now, at the second of those ideas to consider ‘passing’ as a Gypsy and what it does to representation and to authenticity. Intriguingly, the Gypsy lorists, writers almost obsessed with the authenticity of Gypsy life and culture, thought that they could ‘pass’ as Gypsies. This performance could only happen in one direction, however: they were certain, as were many other writers at the time, that a Gypsy could not pass as white. To return to the ideas laid out in Chapter 2, but to reconsider them from the angle of authenticity, non-white race permeated deeper than the skin. It was a part of one’s soul, how one was, and one would always give oneself away. In Groome’s In Gipsy Tents, the narrator describes to Plato Lovell how an acquaintance did not recognise him as he walked past with a group of Gypsies in G€ottingen. On hearing the story, Plato exclaims, ‘you might pass for a Romano with Romane, and have, maybe’. His endorsement of the project is described in conditional terms, with the addition of the equivocal ‘maybe’ casting doubt over its success. The narrator adds that, if anyone asks whether he is a Gypsy he assures them that he is ‘the rankest gorgio [that] ever walked the road’, a trick he learnt from Mrs Lucretia Boswell and one thought to make him seem even more authentically Romani – only inexperienced Romany Ryes proudly proclaim that they

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Encountering Authenticity are Gypsies and risk suspicion or arrest.94 The narrator of In Gipsy Tents tells the truth in order to lie convincingly, undermining the concept of the ‘authentic’ Gypsy. In an earlier passage, Groome denounces the popularity of the Gypsy figures shown on stage, positing his acquaintances as more authentic. However, the very fact that he argues for his own convincing performance of Gypsiness destabilises the opposition between original and copy. Leland, too, enjoys being mistaken for one of his subjects of study. In his Memoirs, he recounts how, having ‘studied Pott’s ‘‘Thesaurus of Gypsy Dialects,’’ and picked up many phrases of the tongue from the works of Borrow, Simpson, and others’, he whispers an improvised rhyme to a famous old Gypsy woman. ‘The effect on the gypsy was startling’, he says; ‘she fairly turned pale’. She takes Leland to one side and exclaims, ‘Rya – master! [Are] you one of our people?’95 Leland emphasises the purity of the woman’s blood in order to better impress the reader with his deception of her. The casualness of Leland’s attitude to his philological study and the ‘improvised rhyme’ as distinguished from a mere parroting of the phrases learnt in books is designed to make him seem naturally able at this language, a reputation that George Borrow cultivated some decades earlier but that undermines Leland’s assertion that he ‘carefully avoided repeating him in the least detail’.96 As a result, Gentilla (the Gypsy) pales in comparison to the pseudo-Gypsy, as if his passing diminishes her power to signify ‘Gypsy woman’. While worshipping the idea of a true Gypsy, his mimicry reveals the difficulty in determining an original of which he is the copy. Leland’s writing reveals an ulterior motive for Gentilla’s apparent gullibility. He adds, later in the Memoirs, that ‘it was widely rumoured that the Coopers had got a rye, or master, who spoke Romany, and was withal not ungenerous’.97 Leland never gives up his superior position in relation to the subjects of his study, referring to himself as their ‘master’ even whilst accompanying them around the countryside. It is a position that Leland seems to have bought rather than fostered and an alternative explanation for the success of his ‘passing’ might be that the Gypsies play his game in return for financial advantage. Rather than seeing this as a story all about Leland and his powers of language, one might rethink the incident as an encounter between Leland and Gentilla, and revisit who knows what about whom. On one occasion, Leland is identified as a gorgio by a Gypsy while

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The Gypsy Woman out with the Coopers. Not being accustomed to hearing himself called a gorgio, he glances up angrily at his observer. To have this reaction shows that he speaks Romani and the Gypsy corrects himself, smiles and touches his hat to Leland. That smile is somewhat enigmatic. Leland seems to have been identified by this newcomer to the scene not just as a gorgio, but as an interloper who, when flattered, pays his way. The adoption of a Gypsy disguise is not as natural as Leland, initially, would have it. As if to prove this point, another of the Coopers, Matthew, offers to brown Leland’s face and hands to make him ‘dark enough’ to buy a donkey.98 The life of Leland and his contemporaries with the Gypsies is revealed as a sort of minstrelsy: not passing but blacking-up. These examples of passing are, of course, male. Examples of white women passing as Gypsies are much harder to come by in nineteenthcentury texts. In the twenty-first century, we are besieged by unthinking cultural appropriation, and by Gypsy characters played by non-Gypsy actresses, but this is not the same as the knowing passing performed by Leland et al. However, frequently in their era, a Gypsy woman is presented as unable to hide her authentic Gypsiness, even if she does not know about her parentage, like Fedalma in George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy, discussed in Chapter 2. The intellectual white male describes himself as being able to pass in ‘other’ cultural spaces, while the impetuous, natural, non-white woman cannot. More recently, in Val Wood’s The Gypsy Girl, Polly Anna is identified as a Gypsy by one of her own before she is sure of the truth of her identity, and by Mrs Pincher, the workhouse matron, because of her dark hair and skin. Much of the latter third of the novel dramatises the ‘purity’ of the authentic Gypsy, with Polly Anna and her friends unable to decide whether she belongs in a Gypsy tent by birth, a circus tent by training, or a mansion by virtue of her mother’s background. Once her marriage to Richard Crossley seems settled, she experiences a similar sensation to Eliot’s Fedalma when watching a dance at a Gypsy wedding: ‘she felt an excitement which she couldn’t explain. Something provocative and arousing and she too longed to dance unconstrainedly to the music’.99 This is Wood’s method for building erotic tension in a non-explicit manner, but it is fitting in terms of the historical image of the Gypsy woman that her sexual desire manifests itself as a desire to dance – and it is a sexual desire for which the naïve Polly Anna constantly castigates herself, as if aware of the judgement on her genes.

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Encountering Authenticity The ‘authenticity’ of the Gypsy woman is all about longing. As a woman, she is unable to contain the passions of her Gypsiness, while the white, civilised males like Groome and Leland and Watts-Dunton think they can play at being a Gypsy when it suits them. But the authenticity that non-Gypsy writers seek is also longing: longing for the past, for the preindustrial, for the real in the age of the fake. Authenticity is a concept deeply tied up with race: it seems to guarantee the assessments made by race thinking, and racial purity appears to be the basis for authenticity. Polly Anna’s story only works because she looks like her father, a Gypsy. She is a Gypsy, because she looks how a Gypsy is supposed to look, and behaves as a Gypsy should behave. While locked in the workhouse, her Gypsiness is nullified. Only when she can explore life under a bender tent does the truth begin to emerge. The way the nineteenth-century Gypsy lorists (Leland, Groome and Watts-Dunton) present the authentic Gypsy with the self-assurance of learned men who feel they are doing their subject justice, means that the vexed question of authenticity – the non-singularity of the singular to which I have pointed several times – is largely effaced. When we rethink the ‘authentic’ as a set of expectations a non-Gypsy brings to the encounter with the Gypsy woman, it is possible to return to the Keomis and the Sinfis of literature and visual culture and reconsider what we seem to know of them. The authentic stranger-Gypsy woman is ‘some-body we know as not knowing’ because the criteria for authenticity are set in advance, yet the authentic is always perceived as elsewhere, in the past, or verified by other texts. Rather than being ‘some-body we simply do not know’, the authentic Gypsy woman is seen as a stranger, a category within knowledge. This means, as Ahmed asserts, ‘that knowledge is bound up with the formation of a community, that is, with the formation of a ‘‘we’’ that knows through (rather than against) ‘‘the stranger.’’’100 The community of writers and artists, the Pre-Raphaelites and their friends, the community around Cheyne Walk, the Gypsy Lore Society, those who, from the outside, know what the ‘authentic Gypsy woman’ should be, how she should look, dress and behave, the authenticity of being she promises, the artistic authenticity she channels: they form a ‘we’ that knows itself through the Gypsy woman. They are a ‘we’ with tremendous power – they are still written about and their work preserved for a community of readers and viewers in the twenty-first century. However, in thinking about the encounter, it is

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The Gypsy Woman possible to come back to the women at the centre of these paintings and texts and retrieve figures like Keomi Gray and Esmeralda Lock in their specificity and importance to Victorian culture and its consumers today. Authenticity seems to be about truth, though the location and ownership of that truth is at issue. Complicated truths are also at stake in the fortunes and curses of the next chapter, in which knowledge lies not with Gypsy ‘experts’, but with the Gypsy women themselves.

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5 Fortunes and Curses

One of the most common and longest-lived expectations readers and viewers bring to a textual encounter with a Gypsy woman is that she will cast curses if wronged, and tell fortunes to those who will pay, usually using palm-reading or a crystal ball, but sometimes with tarot cards. Victorian anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor took for granted in Primitive Culture (1871), a work on the development of civilisation as he saw it and the survival of primitive practices, that Gypsies continued the art of palm reading or chiromancy. This is the kind of authentic primitivism described in the previous chapter. However, he conceded that this particular survival was also exhibited in ‘good society’ despite a belief in magic being generally maintained by the ‘lower races’.1 Telling fortunes is, for Tylor, a primitive behaviour informed by race but not limited to it; as hundreds of examples can be seen to show it is an expectation (not guarantee) of the Gypsy encounter. In Val Wood’s historical fiction The Gypsy Girl, for instance, Kisaiya calls softly (unglossed in the narrative) to the cruel Rowena who has done her wrong: ‘Rinkeno mui and wafodu zee. [. . .] Kitzi’s the cheeros we dicks cattane’.2 Polly Anna, her half-Romani friend and the Gypsy girl of the title, assumes – lacking the bilingualism of her friend – that Kisaiya has cursed Rowena, especially when Rowena later falls from her horse and is badly injured. Wood’s use of George Borrow’s Romani (identified in an appended glossary) encourages the non-Gypsy reader to assume the same, 139

The Gypsy Woman though Kisaiya is innocent; her ‘curse’ is translated as ‘a beautiful face and a black wicked mind, often, full often together we find’. Hull Fair is an event of central importance to the narrative of The Gypsy Girl, and Romani fortune-tellers still ply their trade at the fair in the twenty-first century, using ‘colourful writing and [. . .] lights’ on the caravan, but insisting on the authenticity of the readings’.3 It is with experience of extant fortune-telling booths at fairs, markets and the seaside that I turn to the art historical archive; I begin those investigations with an idea of the enduring appeal of this trade and performance, the giddy shiver that a customer might feel on learning of her future love. Henry Nelson O’Neil’s 1857 oil painting, A Picnic, pictorialises fortune-telling not as a bit of fun but as a shady and peripheral activity. The painting, first exhibited at the Royal Academy, is an absolute dream for those interested in Victorian food, objects and dress, crammed as it is with sumptuous detail of an 1850s upper-class al fresco meal. Once more, it appears today on Pinterest with other outdoor scenes. On a sunny day in Windsor Park, a group of children and adults look forward to tucking in to luxury foods such as pigeon pie, guinea fowl and lobster. Fine china is stacked high, a servant is on hand to distribute the food, and cutlery, glassware and a brilliant white cloth are on show. As a Victorian painter of modern life, O’Neil captures every fringe on the ladies’ shawls, every pleat and fold of the impractical dresses, every shining ringlet of the children. But he also records something less material: the interactions between humans and, most notably for me, an encounter in the wood. It is no surprise to see a Gypsy woman at this picnic. The association between this outdoor meal and Gypsies was a clear one in nineteenthcentury culture. The ‘pic-nic’, as it was written in this period, with a hyphen, was a chance for upper- and middle-class diners to play at being Gypsies, but it also offered the tantalising possibility of having one’s fortune told in an appropriate setting. Indeed, so closely identified was outdoor eating with Gypsies that texts describe a ‘gipsy party’ or ‘going gypsying’. The rather comic encounter between Harriet and the Gypsies in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), for instance, is often discussed in terms of what it says about nineteenth-century attitudes to Gypsies, but later Mrs Elton suggests a picnic or ‘gipsy party’.4 Edwin Ransford’s nineteenthcentury ballad ‘When we went a gypsying’ was extremely popular: it came to be reprinted in America in 1839 and was later cited in John Bartlett’s

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Fortunes and Curses Familiar Quotations, while, in fiction, Bessie the nurse can be heard singing it ‘lingeringly’ in Charlotte Bront€e’s Jane Eyre.5 The ballad’s ubiquity suggests that the concept of going ‘a gypsying’ was by no means an unfamiliar one, representing to its nineteenth-century audience a ready cultural reference. C. R. Leslie’s 1820 painting Londoners Gypsying shows that the notion of spending leisure time in a pseudo-Gypsy fashion – in Epping Forest, this time – infiltrated the popular consciousness not only through song but also through fine art. To underline the ways in which textual encounters with Gypsy women are meetings ‘which are not simply in the present’ but which always reopen past encounters, Leslie also illustrated editions of Scott’s Waverley novels, including Guy Mannering.6 Robert Smith Surtees’s 1860 Plain or Ringlets? delimits the end of the period in which the word ‘Gypsy’ was used to mean ‘picnic’, meaning that as O’Neil was painting the connection was still strong. In describing the formalisation of the dress-code for outdoor dining, the narrator of Plain or Ringlets? comments that ‘formerly these sorts of excursion were called ‘‘gipsyings’’’.7 The novel also dramatises the type of encounter pictured in O’Neil’s work. In a Punch-like tone, Surtees describes how a stall set up by the owner of a local eating-house to serve picnickers momentarily spoils a scene of picturesque ruins; however, this eye-sore is somewhat redeemed by the presence of a veritable gipsy – one of the real dark-skinned, black-eyed, black-ringletted race, who goes fluttering about in her red shawl, russet gown, and ankle boots, dispensing titles, and honours, and fortunes, to all who will listen to her.8

In Chapter 2, I used this same quotation to point to the clearly racialised language of description, as well as indicating that these racial signifiers (skin, eyes and hair) were being deployed as markers of the authenticity critiqued in Chapter 4, the true or veritable Gypsy woman. Authentic Gypsiness is also promised here in Plain or Ringlets? by the performance of what Tylor calls ‘primitive’ culture: fortune-telling. The encounter that Surtees sets up posits this woman as the unchanged but dislocated Oriental, as picturesque a fragment as the ruins by which the picnickers park themselves. It is not unusual to see elements of Gypsy culture held up as picturesque ruins. Philologists B. C. Smart and H. T. Crofton described, in a work first published soon after Plain or Ringlets?, ‘hearing archaic 141

The Gypsy Woman terms and obsolete inflexions’ in Romani, which, ‘like the bones and eggs of the Great Auk, or the mummified fragments of a Dodo, are the relics of extinct forms’, which should be treasured as ‘the broken utterances of an expiring language’.9 In O’Neil’s painting, a young woman also listens intently to the ‘dark-skinned’ one with a ‘red shawl’. The Gypsy woman – for that is how O’Neil undoubtedly intends her to be understood, though an online Southeby’s catalogue politely suggests she is merely a ‘mysterious figure’ – looks carefully into the face of her interlocutor, not at her outstretched palm.10 The politeness of the Southeby’s catalogue erases, as Ahmed would say, ‘the particularity of her embodiment’, positing her simply as a stranger. This chapter puts the Gypsy fortune-teller of O’Neil’s painting, and other textual fortune-tellers and bestowers of curses, in relationship with their other encounters, showing that their meaning is ‘determined elsewhere’.11 In particular, the idea of foresight and even control of the future ‘open[s] out the possibility’ of strangers – in this case Gypsy women – ‘knowing differently to how they are known’.12 In other words, the Gypsy woman has access to forms of knowledge that those who encounter her do not. Expecting her to tell fortunes and make curses, even when that expectation is incredulous, places her beyond what the non-Gypsy can know. Like the ‘true born Romany’ Lee Ester Alita Lee, who offers her clairvoyant services on Whitby’s quayside, you are invited, for a fee, to see ‘what [she has] to say’, but who knows what and how she really knows? In an article on John Everett Millais’s painting The Bridesmaid, Nicola Bown makes the gendered nature of fortune-telling, especially in visual representation, quite clear. She draws on examples such as Mr Rochester’s bizarre dressing-up as a Gypsy fortune-teller in Jane Eyre and a drawing of Rose Heseltine (later to marry Anthony Trollope) having her palm read by her sister, Isabella, in similar fancy dress to Rochester. Her assertion is that this practice and following of fortune-telling was largely female, and the fortunes told dealt in issues of concern to women: ‘its fascination lay in its promise to lay bare the mystery of, and to enable the aspirant to control, the central event in one’s personal life: the passage into matrimony’.13 In the examples I have looked at for this chapter, however, there is little opportunity for the female customer to control her destiny. Either she believes in the art of fortune-telling, in which case the fortune-teller holds all the cards (sometimes literally) and chooses how much knowledge to

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Fortunes and Curses impart and, in addition, tells her an unchangeable destiny, or she does not credit the fortune as authentic and has wasted her money or merely enjoyed a performance. Either way, there is no matrimonial empowerment from having her fortune told. The sorcery associated with Gypsy women in particular – from palmreading to curses – finds surprising traction in an apparently modern age. Gypsy fortune-teller dress-up costumes for adults are available anywhere one can buy fancy dress, and even the toy manufacturer Lego produced a ‘Fortune Teller’ for series nine of its minifigures in 2013, complete with long dark hair, coin-fringed purple headscarf, tarot cards and patterned skirt – and a bright yellow face.14 In a write-up of designer Steffan Schraut’s 2014 collection, the Trend Hunter website approvingly assessed the ‘mysterious look’ of model Kelly Mittendorf, saying it would be ‘perfectly complemented by a crystal ball’.15 In other words: ‘I’m not going to say ‘‘Gypsy’’, but that’s what she looks like’. This is not simply the survival of which Tylor writes, the ‘connexion [. . .] between modern culture and the condition of the rudest savage’, but an opening-out of contemporary encounters with Gypsy women into encounters from earlier periods.16 Some of these encounters fall back on lazy stereotypes, while others are more complex. The examination of this element of the landscape of encounter with the Gypsy woman builds on the argument of the previous chapter, as questions of credulity and performance – the authenticity of the Gypsy fortune or curse – are central to the functioning of this image. One of the earliest proto-racist works on Gypsies, that of Heinrich Grellmann, suggested that Gypsies impose fortune-telling ‘in every district and corner of Europe; this being a thing universally known’.17 Such an idea regularly found its form in painting and subsequent illustration; Hugo Mieth’s A Gipsy Fortune-Teller, for instance, was engraved by Heuer and Kirmse in 1891 for the Illustrated London News, with a woman in a blouse unbuttoned almost to her waist and the familiar scarf with coins sewn on to it half-covering long, loose hair. Today, fashion shoots and serious exhibitions allude to tarot and the crystal ball. This chapter examines four key manifestations of female Gypsy ‘sorcery’ to emphasise the ways in which the Gypsy woman as unknowable stranger can, in some encounters, stand in for an unknowable future, but that this is potentially a position which lies usefully beyond terrains of knowledge governed by authoritative (rather than alternative) tradition. In other

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The Gypsy Woman words, if the male detective in a crime fiction narrative has all the power, how do other kinds of knowledge held by those he governs inform different kinds of encounter? If the white male bank manager knows who can and cannot get credit, how does a different form of power enable vengeance? If an aristocratic white male spurns the love of his Gypsy friend, how can she control what happens next? If a Gypsy woman in a painting is forced to its edges, how might an alternative way of encountering what she knows, beyond the painting’s frame, bring her back into the mainstream narrative of British art? These four manifestations of fortune-telling and curses as different ways of knowing are: an Orientalism that impossibly foretells the Indian Mutiny; the Sibyl; pragmatic inauthenticity; and the vengeful curse. It is not hard to see why expectations of encounters with Gypsy women often unquestioningly include fortune-telling; accounts of early contact in Europe make great play of this activity. In Paris, in 1427, a ‘Parisian Bourgeois’ admits that he never saw anyone in the group of 100 Gypsies at St Denis ‘looking into anyone’s hands, but everyone said they did [and this palmistry] brought trouble into many marriages’.18 Becky Taylor’s interpretation of this account resonates with my use of Ahmed in this chapter (and throughout the book): ‘whether or not the Gypsies recorded in Paris in 1427 in fact read palms, the people they encountered believed that they did: this was clearly the kind of activity [. . .] that populations expected of certain kinds of stranger visiting their town’.19 Like Ahmed’s explanation of otherness, Taylor insists that such European responses were not to ‘something inherent in ‘‘Gypsyness,’’ but rather the ways in which Europe dealt with difference’.20 Later that century, anti-Gypsy legislation in Spain, in common with other European states, ‘combined threats of expulsion with exhortations to assimilate, while accusing the ‘‘Egyptians’’ of begging, theft, deceit and sorcery’.21 In Christian Europe, ‘sorcery’ was akin to deceit. Around 100 years after the St Denis palm-reading, a 1530 statute in England described outlandish Egyptians deceiving people by telling fortunes using palmistry.22 By the 1730s, one could not be accused of being a witch, because that implied belief in the efficacy of witchcraft on the part of the accuser. Maureen Perkins reminds us that from 1736 fortune-telling was ‘treated by the law as the sole preserve of the gullible and the foolish’.23 The repeal of Jacobean legislation preventing witchcraft assumed that it was no longer a threat. However, new legislation (the Vagrancy Act) was levelled at those

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Fortunes and Curses who pretended to engage in witchcraft, enchantment and the like. Just because people no longer officially believed in sorcery such as fortunetelling and curse-casting does not mean that it disappeared from the popular perception of what a Gypsy woman would do, and what an encounter with her – in a text or in life – would entail. By the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Godfrey Leland was able to assert, in typically declarative style, that Gypsy women ‘have all pretended to possess occult power since prehistoric times’.24 He emphasises once more that this is a woman’s art: ‘women excel in the manifestation of certain qualities which are associated with mystery and suggestive of occult influences or power’.25 Thomas Waters notes the tension between what the general populace thought about Gypsy women and what was enshrined in legislation: ‘the scepticism of lawmakers about the reality of sorcery was not shared by many of their subjects’.26 By 1824, the assumption of fraud as part of the performance led to prohibition of charging money for fortune-telling. That same year, a woman was arrested for fortune-telling but then prosecuted for ‘pretending to be a gipsy’.27 Fraudulent fortune-telling and fraudulent Gypsiness are legalistically co-implicated. Sarah Houghton-Walker posits a kind of ‘half-belief’ in witchcraft in the Romantic period, suggesting that people gave credence to fortune-telling and curse-casting alongside their Christianity. However, evangelical moves to ‘reform’ Gypsy life from the late eighteenth century demanded that Gypsies reject their ‘occult reputation’.28 While the evangelical movement amongst Romani people has been and continues to be very successful, those eighteenth-century demands to leave an occult reputation behind have not dimmed nonGypsy interest in the power of Gypsy curses and fortune-telling.29 Literary representations that include fortune-telling simultaneously dismiss Gypsy predictions of the future and display half-belief ‘either shared or laughed at by the author’.30 Houghton-Walker uses the example of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), in which belief in fortune-telling is gently mocked, yet the prophecy is fulfilled by the end of the novel – just one instance amongst many of narrative validation of Gypsy foresight. Maureen Perkins includes in her work the intriguing 1850 compilation True Fortune Teller. The compiler of this work claims he cannot be held responsible for the superstitions therein, because it is constituted of found material from a Gypsy woman’s cave (Mother Bridget – a name that came to be associated with the famous Norwood Gypsies). The compiler

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The Gypsy Woman disavows the legitimacy of the practices on which the book trades, but at the same time uses the Gypsy connection to authenticate them, deploying the ‘half-belief’ Houghton-Walker describes.31 Charles Godfrey Leland, too, indulges in this half-belief, conceding: ‘that gypsy women often do surmise or arrive at very curious and startling truths I know by my own experience’.32 In dealing with legislative and literary attitudes to ‘Gypsy sorcery’ vaguely chronologically, I do not in any way intend to suggest that there is a teleological inevitability to a waning of belief, nor that some periods are characterised by authentic credulity while others are less naïve. Rather, belief and disbelief in fortunes and curses exist alongside each other from the first descriptions of Gypsies in Europe through to the present. Often, belief and disbelief exist together in the same narrative, news story or painting, and sit happily beside each other as equal possibilities, like a textual occult agnosticism. This agnosticism, dual belief and disbelief, or ‘half-belief’, can be seen, for example, in the notoriously superstitious field of football fandom in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There are said to have been Gypsy curses on Derby County’s Baseball Ground, Leeds United’s Elland Road, Gillingham’s Priestfield and Swansea City’s Vetch Field. Since an alleged curse was placed on St Andrews, Birmingham City’s ground, around the turn of the twentieth century after the new stadium displaced Gypsies already living on the land, the ‘Gypsy curse’ has been regularly cited as an excuse for underperformance. In 2006, The Telegraph ran an ambivalently toned Christmas Day article to mark the century of the curse, hoping that it had now run its course.33 On the Sky Sports website in 2011, Alex Byers wondered if the team’s injury problems could be ‘linked to an old gypsy dispute’. The second line of the piece suggests ‘probably not!’, but the rumour’s persistence shows that some uncertainty clings on.34 In 2016, the Birmingham Mail reported that the curse had finally been lifted when a priest sprinkled holy water on fabric about to be used to upholster the substitutes’ seats in the ground.35 Once more, the story is tongue-in-cheek (and excellent publicity for the upholsterer), but reference is made to an atthat-time unbeaten run, retaining belief in the curse’s former hold on the club. The story also pitches Christian authority against the occult, but the story hinges on belief in both at once (City ended that season in nineteenth position in the Championship, just two points shy of relegation, a placing that perhaps suggests the curse remains, or that it always was a poor

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Fortunes and Curses excuse). In short, the co-existence of belief and disbelief in Gypsy curses and fortunes can be seen from fifteenth-century Paris to twenty-firstcentury Birmingham. I want now to return to O’Neil, and the first of four manifestations of Gypsy female sorcery this chapter explores: an Orientalism that impossibly foretells the Indian Mutiny. As suggested by the investigation of Orientalism in Chapter 3 and throughout the chapters so far, the image of Gypsy women as practitioners of various kinds of sorcery is part of an Orientalist vision. It is of significance, therefore, that O’Neil is best known for his painterly responses to the First War of Indian Independence or Indian Mutiny that took place the same year he exhibited A Picnic: the crowd-pulling Eastward Ho! August 1857 (1858) and Home Again, 1858 (1859). On 10 May 1857, following increasing tensions between recruited Indian soldiers and the British, three native infantry regiments of the Bengal army shot dead their British officers, released fellow soldiers being held prisoner, and marched on to capture Delhi and declare the Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, the emperor of India. This success encouraged other regiments in the Bengal army to revolt. Soon local rulers like the Nana Saheb and Lakshmi Bai, who had lost their kingdoms to the British, and landlords like Kuwar Sing who had lost their lands, threw in their lot with the rebellion. The protracted conflict, stretching over a year, was extremely violent, killed thousands of British officers and civilians and provoked an equally ruthless suppression. The war was constantly (though, as Andrea Kaston Tange has pointed out, belatedly) in the British press, conjuring India as a place of danger and violence.36 O’Neil depicts the experience of British individuals involved in this defining moment in British rule in India – a story powerfully retold as a postcolonial statement by British artists the Singh Twins in EnTWINed (2010). In Eastward Ho!, red-coated soldiers kiss and wave goodbye from a ship bound for India, holding out arms and hands for a last touch of, or gesture towards, wives and children. In its partner, the eye is drawn to a khaki-clad, bearded man helped down from the ship, his wife holding crutches behind him. Tired, wan and long-bearded men clutch partners and children with solemn faces. This, according to The Critic of 1858, was ‘rough reality’, a better subject for art than the ‘refined softness’ of O’Neil’s earlier work.37 Jack Lohman suggests that these companion pieces were a ‘turning point’ in

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The Gypsy Woman O’Neil’s career, but I prefer to think that in the dark corners of A Picnic, a Gypsy woman foretells something in addition to the young lady’s matrimonial future, something closer to O’Neil’s work of the following year, a signpost before the turn. The woman in a pale blue dress in A Picnic encounters a fortune-telling Gypsy woman, as art and literature might lead her to expect, on her outing. The textual history of this encounter yokes that Gypsy woman to the East, understood as the locus of her mystical art according to the Orientalism espoused in that same art and literature. As Meg Merrilies, Gypsy woman, is connected to colonial India through the narrative of Guy Mannering, her suspected sorcery and her race, so the Windsor Park fortune-teller is connected to India by the trajectory of O’Neil’s career, developing unrest in India, her chiromancy and her race. This reading, of course, projects an as-yet-unknown future on to O’Neil’s work – the mutiny erupted just as A Picnic was being hung at the Royal Academy. As Faisal Devji notes, ‘most Indian accounts of the rebellion are full of statements about its novelty’; the Windsor Park fortune-teller cannot possibly know or indicate what was to come.38 However, our encounter with the painting today is a knowing one; we have seen the (for Devji, Ghandian) future that the fortune-teller spells out. O’Neil’s later Mutiny paintings draw attention to the Indianness of his dark, fortune-telling, Gypsy woman in the park, and thus to the way in which she prefigures an Indian future for O’Neil’s attention – and not just O’Neil’s. Thousands of people stared up at those two paintings to find a frame for or reflection of the experience they knew or read about of losing loved ones, lives and limbs to a bloody, vengeful and profoundly uncivilised chapter of British colonialism. O’Neil’s work played an enormous role in constructing a cultural memory of the Mutiny, expressing white British pain and effacing the Indian death and injury that occurs between those two paintings, the confrontations that bring those young, waving soldiers home again, broken. Viewers may not find India itself in the paintings, but perhaps they can return to A Picnic to find an Orientalised figure impossibly pointing to what is to happen there. This is not to fetishise the fortune-teller as an Oriental stranger after the fact, making her more Indian than Gypsy, but rather a presentist reading of O’Neil’s oeuvre that locates the visual encounter with O’Neil’s Gypsy woman in the context of its changing reception. If we take the encounter

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Fortunes and Curses beyond that single painting, then what she represents extends far beyond the terrain of knowledge presided over by the picnicking patriarch, whose attention is on his plate, rather than on the Gypsy and the future she prophesises. It invests her with impossible knowledge, and allows her to warn us about the way O’Neil’s Indian Mutiny paintings construct that event. Like the deliberate temporal illogic of seeing the Indian Mutiny in O’Neil’s The Picnic, in Guy Mannering, the Gypsies remind the reader about India, even before Harry Bertram goes there. Despite his youthful foretelling of Bertram’s future using astrology, Guy Mannering fails to recognise the event in India that, twenty-one years earlier, he calculated would threaten both his future wife and the baby just born. Only back in Britain is the astrological prediction retrieved, and even then ‘Mannering could not bring himself to acknowledge’ it.39 Mannering’s resistance distances him, the authority figure, from the activity of fortune-telling. He leaves such superstition behind now that he is part of a reasoned, masterful, imperial project – a mastery that dissolves in 1857. Similarly, O’Neil’s fortune-teller does not undertake her practice within the middleclass circle; she does not besmirch the white sheet or make eye contact with any of the men. She is outside the circle – eccentric – the frequent description of Meg Merrilies. She is also placed at the eastern-most edge of the frame. As Ahmed notes, ‘bodies that cannot be assimilated into a given social space are [. . .] read and recognisable through the histories of determination in which such bodies are associated with dirt and danger’.40 This encounter does not produce the Gypsy fortune-teller as dirty and dangerous, but she, as a stranger who could not possibly fit into the doubled ‘gipsy party’ of the picnic, is read in this way in advance; she has to be at the margin. That she is a Gypsy who cannot go a-gypsying demonstrates this figure as ‘over-represented and familiar in its very alienness’.41 What I suggest in terms of impossible knowledge is to play this over-representation at its own game, to explore how the encounter might actually be in the Gypsy woman’s favour, when taken beyond the painting. As a Gypsy, she does not need to go ‘a-gypsying’, but she can play those who wish to; as the fortune-teller we encounter when looking at the painting today, she knows what comes next for O’Neil’s work. This understanding of the painted Gypsy woman in a narrative of art history

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The Gypsy Woman works in the same way that a fortune-teller character in a fictional written narrative ‘knows’ the future of that narrative because, as Mark Currie points out, in the novel the future already exists.42 These encounters are not one-offs, and when linked across text, time and form they liberate the figure of the fortune-teller so that her strangeness is powerful rather than simply marginal, dirty and dangerous. The morning after Guy Mannering arrives at the hereditary seat of Ellangowan, he hears the voice of ‘the gypsey’ he saw the previous evening. Finding ‘an aperture’ through which to observe her without being visible himself, he gets the feeling that ‘her figure, her employment, and her situation, conveyed the exact impression of an ancient Sybil’.43 Mannering’s observation of Meg goes unnoticed by the Gypsy as he studies her behaviour and casts her in the role of Sibyl, that mythical and feminine figure. He is not alone in comparing a Gypsy woman with a Sibyl at this time (and neither is this the only time he describes Meg as such). John Clare draws the same analogy in both ‘The Gipsies Evening Blaze’ (1807– 10) and ‘The Gipseys Camp’ (1819–20).44 Harrison Ainsworth’s Newgate novel Rookwood (1834) also uses the mythical figure for its tragic Gypsy character Sybil Lovel. ‘Sibyl’ (spelt just as often with the vowels the other way around) was a general name given by the Greeks and Romans to a number of female prophets, some of whom also had individual names (Herophile and Cumae, for instance). Many Sibyls performed their prophecies in an ecstatic state and were thought to be possessed by a male god. Their prophecies were valued, written down and kept to be consulted about the future.45 An 1861 Chambers’s Journal article repeats the connections I highlight above: a ‘gipsy-camp upon the wayside turf’ ubiquitously contains a ‘wrinkled sibyl who starts up to tell our fortunes’, one of the ‘Oriental loungers’ possessed of ‘feline acuteness’ who nonetheless ‘appear indigenous to our island’.46 Just one short description brings together the complexities of textual encounters with Gypsy women in the nineteenth century: this Sibyl is Orientalised, part of the anticipated landscape of the British countryside and yet resolutely foreign, and feline in ways that are exploited by George Eliot later in the 1860s.47 Used in this merely nominal way in the Chambers article, the power of the Sibylline figure is lost. However, if we make use of Ahmed’s suggestions about encounters, and remember that each encounter reopens past ones, it may be possible to

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Fortunes and Curses retrieve the Classical authority held by these figures, as Jessica Malay has done in relation to English Renaissance Sibyls. Her work is instructive – though she does not consider the figure of the Gypsy – as it indicates Sibylline encounters onto which later Gypsy Sibyls open out. The most obvious connection to make would be the Egyptian charmer in Shakespeare’s Othello who gives his mother the cursed handkerchief that takes on such significance: the Egyptian was, Othello says ‘a sibyl that had numbered in the world / The sun to course two hundred compasses’, the very embroidery on the handkerchief a product of her ‘prophetic fury’.48 ‘Egiptian’ meant ‘Gypsy’ in Shakespearean England and, while Othello may mean someone actually from the country of Egypt, an English playwright cannot but have helped see the ‘Egiptian’ Gypsy women he will have passed in Stratford and London as he wrote that word. Malay sees her as ‘an agent of destructive chaos’, but not as a Gypsy – Clement of Alexandria’s c.200 CE Stromata had seen the introduction of an Egyptian Sibyl to the Sibylline lore, after all.49 There are a number of ways to read Othello’s Egyptian woman, and I like to see her as a fascinatingly powerful off-stage figure (she is only ever described rather than seen) in which ideas about Gypsy women and the seeing and shaping of the future meet. Malay points to the creative appropriation of ‘malleable’ Sibylline imagery, dramatists using it variously to connote authority and thus flatter royalty, to discuss sexual desire, to challenge ideas about political prophecy, to signify the coming of the end days or as shorthand for concerns about England’s imperialism.50 Describing the ancient heritage of Renaissance Sibyls, Malay notes qualities that these figures shared: they were women and virgins, famed for vast and momentous prophetic understanding. ‘Each was connected with a particular time and place and at the same time, through her prophecies, was unmoored from any era or locale.’51 They mediated between gods and humanity, guaranteeing their authority and taking an important place in political discourse. Early Christians adopted the Sibyls as prophesying Christ’s birth and the apocalypse, and by the end of the fifth century CE their authority had already lasted over a thousand years.52 Anglo-Norman Romance literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries gave the ‘Sebile’ character beauty, sensuality and foreknowledge, and the motif of seduction and entrapment by a beautiful seer recurs in Arthurian Romance.53 This was revisited by Tennyson in Vivien from Idylls of the King, discussed in her

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The Gypsy Woman visual form in the previous chapter when modelled by Keomi Gray. Henry VIII’s supporters ‘were not averse to using the authority [of] Sibylline and other prophecies in order to support his regime’ and, later, religious reform.54 John Foxe used Sibylline apocalyptic prophecy in his Actes and Monuments, a text that was made available beside the Bible in Cathedral and parish churches.55 A written set of Sibylline Oracles were ‘widely translated and disseminated in the sixteenth century’.56 Controversy about the authenticity of these texts damaged the authority of the Sibyls, condemning them after the seventeenth century to ‘minor mythological characters’.57 I contend that by opening out encounters such as those in Theodore Watts-Dunton’s Aylwin (1898), discussed below, to those with Renaissance and earlier Sibyls, the Gypsy Sibyl might reclaim its strange authority. Watts-Dunton’s attitudes towards the authenticity of Gypsiness were discussed in the previous chapter, but I want to turn now to the way in which his Sibyls might connect to earlier ones. Aylwin, which became ‘the publishing sensation of 1898’, tells the strange tale of Henry Aylwin, his family, his loves and a curse.58 Henry as a boy has skin ‘as much like a young Gypsy’s colour as was compatible with respectable descent’.59 The ‘proud Aylwins’, it transpires, ‘had a considerable strain of Gypsy blood in their veins’. Henry’s great-grandfather ‘had married Fenella Stanley, the famous Gypsy beauty’, who had been painted as the ‘Sybil of Snowdon’ with a ‘mysterious, prophetic expression in the eyes’. Fenella had, it seemed, been ‘the very embodiment of the wildest Romany beliefs and superstitions’.60 That painting hung in the portrait gallery of the ancestral pile. In a twist, it turns out that the Gypsy heroine of the novel, Sinfi Lovell, shares his great-grandmother, and bears an uncanny resemblance to this Sybil; Sinfi’s name, with its initial ‘s’ and two ‘i’ sounds, two ‘eyes’ that double her capacity to see, resonates with the word ‘Sybil’. This resemblance between Sinfi and Fenella, visually obvious when looking at Fenella’s portrait, informs Sinfi’s role and significance in the narrative, a literary device that itself resembles Lady Dedlock’s portrait in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853). Portrait recognition occurs a second time in Aylwin, when Henry recognises the artist Wilderspin’s model as the lost Winifred.61 When a narrative focuses on the present of a heroine (Esther Summerson in Bleak House or Sinfi Lovell in Aylwin), and that present is tied to and predicted by an ancestor whose portrait is captured in oils, the

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Fortunes and Curses painting is oddly lent the gift of foresight – again, in the novel form the future has already happened. This is a narrative reality hidden by the realist novel in order to create suspense (though it may be hinted at in a framing device), so a prophetic ekphrasis always strikes the reader as particularly uncanny. Sinfi is ‘very dark but very handsome’, in an echo of ‘black but comely’, with blue-black plaited hair, ‘powerful and tall’ and, on Henry and her first meeting, wearing a deep blood-red scarf tied ‘like an Oriental turban’. She wears ‘not exactly an uncanny expression, yet it suggested a world quite other than this. It was an expression such as one might expect to see [. . .] in a Roman Sibyl’.62 Or, indeed, on the face of Meg Merrilies. That Watts-Dunton directs the reader’s attention back to a time in which the Sibyls held great authority and their prophecies were understood as authentic opens out Aylwin’s encounter with her on to encounters between Roman heroes and powerful female seers. Shortly after this first encounter, the landlord of the pub in which Sinfi and Henry meet advises him not to interrupt her drinking her beer because ‘she’s got the real witch’s eye’.63 Sinfi herself claims that her mother had the ‘seein’ eye’, and Henry reports that she is famous among her people as a seeress, an authentic teller of the future or ‘real dukkering’ for Romanies rather than the money-making fortune-telling we see in O’Neil’s picnic painting.64 She possesses ‘that power which belonged once to her race, that power which is expressed in a Scottish word now universally misused, ‘‘glamour’’’.65 She expresses belief in animism – a term first used anthropologically by Edward Burnett Tylor – asserting that rocks, lakes and mountains curse us when we do wrong according to Romani code.66 It is Henry’s amateur-mystic father, Philip, who makes the first prophecy for Aylwin: of ‘great things’, and it is also he who unwittingly curses Henry’s beloved, Winifred, with the large jewelled cross he insists must be buried with him.67 If this cross, with its ‘Oriental rubies’, is stolen from the tomb, then the thief’s children will be vagabonds, will have to beg their bread and seek out desolate places.68 He takes the curse from psalm 109, previously connected in literature with Gypsies by Thomas Hardy in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). There, the choir leader resists Henchard’s drunken command to sing the psalm by wondering what David was thinking when he made a psalm that ‘nobody can sing without disgracing himself’. He recalls that they ‘chose it once when the gipsy stole the pa’son’s mare’, a choice that made the parson ‘quite upset’.69

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The Gypsy Woman Intriguingly, a BBC adaptation of the novel, first broadcast in 1994 and reaired on digital radio in 2017, reorders the narrative so that the listener is aware of Henchard’s distress and the results of his drunken behaviour from the beginning. At the Gypsy horse fair where he auctions his wife, the fortune-teller alluded to only by title in the novel leers at him in the radio version: ‘tell your fortune, sir’.70 This happens as his steps are drawn to the tent in which his life course will change drastically. The radio drama has already begun to tell this misfortune: the fortune-teller herself becomes a portent for the misery to come. Gypsy women, then, are not the only characters to understand fortune-telling and curses: in Aylwin, Philip is committed to the occult, and in the adaptation of Hardy’s novel the narrative hints at what is to come. In Aylwin, though, the plot hinges on the credence others lend to these otherworldly powers. Curses have no influence when no-one else believes in them. Catherine Maxwell’s fittingly complex treatment of the novel – an unusual one as it has been relatively neglected by scholarship – deals with its nuanced ‘reduplications’, demonstrating Watts-Dunton’s debts to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the way that he ties ‘repetition to devices such as curses and states of enthralment, which demand that individuals compulsively act out or repeat specific behavioural scripts’.71 Fenella Stanley, absent save for her portrait and reputation, much like Othello’s Egyptian, is a potent force in the novel because she is ancestor to both Philip and Sinfi and overlooks the generational reduplications that occur. Maxwell deals deftly with the uncanny repetitions in the novel, brought about by unconscious repetition – such as Wilderspin’s instinctive use of Winifred as his model for a visual tribute to The Veiled Queen, ‘the novel’s strange shadow-self’.72 Winifred had posed for a photograph that, years earlier, was used as the basis for a woodcut engraving to a new edition of that very book.73 It is gratifying to find these representational reduplications of interest to Watts-Dunton, for the coincidences and effects of cross-form encounters are part of what motivates my own readings throughout this book. Maxell makes an inspired comparison between Sinfi and Marian Halcombe of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), a woman who also helps the man she loves recover his beloved, hovering between death and madness. Maxwell adds that Sinfi’s ‘gypsy background means that [Watts-Dunton] can dispense with all the proprieties that usually attend on the portrayal of Victorian heroines’.74

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Fortunes and Curses Maxwell does not consider in great detail, however, who Sinfi is as a Sibylline Gypsy woman. She may not conform to Victorian propriety, but Sinfi meets the Classical requirement for virginal Sibyls (and, coincidentally, Victorian unmarried women). This is confirmed when she is described as being able to play the Welsh fiddle or crwth, rumoured to summon the spirits of Snowdon when played by a virgin.75 When Henry hears her play it, it seems he is listening to his ancestress, Fenella Stanley, rather than Sinfi.76 Watts-Dunton on the one hand makes clear that the power of a curse is not in magic but in its suggestion, but on the other delivers a narrative that confirms foresight: half-belief making a literary appearance via the interrelation of character and narrative form once more. His father’s amulet haunts his imagination ‘as much as if [he] believed in amulets and curses’, something he attributes to ‘the inherited instinct of superstition’.77 He dismisses Gypsy foresight as ‘a peculiar faculty the Gypsies have of observing more closely than Gorgios do everything that meets their eyes in the woods and on the hills and along the roads’.78 He is at a loss when his cousin’s artistic friends show adulation towards his father and his spiritualist work – Wilderspin’s painting Faith and Love based on The Veiled Queen is described as rendering in art ‘the inevitable attitude of its own time and country towards the unseen world’ and is compared to ‘the masterpiece of Polygnotus in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi’, a comparison that evokes speaking with the dead, prophecies and the Sibyls of Cumae and Delphi.79 Philip’s mystic vision is, Wilderspin says, a counter to the ‘grovelling and gross’ age in which they now live, echoing Charles Godfrey Leland’s disgust about an ‘artificial age’.80 As Buffy the Vampire Slayer, discussed in a previous chapter, positioned itself explicitly as on the cusp of the twenty-first century, so Aylwin positions itself on the cusp of the twentieth, as D’Arcy writes of the ‘modern materialist, who [Henry thinks] is to dominate the Twentieth Century and all the centuries to follow’.81 Henry Aylwin, the white, male, scientific materialist, is undone by ancient curses and fortunes. Sibylline knowledge is never far from Aylwin’s frame of reference. Henry is mockingly accused of making a ‘Delphic utterance’.82 On the night that Winifred’s father steals the amulet, effectively cursing her, she recalls Sinfi and her visit to Swallow Falls, from which Sinfi insisted she could hear the wail of the cursed Sir John Wynne; as Winifred tells

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The Gypsy Woman the story, another Wynne shrieks and Winifred hears the echo in the same way that the heroes of myth recognised Sibylline prophecies being fulfilled.83 As Winifred’s curse takes hold, it is Sinfi who fully understands its import, and can anticipate its manifestations. She hears the voices of spirits risen from the ground, including her grandmother and Fenella Stanley – she knows in a way that Henry cannot. As Henry begins to sympathise with her vision of the universe, he castigates himself and sees it ‘gradually sapping [his] manhood’ – this way of knowing is resolutely feminine.84 One evening, he gives in and reads his father’s superstitious work, falling on a poem that tells of a dialogue between the Egyptian Sibyl and ‘Nin-ki-gal’ (now usually written as Ereshkigal), goddess of the underworld or Queen of Death. He cannot think of the Sibyl ‘without seeing in the Sibyl’s face the grand features of Fenella Stanley’, and thus also Sinfi Lovell, negotiating with the Queen of Death, inhabiting an ancient and unreachable world.85 Sinfi and Fenella belong to particular times and places, but through their connection with the Sibyls are ‘unmoored from any era or locale’.86 This is not timelessness in the sense of being absented from history, but a participation in history and an alternative experience of time and space. This is exemplified when Henry decides he must rebury his father’s amulet: as he thinks about his walk to the Great Eastern Railway station, clearly a modern context, he chatters to the long-dead Fenella, ‘dear Sibyl’, about the palace of Nin-ki-gal.87 And while Nin-ki-gal and Sibylline references unmoor Sinfi from the late nineteenth century, they also place her right there too: Watts-Dunton is able to refer to such ideas with specificity because of the imperialistarchaeological acquisitions of this period: the Amarna Letters, a clay cuneiform tablet telling the myth of Nergal and Ereshkigal, was given to the British Museum in 1888, during the long gestation of Watts-Dunton’s repeatedly revised work.88 Sinfi is a powerful woman as a Sibylline Gypsy in Aylwin. She constantly places herself beyond the terrain of knowledge. She is unknowable and enigmatic, and knows more about the curse than Henry Aylwin ever can. She even deploys modern science, in the form of a precursor to psychoanalysis in the treatment of hysterics, to have the curse transmitted to herself to avoid the destiny she has personally foretold: a broken heart at the hands of a non-Gypsy (Henry). She stares death in the face in order to save Winifred from the curse, the Sybil communing

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Fortunes and Curses with Nin-ki-gal. Is this agency? Can Sinfi Lovell, Sibylline Gypsy, be seen as a powerful woman? She is unlike any other literary heroine, and chooses to swerve her ‘dukkeripen’, the future spelled out by her mother, in a manner that corresponds to her alternative way of knowing. She marches off alone, defiantly telling Henry that Romanies and ‘Gorgios’ should live separate lives. She would rather cut her heart out than have it broken, but this is not much of a choice to have to make. Sinfi does not cast the curse in Aylwin, but she ultimately controls it. She has the power to make it legible. The fear of being cursed by an angered Gypsy woman lasts well beyond the nineteenth century, and is familiar in twenty-first-century literary and visual culture. It is an easily recognisable form of encounter, marking out the dark and (usually) accented stranger as Gypsy fortune-teller without the nuance or empathy of Watts-Dunton’s heroines. For instance, a 2007 episode of Disney’s Hannah Montana makes just this gesture. Around eight minutes in to the season-two episode, a woman with long hair, bangles, an embroidered white blouse, a purple coin-fringed waistcoat and a long turquoise skirt appears and begs a drink in return for a fortune from shop-owner Rico. When he refuses, she waggles her fingers towards him and says, ‘terrible things will happen to you [. . .] you are cursed’. Rico initially laughs off the curse, but less-thanterrible things befall him, such as toffee apples sticking to his head and finding a caterpillar in his sandwich. The curse is a hoax, designed to make Rico be nicer to people; the fortune-teller has been paid to put on the performance. The hoax only makes sense to the audience if the trope of the Gypsy fortune teller is immediately obvious to a young audience. In fact, the trope of the recognisable Gypsy fortune-teller is deployed, actually using the term ‘Gypsy’ and a dressed-up cartoon elephant, for an even younger audience in Nick Sharratt’s Elephant Wellyphant (2008) for preschool readers. Hannah Montana’s fortune-teller may have been paid to make a false curse, but she still rounds off the episode telling Robby Ray Stewart’s fortune, leaving the ‘authentic’ Gypsy fortune teller partially intact.89 I do not suggest that a late-nineteenth-century British novel and a twenty-first-century US television programme aimed at pre-pubescent girls are designed with the same intent or audience, nor that they have the same effect. What I want to draw out is, first, the longevity of the trope and, second, that not all encounters with the Gypsy fortune-teller are equal. Some of these encounters are taken for granted en route to a gag,

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The Gypsy Woman and such crudely drawn Gypsy women are a useful reference point for appreciating the nuance and potential for female Gypsy power in historical texts. There is no residual belief in the fortune-teller’s art in Anthony Asquith’s 1950 film, The Woman in Question. This is an example of fortune-telling as pure performance. Agnes ‘Astra’ Houston (played by Jean Kent) is a fortune-teller insofar as she keeps a booth in the arcade, out of which she can sweep with her large earrings, scarf tied at the back of her head, coin-fringed waistcoat and shawl. This is, though, another fortuneteller who demands the audience look outside the world of the text, as with O’Neil’s painting, to know more about her than we possibly can from the realist narrative. If the audience takes this encounter in isolation, it sees Astra putting on a costume simply as a precursor to chatting up a handsome dupe. Her fortune-telling as a form of knowledge – traditional or alternative – does not seem to come into the film at all. John McCallum as the brutish, racially described Irish sailor, Michael Murray, asks Astra why she is spending time ‘playing the Gypsy’ when she could be with him; in fact, Jean Kent had already famously played the Gypsy woman in Arthur Crabtree’s 1946 Caravan, the film which really made her name as an actress.90 Caravan was based on a 1942 novel of the same name by Lady Eleanor Smith, whose article for the Daily Mail was quoted in Chapter 3. It was one of the Gainsborough melodramas, romantic historical bodice-rippers, and is set in nineteenth-century England and Spain. It accentuates the exoticism of the Spanish Gypsy’s music and dance, responding and contributing to what Lou Charnon-Deutsch has called a European obsession. Charnon-Deutsch focuses particularly on what was often imagined as a dangerous and bewitching power that Gypsy women had over white men, famously seen in the Carmen myth which is, she reminds us, ‘perennially reborn in European and American culture’.91 In some of the versions of Astra’s fortune-teller in The Woman in Question, she is certainly bewitching to men (the film uses the device of showing the same events from different perspectives), but the danger ends up being to her. Her bewitching qualities are more acute if one sees The Woman in Question in dialogue with Caravan. The narrative of Caravan the novel begins in England, with James/ Jamie Darrell (a boy not unlike George Borrow’s young Lavengro) meeting Gypsies for the first time. He tells them that he knows a witch, and they

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Fortunes and Curses believe him: they are ‘superstitious as savages’.92 The book’s first few mentions of fortune-telling see it as a trade, however, not a belief; a way to make money from non-Gypsies.93 When Jamie consults Hagar Brazil (whose name immediately conjures the no-nonsense Hagar Stanley of Hagar of the Pawnshop) about his own future as she gazes in to a crystal ball, she begins to speak ‘the purest form of Romani’, as if to show that this is not a mere performance to have her palm crossed with silver, but an authentic vision for a boy who has become almost one of her own. She reveals another prophecy that the narrative delivers, like in The Mayor of Casterbridge: ‘where the sun is, there’s blood’ and a need for more patience than most could bear before he gets what he wants. At its telling, however, Jamie is caught in half-belief. When she seems in earnest distress about his future, he is ‘impressed by her talent as an actress’, but when she insists she is ‘dukkering proper’ he ‘unwillingly’ assents that he believes her.94 In Spain, James’s Gypsy lover, Rosal, is also ‘an expert fortune-teller’, and it is this character whom Jean Kent played in the film adaptation.95 Astra may not even act the part of fortune-teller very well but, embodied by Jean Kent, she draws us out of the narrative frame of the film and gestures towards a romanticised, exoticised representational backdrop that connects fortune-telling, Gypsy women and sensuality. The encounter with Astra can be seen as one in a series that includes encounters with Rosal in both the visual and literary versions of Caravan. It is no longer an empty performance by Astra, but one whose meaning can only be made sense of when opened out on to others, connected with particular times and places but, through the fortune teller, unmoored from one singular era or locale. Astra is the woman in question, but that ‘woman’ too defies a singular reading, perceived entirely differently in the varying accounts given of her to the detective investigating her murder. Kent puts in a quicksilver performance to portray her as upstanding victim of unwanted male attention (from Dirk Bogarde’s Bob Baker), meek angel, drunkard and harlot, depending on whose recollections frame the scene. The focus of the film is the multiple ways in which a woman is understood depending on the narrative in which she is caught and the feelings the teller has about her. Through repetition and juxtaposition, the film allows Astra to float uncertainly across these singular narratives, and this formal unmooring conceit also allows us to see Rosal as another way of ‘knowing’ Astra, as

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The Gypsy Woman Astra moves beyond the bounds of the film’s frame. The fortune-teller of The Woman in Question is also a Gypsy, but not in the way we expect, and is only visible as such if one considers an encounter with Astra as opening out on to other representations of fortune-tellers. The device of the fortune or curse as an obvious, inauthentic performance is explicitly referenced by examples such as Hannah Montana and The Woman in Question, but also by Aylwin with its insistence on a ‘true dukkeripen’. As noted in several historical examples above (culminating in the curse of Birmingham City FC) textual nods to inauthenticity neither preclude continued belief in fortunes and curses, nor make it less likely that they will be associated with Gypsy women. Fortunes, half-believed but with clear signifiers of inauthenticity, are used as an alternative method for communicating information. This performance can be used as a deflection to pass on hidden or forbidden knowledge other than the fortune, especially in crime fiction. For instance, in a BBC Radio drama (first aired on the BBC Light Programme and today part of the cultural landscape via a Radio 4 Extra podcast) based on a book by Francis Durbridge, suave detective Paul Temple visits a fortune-teller in Brighton’s Dreamland – the fortune-teller booth was and is still something of a staple at seaside resorts, as one can see in The Woman in Question. When Temple spots the fortune-teller’s sign, he lets out his signature exclamation: ‘By Timothy!’96 Her name, Madame Margo, corresponds with a label sewn into a jacket found with a woman whose death Temple is investigating. As Temple’s wife, Steve, enters the tent – a woman sent as the more believably credulous customer – Madame Margo is heard hurriedly finishing a cup of tea, caught unawares before she can put on her ‘seer’ voice. The fact that Steve must play the naïve punter reinforces this as an encounter between two performers, circling around each other to try to ascertain how much the other knows. The radio programme does not mention what Margo looks like, but Durbridge’s book has her in ‘gypsy costume’.97 Both present her speaking in a broad Cockney accent. Once Steve mentions the dead woman, Madame Margo uses the fortune-telling consultation to warn Steve that there will be an attempt on her and her husband’s life; she is, it transpires in later episodes, part of a violent drug-dealing gang that will stop at nothing to avoid detection. There will be ‘an accident’, Margo foretells, and she sees ‘a dolphin’ in Steve’s palm. The ‘whole set up’ may be ‘terribly phony’

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Fortunes and Curses according to Steve, and she ‘wouldn’t believe a word she said’ but ‘that was a warning’.98 The ‘reading’ is false, but the prophecy is genuine. A Gypsy woman hammily performing fortune-telling can use this guise in the crime fiction genre to say things in her booth or van, a space not unlike the priest’s confessional in this context, that otherwise must not be said out loud. She can disown the words, and insist that they belong to another realm; they are not her responsibility and she is protected from their import. As Madame Margo says of Julia’s fate: ‘there’s no getting away from the palm’. It is a professional shrug: I can’t help what I see in someone’s future. The Gypsy curse in Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell (2009) is infinitely more terrifying but no less recognisable as a set piece nor less dependent on credulity for its efficacy. In a preface to the main narrative, set in Pasadena, 1969, a boy who stole a silver necklace from a Gypsy’s wagon is taken by his desperate parents to Shaun San Dena for an exorcism after he hears voices and has visions. The exorcism fails, and we see him literally dragged into hell. As in many horror movies, the audience must decide if what they see is one of the characters’ unreal visions mapped on to a normal world (maybe the exorcist is seeing things), or to be understood as a realist narrative in an abnormal world, a set of events that could also befall them. Drag Me to Hell was heavily influenced by the 1957 film directed by Jacques Tourneur, Night of the Demon. An earlier iteration of that film prior to release played on half-belief, Tourneur later saying that he had wanted mere hints of the physical demon to appear, hoping for the audience to wonder ‘did I see it or didn’t I?’ Such hinting, however, did not fit with the producer’s commercial motivation to live up to an X-certificate.99 Following the 1969-set preface to Drag Me to Hell, the film’s opening credits seem to show swirling ink landing on a page to create woodcutengraving case histories of encounters with the demon. The film constructs the narrative’s historical back story with this technique, suggesting that there exists an archive that will verify what follows – or at least verify what others believe they have seen. It also, though, implies the reinscription of what has come before, the demon’s textuality, its reproduction and reproducibility, just as a woodcut engraving is designed to be reproduced. The film also draws heavily on Stephen King’s (writing as Richard Bachman) Thinner and its film adaptation, though that storyline features a

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The Gypsy Woman male Gypsy. It also draws on mythic figures such as Lamia – recognised in English Literature most often via John Keats’s 1821 poem of that name, and on the vengeful, curse-bestowing Gypsy. The encounter with Drag Me to Hell’s Gypsy is connected to all these other texts. Lamia comes from Greek folklore, a spirit that devoured its victims, especially children. In the late Hellenistic period ‘Lamia began to figure prominently in a story known as the ‘‘Libyan myth’’’. She is female in these Greek versions and later retellings, and Shaun San Dena uses the female pronoun when referring to her in Drag Me to Hell. Like the Sibyl, this is a malleable figure, sometimes a child-killer, at other times a beautiful seductress with a snake’s body or ass’s legs.100 Unlike the Sibylline imagery discussed above, Drag Me to Hell is not suggesting that the Gypsy woman is a lamia, but makes an association between the lamia and the Gypsies. When Sylvia Ganush, Drag Me to Hell’s Gypsy antagonist, first makes an appearance in the bank where Christine Brown works, she looks not

Figure 5.1 Charles Edward Halle, The Fortune Teller, Museums Sheffield.

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Fortunes and Curses unlike the fortune-teller of Charles Edward Halle’s painting of that name. This is not because Raimi was necessarily influenced by Halle’s image (indeed, it is unlikely), but rather because we know what to expect of a Gypsy fortune-teller; she is visually fixed by a series of textual encounters though, as I have described, the meaning of those encounters is determined when they open out on to each other at different times and in different contexts. Raimi’s stock in trade is recognisable horror. The film wants its audience to say ‘well, of course the customer with whom nice farm-girl Christine has to test her financial services mettle is an old Gypsy who will curse her’. In Halle’s painting, the fortune-teller has long dark hair, a black scarf on her head and a black skirt and jacket. Her skin, noticeably darker than the girl whose palm she reads, is lined with deep creases, her eyelids are dark with age and her teeth are uneven. She gesticulates with a pointed finger on her right hand, while the girl looks on, detached. Having parted with the silver coins lying on the table behind her, perhaps she lends no credence to the Gypsy woman’s art. Also on the table are the familiar tools of the fortune-teller’s trade: a crystal ball and cards. Even without the title, any viewer would know who and what the dark woman in the painting is. Raimi does the same with his female Gypsy character. Sylvia Ganush is deliberately grotesque. Even before she issues her curse, we see thick, filthy fingernails, hear the slurp of her slimy false teeth, recoil from her milky eye. She gets on her knees to beg for a loan extension, and it is the public shaming she endures that causes her to summon Lamia to take Christine to Hell. As well as the curse, there are two ways in which Mrs Ganush is visually connected to other Gypsy encounters. The first is one that I have already mentioned in this chapter: an embroidered handkerchief, linking her to Othello’s Egyptian. Whenever the contorted face of the deceased Mrs Ganush is about to appear, or another demonic visitation about to happen, the embroidered handkerchief first seen clutched by Mrs Ganush in the bank office floats through the air or even, eventually, down Christine’s throat. In Othello, we remember, the embroidery is a product of ‘prophetic fury’; in Drag Me to Hell it is a signifier of Mrs Ganush’s prophetic fury returning on Christine. The second connection is the ‘Sinfi’ role in Drag Me to Hell, the person who understands the curse, who works to move it to someone else: Rham Jas, a seer of Indian heritage whose presence Orientalises mystical belief in a world of demons and curses. As Andrew Pulver points out in a review for the Guardian: ‘it’s something of an

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The Gypsy Woman unreconstructed throwback to have a Gypsy as your repellent bringer of evil, though presumably Raimi hopes to balance this out by making one of the good guys an Indian seer. But it’s hardly the point’.101 Christine’s boyfriend, Justin, may consider Jas a fraud, but his Oriental spiritualism is proved authentic by the narrative. The Ganush family, meanwhile, are EuroOrientalised, seen most obviously at Mrs Ganush’s crowded wake. Her granddaughter (played by Serbian-Australian Bojana Novakovic), with a non-distinct but definitely Eastern European accent, has an appearance more in the mould of Jenny Calendar or Josephine Romany from Christi J. Whitney’s young adult occult-romance Grey (2015). She, regarding Christine closely, understands her past without being told. Pulver’s assessment of the Gypsy as ‘repellent bringer of evil’ in this film is accurate but, in summoning Lamia, Sylvia Ganush manages to unleash a power that is well beyond the chauvinist capitalist power embodied by the bank and predict that, no matter what else she does, Christine Brown will go to Hell. In conclusion, the recognisable, almost ubiquitous, figure of the occult Gypsy woman, telling fortunes and dishing out curses, is hackneyed and insists that one anticipate such behaviour in advance of a textual encounter with a Gypsy woman – whether the text was written in the nineteenth century, is set in the nineteenth century, was performed in the twentieth century or was produced last year. However, when the Gypsy woman is recognisable in that role, it does offer certain power. She might hold ways of knowing without being known. She can give out certain pieces of dangerous information without claiming it as her own. She can insist on certain courses of action because they conform to a future she has ‘seen’. An encounter with her opens out on to other encounters that reshape the chronology of how we see works of art or artistic careers. And she can wreak terrible vengeance on those who shame her. Like the opening credits of Drag Me to Hell, the fortune-telling, curse-casting Gypsy is cut into the block of culture, repeatedly copied and re-used. Also like those credits, though, the swirling, smoky ink leaks from context to context so that the way she is understood cannot quite be fixed; despite her recognisability, she becomes, as Ahmed predicts, ‘something that may surprise the one who faces’ her.102 The surprise comes from a particular kind of text-, form-, and chronology-drifting in which the Gypsy fortune-teller participates, gathering together unexpected representations like so much flotsam to produce novel meanings of the fortune and the curse.

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6 Travelling Domesticity

In 2015, The Irish Atheist, a blogger, wrote a post titled ‘Because I’m a Gypsy’. It was a reflection on his ethnic identity (one Romani parent, one white) and the uses and abuses of ‘Gypsy’ culture in his adopted home of the USA. He describes ‘watching [his] culture and identity being bought and sold like a bauble’, adding: ‘Gypsy is not a term for a love of travel or wanderlust. It does not mean a free-spirited individual who doesn’t let society tie her down.’1 The reason this blogger has to make this disavowal explicit is because, in the twenty-first century, ‘Gypsy’ is regularly used to mean exactly what he wants to dismiss: wanderlust. Images tagged ‘Gypsy’, especially ‘Gypsy soul’, on the online image-sharing site, Pinterest, often contain short quotations about the benefits of free-spirited independence, or pictures of barefoot women (often wearing anklets) on the beach. His use of the female possessive is entirely appropriate because these assertions of independence are regularly associated with female empowerment or daring. The Irish Atheist points his criticism at one money-making racket in particular, but the potential targets are everywhere online. He might also have been describing the Colombian musician Shakira’s 2010 music video ‘Gypsy’. In it, a barefoot and barely clothed Shakira walks through a dusty landscape, playing the harmonica and writhing around with the topless and oiled form of Spanish tennis ace Rafael Nadal. In this 165

The Gypsy Woman sexually charged scene, Shakira sings that she is ‘not the homecoming kind’; ‘I’m a Gypsy / Are you coming with me?’ Gypsiness is equated with flight, perpetual movement and, later in the chorus, stealing.2 In turn, these are seen as features of a dangerous and exciting sexual adventure. Shakira’s video links innate wanderlust and female sexuality, a combined and seemingly excessive desire, and can be seen much earlier in Black But Comely (1869): at age nineteen Jane Lee confesses that she ‘should like never to sleep two nights in the same bed’ – superficially a reference to travel but with clear connotations of sexual promiscuity. Her dark beauty, inevitably for a nineteenth-century plot, leads her into all manner of liaisons and adventures as men fall for ‘the temptation that lurks under such outward comeliness’.3 The travelling Gypsy woman is a threat to the white male establishment, and this is one clear reason why she makes such an appealing figure for appropriation by some women on social media in the twenty-first century. This chapter explores how the notion of adopting a ‘gypsy’ (with a lower-case ‘g’) mantle, as Shakira and the culturally appropriative Pinterest taggers do, draws on but also contradicts the ways in which the authentic Gypsy desire for travel is perceived as ‘in the blood’ and thus connected to the discourse of race. One commenter on The Irish Atheist’s blog post criticises his sensitivity towards the mistreatment of Romani culture, justifying this criticism with mention of her or his own ‘Gypsy blood’. The Irish Atheist pithily responds that he has ‘no idea what ‘‘gypsy blood’’ is, the main types of blood are A, B, AB, and O’, demonstrating the anachronistic hold that race-thinking has on questions of culture and identity. The representation of Gypsy mobility is considered in this chapter in light of Sara Ahmed’s assertion that ‘the (mis)recognition of others as strangers is what allows the [. . .] legitimation of certain forms of mobility or movement [. . .] and the delegitimation of others’.4 Looking back to the nineteenth century, a period in which Gypsy travel was equally romanticised and denigrated, while still being a more common and regular reality for Romani people, the travelling Gypsy woman is: a) part of a nation that economically relied on travel; b) expected to travel because of a racially defined imperative; c) delegitimised in her travel as a Gypsy stranger; d) desired and feared as a transgressive figure because of that delegitimation. Finally, the chapter moves on to consider some of the material markers of the ‘domesticity’ of a travelling life. Like the crystal ball

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Travelling Domesticity and coin-fringed shawl in the last chapter, these objects are used as visual shorthand for an encounter with Gypsy life. A social media user’s self-identification as a gypsy soul, travelling through the world as an empowered free spirit, is not, of course, simply a product of a globalised digital century. Leigh Hunt, a now lessremembered Romantic-period writer than his friends John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, wrote his autobiography in 1850, when he was in his sixties. In it, he recalls his return to England from Italy, taking a delight in his native scenery and feeling ‘at home’. At that time, he ‘wrote some lines to ‘‘Gipsy June’’’, a poem that bespeaks ambivalence about travel. The poetic voice considers ‘walk[ing] round the earth’ but also values a less extensive form of mobility, a ‘gipsy time’: ‘loitering here, and living there, / With a book and frugal fare’. In his autobiographical commentary on this period, Hunt asserts that ‘domesticity itself can travel’, a situation that, harking back to the ‘authenticity of being’ described in Chapter 4, can improve one’s ‘own nature [. . .] along with it’.5 The reference to ‘a book and frugal fare’ operates not merely as an autobiographical detail, but places Hunt in a poetic category with Matthew Arnold, tying ‘Gipsy June’ to Arnold’s 1853 The Scholar-Gipsy, itself inspired by Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of the Dogmatizing (1661). The Scholar-Gipsy revivifies Glanvill’s Oxford scholar who, ‘tired of knocking at preferment’s door’, forsakes the university in favour of roaming ‘the world with that wild brotherhood’. The infection of mental strife caused by the demands of the industrialised nineteenth century is in danger of spreading to the ‘fair life’ that the Scholar-Gipsy has found in roaming the countryside.6 The Scholar-Gipsy was not Arnold’s first poetic evocation of Gypsy life, following as it did To a Gipsy Child by the Sea-Shore and Resignation, both published in 1849. In Resignation, the poet retreads a familiar road without thirsting for constant change and, similarly, the Gypsies willingly pitch again at a ‘former scene’, very much like Hunt’s imagined ‘gipsy time’. Deborah Epstein Nord astutely comments that ‘the alienated writer or artist begins to stand in for and replace the Gypsy in a cultural discourse that threatens to occlude the already partly invisible object of sympathy’, especially in the work of poets like Arnold.7 Throughout this book I have been interested in prioritising the Gypsy woman (and her community) partially present in these artworks, rather than the writers and artists who see themselves as

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The Gypsy Woman being selectively ‘like Gypsies’. In Arnold’s To a Gipsy Child, the poet notices the (ungendered) child on the beach with its mother, and centres her or his experience but via poetic imposition rather than real engagement. Nevertheless, it is a deeply affecting work. The recognition, directed at the Gypsy child, that ‘thy sorrow and thy calmness are thine own’ harks back to my earlier assertions that the Gypsy woman (or, here, child) might not be who you think she is; there is no access in this encounter to the child’s thoughts and emotions other than the poetic reading of her or his face.8 Even the melancholy of exile cannot match what the poet reads of the child’s visage. Migrancy and exile are perhaps suggested by the boats on the sea behind the Gypsy child, but this also means that the seaside encounter opens out on to the painting hanging with Webster’s Gypsy woman in Brighouse, Henry Nelson O’Neil’s My Native Land Goodbye (1879), depicting the strained faces of female migrants. Arnold’s poem speaks also to the fortune-telling explored in the previous chapter, and the possibilities in representations of Gypsy women for impossible knowledge. Arnold’s Gypsy child seems to know her or his own future: ‘ –Thou hast foreknown the vanity of hope, / Foreseen thy harvest – yet proceed’st to live’.9 The initial and medial caesurae interrupt a logical chronology, pointing to the fact that others must wait for the delivery of their fate but that this child carries the burden of already picturing it. Hunt’s ‘gypsy time’ is not a melancholic but a bucolic one. He envies the ‘cottage on wheels – moving whithersoever it pleases, and halting for as long a time as may suit it’. He does, however, self-consciously note what Ahmed would call the ‘delegitimation’ of Gypsy mobility and the naïvete of his vision. To partake, as an outsider, in this ‘better heaven’, one must ignore ‘parish objections, inconvenient neighbourhoods, and want of harmony in the vehicle itself’. He describes a privileged form of travel, away from a ‘favourite home in one’s native country’ but with the ability always to return ‘if we please’, implicitly conceding with this assertion of return the potential melancholia of not being able to – to one’s native land forever goodbye, and the frustration of finding one’s travel inhibited or pain of being persecuted because of it.10 Hunt, then, sets up the ‘cottage on wheels’ as a homely part of the English landscape. This serves as potential evidence for Sarah HoughtonWalker’s assertion that ‘in the years after 1780 gypsies undergo a transition

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Travelling Domesticity from being unknown strangers into a familiar other’ but for one thing: Hunt doesn’t mention the people living inside the waggon at all.11 He encounters the vehicle, so often fetishised in art and literature, but not its apparently disharmonious inhabitants. In so doing, he engages in what Ahmed calls stranger fetishism, ‘the transformation of objects into figures’, the cottage on wheels displacing any engagement with Gypsy life, cutting off those figures ‘from the social and material relations which determine their existence’.12 Hunt sets up a complicated relationship between home and travel; he sees home, a home to which one can return, somehow unchanged yet also improved, as a condition for enjoyable travel. One must move away – from England, in Hunt’s Anglobiocentric vision – to appreciate home, but there must be a defined and owned point from which to move. That is the domesticity, the self, that one takes away for improvement – but it also has to stay ‘at home’ to come back to. In seeking an understanding of home, of the homeland, Hunt asks it to do impossible things. And then what of the cottage on wheels? This is a figure of travelling domesticity that Hunt apparently envies, a symbol of the kind of home/travel relationship he envisages, but given neither travellers nor a return point. This is not quite the same as Jacob Thomasius’s deliberately paradoxical assertion in the seventeenth century that Gypsies ‘are at home everywhere and nowhere in Europe’ because there is no suggestion in Thomasius’s epigram of leaving and returning, or of cleaving the home from itself.13 Nonetheless, it is clear that ‘travelling domesticity’ is a complicated condition. These contortions do not, if one returns to Ahmed’s reading of encounters with the stranger, contradict Hunt’s subject position, however. Hunt’s consumption of the waggon as a signifier of travelling domesticity does not make him a Gypsy, even though it metonymically makes him a traveller like the ones he erases from the scene of Gipsy June: ‘proximity allows rather than disallows the (ontological) distinction between the one who becomes (the consumer), and the one who merely is (the stranger)’.14 Ahmed makes clear that this proximal relationship puts the stranger ‘beyond’ what is being consumed: Hunt has tipped the Gypsy out of the waggon so that he may inhabit it, just as almost every fairy-light-decked vardo on Pinterest or Instagram, and every glamping travel brochure (gorgeous as they look), has been emptied of Romani experience.15 Hunt and the Gypsies do not share the same ‘bodily and social space’: this is an

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The Gypsy Woman appropriation. It is perhaps not emphasised enough, in a cultural context that discusses cultural appropriation regularly, that it is not a direct result of kleptomaniac postmodernity nor a globalisation that exploits the imbalance between producer and consumer: these are the enablers rather than the initiators of white people appropriating Gypsy culture. This is not at all to suggest that the ways in which home and movement away from it are not historically specific, but to point to the ways in which encounters with the Gypsy woman are informed by those historical and contemporary understandings of home and mobility, whether in the nineteenth-century forge of nationhood or in a context where (to almostquote several hundred Pinterest pins) one should deploy white privilege, wealth and a passport that opens the right doors at border control to live by the rising sun, travel the world barefoot and yearn to be where one is not. To return to the century in which Hunt wrote his autobiography, Josephine McDonagh has written about the ways in which ‘settlement’ is understood, and how those understandings relate to its opposite: the state of being unsettled. McDonagh pays attention to ‘the intense interest in the relationship between land and belonging, both legal and in regard to feeling’. To be settled is to be. . . settled. It implies certainty as well as habitation. The 1850s, McDonagh notes, were ‘a period during which the geography of Britain was under considerable pressure, as the gradual realignment of country and city interests and the formation of the bureaucratic state brought about new conceptualisations of national space and revised modes of belonging’. Labour mobility was actively encouraged, and this was at odds not only with the old laws of settlement through which poor relief was administered, but with a sense of where people belonged. ‘Place, identity and belonging had been violently dissevered in the changing conditions of mid-nineteenth-century England.’ McDonagh quotes an 1851 report on the laws of settlement, which argues that the nation must replace the parish as the ‘modern geographical unit’.16 The troubling question from which these laws and policies hang is: where do people belong, and how do we know? It is from the exclusionary answers to this question that Ahmed’s focus on encounters with the unsettled, non-belonging stranger emerges. In addressing the Philosophical and Literary Society of Leeds in 1860, however, there was one idea for which the Right Reverend R. Bickersteth, Lord Bishop of Ripon, assumed no proof was needed: ‘that there is not a

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Travelling Domesticity nation on the face of the earth where a loftier spirit of patriotism lives and breathes than in our own’. Such exceptional patriotic feeling, he asserted, was an imperative for taking action against evils ‘tending to impair the national vigour [or] cast a stain on our character as a wise and a Christian nation’. The evils of which he spoke were the conditions in which the poorer classes lived and which, he used various sources to prove, affected their health and moral welfare. Understanding ‘the mutual interdependence of all sections of the body politic’ was justification enough for attempting to improve the conditions in which neglected parts of the community lived. For Bickersteth, this meant providing something that could be called ‘home’, and ‘what a thousand hallowing associations belong to that one word’.17 The same imperative, from a number of denominational perspectives, is what directed many of the nineteenthcentury (and later) texts critical of Gypsy mobility. What begins to emerge from looking at sociological-philanthropic works like Bickersteth’s, and literary-autobiographical ones like Hunt’s, is that nineteenth-century conceptions of home were tied to nationhood, and thus the ‘inherent’ Gypsy ‘desire’ to travel complicated and undermined that sense of national cohesiveness. Discourses of Christianity and conversion, like that of the Reverend Bickersteth, were not the only ones driving investigation into the lives and habits of Britain’s Gypsies and other internal migrants. In a 2012 article, ‘The Victorian Archive and Its Secret’, which considers, as McDonagh also does, Bleak House (a novel with a troubled idea of home in its title and at its heart), Nancy Armstrong comments on the way in which new technologies and theories of taxonomic representation, such as Francis Galton’s composite pictures, accompanied the rise of a new bureaucracy, one which ‘fueled a fantasy that people and things could be managed by producing and managing information about them’, akin to a kind of ‘taming’ described by Ian Hacking.18 Fully understanding who belongs where, who was known and who was a stranger, was a Victorian fantasy. From the distribution of poor relief to sanitary inspections, from the census to education legislation, from enclosure acts to vagrancy and pedlar regulation, the information produced by the new bureaucracy connected ‘who’ with ‘where’; it grappled with knowing those who travelled, something which turns physical distance between communities into ideological distance, as elaborated by David Mayall in Gypsy-travellers in

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The Gypsy Woman Nineteenth-century Society (1988). As Mayall notes, ‘itinerant groups performed important functions’ before and after the development of an efficient communications and trade network.19 As well as goods, travellers brought news and contact with other places. The nineteenth-century texts under analysis here are designed to perform that very role. Digitised, those texts enable encounters in the twenty-first century with the nineteenth: time travellers. Mayall suggests that economic shifts wrought changes in attitudes to travellers of various kinds. For Eric Hobsbawm, writing in the 1950s, ‘the story of nineteenth-century labour is one of movement and migration’. He writes of a time in which workmen travelling for the purpose of getting employment were commonly known as tramps, a term that powerfully communicated the hard business of mobility. Early unions, Hobsbawm notes, were interested in securing financially secure mobility, a tramping system. ‘That they should wander at all was taken for granted’.20 Outlining the custom of tramping, Hobsbawm describes how the nineteenth-century labour market demanded national, as opposed to regional, mobility. Working out who was ‘on the tramp’ and who was simply a ‘vagabond’ was an anxious business. Adam Hansen considers the ‘vagabond’ in relation to representation, seeing that ‘discourses on itinerancy, class, criminality, race, and morality interrelated to construct the ‘‘vagabond savage’’’.21 Many of the terms associated with an undesirable mobility ‘emphasised their polar opposition to sedentary, decent, and civilised society’. This is seen regularly in nineteenth-century descriptions of travelling Gypsies, and in the focus on dirt and mess in depictions of Gypsy caravan sites in the twenty-first century. For instance, a Daily Mail article from 2014 derides a council’s decision to provide appropriate accommodation for a group of Gypsies near Bath, adding ‘the site is currently a muddy field with litter piled high’. Photo captions counterpoint the site with the ‘picturesque’ and ‘idyllic’ area.22 The perceived lack of decency and civilisation observed by Hansen in the figure of the vagabond savage remains. Yet Hansen suggests another angle on the anxious formation of the migrant category: its instability. ‘All observers – whether appalled or compassionate – were engaged in an agonised debate about who came and moved about between these poles of deviant mobility and sedentary civility.’23 This is one explanation for why clear signifiers of a distinctively Gypsy travelling life were so enthusiastically deployed in representation: they marked out the Gypsy

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Travelling Domesticity traveller from other travellers and offered certainty about who was who. Nineteenth-century Britain demanded mobility for economic reasons, and yet encounters with mobile subjects were unsettling because one could not be sure if they were the bad travellers or good travellers. The Gypsy traveller is in some ways ‘deviantly mobile’, but in other ways taxonomically reassuring because her movement can be ascribed to race. Similar anxieties infuse the pro-Brexit, anti-Gypsy tabloid stories discussed in Chapter 3: open European borders enable workers to come to Britain – German engineers, Dutch doctors, Swedish designers – but there are concerns about the wrong kind of immigrants, the deviously mobile, entering the country. Eastern European Roma certainly fit that latter category according to the Daily Mail, caught as Hansen predicts in the discourse of class, criminality and race. Dealing with the nineteenth century, Hansen quotes Darwin on civilisation in The Descent of Man (1871) to describe the idea of settled life as progress: ‘nomadic habits, whether over wide plains, or through the dense forests of the tropics, or along the shores of the sea, have in every case been highly detrimental’. Henry Mayhew had already asserted ‘two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers and the settlers [. . .] The nomadic or vagrant class have all an universal type, whether they be the Bushmen of Africa or the ‘‘tramps’’ of our own country.’24 ‘Nomad’ is too generalised a term for the kind of mobility encountered in this and other chapters in The Gypsy Woman. However, many of the literary and popular texts referred to in this work attempt the generalisations Hansen describes, like those of Darwin and Mayhew, making comparisons across time and space to, for instance, Bedouins, ‘Red Indians’ and Biblical tribes. Much of the scholarly literature about mobility and its control in the nineteenth century, Hansen’s included, relates to vagrancy. While individual travelling Romani people may have moved in or out of the category of ‘vagrant’ at one time or another, these were not the ‘wandering bands of ‘‘depredators’’’ troubling Edwin Chadwick’s report ‘as to the Best Means of Establishing an Efficient Constabulary Force in the Counties of England and Wales’ whose policing was necessary to produce a ‘safe, and efficient nation’ – connecting nation, home and settlement once more.25 This report, to which Patrick Brantlinger and Donald Ulin draw attention, separates vagrants into two classes: ‘habitual depradators, house-breakers, horse-stealers, and common thieves; secondly, of vagrants, properly so

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The Gypsy Woman called, who seek alms as mendicants’. The testimony of a twenty-one-yearold inmate of Salford gaol in the report explains how his hawker’s basket ‘was the excuse for travelling’: his real purpose was to sell stolen goods and to visit fairs for thievery and trickery. ‘Gipsies’, he told the Commissioners, though, ‘are the worst of thieves’, no doubt confirming their own prejudices and another set of erroneous assumptions that surround us today. A Mr J. Perry, witness at a police office in London, believed ‘vagrancy to be the first step towards the committal of felony’.26 ‘Throughout Victorian discourse’, Brantlinger and Ulin tell us, ‘vagrancy and thievery are antitheses to what are nowadays called ‘‘family values’’.’27 Not everyone on the move was a vagrant, nor were they Gypsies, but these testimonies confirm the suspicion that mobility amongst the lower classes was always potentially an excuse for misdemeanour. For the Gypsy woman encountered in nineteenth-century texts, her travel was to be expected, but it was also suspected to be a cover for criminality. For instance, in Emma Leslie’s children’s story A Gypsy Against Her Will [1889], Lizzie is a fickle adolescent, dissatisfied with her life in service. She is kidnapped by Gypsies when they tempt her with riches and an easy life; after winning Lizzie’s confidence, Mrs Stanley smilingly dupes ‘the silly girl’ with promises of freedom and wealth.28 She is abducted to replace the mortally sick Tottie in guiding paying members of the public around a macabre waxwork exhibition at the fair. As with so many other Gypsy kidnap stories, the kidnap is possible because Mrs Stanley can roll right out of the area with Lizzie overnight. Who knows what might be hiding in those ‘cottages on wheels’? In historically contextualising ‘an era of social legislation and of systematic efforts to improve the condition of the poorer classes hitherto unparalleled’ in the 1880s, C. J. Ribton-Turner quoted the laws of seventhcentury Kent, which held that any host entertaining a stranger ‘did so at the risk of incurring responsibility for any offence he might subsequently commit’. The message then (and by its inclusion in Ribton-Turner’s text, once more in the nineteenth century and informing encounters with migrant strangers ever since) seemed to be ‘welcome the travelling stranger at your peril’. The author goes on to conflate, as many others do, migrancy and vagrancy in discussing the mobility of labourers who wandered the country in search of the best market for their highly desirable labour following the Black Death. ‘Their idle habits’, he asserts, ‘naturally gave

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Travelling Domesticity birth to other disorders’. Ribton-Turner points to a 1388 law as the origin of his contemporary poor laws. It states that servants travelling from one district to another had to carry letters of testimonial. ‘If found wandering without such letters they are ordered to be put in the stocks and kept till they find surety to return to the service or place from whence they came’.29 If ‘who’ and ‘where’ could not be textually bound in the form of a letter, the travelling individual would be literally locked in place. Travel has long been seen as threatening, even in circumstances where economic forces demand it. But when it comes to Gypsy mobility, it is also compelling, as a series in the Illustrated London News shows. The Illustrated London News of November 1879 featured an illustration ‘from a sketch taken by one of [its] Artists in the neighbourhood of Latimer-road, Notting-hill’, identified by his signature as W. H. Overend, and accompanying the article ‘Gipsy Life Round London’. The article consists mainly of extracts from a paper given by the social campaigner George Smith of Coalville, who was determined to ‘apply the principles of the Canal-Boats Act of 1877 to all movable habitations’, ensuring that all tents, caravans and vans be registered and inspected, brought under the purview of the bureaucracy mentioned above.30 Smith was, therefore, in his reforming zeal, prone to show the Gypsies in as bad a light as possible. He had, as David Mayall explains, ‘no time for the romantic and poetic images of innocent, rural nomads communing with Nature’.31 Smith described the people as ‘moving about the country outside the educational laws and the pale of civilisation’, conforming to the discourses which exploited Darwin’s vision of migrancy. ‘Like locusts’, Smith asserted, ‘they leave a blight behind them wherever they have been’, a blight enthusiastically detailed by the Daily Mail and other tabloids today. He described how ‘men, women, grown-up sons and daughters lie huddled together in such a state as would shock the modesty of South African savages’. The natives of Africa were, for Smith, the limit case of savagery but the readers of the Illustrated London News should be shocked that such barbarism exists so close to home. ‘In many instances’, he believed, ‘they live like pigs and die like dogs’.32 The illustration shows Smith, bespectacled and carrying an umbrella, handing something out of a paper bag to four Gypsy children – confirmation, perhaps, of David Mayall’s assertion that Smith ‘thought that the Gypsies could be persuaded to his side by the offer of sweets and

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The Gypsy Woman tobacco’.33 A woman, presumably their mother, hangs out washing on a line, something that, the accompanying text tells the reader, ‘they do not indulge in too often’. The image does not, of course, tell the reader how frequently clothes and sheets are washed but Smith’s testimony is designed to fill in this detail. As a travelling Gypsy woman, the text attempts to undermine her ability to conform to appropriately clean domesticity – even as she can be seen undertaking laundry. Of the blight the group will leave behind when they move on there is little evidence but, again, Smith’s predictions are apparently proof enough. Smith’s agenda (and thus the reason for his emotive denigration of Gypsy life) is made explicit by the end of the article. Nevertheless, he is introduced in the article’s first paragraph as a ‘benevolent promoter of social reforms’. His benevolence is reinforced by his activity in the picture. The text introduces the engraving, which in turn introduces Smith in the campaigning field, bolstering the authority of his words quoted in the article. Despite the vehemence of Smith’s disgust at the way of life he wishes to change, an encounter with caravans, barefoot children and dark-haired maidens must still hold some appeal for the newspaper’s readers, at least in this mediated form, for the piece concludes with an assurance that ‘some further Illustrations of the life of the Gipsies in England, from Sketches by our own Artist, will appear in this Journal’. The reader is encouraged to desire that which is repellent and gaze upon that which is unsightly. Readers had only to wait until the following week for the next instalment of ‘Gipsy Life near London’. This short article refers the reader back to the previous week’s text to learn more about the ‘wild and squalid habits of life’ of the Gypsies.34 It goes on to quote another note from Smith about Gypsies camping on Mitcham Common. In it, he describes the effect of seeing a woman who has just given birth lying on ‘a layer of straw upon the damp ground’. In the previous week’s article he criticised servant girls and farmers for giving eggs, bacon, milk and potatoes to Gypsies camped in the lanes because it merely encourages their lifestyle. Despite this, he admits, ‘such was the wretched and miserable condition they were in that I could not do otherwise than help the poor woman, and gave her a little money’; he compulsively contravenes his own ‘cruel to be kind’ dictum. Behind this textual encounter is a Gypsy woman’s immediately postpartum encounter with George Smith; whatever the circumstances of her life and labour, one cannot imagine that she was pleased to see him.

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Travelling Domesticity There are few situations in which an unqualified, unrelated and judgemental male would be a welcome visitor to a new mother, no matter how much of a philanthropic celebrity he might have been. He chooses to represent her in a position of degradation: wretched, miserable. Now available online are photographs of Gypsies on Mitcham Common, taken by local businessman and amateur photographer Tom Francis in 1881 and later digitised by a Heritage Lottery-Funded local history project. One of the images in this collection, of Galician Gypsies on the common, is regularly repinned on Pinterest without attribution. It is noteworthy that it is these more exotic Gypsies who inspire twenty-firstcentury interest, rather than the Gypsy women born and bred around London. In at least three of the Mitcham Common photographs, Gypsy women are shown amongst family groups outside bender tents (other locations such as Hubert Road, Wimbledon, show more vans than tents); many of the women wear smart dresses, holding babies and smoking pipes, with washing drying on bushes nearby.35 I include this description of a comparison image for two reasons. The first is to point to the fact that representations are a choice: Smith had many more encounters than the one he describes for the Illustrated London News. He (and the editor) selected the one that would be sensational and salacious. The second is as a reminder that our textual encounter with Smith’s Gypsy woman is not entirely reliant on the mutually informing text and image in one newspaper, but can be complicated today by alternative visions of Gypsy women in that century on Mitcham Common. The Illustrated London News follows its damning reports of Gypsy van life with illustrations that portray a simple, ragged way of living, but not one that would, on its own, incite the fury that similar sights seem to spark in the Coalville reformer. The engravings, as the text readily admits, are not designed to accompany Smith’s words. They are taken from sketches by a London artist and, unlike the descriptions and engravings of painted artworks of the day that the newspaper favoured, are not supposed to be reproductions of the same content as the text. They are, however, expected to work in harmony: mothers cradling children, for example, confirm that infants are, indeed, born on the hard ground under a torn tent. The reader is asked to find tent life so awful that it must be sanitised, if not eradicated. At the same time he or she must absorb all the picturesque details of the cauldron hung on a prop over a fire and men whittling pegs. To look away

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The Gypsy Woman in disgust, one has to have been looking closely in the first place. The Illustrated London News demands a Gypsy encounter of its readers. The series continued the following week, this time illustrating the interior of a van. The text introduces the sketch as one of ‘the singular habits and rather deplorable condition of these vagrant people, who hang about, as the parasites of civilisation, close on the suburban outskirts of our wealthy metropolis’, describing their Notting Hill habitation as uglier even than the Hackney Marshes.36 The only clue in the illustration to the location of the scene is the shadow of chimney pots through the van’s cracked window. The text, though, in the manner of George Smith, describes the camp as ‘squatting within an hour’s walk of the Royal palaces and of the luxurious town mansions of our nobility and opulent classes’, as if the squalor of the Gypsies might somehow pollute or encroach on the cleanliness and morality of Bayswater. Such complaints are strongly reminiscent, once more, of today’s Daily Mail, a paper that, according to Catherine Hughes, since its nineteenth-century beginnings caught an aggressively patriotic mood but did not, in that century, use the visual image to the effect that the Illustrated London News managed.37 Having made the Gypsies out to be a threat to all that middle-class London holds dear, the 1879 Illustrated London News article goes on to suggest that rather than civilising savages in Africa, the people of Britain might turn their attention rather closer to home. A similar theme, frequently remarked upon by critics, is taken up by Charles Dickens in a chapter of Bleak House (1853) entitled ‘Telescopic Philanthropy’, and elaborated through the character of Mrs Jellyby, who neglects her own children in favour of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha.38 Dickens’s critique is sharpened in this novel that is, as noted above, centred on the responsibilities, ties and deficiencies of ‘home’. The beneficiaries of a more microscopic philanthropy are not, in the first instance, to be the Gypsies themselves, but rather the ‘respectable’ people whose lives are blighted by the presence of two or three vans ‘in full view of their bedroom or parlour windows’.39 The ambivalence of the Illustrated London News’s attitude is evident in the contradiction in lamenting the horror of having to look out of one’s parlour window to see a Gypsy caravan, only to reproduce that very sight on its pages. The curious emphasis on the bedroom, the site of middle-class sexual reproduction, is also symptomatic of a taboo desire

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Travelling Domesticity for the exotic and sexualised Gypsy other that is nonetheless encouraged by images such as, for instance, John Phillip’s earlier Gypsy Sisters of Seville. In 1855 this painting (now in Sudley House, Liverpool) was engraved and described in the Illustrated London News with the title The Spanish Gipsy Sisters. In the description, the thoughts of the Gypsy women are voiced. The painting, the reader is told, ‘is no imaginary sketch’; it is ‘a study of character, of race, of nationality’. It offers Nature and the apparent truth about the Gypsy. This ‘truth’, the meaning of which was explored in Chapter 4, must be described in writing and so could no longer be said to reside in the image alone. As with many other representations in this book, the ‘deep meaning in the [Gypsy woman’s] eye’ is emphasised, a feature of ‘a persecuted race, but of an intelligent and deeply reflective one withal’. The text has trouble containing its desire. One of the sisters has ‘a transient smile, with a smack of coquetry in her regard, as if she were recognising the flattering salutation of some passer-by’.40 The writer, then, manages to observe the fleetingness of her expression and imagines that which might have inspired it, drawing out the narrative of the image. The gaze of the viewer is acknowledged by the woman; desire is invited. The written text suggests that the Gypsy woman with a ‘swarthy complexion’ wants to be looked at, a suggestion that demands that the viewer respond to the invitation and survey the engraving closely. Looking at the engraving, however, the viewer only finds references elsewhere. The notion of coquetry is merely a mirror for the viewer: ‘she wants me to look at her’ is a reflection of one’s own desire, not necessarily that of the unknowable other. She is not made present by this representation; the meanings of the term ‘Gypsy’ are disseminated by the article rather than brought conclusively together on the page in a single encounter. The actual Gypsy sister’s absence – and the absence of the ‘original’ painting from this newspaper reproduction – is delineated by the engraving and the text, and it becomes, to adopt W. J. T. Mitchell’s term, ‘potent’.41 To think about where the text points the viewer of the engraving (to the engraving in the first instance, to a painting, to a Gypsy woman somewhere in Spain) is to account for ‘being faced by her in such a way that she ceases to be fully present’; an encounter that positions the Gypsy woman in a particular way, but cannot entirely frame her.42 The combination of reproduction technique and discourses about migrancy mean that the textual encounter with the Gypsy woman in the

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The Gypsy Woman Illustrated London News involves desire for a stranger, a woman, a meaning and a text that have all already moved on. In the 1879 series, the text proceeds to make explicit what has so far been implicit in ‘Gipsy Life near London’. It admits that ‘the interior of one of the vans, furnished as a dwelling-room, which is shown in our Artist’s Sketch, does not look very miserable’. Indeed, with its covered bunks, stove, wooden (if dilapidated) furniture and herbs hanging from the roof, it seems quite the opposite. Once again, though, Smith’s testimony supplements what the image cannot show: ‘these receptacles of vagabond humanity are often sadly overcrowded. Besides a man and his wife and their own children, the little ones stowed in bunks or cupboards, there will be several adult persons taken in as lodgers’.43 It seems as if, despite what is illustrated, another three children might clamber out from under the table at any moment. Despite appearances, Gypsy life is a squalid, overcrowded and dangerous one – if the reader is to believe the eye that reads rather than the eye that consumes the image. The bitextual encounter with the Illustrated London News is contradictory, and yet manages to communicate ideas about Gypsy women that have far outlived the century and exceeded the medium in which they were produced. The mutual supplementarity of text and image was successful in convincing the nineteenth-century middle and upper classes of the need for action, as George Smith’s pet project, the Moveable Dwellings bill, was a popular one. Proposals for this bill, designed to deal specifically with van dwellers, were put forward between 1877 and 1894. A Select Committee heard evidence on the issue (including that of Smith), but the bill was rejected because it duplicated existing powers, not because of any parliamentary discomfort at the draconian control over private space that the registering and inspecting of vans implied.44 Episodes like these bear out Roland Barthes’s assertion that it is at the level of textual control over an image, ensuring (in this case) that the reader comprehends the severe disadvantages experienced by the children in the van, that the morality and ideology of society are invested.45 These ‘receptacles of vagabond humanity’ fail, despite Hunt’s view of them as cottages on wheels, to be domestic enough. It should be remembered that such waggons were still a fairly recent innovation as the articles were being written – Tom Francis’s Mitcham Common photographs a few years later show families still living in the older form of accommodation, the bender tent. Still, the vardo has

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Travelling Domesticity neither enough space nor enough rooms and partitions for a woman to bring up her children decently. Smith’s view became widespread, as Mayall notes: ‘his legacy is evident in contemporary accounts and reports which justify persecution and harassment by recourse to Smith’s language and imagery’.46 The lasting effect of his words can only have been helped by their repetition on the pages of the Illustrated London News. In the last of the series of ‘Gipsy Life Round London’ articles, appearing early in 1880, Smith’s estimates of the number of Gypsies living around London are repeated for the fourth consecutive week. Smith’s figures are now generally believed to be inaccurate, but their anxious repetition, week after week, makes them start to sound like fact. The Gypsies are described as ‘living in the manner of Zulu Kaffirs rather than of European citizens’, Gypsies once more being used to explore what constitutes the proper European and its other.47 The aim of this comparison may well have been, again, to draw charitable impulses away from Africa and towards the poor of London, but the effect is to emphasise the stubbornly non-European identity of the British Gypsy. The middle-class readers of the newspaper had to deal with the problematic notion that another (and, as many of them saw it, inferior) culture existed at the peripheries of, and even encroached on, their own. It had to be marked as different, definitively outside their parlours and certainly outside their own bedrooms, but this difference was itself threatening. The Gypsy had to be marked out, and the readers of the Illustrated London News were supposed to be horrified by what it was that did so: their living arrangements, their family relationships and, when it came down to it, their race. This begins to sound extremely similar to the hysteria on which the television series Big Fat Gypsy Weddings trades. When its controversial billboards advertising a new series in 2012 proclaimed it to be ‘BIGGER. FATTER. GYPSIER’, this is what it alluded to: living arrangements most viewers won’t understand; family relationships most viewers will enjoy being shocked by; STRANGER. The quotation from the Illustrated London News above begins by talking about mode of life (something which can be legislated against) but shifts to the question of race within a few words. The two are, as this naturalised discursive transition demonstrates, inseparable when referring to Gypsies in the later portion of the nineteenth century, but this relationship is also implicit in representations today.

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The Gypsy Woman The bodies of Gypsy women – lying on straw having just given birth, crowded into a living waggon, hanging out their not-clean-enough washing – ‘cannot be’, Ahmed’s work suggests, ‘assimilated into a given social space’ and ‘such bodies are associated with dirt and danger’.48 There is a crossable border between these and the clean bodies of the white subject. For the Illustrated London News and George Smith of Coalville, that border lies somewhere around Bayswater. For Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, shown on Channel 4, the border is the visual cue that an advertising break has begun: the clean body of the white subject in the cars and domestic settings of advertising is understood as entirely separate from the Gypsy bodies within the programme. The viewer is expected to consume the Gypsy weddings as strange: this is an entirely different consumption to that of washing powder, internet service providers, or holidays seen in the adverts. Those Gypsy wedding dresses: you aren’t supposed to want one yourself. Once more, in the first of these articles in 1880, there are things that the text does not make explicit. The collective voice of journalists and editors blusters: ‘far be it from us to say or suspect that the gipsy stole [a] horse’, by which it implies that the reader should suspect exactly this. Rather than directly point the finger of suspicion at the Gypsy, the text suggests that the reader will find the truth of the matter for him- or herself in the illustration by saying, ‘the Sketches we now present in illustration of this subject are designed to show the squalid and savage aspect of gipsy habitations’.49 There is, of course, no way of telling whether any of the items in the accompanying pictures have been stolen, and the tents and vans do not appear squalid, but squalor is a subjective term and something such as dirt is not easily discerned in a line engraving. Clearly, this dirt is ideological, not visible. The reader is expected to see there what the text tells him or her to find, to know that the frame around the engraving marks the border between clean and dirty. More complicatedly, the reader is expected to find in the illustration what the text has apparently told him or her not to, such is the power of negative suggestion. It is tempting to say that the text and image add up to something more than the sum of their parts, but this implies that the two forms work together as two presences to represent doubly the lived experience of Victorian Gypsy life. On the contrary, the figure of the Gypsy read in the reportage pieces of the Illustrated London News is a product of the relationship between the two as they supplement

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Travelling Domesticity each other’s deficiencies while effacing these gaps. The text tells the reader that the picture shows exactly what it has been saying all along, while the picture demands that the text explain precisely what happens within its frame, and what will happen in the future beyond it. According to James Heffernan, the written description of a visual image, ekphrasis, reveals ‘a profound ambivalence toward visual art, a fusion of iconophilia and iconophobia, of veneration and anxiety’. To represent the visual image in words is, he adds, ‘to evoke its power – the power to fix, excite, amaze, entrance, disturb, or intimidate the viewer – even as language strives to keep that power under control’.50 The image of the Gypsy presented in the Illustrated London News’s reporting of ‘Gipsy Life Near London’ has the power to entrance – shown in the serialisation of the articles, guaranteeing readers for the next week – but also indicates anxiety about a strange encounter. The Gypsy camp is seen as an encroaching threat to the morals and cleanliness of the capital’s moneyed classes, but a threat that is scrutinised to a fetishistic extent. The fear that the Gypsy and the Gypsy way of life portrayed in the illustrations will appeal too much to the very people that the Illustrated London News expects to consume it is evident in the ways in which language strives to keep the image under control. In this instance, then, not only is the form disturbingly powerful, but the content is too. Iconophilia and iconophobia are exhibited in the Illustrated London News, but this formal vacillation reflects the fusion of Gypsophilia and Gypsophobia to be found on its pages. The reader is supposed to be appalled by the Gypsy, as instructed by anti-Gypsy campaigners like Smith, but cannot help looking. The alternating bitextual demands of ‘look at this’ and ‘be disgusted by this’ constitute a recurrent form of textual encounter with the Gypsy woman. Combined desire and repulsion, philia and phobia, are demanding and confusing, and the encounter is easier to understand if an object can be put in place to block the confusion of these contradictions. The caricatured glassy-eyed, stealing, dirty and sexual Gypsy woman is this object. In these articles in the Illustrated London News, language strives to keep the power of the image and of the Gypsy under control by demanding that the reader be disgusted by the way of life depicted. However, it strengthens the power of the image by alluding to things that the text finds, literally, unspeakable, but which may be read in the image by the power of suggestion. The Illustrated London News asks readers to be excited by the disturbing

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The Gypsy Woman and amazed by the intimidating and, in so doing, collude in producing the Gypsy woman as fetishised object, effacing the social conditions and relations in which the encounter takes place. There are particularly recognisable symbols for the encounter with a travelling Gypsy. The colourful vardo or waggon is one of these, and has been described in this chapter as a ‘receptacle’ for non-Gypsy desire for travel. The chapter has also considered the relationship between travel and home, and this is especially noticeable in references to ‘hearth’, which takes the form of a campfire in encounters with the travelling Gypsy. ‘Hearth’ is a very old English word, inherited from Germanic. Its literal meaning is the part of the floor where a domestic fire is made, but for almost as long as the word has been in usage it has also meant a household or settled home.51 Descriptions of Gypsy camps seem strangely incomplete if they do not mention the campfire. In Francis Hindes Groome’s In Gipsy Tents, for instance, his claims for the authenticity of the Gypsies he describes are bound to the ‘sight of the thin blue smoke, curling mysteriously among the green boughs’.52 Staffordshire artist Thomas Peploe Wood’s Gypsy Scene (1843), likely set on Cannock Chase where Wood often worked, is a very typical image of the Gypsy camp, with the smoking fire at its heart. Wood has captured the late evening sun tingeing clouds that seem almost a celestial continuation of the smoke from the fire. This evening light illuminates most fully – at least in its digitised version – a woman cradling an infant. She, with her children, is placed at the centre of the image. Penand-ink drawings of Wood’s show his interest in the female figure in particular, next to the identifying kettle prop and with the infant on her lap.53 Very similar images to Wood’s are found throughout nineteenthcentury visual art, including George Haydock Dodgson’s Gipsies – Twilight, engraved by Edmund Evans for The Illustrated London News in 1857, and Frederick Goodall’s Gypsy Encampment, engraved as ‘A Gipsy Family of Three Generations’ by George Dalziel for the Illustrated London News in 1848, with its Madonna-like Gypsy woman at the centre.54 In the original painting, she is rather less saintly, with a bared shoulder and chest, but she is nonetheless the light centre of the image; Dalziel’s censorship for wide circulation shows something of the limit of public appetite for the sexualised Gypsy woman. The engraving assumes a new digital life, a new round of circulation, in an affecting video of a spoken-word poem performance by Damian Le Bas, The Oldest Show on the Road.

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Travelling Domesticity The poem responds to the cultural violence done to groups now labelled Gypsies, who formerly spoke their own names thought by others ‘too humble to stamp in clay / Or ink onto papyrus’, replacing them with exonyms still used today. Le Bas proceeds to catalogue a small portion of the abuse visited on Gypsies up to the present: ‘every millisecond someone writes a line about us out of hate, or fear’. The poem ultimately strikes a defiant note: ‘we’re still here’.55 The poem is powerful, achieving measured anger and pride, but here I am most interested in the fact that Dalziel’s Gypsy Madonna returns to illustrate a passage of Le Bas’s poem that celebrates fairs, weddings and life on the road. There she is, surrounded by tent, fire and cauldron, now reappropriated by a modern poet, a native speaker of Romani, at the centre of travelling domesticity. Representative of the ‘they’ accused in Le Bas’s poem of framing Gypsies as outsiders, Victorian nature-writer Richard Jefferies repeats many of the gestures so far described in this book, in particular here the ‘lines of bluish smoke ascend[ing] from among the bracken of the wild open ground, where a tribe of gipsies have pitched their camp’. He details ‘two hoop-tents, or kibitkas, just large enough to creep into’ near these fires, ‘where the women are cooking the gipsy’s bouillon, that savoury stew of all things good’. He adds that the scene is ‘a bit out of the distant Orient under our Western oaks’, with Gypsies born under a tent and thus ‘a species of human wild animal’.56 The fire as the hearth of the camp, usually tended or presided over by a woman, is by no means an unequivocal aspect of the encounter with travelling domesticity. On the one hand, it is a common, human experience to centre the domestic experience around the hearth. One of the major debates in archaeological (and allied disciplines’) studies of prehistory is about the earliest habitual use of fire – in some senses these studies try to ascertain which hominin species are like us because they use fire; the hearth becomes even a determiner of who we are. For instance, research published in 2014 describes a hearth in use as early as 300,000 years ago.57 When writers use the curl of blue smoke as synecdoche for the camp and community, they do so analogously to the symbolic relationship between hearth and home. However, the fact that these fires are not built hearths also indicates a lack of civilisation: the human ‘wild animal’. On a stretch of Kentish road described in The Uncommercial Traveller, Charles Dickens refers to the ‘vagabond fires’ of Gypsies and other travellers. He ‘love[s] the

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The Gypsy Woman ashes [. . .] that have scorched [the grass]’.58 Because they are here and gone, leaving ashes but no stone, those fires do not quite constitute the homely hearth, no matter how beautiful the spot. A hearth is something that might be determined 300,000 years hence. All else is vagabond fire. A similar differentiation is made by George Eliot in The Spanish Gypsy. As Fedalma leads her tribe to a new homeland, it will be to a place where they ‘may kindle [their] first altar-fire / From settled hearths’.59 This can be read as Fedalma’s heroic quest being reduced to the domestic, or as recognition that her people’s full humanity can only be realised in a new context where they are unpersecuted and may settle. Either way, the camp fire is not enough. Meg Merrilies, though, attempts to make the laird of Ellangowan see the inhumanity of his action when her group are evicted from his land, as she equates their fires with his parlour. Leaving the grounds of Ellangowan for the last time, she cries ‘this day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths – see if the fire in your ain parlour burn the blyther for that’.60 Meandering, aimless travel is exciting and improving, suggest social media ‘gypsies’ and writers like Leigh Hunt. It hints at transgression, at alliance with an outcast race. Domesticity travels, but home is also somewhere to which one can return; without that return, migrancy is melancholic. The possibility of splitting the domestic, so that it may both move and stay in one place, bespeaks power and agency. The romantic ‘gipsy time’ in which one can move around is regularly signified by the campfire. It marks out a particular kind of outdoor, travelling encounter. Fire is to camp as hearth is to home, but not quite. Never mind the reality of Romani travel to particular places, back to a home, to a harvest, to a fair; the suggestion is that the blue smoke, poetically curling through the trees, does not add up to hearth and home. The existence of a settled home legitimates travel: the holiday, the excursion, the sojourn. The perception that the traveller has no hearth to which she can return delegitimises that movement. For Ahmed, ‘the most privileged white masculine body is at home in the spaces which themselves are privileged (his body ¼ his home ¼ the world)’. This is also a homeliness that enables the establishment of borders to determine privileged space: in the nineteenth century, and still today, this often means the nation, and who belongs in it. This chapter refers to a number of nineteenth-century writers who associated home and the nation. Conversely, the Gypsy woman is

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Travelling Domesticity determined as ‘dangerous, uncontrollable, dirty’.61 The Daily Mail headlines, the Illustrated London News descriptions, even the romantic fire-lit scenes in nineteenth-century paintings all come together to confirm that the Gypsy woman may not be at home when she travels: campfire – hearth. The implications of this are real for all those who, in the twentyfirst century, find themselves without a hearthstone to call their own: the street homeless, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the economic migrant.

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7 Closing the Encounter: Conclusion

This book was never intended to be a critical attack on all representations of Gypsy women in British and American culture. To repeat the gist of my citation of Rita Felski in the Introduction: there would be no textual encounters with the Gypsy woman if the texts themselves were all abandoned to a censorial bonfire of political correctness. Besides, the cultural landscape would be infinitely less exciting if it were not populated by Gypsy women. Some of these texts are crude, no doubt: George Smith of Coalville’s campaigning hyperbole, Ricky Gervais’s music video, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, the Daily Mail. Others are romanticised in a way that prioritises non-Gypsy experience: the writing of the Gypsy Lore Society and the paintings of Augustus John. More others are deeply equivocal. However, there are plenty of fearsome Gypsy women in this book to counterbalance the crude and exoticised representations, from George Eliot’s Fedalma and Walter Scott’s Meg Merrilies to Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Jenny Calendar. There are Medusas and Sibyls with power. I have approached these encounters ‘not simply in the present’; instead I see each one reopening past encounters, and also looking to those of the future.1 I situate myself, as reader and viewer, in the twenty-first century, looking back on representations of the past with the benefit of hindsight and the blind spots of archival absence. In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Maggie Tulliver, a very well-known literary character who desires to 188

Conclusion run away with the Gypsies, looks, as an adult, at a childhood portrait of herself. She reflects on ‘what a queer little girl [she] was . . . [She] really was like a gypsy’. She adds, ‘I daresay I am now’. She recognises a strangeness in herself, and can see why her female relatives so often compared her to other strangers that they recognised: the Gypsies. As she thinks about what this Gypsiness is supposed to mean, whether the ‘blond haired women’ of novels really will ‘carry away all the happiness’, she encounters her younger self, and all the preconceptions her community held about Gypsy women and Gypsy life.2 It is not an encounter with a real Gypsy girl, but as Chapter 4, on authenticity, elaborated, and as I have explained throughout the book, encounters with the avowedly authentic Gypsy woman, with performed and constructed Gypsiness and with figures assumed to be Gypsies inform each other; and encounters in the past, present and even future open out on to each other. Taking each representation and placing it in a historical box, determining whether it is authentic or not, tells us very little. Regarding these encounters as interrelated is much more helpful for understanding how the Gypsy woman as a stranger comes into being, marked out through particular spaces, bodies and terrains of knowledge.3 To conclude the book, and explore the types of twenty-first-century issue at stake in textual encounters with the Gypsy woman, I want to examine the texture of the encounters in an eight-part British drama series from 2014, Glue. One might anticipate this countryside-set drama as another stock crime thriller featuring Gypsies as the fall guys or the red herring. Historically, readers can find this in Sherlock Holmes stories (‘Silver Blaze’ and ‘The Speckled Band’, for instance) and Agatha Christie works (‘The Gypsy’ and Endless Night).4 However, the characters and relationships in Glue are far more complex, and as a series it explores Romani/non-Romani encounters: sexual, friendly, professional and parental. One character on which I especially want to focus is Ruth Rosen, a half-Romani woman and police officer who has had a child with the father of one of her non-Romani peers. Though the drama is an ensemble piece, Ruth’s face often fills the screen as she navigates an almost impossible social position. Our first encounter with Ruth is as part of a sequence of young people dealing with the physical consequences of the night before. She wakes, and a child cries in the background. She is: first, a young, petite woman; second, a young mother; and third, a police officer, discernible only when she puts on her uniform jacket. She recognises the

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The Gypsy Woman dead body discovered outside the village when a tractor rolls over him as Caleb ‘Cal’ Bray, a young Romani man. Her superior tells her: ‘You’re needed. Down at the Travellers’ site’, and this is the audience’s first indication that she may have a connection with the site. She explains that she has not spoken Romani in a while, but her Inspector requests that she does so now because ‘they’re refusing to speak our language’. A barrier between Gypsies and non-Gypsies is made abundantly clear. Eventually, one young woman, Marah, speaks to Ruth, telling her that she recognises her as the ‘Romani gavver’ (police).5 In an interview with the Independent, Candis Nergaard, an actor who advised on set, said ‘this is the first time I’ve ever heard the Romany [sic] language on screen with an English dialect rather than East European. That’s important for us’.6 The series made a deliberate attempt to move away from the Euro-Orientalism described in Chapter 3, which moves authentic Romani experience out of Britain, eastwards. After Cal’s older brother, Eli, is interviewed by the police, Ruth tells him ‘you’re going to have to trust us’, identifying herself as more gavver than Romani in the age-old tension between Gypsies and a repressive police force and state bureaucracy. That tension is exemplified in episode three, when truant officers visit the site on the day of Cal’s funeral.7 However, when Ruth comforts her sick daughter in episode two, she sings the English folk song The Lincolnshire Poacher, echoing Eli as he walks along the road in another scene, aurally connecting her with the Romanies.8 Hair, the perennial signifier of women’s freedom and which has had a number of mentions in this book, is also significant for Ruth. In episode one, her long and curly hair is tied back into a braid, but as she acquires more responsibility in her police role it is fuller and looser, as if she allows more of her Romani identity to show. The pull Ruth feels between the expectations of her as a police officer and as a former member of the Romani community on the site does not just dramatise identity politics but also motivates the plot: she constantly has to prove herself as worthy of her uniform, but also feels a personal desire to find out who killed Cal, meaning she takes greater risks to uncover the truth. Once police corruption and abuse are revealed, it seems that solving this case will also enable her to find out which side she wants to be on. However, her confusion about her identity also hinders her ability to solve the case: for every insight having a foot in two camps brings her, it also blinds her to

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Conclusion certain realities. Even as she appears to make a choice to be Romani, allowing Eli to escape from the police, the final episode sees her thinking like a detective once more and working out how much he knows about Cal’s time in the care system.9 She constantly renegotiates her position through eight episodes, responding to the grief, anger and disgust of others, but her last shot of the series sees her closing the door of a van on the site from the inside, placing her back with her paternal community. Ruth, then, is not marked simply as a Gypsy woman when we first encounter her. She plays a number of roles, and they intersect and pull apart at various points in the narrative, her social position a doing not a being. There is no straightforward move into or out of each community, and she is seen as an outsider by both at times – but not as a stranger. She crosses boundaries, breaks rules, answers back, assumes authority, speaks to power, makes mistakes and faces up to them. As a character, she is encountered as a woman with ‘ongoing connections, disconnections, and reconnections [with] multiple actors’.10 These are connections within the text, with Tina (whose father is also the father of her child), Eli, her mother, her daughter, her colleagues and Marah. But they are also connections and disconnections with other encounters: the stereotypes, the repetitions, the departures from expectation. Ruth is an example of a complex and imperfect character, a stranger no more. Near the beginning of this book, I quoted Griselda Pollock’s assertion that the visual field, ‘being always remade, may be rendered semantically complex and affectively vivid in the act of constant, and situated, rereadings’. I have self-consciously situated my re-readings of the visual and literary field (where it includes the Gypsy woman) in the digital twentyfirst century, not to suggest simple continuity of representation of the Gypsy woman but to render these encounters affectively vivid, taking account of who we are and what we experience when we approach the past. These Gypsy women are not inert and distant; they remain with us. In some cases this is troubling because it points to the persistence and popularity of racist imagery, but this is not the only way of encountering the past. Having witnessed the furore over Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, and the damage wrought by the programme described by Romani and Traveller parents and by teachers, I return with heightened sensitivity to the tactics deployed by Mary Squires’s eighteenth-century powerful accusers – using

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The Gypsy Woman grotesque imagery to capture the public imagination, calling on determinist ideas about Gypsy morals, ensuring that the descriptions and pictures absolutely surrounded a judgemental audience.11 The efficacy of those tactics can be seen in the fact that images from the Canning case resounded through the centuries, and, jumping back to the twenty-first century, the associations a broad public makes between Gypsies and those weddings will, I fear, be similarly pernicious. I am not suggesting a direct equivalence between two cultural phenomena divided by centuries of social change, a court case and a television show; rather, I argue that my encounters with Mary Squires are nuanced by the representations of Gypsy women that surround me today. As actors in the Canning case deployed racist ideas about Gypsies that pre-existed the ‘kidnap’, so Big Fat Gypsy Weddings (and tabloid newspapers that report on ‘Gypsy’ life in a similar vein) capitalise on centuries-held beliefs about Gypsies as exotic yet suspect, interesting outsiders. Transhistorical awareness also works in the other direction. Returning to early conceptions of race, those which informed the texts of the Canning case, is a useful strategy for understanding the experiences of twenty-firstcentury writer Jessica Reidy, who grew up as a girl expecting to be a woman whose body was not her own because of racist conceptions of female sexuality. Conversely, the dispassionate taxonomies of Linnaeus, the racist logic of Robert Knox, and the almost throwaway racisms of George Borrow and his followers become affectively vivid as they are remade in the light of Reidy’s anger, causing embarrassment and shame that a discourse structured around white male supremacy informs mainstream representations of the Gypsy woman, and the attendant social attitudes that follow. Self-consciously returning to texts of the past with a standpoint of the present enables a recognition that the same constellations of physical characteristics attributed to the Gypsy woman, such as dark and alluring eyes, dusky skin and long dark hair, are mapped onto a set of behaviours: passionate, wild and sexualised, unpredictable, flighty, dangerous. While this biological determinism is restrictive and frustrating, having a reputation as uncontrollable and ‘dangerous’ can be its own sort of power, and it is interesting to conceive of, for instance, a Meg Merrilies for the twenty-first century: tall, mannish, slightly threatening, party to hidden secrets and this time able to survive the patriarchal/imperial/legal structures that crush her in Guy Mannering. Or perhaps we might imagine

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Conclusion a popularised neo-fifteenth-century Fedalma on TV, feminist icon and leader of her people. Biographies or biopics of figures such as Keomi Gray and Esmeralda Lock, alive to the politics of race and gender, would make fascinating new encounters – perhaps similar in intent and appeal to Jane Campion’s John Keats biopic Bright Star (2014), aware of female actions, experiences and motivations in a history that has traditionally been told from the point of view of the male artistic superstar.12 The ‘raw material’ for such productions are the volumes and prints in archives that it is easy to condemn, full of stereotypes and structured by systems of knowledge that position the Gypsy woman as subordinate, as object, and as other. Ken Lee suggests, however, that we might think of these repositories as the basis for ‘salvage ethnography’, enabling ‘colonized and postcolonial subjects to actively interrogate the mechanisms of knowledge production, and thus generate alternative perspectives for themselves’.13 This must include a call, then, for more encounters shaped by Romani women themselves on their own terms, as actors, directors, producers, writers, editors, curators, artists – in every creative cultural role – to make a difference to the representation of Romani experience. This would also respond to Margareta Matache’s concern that ‘for non-Roma, we are still just ‘‘the Gypsies’’, or the ‘‘Romani Gypsies’’. But it is not only the gadje: we ourselves hold tight to this identity of ‘‘a Gypsy’’’.14 These suggestions are for self-conscious and politically aware returns to Gypsy women of the archives, yet this project comes with a significant risk because of those very mechanisms of knowledge production. As a set of discourses, Orientalisms (including Euro-Orientalism) are very good at shoring up their own immoveable discursive foundations so that imaginative texts come back again and again to the characteristics Orientalism’s early anthropologists identified. Orientalism relies on a spatial and temporal cultural translation, bringing a strange culture into ‘the language of the one who knows’ without losing the coherence of that primitive strangeness.15 Salvage ethnography projects that revisit, revision and re-present the Orientalised Gypsy woman must caution against performing a temporal cultural translation that reproduces Orientalism, and the way to avoid this is by guarding against any inflection of the primitive, the suggestion that that ‘Eastern’ culture is a version of our ‘Western’ past that the West has developed beyond. Setting up a text so that it appears to grant special access to the Gypsy stranger (as Big Fat

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The Gypsy Woman Gypsy Weddings does so explicitly, or as Ruth’s colleagues in Glue do when they expect her to be able to reveal every Gypsy secret) gives the translator all the power. A different approach would be to revisit the Orientalised Gypsy woman of the archive with the aim of drawing attention to what Ahmed calls (in harmony with Lee’s call) ‘the forms of authorisation and labour that are concealed by stranger fetishism’.16 With these textual suggestions, informed by the stereotypes and images on which historical and contemporary representations of the Gypsy woman converge, I am peering into a creative future – one I do not, in actuality, have the ability to see, of course. As Chapter 5 showed, the female Gypsy character who professes mystical knowledge of the future, or the power to control it with a curse, exceeds what can be known about her. She demands that the non-Romani relinquish authority over knowledge. Informed by reflections on the representation of Gypsy fortunes and curses, and inspired by Jelena Jovanovic’s affective description of speaking at an esteemed institution like Harvard University, I assert that nonRomani academics have a responsibility to question, examine and disrupt the forms of knowledge that have traditionally constructed Romani people as objects of study rather than as academic researchers.17 The emancipatory promise of being a stranger, knowing in ways inaccessible to the non-Romani, can only be realised when: a) Romani women have equal rights with non-Romani people in all areas of life; and b) non-Romanies resist the scholarly and artistic objectivisation of the Gypsy woman. As Alexandra Oprea has pointed out, this is not as simple as embracing feminist or anti-racist politics: ‘Because antiracist/Roma rights politics and feminist politics are both constructed based upon the experiences of the dominant members in each group (Roma men and white women), the political concerns specific to Roma women are neglected.’18 It is the politics of representation that I have explored throughout the book, and my insistence on textual encounters opening out onto others has been to emphasise that their meaning is ‘determined elsewhere’.19 These encounters are always reaching beyond themselves, travelling across time, space and context. Chapter 6 explored the relationship between travel and belonging. Taking a cue from that specific exploration, but drawing back to think more generally about the Gypsy woman as she has been presented in this book, one might ask: to whom do these images belong? If their meaning is dispersed and they are continually re-encountered and thus

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Conclusion reinterpreted, who takes responsibility for the Gypsy woman in the archive? My feeling is that white scholars and cultural consumers should contribute to accounting for, and dismantling the appeal of, the harmfully stereotypical. This is not the same as burning down the archive, editing the past, or rejecting artistic history. I suggest that one might follow Lee’s enthusiasm for ‘salvage ethnography’ with ‘salvage literary and visual cultural criticism’. Such attempts self-consciously re-encounter the historical Gypsy woman with an awareness of the salvagers’ present and of the affective qualities of literary and visual culture, a statement of politics or ideological position, a willingness to cede authority to the Romani voice, writer or artist, and with the aim of displacing the power over Gypsy women that creators such as Henry Fielding, George Borrow, Charles Godfrey Leland and Augustus John assumed they had. The salvagers thus make way for us to enjoy feminist encounters with Meg Merrilies, Fedalma, Esmeralda Lock, Keomi Gray, Fenella Stanley and Sinfi Lovell, Clementina Smith, Jenny Calendar, Ruth Rosen and all the other fictional and historical Gypsy women who might make one feel pride, admiration, love, annoyance, anger, disappointment, affinity and other affects.

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Notes

1

Timely Introductions

1. See Wim Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy: From Enlightenment to Final Solution, trans by Don Bloch (London: Frank Cass, 1997); and David Mayall, Gypsy Identities: 1500–2000: From Egipcyans and Moon-Men to the Ethnic Romany (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 2. Ethel Brooks, ‘Europe is ours: a manifesto’, European Roma Rights Centre (10 October 2017). Available at www.errc.org/blog/europe-is-ours-a-manifesto/ 194 (accessed 26 October 2017). 3. Ian Hancock, ‘The ‘‘Gypsy’’ stereotype and the sexualization of Romani women’, in Valentina Glajar and Domnica Radulescu (eds), ‘Gypsies’ in European Literature and Culture (New York and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2008), pp. 181–91. 4. Becky Taylor, Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (London: Reaktion, 2014), p. 39. 5. Ana L. T€opf and A. Rus Hoelzel, ‘A Romani mitochondrial haplotype in England 500 years before their recorded arrival in Britain’, Biology Letters i/3 (2005), pp. 280–2 (p. 281). 6. Ibid., p. 282. 7. Philip Pullman’s use of this archaic term (‘Gyptians’) in the His Dark Materials series and The Book of Dust conflates the histories and representations of canal boat people and Romani people to construct a new, imaginary and heroic group. 8. David Cressy, ‘Trouble with Gypsies in Early Modern England’, The Historical Journal lix/1 (2016), pp. 45–70 (p. 49). 9. Taylor, Another Darkness, Another Dawn, p. 49. 10. Frances Timbers, ‘The Damned Fraternitie’: Constructing Gypsy Identity in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 71.

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Notes to Pages 5 –12 11. George Crawfurd, Peerage of Scotland: Containing an Historical and Genealogical Account of the Nobility of that Kingdom (Edinburgh: n. pub., 1716), p. 238. 12. John Burke, A General and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the British Empire, 4th edn (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1832), p. 44. 13. Mayall, Gypsy Identities, p. 68. 14. Ibid., p. 56. 15. For more detail on these extracts and on the Romani diaspora more generally, see Taylor, Another Darkness, Another Dawn. 16. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 13; Donovan Schaefer, ‘The promise of affect: the politics of the event in Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness and Berlant’s Cruel Optimism’, Theory & Event xvi/2 (2013). 17. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, ‘An inventory of shimmers’, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press), pp. 1–25. 18. Simon O’Sullivan, ‘The aesthetics of affect: thinking art beyond representation’, Angelaki vi/3 (2001), pp. 125–35 (pp. 126; 130). 19. Griselda Pollock, ‘The grace of time: narrativity, sexuality and a visual encounter in the Virtual Feminist Museum’, Art History xxvi/2 (2003), pp. 174–213 (p. 174). 20. Ibid., p. 176. 21. Susu Jeffrey, Songs of the Gypsy Women (St Paul, MN: New Rivers, 1979), p. 89. 22. Evgeniya I. Ivanova and Velcho Krustev, The Roma Woman: Dimensions and Margins in her Life (Muenchen: Lincom Europa, 2013), p. 6. € 23. Ozge Burcu G€une et al., ‘Editorial: introducing the Journal of Gypsy Studies’, Journal of Gypsy Studies i/1 (2017), pp. 1–3. 24. Adrian Marsh and Elin Strand, Gypsies and the Problem of Identities: Contextual, Constructed and Contested (Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul Transactions, 2006), p. 13. 25. Toby Sonneman, ‘Dark mysterious wanderers: the migrating metaphor of the Gypsy’, Journal of Popular Culture xxxii/4 (1999), pp. 119–31 (p. 121). 26. Katrin Simhandl, ‘‘‘Western Gypsies and Travellers’’–‘‘Eastern Roma’’: the creation of political objects by the institutions of the European Union’, Nations and Nationalism 12, pp. 97–115 (p. 110). 27. Robert Fraser, ‘Mapping the mind: borders, migration and myth’, Wasafiri 39 (2003), pp. 47–54 (p. 50). 28. David Malvinni, The Gypsy Caravan: From Real Roma to Imaginary Gypsies in Western Music and Film (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 13. Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy, p. 4. 29. Brian Belton, Gypsy and Traveller Ethnicity: The Social Generation of an Ethnic Phenomenon (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 10.

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Notes to Pages 13 –17 30. Angus Bancroft, Roma and Gypsy-Travellers in Europe: Modernity, Race, Space, and Exclusion (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), p. 40. 31. Simhandl, ‘‘‘Western Gypsies and Travellers’’–‘‘Eastern Roma’’’, p. 103. 32. Ken Lee, ‘Constructing Romani strangerhood’, PhD diss (Newcastle, NSW: University of Newcastle, 2001), p. 11. 33. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013. ProQuest Ebook), pp. 145–7. 34. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 158. 35. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 144. Ahmed opens Strange Encounters with a meditation on how we think about aliens, and another alien encounter occurs to me when thinking about the process of Felski’s ongoing connections and reconnections as texts travel through time and space: the 2016 science fiction film Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve). This is not just because the idea of a Linguistics professor saving the world is appealing, but because the alien language Louise Banks comes to understand is non-linear. The fluid ink-blot circles the heptapods shoot out lead to teams of scientists drawing vectors across and within them in order to engage with their meaning. It is a useful way to think about texts in culture: blots on an inky circle that must be read across time and in relation to each other. 36. Sarah Houghton-Walker, Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 58. 37. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 145. 38. Felski, Limits of Critique, p. 11. 39. Julie Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim, ‘Pinning happiness: affect, social media, and the work of mothers’, in Elana Levine (ed), Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016), pp. 232–48 (pp. 233–7). According to Jarice Hanson, about 70–80 per cent of Pinterest users in the USA are women, but in other parts of the world ‘gender usage is far more varied’. Jarice Hanson, The Social Media Revolution: An Economic Encyclopedia of Friending, Texting, and Connecting (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2016), p. 279. 40. Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), p. 15. For a further Derridean reading of the parergonal relationship between an image and its context, focusing on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, see Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 15–147. 41. ‘Autumnal walking tours’, The Graphic, 2 December 1871. Available at http:// gdc.galegroup.com/gdc/artemis (accessed 3 July 2016). 42. ‘Scenes from the ‘‘Sorceress’’’, The Graphic, 3 March 1888. Available at http:// gdc.galegroup.com/gdc/artemis (accessed 3 July 2016).

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Notes to Pages 17 –24 43. Lee MacCormick Edwards, ‘Herkomer, Sir Hubert von (1849–1914)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, 2011). Available at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33836 (accessed 25 Aug 2016). 44. ‘Magazines’, The Graphic, 28 April 1888. Available at http://gdc.galegroup. com/gdc/artemis (accessed 3 July 2016). 45. ‘Hunting for Gypsies’, The Graphic, 13 July 1889. Available at http://gdc. galegroup.com/gdc/artemis (accessed 3 July 2016). 46. ‘The Reader’, The Graphic, 5 September 1891. Available at http://gdc. galegroup.com/gdc/artemis (accessed 3 July 2016). 47. For more on this physicality see James Mussell, Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types (London and New York: Ashgate, 2007). 48. Illustrated London News, 14 May 1842, p. 1. 49. Huddersfield Chronicle, 10 January 1857, p. 4. 50. Harry Bruce, ‘Perceptions of the internet: what people think when they search the internet for information’, Internet Research ix/3 (1999), pp. 187–99. 51. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley (eds), Media Technology and Literature in the Nineteenth-Century: Image Sound and Touch (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), p. 3. 52. Amy Von Lintel, ‘Wood engravings, the ‘‘marvellous spread of illustrated publications,’’ and the history of art’, Modernism/Modernity xix/3 (2012), pp. 515–42. 53. Ibid., pp. 516–19. 54. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media (New York: NYU Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook), pp. 1–3. 55. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 22. 56. Jennifer L. Fleissner, ‘Is feminism a historicism?’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature xxi/1 (2002), pp. 45–66 (p. 59). Available at www.jstor.org/stable/ 4149215 (accessed 4 May 2017). 57. Charles Godfrey Leland, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling (London: Unwin, 1891), p. 2. 58. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 55. 59. Pratibha Parmar, ‘Hateful contraries: media images of Asian women’, in Amelia Jones (ed), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 385. 60. Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘The image and the void’, Journal of Visual Culture xv/1 (2016), pp. 131–40 (p. 132). 61. Judith Wilson, ‘One way or another: Black Feminist Visual Theory’, in Amelia Jones (ed), The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 20. 62. Quoted in Annabel Tremlett, ‘Demotic or demonic? Race, class and gender in ‘‘Gypsy’’ reality TV’, The Sociological Review 62 (2014), pp. 316–34 (p. 317).

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Notes to Pages 24 –32 63. Anca Pusca, ‘Representing Romani Gypsies and Travelers: performing identity from early photography to reality television’, International Studies Perspectives 16 (2015), pp. 327–44 (pp. 329–30). 64. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 8. 65. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1999 [ebook, 2013]), p. 252. 66. Illustrated London News, 12 February 1848, p. 87. 67. Gregory Galligan, ‘Manet, the mirror, and the occupation of Realist painting’, The Art Bulletin lxxx/1 (1998), pp. 138–71 (p. 140). 68. Ibid., p. 150. 69. Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey-Sauron (eds), The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007), p. 5. 70. For instance, the Daily Mail, which I cite a number of times, is targeted at ‘a lower-middle and upper working-class readership, who are more often women than men’. Michael Toolan, ‘Peter Black, Christopher Stevens, class and inequality in the Daily Mail’, Discourse & Society xxvii/6 (2016), pp. 642–60. 71. Felski, Limits of Critique, p. 152. 72. Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Steedman’s book is published as part of a series titled Encounters which, the series editors explain, acknowledges the fact that ‘cultural history has become the discipline of encounters’. 73. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook), p. 2. 74. Felski, Limits of Critique, pp. 154; 16. 75. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 76. Sally Wainwright (writer and director), To Walk Invisible (Cardiff: BBC Cymru Wales, 2016); Laura Fish, Strange Music (London: Vintage, 2009). 77. Charles Martindale, ‘Reception – a new humanism? Receptivity, pedagogy, the transhistorical’, Classical Receptions Journal v/2 (2013), pp. 169–83 (pp. 172–81). 78. Eric Hayot, ‘Against periodization; or, on institutional time’, New Literary History xlii/4 (2011), pp. 739–56 (p. 753). 79. Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 153. I do not intend to revisit the extensive existing scholarship on Carmen here, but to point to the relationships between adaptations of a wildly popular story and the concept of the transhistorical. This scholarship includes Guy Bensusan, ‘Carmen and her updates: an introduction’, USDLA Journal xvi/3 (2002); Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Lou Charnon-Deutsch, The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2004).

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Notes to Pages 33 –44 80. Robert Sutcliffe, ‘Will Kirklees Council take enforcement action over Scammonden travellers’ site?’, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 6 May 2017. Available at www.examiner.co.uk/news/kirklees-council-take-enforcementaction-12992091 (accessed 6 May 2017). 81. Felski, Limits of Critique, pp. 172; 24; 65. 82. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1980), p. 42. 83. Chris Weedon, Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 12. 84. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, pp. 145–7. 85. Oprea, ‘Re-envisioning social justice from the ground up: including the experiences of Romani women’, Essex Human Rights Review i/1 (2004), pp. 29–39. 86. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 82. 87. Weedon, Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference, p. 153.

2

Race and Recognition

1. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 4. 2. The court recording reflects the non-standard spelling of ‘Gypsy’ in this period; see Mary Squires, Susannah Wells, Violent Theft . robbery, 21st February 1753, Proceedings of the Old Bailey (ref: t17530221-47). Available at www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id ¼ t17530221-47&div ¼ t17530221-47&terms ¼ elizabethjcanning#highlight (accessed 15 January 2017). 3. Lou Charnon-Deutsch, The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 4. Heinrich Grellmann, Dissertation on the Gipsies, trans by Matthew Raper (London: Elmsley, 1787), p. 14. 5. Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair (London: Folio Society, 2001), p. 22. 6. Bevis Hillier, ‘The mysterious case of Elizabeth Canning’, History Today liii/3 (2003), pp. 47–53 (p. 48). 7. G. H. Pike, ‘The mystery of Elizabeth Canning’, Golden Hours, April 1871, pp. 261–70 (p. 264). 8. KJV Genesis 10; Walter Besant, ‘Gipsies and their friends’, Temple Bar, May 1876, pp. 64–75 (p. 71). 9. Judith Moore, The Appearance of Truth: The Story of Elizabeth Canning and Eighteenth-century Narrative (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), pp. 123–4. 10. Quoted in Dana Rabin, ‘Seeing Jews and Gypsies in 1753’, Cultural and Social History vii/1 (2010), pp. 35–58 (p. 36).

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Notes to Pages 44 –49 11. Ibid., p. 39. 12. Samuel Roberts, Parallel Miracles; or, the Jews and the Gypsies (London: Nisbet, 1830), p. 136. 13. Grellmann, Dissertation, pp. 110; 231. 14. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013. ProQuest Ebook), pp. 50–1. 15. Rabin, ‘Seeing Jews and Gypsies in 1753’, p. 36. 16. Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1993), p. 116. 17. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1999 [ebook, 2013]), p. 256. 18. The Gypsy’s Triumph, for The Gentleman’s Magazine (1754), British Museum (ref: 1868,0808.3931). Available at britishmuseum.org (accessed 17 July 2017). 19. R. Cole, Portrait of Mary Squires for New Universal Magazine (1754), British Museum (ref: 1927,1126.1.26.94). Available at britishmuseum.org (accessed 17 July 2017). 20. See, for instance, James Gillray, Betty Canning revived (1791), British Museum (ref: 1851,0901.514). Available at britishmuseum.org (accessed 17 July 2017). 21. Rabin, ‘Seeing Jews and Gypsies in 1753’, p. 50. 22. [John Paget], ‘Judicial Puzzles – Elizabeth Canning’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, May 1860, pp. 581–90 (pp. 583–4). 23. Bernier, ‘A new division of the Earth, according to the different species or races of men who inhabit it (1684)’, in Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton (eds), Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 272–4. 24. Pike, ‘Mystery of Elizabeth Canning’, pp. 268–70. 25. Tracey Jensen and Jessica Ringrose, ‘Sluts that choose vs doormat Gypsies’, Feminist Media Studies xiv/3 (2014), pp. 369–87 (p. 370). 26. Pike, ‘Mystery of Elizabeth Canning’, pp. 266–70. 27. Besant, ‘Gipsies and their friends’, pp. 70–1. 28. Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 130. 29. Besant, ‘Gipsies and their friends’, pp. 66–7. 30. Henry Neville Hutchinson et al., Living Races of Mankind, Vol. 2 (London: Hutchinson, 1901), p. 456. 31. Besant, ‘Gipsies and their friends’, pp. 68–70. 32. Simon Eliot, ‘Besant, Sir Walter (1836–1901)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008). Available at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30736 (accessed 3 October 2016). 33. Besant, ‘Gipsies and their friends’, p. 71.

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Notes to Pages 49 –56 34. Regenia Gagnier, ‘Cultural philanthropy, Gypsies, and interdisciplinary scholars: dream of a common language’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 1 (2005), p. 3. Available at www.19.bbk.ac.uk (accessed 17 July 2017). 35. Cesare Lombroso, Crime: Its Causes and Remedies, trans by Henry Horton (Boston: Little, Brown, 1911), p. 39. 36. See Robert Bernasconi (ed), Race (Malden: Blackwell, 2001) and Brian Niro, Race (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 37. Niro, Race, p. 44. 38. Ibid., p. 64. 39. Grellmann, Dissertation, p. 69. 40. Donald Kenrick, Gypsies: From the Ganges to the Thames (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004), p. 8. 41. ‘But where are the sparkly dresses? Stunning pictures shed light on the fascinating world of Britain’s New Age Travellers’, Daily Mail, 15 October 2014. Available at www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2793737/but-sparklydresses-stunning-pictures-shed-light-fascinating-world-britain-s-new-agetravellers.html (accessed 23 March 2017). 42. Gates, ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference, p. 3. 43. Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, trans by Adrian Collins (London: Heinemann, 1915), p. xiv. 44. Robert Smith Surtees, Plain or Ringlets? (Bath: George Bayntun, 1926), p. 8. 45. Val Wood, The Gypsy Girl (London: Corgi, 2011). 46. Gobineau, Inequality of Human Races, pp. 35; 28. 47. Becky Taylor, Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (London: Reaktion, 2014), p. 138. 48. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, p. 156. 49. Nancy Leys Stepan, ‘Race and gender: the role of analogy in science’, in David Theo Goldberg (ed), Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 38–57 (p. 40). 50. Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 20. 51. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 90–4. 52. Jessica Reidy, ‘Esmeralda declines an interview’, Missouri Review (2015). Available at www.missourireview.com/tmrblog/2015/05/esmeraldadeclines aninterview/ (accessed 12 May 2017). 53. Young, Colonial Desire, pp. 97; 108. 54. See, for some recent examples, Diane Ponterotto, ‘Resisting the male gaze: feminist responses to the ‘‘normalization’’ of the female body in Western culture’, Journal of International Women’s Studies xvii/1 (2016), pp. 133–51, and Ana Fernandez-Caparros Turina, ‘The world grasped as picture: subjective vision and the embodiment of male gaze in Sam Shepard’s Seduced’, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English ii/2 (2014), pp. 260–74.

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Notes to Pages 56 –61 55. Tom Taylor, ‘Gypsey experiences’, Illustrated London News, 13 December 1851, pp. 715–16. 56. ‘A Gypsy wedding’, Star [Guernsey], 21 August 1890. British Library Newspapers. Available at tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/4uZGa1 (accessed 5 June 2017). 57. Jake Bowers, ‘Why Big Fat Gypsy Weddings betrays us real Romanies’, The Sun, 10 February 2011. 58. Alex Robertson and Marie Wright, Challenging Invisibility, Renegotiating Power: Romani Language as a Tool in Online Forums, RomIdent Working Papers No. 22 (Manchester: Manchester University, 2013), p. 11. 59. ‘Big Fat Gypsy Reaction: Warwickshire Travellers’ Views’, BBC Coventry & Warwickshire, 1 February 2011. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/ coventry/hi/people_and_places/newsid_9384000/9384055.stm (accessed 7 November 2017). 60. ‘Big Fat Gypsy Weddings under fire for showing eight-year-olds ‘‘pole dancing’’’, Metro, 26 January 2011. Available at http://metro.co.uk/2011/01/ 26/big-fat-gypsy-weddings-under-fire-for-showing-eight-year-olds-poledancing-633235/ (accessed 5 June 2017). 61. Annabel Tremlett, ‘Demotic or demonic? Race, class and gender in ‘‘Gypsy’’ reality TV’, The Sociological Review 62 (2014), pp. 316–34 (p. 322). 62. Osca Humphreys (director and producer), Jenny Popplewell (producer), My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (London: Firecracker Films for Channel 4, 2010). 63. Jensen and Ringrose, ‘Sluts that choose vs doormat Gypsies’, p. 370. 64. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 82; Jensen and Ringrose, ‘Sluts that choose vs doormat Gypsies’, p. 376. 65. Elsie, 38, Gypsy woman quoted by Rionach Casey, ‘‘‘Caravan wives’’ and ‘‘decent girls’’: Gypsy-Traveller women’s perceptions of gender, culture and morality in the North of England’, Culture, Health & Sexuality xvi/7 (2014), pp. 806–19. 66. Jensen and Ringrose, ‘Sluts that choose vs doormat Gypsies’, p. 378. 67. Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race Over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd edn (London: Renshaw, 1862), p. 151. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., pp. 151–9. 70. Walter Simson, A History of the Gipsies: With Specimens of the Gipsy Language, ed by James Simson (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1865), p. 341. 71. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, ed by Peter Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 23. 72. Deborah Epstein Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 10. 73. Scott, Guy Mannering, p. 35; emphasis added.

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Notes to Pages 61 –66 74. See Matthew Shum, ‘[A] dark, deceitful and disorderly race’: Thomas Pringle’s ‘Notices concerning the Scottish Gypsies’, English Academy Review xx/1 (2003). 75. Scott, Guy Mannering, p. 36. 76. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 66; original emphasis. 77. Scott, Guy Mannering, p. 14. 78. Ibid., p. 15. 79. Ibid., p. 14. 80. Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, trans by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955, repr 1961), pp. 273–4. 81. Francis Hindes Groome, In Gipsy Tents (Edinburgh: Nimmo, 1880), p. 329. 82. Francis Hindes Groome and Leslie Frank Newman, ‘Gypsies’, in M. D. Law (ed), Chambers’s Encyclopædia, new edn, Vol. 6 (London: Newnes, 1950), pp. 672–5. 83. Juliana Horatia Ewing, ‘Father Hedgehog describes Sybil Stanley’, in John Sampson (ed), The Wind on the Heath: A Gypsy Anthology (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), p. 126. 84. Ken Lee, ‘Constructing Romani strangerhood’, PhD diss (Newcastle, NSW: University of Newcastle, 2001), p. 130. For a full assessment of responses to Borrow and of his linguistic accuracy, see Ian Hancock, ‘George Borrow’s Romani’, in Danger! Educated Gypsy (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010), pp. 160–76. 85. Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, pp. 71–2. 86. George Saintsbury, ‘George Saintsbury on Borrow’, in Humphrey S. Milford (ed), Borrow Selections (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), pp. 26–52 (p. 27). 87. Ian Duncan, ‘Wild England: George Borrow’s nomadology’, Victorian Studies xli/3 (1998), pp. 381–403 (p. 393). 88. George Borrow, The Romany Rye (London: Dent, 1961), pp. 246–7. 89. Ibid., pp. 34–5. 90. Illustrated London News, 19 July 1884, p. 68. 91. Illustrated London News, ‘preface’ to Volume 1, pp. iii–iv. 92. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 29. 93. Illustrated London News, ‘preface’ to Volume 1, pp. iii– iv. 94. Illustrated London News, 10 March 1888, p. 254. 95. George Eliot, ‘The modern hep! hep! hep!’, in Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed by Nancy Henry (London: William Pickering, 1994), pp. 143–87. 96. See Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Nations and novels: Disraeli, George Eliot, and Orientalism’, Victorian Studies 35 (1992), pp. 255–75 (p. 270). 97. George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy (London: Virtue [n.d.]), p. 150. 98. Ibid., p. 139. 99. Ibid., pp. 142–3.

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Notes to Pages 66 –74 100. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed by A. S. Byatt (London and New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 164. 101. Alicia Carroll, Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), p. 45. 102. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, pp. 166; 61. 103. Ibid., p. 125. 104. Ibid., p. 172. 105. Eliot, Spanish Gypsy, p. 250. 106. Ibid., pp. 40–1. 107. Carroll, Dark Smiles, pp. 152–3; n. 28. 108. Eliot, Spanish Gypsy, pp. 43; 246; 310; 83; 153; 331. 109. George John Whyte-Melville, Black But Comely or, The Adventures of Jane Lee, Vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1879), p. 6. 110. Cited in Young, Colonial Desire, p. 104. 111. Knox, Races of Mankind, p.151. 112. Eliot, Spanish Gypsy, pp. 64; 71; 65. 113. Eliot, Spanish Gypsy, p. 65; Mill on the Floss, pp. 216; 161. 114. Eliot, Spanish Gypsy, p. 90. 115. Catherine Maxwell, Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 166; Theodore Watts-Dunton, Aylwin (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1899), p. 35. 116. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, pp. 620–1. 117. Rupert Croft-Cooke, ‘Foreword’, in Dora Yates (ed), A Book of Gypsy Folktales (London: Phoenix House, 1948), pp. 1–15. 118. bell hooks, ‘Eating the Other: desire and resistance’, in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), pp. 21–39 (p. 21). 119. Croft-Cooke, ‘Foreword’, A Book of Gypsy Folk-tales, pp. 1–15. 120. Ricky Gervais (writer and performer), Lady Gypsy (2016). Available at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQD3EjukimI (accessed 7 January 2017). 121. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 72.

3

Orientalisms and Inheritance 1. Charles Godfrey Leland, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling (London: Unwin, 1891), p. 100. 2. Tom Taylor, ‘Gypsey experiences’, Illustrated London News, 13 December 1851, pp. 715–16. 3. Horace Smith, ‘Arabs of Europe’, in John Sampson (ed), The Wind on the Heath: A Gypsy Anthology (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), pp. 15–16. 4. Paola Pugliatti, ‘A lost lore: the activity of Gypsies as performers on the stage of Elizabethan-Jacobean street theatre’, in Paula Pugliatti and Alessandro

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Notes to Pages 74 –80

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Serpieri (eds), English Renaissance Scenes: From Canon to Margins (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 259–310 (p. 260). Timothy Neat, The Summer Walkers: Travelling People and Pearl-Fishers in the Highlands of Scotland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2002), p. vii; emphasis added. Ibid., p. 221. Deborah Epstein Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 2–3. Ken Lee, ‘Belated travelling theory, contemporary wild praxis: A Romani perspective on the practical politics of the open end’, in Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt (eds), The Role of the Romanies: Images and Counter-Images of ‘Gypsies’/Romanies in European Cultures (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), pp. 31–50 (p. 32). Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013), p. 8. Ken Lee, ‘Orientalism and Gypsylorism’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice xliv/2 (2000), pp. 129–56. For criticism of Said, see Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006). Ziad Elmarsafy and Anna Bernard, ‘Orientalism: legacies of a performance’, in Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard and David Attwell (eds), Debating Orientalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 1–17 (p. 1). Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 203. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 206. Christian Schmitt-Kilb, ‘Gypsies and their representation: Louise Doughty’s Stone Cradle and David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green’, in Barbara Korte, Eva U. Pirker and Sissy Helff (eds), Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 293–308 (p. 296, n. 6). Becky Taylor, Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (London: Reaktion, 2014), p. 20. Donald Kenrick, Gypsies: From the Ganges to the Thames (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004), p. 4. Taylor, Another Darkness, Another Dawn, p. 20. Heinrich Grellmann, Dissertation on the Gipsies, trans by Matthew Raper (London: Elmsley, 1787), pp. 163–70. David Mayall, Gypsy Identities: 1500–2000: From Egipcyans and Moon-Men to the Ethnic Romany (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 122. Francis Hindes Groome, ‘Persian and Syrian Gypsies’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society ii/1 (1890), pp. 21–7. Paul Bataillard, ‘Beginning of the immigration of the Gypsies into Western Europe in the fifteenth century’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society ii/1 (1890), pp. 27–53 (p. 28). Sarah Houghton-Walker, Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 23–5.

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Notes to Pages 80 –85 25. Ibid., p. 44. 26. Adrian Marsh, ‘‘‘. . .the strumming of their silken bows’’: the Firdawsī legend of Bahram Gur & narratives of origin in Romani histories’, in Adrian Marsh and Elin Strand (eds), Gypsies and the Problem of Identities: Contextual, Constructed and Contested (Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul Transactions, 2006), pp. 39–55 (pp. 47; 54–5). Angus Fraser has also written about this Persian connection in The Gypsies, Peoples of Europe Series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 27. William Dalrymple, ‘The East India Company: the original corporate raiders’, Guardian, 4 March 2015. 28. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 362. 29. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, ed by Peter Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 123. 30. Peter Hawkins, ‘Cybele’, in A. C. Hamilton (ed), The Spenser Encyclopedia (London: Routledge; Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2006). 31. Alyson Bardsley, ‘In and around the borders of the nation in Scott’s Guy Mannering’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts xxiv/4 (2002), pp. 397–415 (p. 400). 32. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. 221. 33. Ibid., p. 190; Peter Garside, ‘Picturesque figure and landscape: Meg Merrilies and the Gypsies’, in Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (eds), The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 145–74 (pp. 163–4). 34. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. 222. 35. Peter Garside, ‘Meg Merrilies and India’, in J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt (eds), Scott in Carnival: Selected Papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference, Edinburgh 1991 (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1993), pp. 154–71 (p. 166); Scott, Guy Mannering, pp. 230; 215. 36. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. 188. 37. A Raj-era postcard in the collection of Steven Patterson depicts and also describes an ayah: ‘The term ayah may be applied both to nannies for children and ladies maids. The best maids hail generally from the Madras Presidency . . . being more up to date and amenable to European customs. They frequently become greatly attached to the European children in their charge, the inevitable parting eventually causing great distress’. Patterson, ‘Postcards from the Raj’, Patterns of Prejudice xl/2 (2006), pp. 142–58 (n. 44). 38. Scott, Guy Mannering, p. 58; original emphasis. 39. Sigmund Freud, ‘The ‘‘Uncanny’’’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans by James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955–74), Vol. 17: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1955, repr 1991), pp. 217–52 (pp. 220; 225). 40. Walter Scott, Quentin Durward, ed by J. H. Alexander and G. A. M. Wood (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p. 73.

208

Notes to Pages 86 –91 41. ‘Biographical memoir of Mrs. Egerton’, The Theatrical Inquisitor 10 (March 1817). 42. George Cruikshank, Mrs Egerton as Meg Merrilies (1821), British Museum (ref: 1871,0429.764). Available at britishmuseum.org (accessed 17 July 2017). 43. Henry Richter, ‘The ruffian turned his first vengeance on Meg Merrilies’ [n. d.], British Museum (ref: 1977,U.968). Available at britishmuseum.org (accessed 17 July 2017). 44. Charles Robert Leslie, title page to Guy Mannering [1823], British Museum (ref: 1859,0312.89). Available at britishmuseum.org (accessed 17 July 2017). 45. Nicholas Saul, Gypsies and Orientalism in German Literature and Anthropology of the Long Nineteenth Century (London: MHRA and Maney, 2007), pp. 6–7. 46. Nicholas Saul, ‘Half a Gypsy: the case of Ezra Jennings’, in Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbut (eds), The Role of the Romanies: Images and Counter-Images of ‘‘Gypsies’’/ Romanies in European Cultures (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), pp. 119–30 (p. 119). 47. Wilkie Collins, Armadale (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 91. 48. Ibid., p. 60. 49. Walter Simson, A History of the Gipsies: With Specimens of the Gipsy Language, ed by James Simson (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1865), p. 51. 50. Ibid., p. 365. 51. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, new edn, trans and ed by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovaney-Chevallier (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 4. 52. Katie Trumpener, ‘The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘‘People without History’’ in the Narratives of the West’, in Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (eds), Identities (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 338–79; Lee, ‘Orientalism and Gypsylorism’. 53. Illustrated London News, 11 March 1843, p. 168. 54. Ibid., pp. 167–8. 55. Louise Doughty, Stone Cradle (London: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 19. 56. Ibid., pp. 319–20. 57. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 58. Display panel, Proud Gypsy Traveller exhibition, Doncaster Museum, 2016. 59. Said, Orientalism, p. 240. 60. Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘Answer to the question: what is the Postmodern?’ in The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–1985, trans by Julian Pefanis and others (London: Turnaround, 1992), pp. 9–25 (p. 14). 61. Said, Orientalism, p. 70; original emphasis. 62. Ibid., p. 240. 63. Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, pp. 126–7. 64. Said, Orientalism, p. 239. 65. Leland, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling, p. 2.

209

Notes to Pages 92 –96 66. Leland, The English Gipsies and Their Language, 4th edn (London: Kegan Paul, 1893), p. xi. 67. Ibid., p. 25. 68. Said, Orientalism, p. 67. 69. Ibid., p. 308. Said’s use of gendered terms here reflects the discipline about which he writes. 70. Leland, The Gypsies (London: Tr€ubner, 1882), p. 255. 71. Said, Orientalism, p. 308. 72. Ibid., p. 72. 73. Leland, The Gypsies, p. 11. 74. Samuel Roberts, Parallel Miracles; or, the Jews and the Gypsies (London: Nisbet, 1830), p. 31. 75. Leland, The Gypsies, p. 10. 76. Lady Eleanor Smith, ‘The unchanging lore of Romany’, Daily Mail, 27 April 1933, p. 10. Daily Mail Historical Archive, 1896–2004. Available at tinyurl. galegroup.com/tinyurl/4ub5a4 (accessed 5 June 2017). 77. In addition to previous Trumpener and Lee citations, see Ian Hancock, ‘Duty and beauty, possession and truth: the claim of lexical impoverishment as control’, in Diane Tong (ed), Gypsies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (New York and London: Garland, 1998), pp. 115–26. 78. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 58. 79. Ibid. 80. Alexandra Oprea, ‘Re-envisioning social justice from the ground up: including the experiences of Romani women’, Essex Human Rights Review, i/1 (2004), pp. 29–39, (pp. 30–4). 81. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 74. 82. Ibid., p. 8. 83. Ana Dumbara, ‘The Romanian town ‘‘built on British benefits’’: mansions bigger than the average UK semi and BMWs with British number plates parked in the drives ‘‘paid for with taxpayer cash’’’, Daily Mail, 5 April 2016. Available at www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3518736/The-Romaniantown-built-British-benefits-Mansions-bigger-average-UK-semi-BMWs-Britishnumber-plates-parked-drives-paid-taxpayer-cash.html (accessed 23 April 2017). Sue Reid, ‘It’s a good time for us to come begging in Britain: Romanian gipsy couple arrive on £38 flight and make £800 on streets of London in ONE WEEKEND to wire home to their family’, Daily Mail, 23 December 2015. Available at www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3372590/It-s-good-time-comebegging-Britain-Romanian-gipsy-pair-fly-make-hundreds-pounds-weekendhome.html (accessed 3 June 2017). 84. Nick Gutteridge, ‘Migrant Benefits Boom: Number of east Europeans claiming handouts DOUBLES in five years’, Daily Express, 13 May 2016. Available at www.express.co.uk/news/uk/670038/EU-referendum-easternEuropean-migrants-benefits-UK-Britain-Brexit-Cameron (accessed 5 June 2017).

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Notes to Pages 96 –102 85. Kate McCann, ‘Number of Eastern European migrants working in the UK surges since EU referendum’, The Telegraph, 17 November 2016. Alan Travis, ‘Surge in eastern Europeans working in UK since EU referendum’, Guardian, 16 November 2016. 86. Pamela Ballinger, ‘Whatever happened to Eastern Europe? Revisiting Europe’s eastern peripheries’, East European Politics and Societies xxxi/1 (2017), pp. 44–67. 87. Clover Stroud, ‘In the crackly light of the fire, we talked about a shared future’ in ‘The magic of living big’, Good Housekeeping, May 2017. 88. G€unter Grass, ‘Losses’, trans by Michael Hofman, Granta 42 (1992), pp. 97–108 (p. 107). 89. Jan Grill, ‘‘‘It’s building up to something and it won’t be nice when it erupts’’: The making of Roma/Gypsy migrants in post-industrial Scotland’, Focaal 62 (2012), pp. 42–54. 90. George Boswell, Comment on Adrian Marsh, ‘Gypsies, Roma, Travellers: an animated history (2013), Open Society Foundations. Available at www. opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/gypsies-roma-travellers-animatedhistory?page¼ 1 (accessed 17 July 2017). 91. Ezequiel Adamovsky, ‘Euro-Orientalism and the making of the concept of Eastern Europe in France, 1810–1880’, Journal of Modern History lxxvii/3 (2005), pp. 591–628 (p. 599). 92. This is a location that fits into contemporary fears about Greece as the entry point into Europe of Middle Eastern refugees, but was also exploited in the aftermath of Greece’s sovereign debt crisis from 2009 and subsequent bailout by the Troika. 93. Ibid., p. 611. 94. Julianna Beaudoin, ‘Exploring the contemporary relevance of ‘‘Gypsy’’ stereotypes in the Buffyverse’, Journal of Popular Culture xlviii/2 (2015), pp. 313–27 (p. 313). 95. David Greenwalt (writer) and Scott Brazil (director), ‘Angel’, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 1 (Los Angeles, CA: Mutant Enemy, 1997). 96. Ashley Gable and Thomas A. Swyden (writers) and Stephen Posey (director), ‘I, Robot. . . You, Jane’, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Los Angeles, CA: Mutant Enemy, 1997). 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. Marti Noxon (writer) and James A. Contner (director), ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2 (Los Angeles, CA: Mutant Enemy, 1998). 100. Ty King (writer) and Bruce Seth Green (director), ‘Some Assembly Required’, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2 (Los Angeles, CA: Mutant Enemy, 1998). 101. Ty King (writer) and Michael Gershman (director), ‘Passion’, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2 (Los Angeles, CA: Mutant Enemy, 1998).

211

Notes to Pages 102 –107 102. Joss Whedon (writer and director), ‘Becoming (Part 1)’, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2 (Los Angeles, CA: Mutant Enemy, 1998). 103. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (New York and London: Norton, 1997), p. 45. 104. Stoyan Tchaprazov, ‘The Slovaks and Gypsies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: vampires in human flesh’, English Literature in Transition lviii/4 (2015), pp. 523–35 (p. 526). 105. Mary Burke, ‘Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources for Bram Stoker’s Gypsies’, ANQ xviii/1 (2005), pp. 58–63 (p. 60). 106. Tchaprazov, ‘The Slovaks and Gypsies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, p. 532. 107. Burke, ‘Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Sources for Bram Stoker’s Gypsies’, p. 62, n. 1. 108. George Eliot, ‘The modern hep! hep! hep!’ in Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed by Nancy Henry (London: William Pickering, 1994), pp. 143–87 (pp. 150; 152). 109. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 36; 29. 110. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed by Graham Handley (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 210–11. 111. Ibid., pp. 424; 454 112. Ibid., p. 565. 113. Ibid., p. 640. 114. Margueritte Murphy, ‘The ethic of the gift in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda’, Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006), pp. 189–207 (p. 202). 115. George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy (London: Virtue [n.d.]), pp. 142–5. 116. Ibid., p. 114. 117. Ibid., p. 161. 118. Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, p. 109. 119. George Eliot, Spanish Gypsy, pp. 369–70. 120. Ibid., pp. 360–1. 121. Ibid., p. 147. 122. Ibid., p. 156. 123. George Eliot, George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals, ed by John Walter Cross, Vol. 3 (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1885), p. 42. 124. Eliot, Spanish Gypsy, p. 148. 125. Ibid., p. 163. 126. Ibid., p. 160. 127. Ibid., p. 162. 128. Ibid., p. 51. 129. David Fury and Elin Hampton (writers) and David Semel (director), ‘Go Fish’, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2 (Los Angeles, CA: Mutant Enemy, 1998).

212

Notes to Pages 108 –112

4

Encountering Authenticity

1. Charles Godfrey Leland, The English Gipsies and Their Language, 4th edn (London: Kegan Paul, 1893), preface p. v. Original emphasis. On the dangers of trusting nineteenth-century sources on the Romani language as ‘authentic’, see Ian Hancock, ‘The concocters: creating fake Romani culture’, in Danger! Educated Gypsy (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010), pp. 178–94. 2. Charles Godfrey Leland, E. H. Palmer and Janet Tuckey, English-Gipsy Songs (London: Tr€ubner, 1875), preface, p. v. 3. Ibid., p. vi. 4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Romany girl’, in John Sampson (ed), The Wind on the Heath: A Gypsy Anthology (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), p. 131; emphasis added. 5. Cited by Matthew Shum, ‘[A] dark, deceitful and disorderly race’: Thomas Pringle’s ‘Notices concerning the Scottish Gypsies’, English Academy Review xx/1 (2003), pp. 1–12 (p. 4). 6. ‘Costume and character’, The Cornhill Magazine xxii/71, November 1865, pp. 568–75. 7. Richard Phillips, ‘A Singular Race’ in Sampson (ed), The Wind on the Heath, pp. 23–4. 8. For social construction, see Wim Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy: From Enlightenment to Final Solution, trans by Don Bloch (London: Frank Cass, 1997), and for a comment on ‘constructing the true Romany’, see David Mayall, Gypsy Identities: 1500–2000: From Egipcyans and Moon-Men to the Ethnic Romany (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 9. Becky Taylor, Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (London: Reaktion, 2014), p. 55. 10. Sarah Houghton-Walker, Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 49. 11. Margaret Russett, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 148. 12. ‘Not real Gypsies’, Western Morning News, 9 July 2009. 13. Mayall, Gypsy Identities, pp. 135–7. 14. Phillips, ‘A Singular Race’, p. 23. 15. Theodore Watts-Dunton, Aylwin (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1899), p. 194. 16. Mary Burke, ‘Dwellers in archaic cultural time: ‘‘Gypsies’’, ‘‘Tinkers’’ and ‘‘Gaels’’ in early nineteenth-century Scottish writing’, in Neal Alexander, Shane Murphy and Anne Oakman (eds), To the Other Shore: Cross-Currents in Irish and Scottish Studies (Belfast: Queen’s University Belfast, 2004), p. 23. 17. Phillips, ‘A singular race’, p. 24. 18. See Becky Taylor, A Minority and the State: Travellers in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).

213

Notes to Pages 112 –118 19. Vincent John Cheng, Inauthentic: The Anxiety over Culture and Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 34. 20. Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), p. 7. 21. Ibid., p. 8; emphasis added. 22. Charles Godfrey Leland, Memoirs, Vol. 1 (London: Heinemann, 1893), p. 262. 23. ‘‘artificial, adj. and n.’’ OED Online (Oxford University Press), March 2017 (accessed 8 June 2017). 24. The Star, 14 September 1876. 25. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986) and Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 26. Burke, ‘Dwellers in archaic cultural time’, p. 18. 27. Deborah Epstein Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 9. 28. Bendix, In Search of Authenticity, p. 9; Lynn Voskuil, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004). 29. Voskuil, Acting Naturally, p. 22. 30. George Meredith, ‘Adventures of Harry Richmond’, Cornhill Magazine, October 1870, p. 410. 31. Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), p. 5. 32. The contrast of tiger and white lily can be seen most clearly in Charles Allston Collins’s Convent Thoughts (1851), and Rossetti may be making a visual reference to this work, particularly as Collins’s frame was inscribed ‘sicut lilium’ (a lily among thorns), also from the Song of Solomon. Rossetti had earlier made the direct connection between the Virgin Mary and the white lily in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848–9). 33. Stewart Dearing, ‘Painting the other within: Gypsies according to the Bohemian artist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, Romani Studies xx/2 (2010), p. 183. 34. KJV Song of Solomon, 7:4; J. B. Bullen, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the mirror of masculine desire’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts xxi/ 3 (1999), pp. 329–52 (p. 331). 35. KJV Song of Solomon, 2:16. 36. Christopher Wood, Victorian Painting (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), p. 170. 37. Thomas, Pictorial Victorians, p. 53. 38. Thomas Hoberg, ‘Duessa or Lilith: the two faces of Tennyson’s Vivien’, Victorian Poetry xxv/1 (1987), pp. 17–25 (p. 18). 39. Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ed by J. M. Gray (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 146–8.

214

Notes to Pages 119 –124 40. Jessica Hinings, ‘Melville, George John Whyte- (1821–1878)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). Available at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29343 (accessed 5 February 2016). 41. George John Whyte-Melville, Black But Comely or, The Adventures of Jane Lee. Vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1879), p. 5. 42. Jodie Matthews, ‘Back where they belong: Gypsies, kidnapping and assimilation in Victorian children’s literature’, Romani Studies 5, xx/2 (2010), pp. 137–59. 43. Nathalie Savaricas, ‘Greek charity awarded custody of Roma girl Maria’, Independent, 2 June 2014. Available at www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ europe/greek-charity-awarded-legal-custody-of-roma-girl-maria-9474569. html (accessed 12 August 2016). 44. Whyte-Melville, Black But Comely, Vol. 1, p. 19. 45. Ibid., p. 23. 46. Fergus Hume, Hagar of the Pawn-Shop (New York: Buckles, 1899), p. 13. 47. Ibid., pp. 15–16; emphasis added. 48. See www.instagram.com/kristin.raeesi/. Raeesi explained the benefits of Romani research methods at a Harvard conference in 2017. Culture Beyond Borders: The Roma Contribution, Harvard University, 10 April 2017. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v¼dVWwRK2Zsj8 (17 October 2017). 49. Hume, Hagar of the Pawn-Shop, pp. 21–2. 50. LeRoy Lad Panek, After Sherlock Holmes: The Evolution of British and American Detective Stories, 1891–1914 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), p. 76. 51. Alicia Carroll, Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), p. 33. 52. Leland, English Gipsies and Their Language, pp. vi–vii. 53. Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, pp. 71–2. 54. See Galia Okek, Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 55. George Borrow, Lavengro (London: Dent, 1961), p. 42. 56. Ibid., p. 42. 57. Ibid., p. 62. 58. Ibid., p. 85. 59. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013), p. 15. 60. Laura Bowder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 44. 61. Ibid., p. 21. 62. Paul Kester, Tales of the Real Gypsy (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1897), p. 7. 63. Ibid., pp. 7–8. One regularly sees this surname authentication in action today as individuals trace Romani family history online. 64. Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, ‘seventh son, daughter’. A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Available at www.

215

Notes to Pages 124 –131

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198607663.001.0001/acref9780198607663-e-934 (accessed 1 June 2017). Paul Kester, Tales of the Real Gypsy, pp. 7–8. Ibid., p. 291; emphasis added. Ibid., p. 268. ‘Gypsies set a fashion’, Daily Mail, 4 September 1899, p. 7. Daily Mail Historical Archive, 1896–2004. Available at tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/4uZPD6 (accessed 5 June 2017). The Illustrated London News, 19 July 1884, p. 68; 27 January 1855, p. 88. Mark Llewellyn, ‘What is Neo-Victorian Studies?’, Neo-Victorian Studies i/1 (2008), pp. 164–85 (p. 170). Ryan Joe, ‘Anatomy of a cover: romance novels 2015–2016’, Publishers Weekly cclxii/46 (2015), p. 22. Hubert Smith, Tent Life with English Gipsies in Norway (London: King, 1873), p. 10. Ken Lee, ‘Salvage ethnography, ambiguity, ambivalence, anamnesia and the traductions of Esmeralda Lock’, unpublished transcript of address given at Culture Beyond Borders: The Roma Contribution, Harvard University, 10 April 2017. ‘Romantic Divorce Court Case’, County Observer and Monmouthshire Central Advertiser, 11 March 1876. Jennifer Davies, Tales of the Old Gypsies (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1999). Similar images of her are available at the Shropshire History website http://search.shropshirehistory.org.uk (accessed November 2017). Fred Shaw, Esmeralda Groome, 9 September 1928. SMGC Shaw P.241. Liverpool University. Ken Lee, ‘Salvage ethnography, ambiguity, ambivalence, anamnesia and the traductions of Esmeralda Lock’. Francis Hindes Groome and Leslie Frank Newman, ‘Gypsies’, Chambers’s Encyclopædia, new edn, Vol. 6 (Newnes: London, 1950), pp. 672–5. Michael Holroyd, ‘John, Augustus Edwin (1878–1961)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006). Available at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34196 (accessed 21 February 2017). Display caption, Manchester Art Gallery. David Fraser Jenkins and Chris Stephens (eds), Gwen John and Augustus John (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), p. 47. Ibid., pp. 130; 103; 132–3. ‘Mumper’ was an often-derogatory term for nonGypsy travellers. Watts-Dunton, The Coming of Love: Rhona Boswell’s Story and Other Poems, 8th edn (London: John Lane, 1907), dedication. Arron Fellows et al. (producer and director), ‘Diamantes are forever’ (2012), Big Fat Gypsy Weddings (London: Firecracker Films for Channel 4).

216

Notes to Pages 132 –141 85. Tracey Jensen and Jessica Ringrose, ‘Sluts that choose vs doormat Gypsies’, Feminist Media Studies xxiv/3 (2014), pp. 369–87 (p. 374). 86. Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, trans by Adrian Collins (London: Heinemann, 1915), p. 25. 87. Theodore Watts-Dunton, Aylwin (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1899), p. 158. 88. Stephanie Graham Pina, ‘Exploring Rossetti’s home’, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, 20 November 2014. Available at http://preraphaelitesisterhood. com/exploring-rossettis-home/ (accessed 17 July 2017). 89. Watts-Dunton, Aylwin, p. 209. 90. According to Pina, poor Meredith did not have a happy time at Cheyne Walk as part of the circle who knew Keomi Gray. Algernon Swinburne, the poet, threw an egg at him in the course of an argument about Victor Hugo, and Rossetti flung a cup of tea in his face. See http://preraphaelitesisterhood.com/ exploring-rossettis-home/ (accessed 17 July 2017). 91. Watts-Dunton, Aylwin, pp. 353–4. 92. Ibid., p. 355. 93. Bowder, Slippery Characters, p. 57. 94. Francis Hindes Groome, In Gipsy Tents (Edinburgh: Nimmo, 1880), p. 46. 95. Leland, Memoirs, Vol. 2, p. 262. 96. Leland, ‘preface’ to English Gipsies and Their Language, p. v. 97. Leland, Memoirs, Vol. 2, p. 276. 98. Ibid., p. 278. 99. Val Wood, The Gypsy Girl (London: Corgi, 2011), p. 493. 100. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 55.

5

Fortunes and Curses 1. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, Vol. 1 (London: Murray, 1871), pp. 113; 101. 2. Val Wood, The Gypsy Girl (London: Corgi, 2011), p. 347. 3. James Campbell, ‘Meet the Hull Fair fortune-teller who says it’s not all smoke and mirrors’, Hull Daily Mail, 15 October 2016. Available at http://www.hull dailymail.co.uk/meet-the-hull-fair-fortune-teller-who-says-it-s-not-all-smokeand-mirrors/story-29803838-detail/story.html (accessed 30 October 2016). 4. See Michael Kramp, ‘The Woman, the Gypsies, and England: Harriet Smith’s national role’, College Literature xxxi/1 (2004), pp. 147–68, and Maaja Stewart, Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen’s Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1993). Jane Austen, Emma, ed by Fiona Stafford (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 333. 5. John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature, 10th edn,

217

Notes to Pages 141 –145

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

rev by Nathan Haskell Doe (Boston: Little, Brown, 1914), p. 632; Charlotte Bront€e, Jane Eyre (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 29. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013), p. 8. Robert Smith Surtees, Plain or Ringlets? (Bath: George Bayntun, 1926), p. 43. Ibid., p. 7. B. C. Smart and H. T. Crofton, The Dialect of the English Gipsies, 2nd edn (London: Asher, 1875), p. ix. ‘Henry Nelson O’Neil, A.R.A.’, Southeby’s ecatalogue [2006]. Available at www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2006/19th-century-europeanart-n08235/lot.212.html (accessed 4 May 2017). Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 9. Ibid., p. 74. Nicola Bown, ‘‘‘Will He, won’t he? Will she, won’t she?’’ Fortune-telling and female subjectivity in John Everett Millais’s the Bridesmaid’, Women: A Cultural Review xiii/1 (2002), pp. 73–83 (p. 79). ‘Minifigures: Fortune Teller (series 9)’, www.lego.com/en-us/minifigures/ characters/fortune-teller-6dd9211ed0b74c4baed48fc5ba7d2e34. The detail on this page reveals that ‘The mystical Fortune Teller has a unique gift for prophecy . . . sometimes’. Meghan Young, ‘The Steffen Schraut FW14 campaign stars a dark and edgy Kelly Mittendorf’, Trend Hunter Fashion, 17 June 2014. Available at www. trendhunter.com/trends/steffen-schraut-fw14 (accessed 1 June 2017). Tylor, Primitive Culture, p. 144. Heinrich Grellmann, Dissertation on the Gipsies, trans by Matthew Raper (London: Elmsley, 1787), p. 34. Cited in Becky Taylor, Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (London: Reaktion, 2014), p. 39. Ibid., p. 40; emphasis added. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 59. Cited in Maureen Perkins, The Reform of Time: Magic and Modernity (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2001), p. 90. Ibid., p. 41. Charles Godfrey Leland, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling (London: Unwin, 1891), p. xi; emphasis added. Ibid., p. 162. Thomas Waters, ‘‘‘They seem to have all died out’’: witches and witchcraft in Lark Rise to Candleford and the English countryside, c.1830–1930’, History Research, lxxxvii/235 (2014), pp. 134–53 (p. 136). Perkins, Reform of Time, pp. 34; 90. Sarah Houghton-Walker, Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 251. Katharine Quarmby, Romani Pilgrims: Europe’s New Moral Force (London: Newsweek Insights, 2014).

218

Notes to Pages 145 –151 30. Houghton-Walker, Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period, p. 252. 31. Perkins, The Reform of Time, p. 70. 32. Leland, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling, p. 173. 33. Martin Smith, ‘Birmingham hope curse has run course’, Telegraph, 25 December 2006. Available at www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/2352837/ Birmingham-hope-curse-has-run-course.html (accessed 15 May 2017). 34. Alex Byers, ‘Big Fat Gypsy Curse’. Sky Sports. 2011. Available at www. skysports.com/football/news/15162/6911367/big-fat-gypsy-curse (accessed 23 May 2017). 35. Mike Lockley, ‘Hex that has dogged Birmingham City FC removed by priest and upholsterer’, Birmingham Mail, 27 September 2016. 36. Tange, in her nuanced reading of images in reporting of the uprising, notes that it ‘took six weeks for reports to reach England via the slow process of ship-carried mail’. Her approach to ‘circulating images’ has been instructive for my own thinking in these chapters. See Andrea Kaston Tange, ‘Maternity betrayed: circulating images of English motherhood in India, 1857–1858’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts xxxv/2 (2013), pp. 187–215 (p. 187). 37. Cited in Jack Lohman, ‘Eastward Ho! and Home Again at the Museum in Docklands’, History Today lv/4 (2005), pp. 4–5. 38. Faisal Devji, ‘The Mutiny to come’, New Literary History, xl/2 (2009), pp. 411–30 (p. 413). 39. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, ed by Peter Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 312. 40. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, pp. 50–1. 41. Ibid., p. 1. 42. Mark Currie, ‘The novel and the moving now’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction xlii/2 (2009), pp. 318–25. 43. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, p. 23. 44. John Clare, The Early Poems of John Clare: 1804–1822, ed by Eric Robinson and David Powell, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 45. See ‘Sibyl’, Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 3rd edn, ed by M. C. Howatson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 46. ‘Gipsies’, Chambers’s Journal, 26 October 1861, p. 265. 47. George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy (London: Virtue [n.d.]), pp. 43; 246; 310; 83. 48. William Shakespeare, Othello, ed by E. A. J. Honigmann (London: Methuen, 1997), 3. 4. 58–74, p. 244. 49. Jessica Malay, Prophecy and Sibylline Imagery in the Renaissance: Shakespeare’s Sibyls (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 116; 5. 50. Ibid., p. 2. 51. Ibid., p. 16. 52. Ibid., pp. 17; 30. 53. Ibid., pp. 42–3.

219

Notes to Pages 152 –157 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89.

Ibid., pp. 46–8. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 20. Catherine Maxwell, Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 172. Theodore Watts-Dunton, Aylwin (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1899), p. 4. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., pp. 145; 171. Ibid., p. 370. Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., pp. 45–8. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed by Keith Wilson (London and New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 230. Sally Hedges (dramatist), ‘The horse fair’, in Nigel Bryant (director), Thomas Hardy – The Mayor of Casterbridge (Birmingham: BBC, 1994). Maxwell, Second Sight, p. 174. Ibid., p. 175. Watts-Dunton, Aylwin, p. 183. Maxwell, Second Sight, pp. 176–7. Watts-Dunton, Aylwin, p. 137. Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 191. Charles Godfrey Leland, Memoirs, Vol. 2 (London: Heinemann, 1893), p. 196. Watts-Dunton, Aylwin, p. 453. Ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 264. Malay, Prophecy and Sibylline Imagery in the Renaissance, p. 16. Watts-Dunton, Aylwin, p. 267. ‘The Amarna Letters’, British Museum Collection Online, 2017. Available at www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_ details.aspx?objectId¼ 318270&partId ¼1&searchText ¼ereshkigal&page ¼1 (accessed 11 February 2017). Jody Margolin Hahn (director) and Sally Lapiduss (writer), ‘Everybody was Best Friend Fighting’, Hannah Montana (USA: Disney, 2007).

220

Notes to Pages 158 –167 90. Anthony Asquith (director), The Woman in Question (United Kingdom: Javelin Films, 1950); Arthur Crabtree (director), Caravan (United Kingdom: Gainsborough Pictures, 1946). 91. Lou Charnon-Deutsch, The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), p. 2. 92. Lady Eleanor Smith, Caravan (London and New York: Hutchinson [1943]), p. 26. 93. Ibid., p. 41. 94. Ibid., pp. 99–100. 95. Ibid., p. 129. 96. Francis Durbridge (writer), ‘Breakwater House’, in Martin C. Webster (producer), Paul Temple and the Margo Mystery (London: BBC, 1961 [aired again in 2011 and 2017]). 97. Francis Durbridge, Paul Temple and the Margo Mystery (Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2011). 98. Durbridge, ‘Breakwater House’. 99. Marcus Hearn and Jonathan Rigby, Night of the Demon Viewing Notes (UK: Mediumrare Entertainment, 2010). 100. Bradley Skene, ‘Lamia’, in Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (ed), Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 101. Andrew Pulver, ‘Drag me to hell’, Guardian, 29 May 2009. 102. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 145.

6

Travelling Domesticity 1. The Irish Atheist, ‘Because I’m a Gypsy’, 11 May 2015. Available at https:// theirishatheist.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/because-im-a-gypsy/ (accessed 17 June 2016). 2. Jaume De Laiguana (director) and Shakira (artist), Gypsy (2010). Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ _3-GiVIE8gc (accessed 3 May 2017). 3. George John Whyte-Melville, Black But Comely or, The Adventures of Jane Lee. Vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1879), p. 41. 4. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013), p. 33. 5. Leigh Hunt, The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, new edn (London: Smith, Elder, 1906), pp. 367–8. 6. ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, in Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed by Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, 1965), pp. 331–44 (ll. 32–7; 224). 7. Hunt, Autobiography, pp. 367–8. Matthew Arnold, ‘Resignation’, in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, pp. 84–94 (l. 115); ‘To a Gipsy child by the seashore’, in Poems of Matthew Arnold, pp. 22–6. Deborah Epstein Nord, Gypsies

221

Notes to Pages 167 –172

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

and the British Imagination, 1807–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 16. Arnold, ‘To a Gipsy child by the sea-shore’, l. 19. Arnold, ‘To a Gipsy child by the sea-shore’, ll. 19; pp. 39–40. Annmarie Dury explores the form of the poem and its Romantic antecedents in detail in ‘‘‘To a Gipsy child by the sea-shore’’ (1849) and Matthew Arnold’s poetic questions’, in Dino Franco Felluga (ed), BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Available at www.branchcollective.org (accessed 21 May 2017). Leigh Hunt, Autobiography, pp. 367–8. Houghton-Walker, Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period, p. 44. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 5. Cited in Nicholas Saul, Gypsies and Orientalism in German Literature and Anthropology of the Long Nineteenth Century (London: MHRA and Maney, 2007), p. 7. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 118. See, for instance, ‘Owl Cabin and Romany Caravan’, Blaentrothy Cottages. Available at www.cottage-holiday-wales.co.uk/romany-caravan-wales.shtml (accessed 21 May 2017). This site encourages the reader to ‘Indulge your childhood fantasies about running away with the gypsies by staying in an original Romany wagon or ‘‘Vardo’’’. Josephine McDonagh, ‘On Settling and being unsettled: legitimacy and settlement around 1850’, in Margot Finn, Michael Lobban and Jenny Borne Taylor (eds), Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Law, Literature and History (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 48–66. Right Rev. Robert Bickersteth, The Physical Condition of the People in its bearing upon their Social and Moral Welfare, A Paper read before the Philosophical and Literary Society of Leeds, 17 January 1860. University of Huddersfield Archives, LSS/4/5. Nancy Armstrong, ‘The Victorian archive and its secret’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts xxxiv/5 (2012), pp. 379–96 (p. 380); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). David Mayall, Gypsy-travellers in Nineteenth-century Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 13. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The tramping artisan’, Economic History Review iii/3 (1951), pp. 299–320 (pp. 299–303). Adam Hansen, ‘Exhibiting vagrancy, 1851: Victorian London and the ‘‘vagabond savage’’’, in Lawrence Phillips (ed), A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 61–84 (p. 65). Rob Cooper, ‘Council plans to blow £2.5 MILLION on deluxe travellers’ site which will give caravans their own driveway, lighting and soundproofing . . .’ Daily Mail, 18 February 2014.

222

Notes to Pages 172 –180 23. Hansen, ‘Exhibiting vagrancy’, p. 66; emphasis added. 24. Ibid., pp. 66–7. 25. Patrick Brantlinger and Donald Ulin, ‘Policing nomads: discourse and social control in early Victorian England’, Cultural Critique 25 (1993), pp. 33–63. 26. First Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire as to the Best Means of Establishing an Efficient Constabulary Force in the Counties of England and Wales (London: HMSO, 1839), pp. 21–38; 56–7. 27. Brantlinger and Ulin, ‘Policing nomads’, p. 52. 28. Emma Leslie, A Gypsy Against Her Will (London: Blackie [1889]), p. 54. See my ‘Back where they belong’, Romani Studies (2010) for more examples of Gypsy kidnap stories. 29. Charles James Ribton-Turner, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and Beggars and Begging (London: Chapman and Hall, 1887), pp. 241; 5; 42–3; 59. 30. Illustrated London News, 29 November 1879, p. 503. 31. David Mayall, Gypsy Identities, p. 264. For a detailed account of George Smith and his work, see Mayall, Gypsy-travellers in Nineteenth-century Society, chapter 6. 32. Illustrated London News, 29 November 1879, p. 503. 33. Mayall, Gypsy Identities, p. 39. 34. Illustrated London News, 6 December 1879, p. 527. 35. Tom Francis, Gypsy family and their bender tent on Mitcham Common (1881). Available at http://photoarchive.merton.gov.uk/collections/people/ gypsies-travellers (accessed 15 May 2017). 36. Illustrated London News, 13 December 1879, p. 545. 37. Catherine Hughes, ‘Imperialism, illustration, and the Daily Mail, 1896–1904’, in Michael Harris and Alan Lee (eds), The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986), pp. 187–200 (pp. 188; 200). 38. Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed by Norman Page (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 82–94. The periodical Punch takes up the same theme in a cartoon also entitled ‘Telescopic philanthropy’ in 1865. The cartoon shows the figure of Britannia looking through a telescope towards a beach on which newly landed missionaries talk to black figures, while a ragged-looking child tugs at her dress. The caption reads, ‘Little London Arab. ‘‘Please ’m, ain’t we black enough to be cared for?’’’ (Punch, 4 March 1865, p. 89). 39. Illustrated London News, 13 December 1879, p. 545. 40. Illustrated London News, 27 January 1855, p. 88. 41. William J. T. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, South Atlantic Quarterly xci/3 (1992), pp. 695–719 (p. 699). 42. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 145. 43. Illustrated London News, 13 December 1879, p. 545. 44. Mayall, Gypsy Identities, p. 259. 45. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 39–40.

223

Notes to Pages 181 –189 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

7

Mayall, Gypsy Identities, p. 264. Illustrated London News, 3 January 1880, p. 11. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, pp. 50–2. Illustrated London News, 3 January 1880, p. 11. James, A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 7. ‘hearth, n.1.’ OED Online (Oxford University Press, March 2017) (accessed 21 May 2017). Francis Hindes Groome, In Gipsy Tents (Edinburgh: Nimmo, 1880), p. 325. Thomas Peploe Wood, Gipsy Figures [n.d.], Shire Hall Gallery, Stafford. Available at www.archives.staffordshire.gov.uk (accessed 21 May 2017). Frederick Goodall, Gypsy Encampment (1848). Towner, Eastbourne. Available at artuk.org (accessed 17 July 2017); Frederick Goodall, A Gipsy Family of Three Generations, engraved by George Dalziel for the Illustrated London News, 12 February 1848, p. 87; George Haydock Dodgson, Gipsies – Twilight, engraved by Edmund Evans for the Illustrated London News, 20 June 1857, p. 610. Damian Le Bas, The Oldest Show on the Road (UK: Rural Media, 2016). Richard Jefferies, Field and Hedgerow (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1889), pp. 160–1. Ruth Shahack-Gross et al., ‘Evidence for the repeated use of a central hearth at Middle Pleistocene (300 ky ago) Qesem Cave, Israel’, Journal of Archaeological Science 44 (2014), pp. 12–21. Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller (London: Chapman and Hall, 1861), p. 167. George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy (London: Virtue [n.d.]), p. 147. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, ed by Peter Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 44. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 53.

Closing the Encounter: Conclusion 1. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013), p. 8. 2. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed by A. S. Byatt (London and New York: Penguin, 1985), pp. 395–433. 3. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 79. 4. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Silver Blaze’, in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (New York: A. L. Burt, 1894), pp. 1–28; ‘The adventure of the speckled band’, in Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (London: Newnes, 1892), pp. 181–209; Agatha Christie, ‘The Gypsy’, in The Hound of Death (London: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 109–18; Endless Night (London: HarperCollins, 2011).

224

Notes to Pages 190 –194 5. Jack Thorne (writer) and Daniel Nettheim (director), ‘Everyone’ in Glue (London: Eleven, 2014). 6. Adam Sherwin, ‘Glue: E4 drama exposes ‘‘rotting despair’’ of English countryside’, Independent, 15 September 2014. Available at www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/new-e4-drama-glue-exposesrotting-despair-of-english-countryside-9732854.html (accessed 3 June 2017). 7. Jack Thorne (writer) and Olly Blackburn (director), ‘Eli/Rob’ in Glue (London: Eleven, 2014). 8. Jack Thorne (writer) and Daniel Nettheim (director), ‘James/Janine’ in Glue (London: Eleven, 2014). 9. Jack Thorne (writer) and Daniel Nettheim (director), ‘Everyone’ in Glue (London: Eleven, 2014). 10. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 158. 11. John Plunkett, ‘Big Fat Gypsy Weddings ‘‘has increased bullying of Gypsies and Travellers’’’, Guardian, 16 October 2012. Available at www. theguardian.com/media/2012/oct/16/big-fat-gypsy-weddings-bullyingtravellers (accessed 18 November 2017). 12. Jane Campion (director and writer) and Jan Chapman and Caroline Hewitt (producers), Bright Star (UK: BBC Films, 2009). 13. Ken Lee, ‘Salvage ethnography, ambiguity, ambivalence, anamnesia and the traductions of Esmeralda Lock’, unpublished transcript of address given at Culture Beyond Borders: The Roma Contribution, Harvard University, 10 April 2017. 14. Margareta Matache at Culture Beyond Borders: The Roma Contribution, Harvard University, 10 April 2017. Available at www.youtube.com/watch? v¼dVWwRK2Zsj8 (accessed 10 November 2017). 15. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 58. 16. Ibid., p. 74. 17. Jelena Jovanovic at Culture Beyond Borders: The Roma Contribution, Harvard University, 10 April 2017. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ dVWwRK2Zsj8 (accessed 10 November 2017). 18. Alexandra Oprea, ‘Toward the recognition of critical race theory in human rights law: Roma women’s reproductive rights’ in Jacqueline Bhabha, Andrzej Mirga and Margareta Matache (eds), Realizing Roma Rights (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), pp. 39–56; p. 56. 19. Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 9.

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Index

affect theory, 6 –9, 15, 22, 34– 6, 47, 84, 90, 128, 168, 184, 191– 5 see also Ahmed, Sara African peoples and cultures (undifferentiated in historical texts), 45, 60, 67, 101, 106, 110, 173, 175, 178, 181 African-American people, 30, 82, 123–4 Ahmed, Sara, 6– 8, 14–15, 22– 4, 35, 38, 45, 48, 76, 93– 5, 137, 142– 50, 164–70, 182, 186, 194 Ainsworth, Harrison, 119, 150 anti-Gypsyism, 3, 6, 8, 31, 33, 36, 41–2, 50, 102, 110, 132, 144, 173, 183, 192 Appleby (Cumbria), 57 archive, 24, 28, 64 –5, 94, 99, 100, 103–6, 121, 140, 161, 171, 193, 200n.72 Arnold, Matthew, 17, 167– 8 Arrival, 198n.35 Austen, Jane, 14 Emma, 140 Mansfield Park, 84 autobiography/memoir, 63, 113, 122–8, 133– 6, 167 –71 beauty, 47 –8, 54, 65, 66, 67, 72, 97, 100, 116, 119, 120, 123, 140, 151, 152, 162, 166 Beauvoir, Simone de, 88, 90

Bedouin people, 74, 173 Bendix, Regina, 112, 115 Besant, Walter, 48– 50 Bhabha, Homi, 36, 57 –8, 61, 72, 114, 178 Bible, 43, 50, 87, 152, 173 Song of Soloman, 116–17, 119, 214n.32 Big Fat Gypsy Weddings (television series), 23 –4, 36, 47, 52, 56–8, 72, 76, 95, 131– 2, 181–2, 188, 191–4 bitextual, 16, 89, 180, 183 blackness, 45, 48, 51, 55, 68, 114 blacking-up, 111, 136 Blackwood’s Magazine, 46, 61 blood, 38, 43, 49, 65, 66, 67, 90, 100, 102, 103, 106, 116–20, 132, 135, 152, 159, 166 body, 6 –7, 14, 34, 36, 44, 49, 54– 9, 63–71, 90, 94, 118, 120, 128, 137, 182, 186, 192 Borrow, George, 33, 69, 124, 125, 135, 192, 195, 205n.84 Bible in Spain, The, 63 Lavengro, 63, 87, 122– 3, 158 Romano Lavo-Lil, 63, 139 Romany Rye, The, 63, 122 Zincali, The, 32, 63 Brantlinger, Patrick, 173– 4 Brexit, 96, 173 British Museum, 44, 86, 102, 156 Bront€e, Charlotte, 30, 141

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Index Brooks, Ethel, 3 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 37, 87, 99–104, 107, 155 Canning Case, see Squires, Mary Caravan novel, see Smith, Lady Eleanor film, see Kent, Jean caravan/vardo, 16, 38, 86, 91, 102, 108, 129–31, 140, 169, 172, 175, 178, 180, 184, 222n.15 Carew, Bampfylde-Moore, 17, 111 Carmen (character), 32– 3, 158, 200n.79 Clare, John, 14, 111, 150 Collins, Wilkie Armadale, 87 Moonstone, The, 86 Woman in White, The, 154 colonialism/empire, 19, 34, 76– 8, 80–5, 148– 9, 151, 156, 193 convergence, 2, 5, 24, 29–30, 100, 194 cultural appropriation, 53, 136, 166, 169–70 curse, 37 –8, 100– 2, 106, 139– 47, 151–64, 194 Daily Mail, 52, 93, 96, 102, 158, 172– 3, 175, 178, 187, 188, 200n.70 Darwin, Charles, 173, 175 Derrida, Jacques, 64, 103, 198n.40 desire, 6, 7, 21, 29, 30, 36, 38, 54, 55, 57–8, 64, 72, 73, 75, 90, 115, 117, 121, 123, 125, 136, 151, 166, 171, 176, 178–80, 183, 184, 188, 190 detective/crime narratives, 40, 120–1, 144, 159–61, 189– 91 diaspora, 3, 74, 78, 99 Dickens, Charles Bleak House, 152, 178 The Uncommercial Traveller, 185 digital, 2, 8, 9, 15– 22, 25, 27 –32, 34, 73, 86, 99, 100–1, 104– 7, 113, 118, 121, 154, 167, 172, 177, 184, 191

Dodgson, George Haydock, 184 Doncaster (Yorkshire), 90–1 Doughty, Louise, 89– 90 DNA, 4, 78, 109 Drag Me to Hell (film), 44, 161–4 dukkering, see fortune-telling Eastern Europe, 3, 11 –12, 37, 74, 75, 77, 95– 9, 102, 164, 173 Egypt, 25, 74, 88, 151, 156 ‘Egyptians’ (Gypsies as), 3, 5, 6, 43, 45, 78, 111– 12, 123, 144 Egyptians Act, 5, 110 ‘Egypt, Little’ (Greece), 3, 78 Eliot, George, 9 Daniel Deronda, 65, 103– 4, 106, 107 Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 65, 103 Mill on the Floss, 66– 70, 122, 188–9 Spanish Gypsy, The, 17, 65, 67 –9, 105– 6, 136, 150, 186, 188 Elizabeth I/Elizabethan, 5, 43, 51, 74, 110–11, 119 engraving, 16– 21, 25, 44, 47 –8, 64– 5, 73, 88– 9, 125–6, 128, 143, 154, 161, 176–84 epistemology, see knowledge Ereshkigal (Queen of Death), 156 European Union (EU), 11– 13, 96 eyes, 23, 49, 52, 53, 60 –7, 72, 74, 87, 91, 97, 111, 115, 117, 119, 120, 126, 128, 141, 149, 152, 153, 155, 163, 179, 183, 192 Fedalma, see Eliot, George Felski, Rita, 14 –15, 28– 9, 33, 188 feminism/feminist, 2, 6, 8, 23, 24, 30, 35, 36, 39, 193– 5 fetishism, 2, 14, 63 –4, 82, 95, 98, 107, 148, 169, 183– 4, 194 Fielding, Henry, 44, 195 folklore, 14, 37, 57, 69, 93, 110, 112, 122, 125, 162 football, 146– 7

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The Gypsy Woman fortune-telling, 37–8, 42 –3, 53, 79, 121, 124, 139– 46, 148 –50, 153–64, 194 France, 21, 79, 80, 97, 99, 144 Freud, Sigmund, 62 –3, 84 gadje/gorjer/gorgio (non-Gypsy), 3, 86, 90, 121 –4, 130, 133– 6, 155, 157, 193 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 41, 53 gaze, 23, 25, 26, 55–8, 64, 91, 116, 130, 147, 176, 179, 180, 203n.54 gender, 14, 15, 23, 28, 30, 34 –6, 58, 62, 69, 77, 94, 106, 121, 142, 168, 193 Germany, 42, 45, 49, 86, 87, 97 –8, 99, 128, 173 Gervais, Ricky, 70 –1, 95, 188 Glue (television series), 38, 189– 91 Gobineau, Arthur de, 53 –4, 68, 132 Goodall, Frederick, 25, 184 Graphic, The, 16– 20, 27, 32 Gray, Keomi, 37, 116– 9, 133, 137, 138, 193, 195 Greece/Greek, 50, 99, 117, 119–20, 150, 162, 211n.92 see also ‘Egypt, Little’ Grellmann, Heinrich, 3, 42, 45, 49– 51, 59, 71, 78– 9, 86, 87, 96, 102, 143 Groome, F. H., 79–80, 128–30, 131, 137 In Gipsy Tents, 63, 64, 125 –6, 134– 5, 184 Gypsiness, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 22, 36, 46, 52, 71– 2, 76, 94, 101, 109, 111, 115–23, 128–9, 132, 135–7, 141, 144, 152, 166, 189 ‘Gypsy’ (term), 1, 3, 10– 12, 18, 36, 52–3, 56, 66, 78, 98, 157, 165, 179 Gypsy Lore Society, 3, 22, 69, 79– 80, 94, 129– 31, 137, 188 Halle, Charles Edward Fortune Teller, The, 162 hair, 49, 52– 4, 60, 62, 64, 67– 72, 85, 86, 89– 90, 116– 29, 136,

141, 143, 153, 157, 163, 176, 189, 190, 192 Hancock, Ian, 3, 93 Hannah Montana (television series), 157, 160 Hardy, Thomas Mayor of Casterbridge, The, 153– 4 Herkomer, Hubert, 17 history, 5, 6, 28 –35, 64, 83, 97, 106, 156, 177, 195 art, 8– 9, 21, 149– 50 encounters, 2, 14, 107, 134, 148 race, 50– 1, 53 –5, 59 Romani/Gypsy, 3 –6, 43– 4, 49, 59, 61, 75, 76, 81, 91 –2, 110, 125, 215n.63 see also transhistorical Houghton-Walker, Sarah, 5– 6, 14, 80, 111, 145–6, 168 Hugo, Victor, 32, 52, 55, 128 Hume, Fergus Hagar of the Pawn Shop, 120–1 Hungary, 63, 79, 102 Hunt, Leigh, 167–71, 180, 186 identity, 3, 5, 11–12, 25, 51, 53, 55, 58, 69, 71, 83, 88, 98, 104, 107, 110–11, 114–15, 127, 132, 136, 165–6, 170, 181, 190, 193 Illustrated London News, The, 16– 17, 19, 20, 25, 27, 56, 64 –5, 69, 72, 73–4, 88 –9, 143, 175– 85, 187 India, 1, 74, 77, 82– 3, 84– 6, 110, 144, 163–4, 208n.37 East India Company, 43, 81, 83, 118, 147– 8, 219n.36 source of Romani diaspora, 3, 57, 74–6, 77 –81, 84– 6, 88, 91– 2, 125 Indigenous North American people, 123, 134, 173 Ireland/Irish people, 4, 88, 100, 114, 158, 165–6 Irish Travellers, 13, 56, 57, 132

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Index Jewish people and identity, 13, 42, 45, 48, 49, 59, 60, 65, 66, 103–4, 106, 107, 120 John, Augustus, 130– 1, 188, 195 John, Gwen, 130 Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, see Gypsy Lore Society Jovanovic, Jelena, 194 Kale, 11 Keats, John, 86, 162, 167, 193 Kent, Jean, 158–60 kidnapping, 40– 3, 60–1, 69, 82– 3, 119, 174, 192 Knox, Robert, 59, 68, 192 knowledge, 1, 5, 7, 20, 22– 3, 25– 6, 28, 32, 37, 38, 43, 55, 59, 61, 66, 76, 83, 84, 85, 92– 3, 95, 100, 103 –4, 107, 119, 125, 135– 8, 142–59, 164, 168–71, 179, 189, 193 –4 see also archive, stranger, transhistorical Lamia, 162– 4 Le Bas, Damian, 184 –5 Lee, Ken, 13– 4, 63, 75, 76, 88, 93, 128–9, 193, 195 Leland, Charles Godfrey, 23 –4, 48, 91, 115, 124, 131, 133, 195 English Gipsies and their Language, The, 108, 122 English-Gipsy Songs, 108, 112, 117 Gypsies, The, 92 Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling, 18, 22, 73 –4, 91– 2, 145–6 Memoirs, 113– 14, 135– 7, 155 Leslie, Charles Robert, 86, 141 Linnaeus, Carl, 51, 192 Lock, Esmeralda, 37, 128– 9, 138, 193 Lombroso, Cesare, 49– 50 London, 21, 40, 46, 79, 81, 82, 96, 116, 120, 141, 151, 174, 177 see also Illustrated London News Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 111, 119

masculinity, 7, 23, 28, 36, 37, 54, 55–6, 58, 62, 64, 86, 88, 91, 117, 118, 119, 136–7, 144, 155, 166, 177, 186, 192 Matache, Margareta, 193 Mayall, David, 79, 111, 171 –2, 175, 181 Mayhew, Henry, see London McKell, Iain, 51– 3, 72 Medusa, 62, 68, 85, 188 Meredith, George, 116, 133, 217n.90 migration, 5, 9 – 10, 19, 25, 54, 59, 74–5, 78, 96– 8, 168, 171–9, 186–7 see also diaspora Moors (people), 5, 13, 65, 66, 87, 105 music, 12, 17, 68, 80, 85, 95, 110, 125, 136, 155, 158 festivals, 94 videos, 32, 71, 165– 6, 188 Nazis, see Porajmos neo-Victorian, 30, 53, 90, 127 Nergaard, Candis, 190 New Travellers, see McKell, Iain Night of the Demon (film), 161 nomadism, 13, 59, 75, 132, 173, 175 see also migration Nord, Deborah Epstein, 60, 75, 91, 105, 114, 122, 124, 167 occult, 12, 69, 73, 100, 145– 6, 154, 164 O’Neil, Henry Nelson Eastward Ho! August 1857 and Home Again, 1858, 147– 9 My Native Land Goodbye, 25, 168 Picnic, A, 140– 2, 148, 149, 153 online/internet, 8, 16, 20, 29, 33, 34, 38, 57, 73, 100–7, 114, 121, 132, 142, 165, 177, 182 see also digital Oprea, Alexandra, 36, 94, 194 otherness, 5, 13– 15, 18, 22– 3, 33, 35–7, 41, 43, 44, 45, 48, 50, 51, 56–60, 63, 66–7, 70, 75– 7, 80,

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The Gypsy Woman 92, 95– 6, 109, 125, 133, 136, 144, 166, 179, 181, 193 see also stranger Ottoman, 3, 102

Romani Studies, 2– 6, 10 –15, 34– 5, 76, 93 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 116– 19, 132–3, 214n.32, 217n.90

performance, 4, 33, 35, 55, 70, 80, 94, 108, 111, 115, 117, 123– 4, 129, 131, 133–7, 140– 5, 150, 157– 61, 172, 189, 191, 193 philology, 60, 79, 80, 125, 135, 141– 2 photography, 17, 51– 3, 71, 91, 113, 126, 127, 128, 129, 154, 172, 177, 180–1 Pinterest, 8, 15 –18, 29, 32, 38, 86, 103, 113, 121, 140, 165–70, 177, 198n.39 police, 54, 174, 189– 91 Pollock, Griselda, 8 –9, 24, 27, 35, 45, 191 Porajmos (genocide), 10, 92– 3, 120 power colonial/geopolitical/legal, 81, 180, 194 discursive, 7, 15, 22, 23 –4, 26, 28, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 49, 50, 55, 71, 75, 76, 82, 85, 87–91, 114–16, 118, 123–4, 135, 137, 143, 144, 158, 165, 167, 182, 183, 185, 186, 191, 192, 195 physical/mystical, 63, 107, 124, 145, 150– 1, 153–8, 164, 188 steam, 19, 21, 22, 113 presentism, see transhistorical

Said, Edward, 34, 77 –8, 88, 91 –2, 97 –8 Sampson, John, 74, 93, 130 Sandys, Frederick, 116–19, 123, 133 Saracens, 4, 5, 13 Scotland, 4– 5, 18, 59– 61, 86, 114, 153 Scottish Travellers, 13, 75 see also Scott, Walter Scott, Walter, 112, 141 Guy Mannering, 37, 60 –2, 68, 76, 81 –6, 119, 126, 188 Ivanhoe, 60, 63 Meg Merrilies, see Guy Mannering Quentin Durward, 60, 85 sex/sexuality, 19, 24, 28, 31, 35, 37, 38, 48, 54– 6, 57– 8, 60, 62, 70–2, 74, 89, 90, 100, 101, 105, 117, 118, 122, 127, 136, 151, 166, 178– 9, 183, 184, 189, 192 Shakespeare, William Othello, 151, 163 Sibyl, 83, 144, 150– 3, 155–7, 162, 188 Simson, Walter, 59 –60, 88, 92 Sinti, 98 Smith, Lady Eleanor, 93, 158–9 Smith, George, of Coalville, 114, 175–8, 180– 3, 188 Smith, Horace, 74, 89 Smith, Hubert, 128–9 Smith Surtees, Robert, 53, 141 Spain, 9, 18, 32, 63, 88, 126, 144, 158– 9, 165, 179 see also Eliot, George, The Spanish Gypsy Spenser, Edmund, 82 –3 spreadability (media), 22, 121 Squires, Mary, 40– 8, 54, 58, 72, 86, 191, 192 stereotype, 2, 10, 12, 13, 19, 21, 24, 32, 34, 36– 9, 42, 47, 50, 55 –8, 62,

radio, 31, 154, 160 –1 Reidy, Jessica, 55, 72, 192 Roma people, 10– 13, 36, 75, 95– 8, 119, 173, 193, 194 Romania, 37, 77, 88, 95–8, 101– 2, 107 Romanichal people, 11, 13, 80 Romani language/Romanes, 1, 3, 5, 10–13, 60, 63, 64, 74, 78 –81, 94, 108, 111, 121, 123, 125, 129, 130, 135–6, 139– 40, 141– 2, 159, 190, 213n.1

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Index 69–72, 77– 8, 87, 90, 94 –6, 98, 99, 101, 105, 118, 119, 123, 126– 8, 130, 143, 191– 5 Stoker, Bram Dracula, 102– 3, 107 stranger/strangeness, 5, 7, 13–15, 21–4, 35, 37–9, 52, 53, 60, 63, 70, 74, 80, 83, 85, 93–5, 109, 120, 125, 137, 142–4, 148, 149, 150, 152, 157, 166, 169–71, 174, 180–3, 189, 191, 193–4 sybil, see Sibyl Taylor, Becky, 3 –4, 54, 78, 144 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 108, 117– 18, 151 theatre/opera, 16, 17, 19, 32– 3, 82, 85–6, 97, 109, 126, 135, 151 street, 74 transhistorical, 2, 7, 8– 9, 15–20, 27–33, 35, 38– 9, 90, 91, 106, 120, 121, 192–5 Trumpener, Katie, 83–4, 88, 93 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 139, 141, 143, 153 uncanny/unhomely, 34, 84– 5, 152–4, 186 United States of America, 9, 12, 40, 48, 74, 92, 95, 98, 99, 101 –2, 123–4, 134, 140, 158, 188 vagrants/vagrancy, 49, 87, 144– 5, 171, 173–4, 178

Verdi, Giuseppi, 19 Victorian painting, 7– 8, 16, 24 –7, 33–4, 58, 64– 5, 85 –6, 88– 9, 116–19, 126, 130– 1, 140–4, 148–50, 153, 155, 158, 162–3, 168, 179, 184, 187, 214n.32 visual field, 8, 191 Wales, 4, 111, 125, 129, 155, 173 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 137 Aylwin, 69, 111, 132– 3, 152–7 The Coming of Love, 131–2 Webster, Thomas, 25– 7, 168 Western culture, 1, 12, 13, 22, 36– 7, 41, 48, 77– 8, 87, 92, 95, 98, 102– 3, 110, 121, 193 whiteness, 1, 7, 15, 23, 27, 28, 36– 7, 42, 44, 45, 47, 52 –6, 58, 60, 66 –8, 70, 76, 77, 84, 90, 91, 93, 100, 109, 112, 125, 134, 136, 137, 144, 148, 155, 158, 165, 166, 170, 182, 186, 192, 194, 195 Whyte-Melville, G. J. Black But Comely, 67, 93, 119– 20, 133, 166 Willems, Wim, 12, 51 witches/witchcraft and sorcery, 17 –18, 31, 34, 36, 42, 46– 7, 62, 86, 92, 103, 107, 117, 123, 143– 8, 153, 158–9 Wood, Val, 53, 69, 70, 76, 127, 136, 139–40 Yates, Dora, 128, 129

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