Deborah Epstein Nord. Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930. New York: Columbia UP, 2006. ISBN: 0231137044. Price: US$24.50

In Gypsies and the British Imagination, Deborah Epstein Nord aims most broadly to demonstrate the “ubiquity of the idea of the Gypsy in British literature and culture” (1). An early chapter focuses on Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering and the Gypsy episode from Jane Austen’s Emma. Other chapters consider poems about wandering figures and “scholar-gypsies” by Wordsworth, Clare, and Arnold; George Borrow’s prose narratives Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857); George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and Daniel Deronda (1874-6); and the Gypsy Lore Society (1888-1930). A final chapter pairs stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and D. H. Lawrence with The Book of Boswell (1970), an autobiographical memoir written by the descendent of a Gypsy family frequently discussed by nineteenth-century folklorists. Throughout her discussion of these works she interlaces many incidental references to other writers and, to some extent, graphic artists. Although scholars interested in this topic will find a much more expansive catalogue of journalistic and political sources in David Mayall’s Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society (1988), Nord admirably fulfills her objective in relation to imaginative writers. Nord deftly unpacks the paradoxical complexity of the widespread fascination with Gypsies in the long nineteenth century. Assuming that Gypsies had emigrated to Europe from India, many writers emphasize their status as outsiders, accentuating signs of ethnic and racial difference and perpetuating long-standing associations of criminal deviance. “Like the ‘Oriental’ or the colonized, racially marked subject,” Nord observes, “the Gypsy was associated with ... primitive desires, lawlessness, mystery, cunning, sexual excess, godlessness, and savagery” (3). Such stereotypes were complicated, however, by the sense that Gypsies had inhabited the British isles for hundreds of years and that their presumably pastoral lifestyle reflected a heroic defiance of the socio-economic transformations wrought by industrial modernity. In a strange way, then, Gypsies came to be associated with an authentic, pre-industrial Britishness. To develop this irony, Nord makes effective use of ideas drawn from Orientalism (1979). Many of those who have engaged the argument developed by Edward Said have followed his effort to demonstrate how imperial culture produces and enforces distinctions between imperial selves and colonial others. Nord takes a more convincing and more interesting path, pursuing his relatively undeveloped comment that Europe discovered in the Orient a “sort of surrogate and even underground self” (Orientalism 3). This notion undergirds her approach to nineteenth-century representations of Gypsies as an intriguing “mix of foreignness and familiarity, exoticism and homeliness” (5). Recognizing that the uncanny familiarity of Gypsies, no less than their foreignness, reflects a deep-seated fantasy, Nord turns to Freud, adapting his conception of the family romance to explain the desire to discover a lost heritage in the Gypsy tribe. Nineteenth-century writers and their protagonists sometimes indulge the feeling that they have been wrongfully placed in the respectable middle class, tragically estranged from their true community among the despised outcasts. As Nord indicates, this dream represents an ironic reversal of the conventional belief that Gypsies were in the habit of stealing white European children. The inverted family romance manifests itself on the individual level in narratives of downward mobility as characters such as Arnold’s scholar-gypsy, Borrow’s Lavengro, and the young Maggie Tulliver strive to escape the constraints of propriety and social convention by embracing the Gypsy life. This fantasy also operates on a broader cultural and historical level, arising in the suspicion that the Gypsies were, secretly, the aboriginal parents of us all. The work of nineteenth-century philologists and folklorists, Nord shows, promoted an understanding of the Gypsy as “ur-ancestor to humankind” (9). The representation of the Gypsies as primitive thus taps into the central paradox …