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Reading the Victorian Gypsy Jodie Matthews Reading the Victorian Gypsy PhD Cardiff University 2008 UMI Number: U585073 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U585073 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 DECLARATION This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not currendy submitted in candidature for any degree. Signed .................... (candidate) Date ....1 1 ...0 /2 :.# £...... STATEMENT 1 This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD. Signed (candidate) D ate__ it -. /? .2 . 0. .^7. STATEMENT 2 This thesis is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by explicit references. Signed (candidate) D ate !l..ft O r... $ STATEMENT 3 I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the tide and summary to be made available to outside organisations, Signed (candidate) D ate \\: jL. .' ft Si... Contents List of figures hi Summary iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 ‘Arabs of Europe!’: Who Were the Gypsies? 1 ‘He Mark’d the Features of her Vagrant Race’: Who Constructs the 5 Victorian Gypsy? ‘Race is Everything’ 7 Methodology 15 Locating the Thesis 18 A Note on Terms and Spelling 30 1 Scott’s Romantic Impression: Meg Merrilies and the Archive 32 The Haunted Work 36 Contesting Legacy 42 Fetishism 55 Writing Unwriting 60 Conclusion 68 2 La Recherche du Temps Perdu 70 Keeping Sturnrn: Death and the Archive 73 Synchronic Essentialism 87 Resistance 95 3 Text, Image and Supplement: Gypsies in the Illustrated London News 102 The Terror of Uncertain Signs 107 Textual Others 118 Look — Don’t Look: Ambivalent Desire in the Reporting of Gypsy Life 125 Conclusion 137 4 Gambling with George Eliot: Gypsy Women, Jewish Men, and Their Inheritances 144 Uncertain Heirships 150 ‘I Will Eat Dust’ 165 5 Back Where They Belong: The Psychopathology of Gypsies and Kidnap in Children’s Literature 193 The Family Romance 196 Assimilation: The Alternative Family Romance 216 Conclusion: Unstable Locations 226 Conclusion 229 Notes 235 Bibliography 250 List of Figures Figure 1 Frederick Goodall,A Gipsy Family of Three Generations, engraved by George Dalziel(ILN, 12 February 1848, p. 87). Figure 2 George Haydock Dodgson,Gipsies — Twilight, engraved by Edmund Evans(ILN, 20 June 1857, p. 610). Figure 3 Alfred Rankley, Gipsy Children Gathering Wood, unsigned engraving (ILN , 1 February 1873, p. 101). Figure 4 G. Richter, A Gipsy, engraved by W. B. Gardner(ILN, 2 May 1874, p. 424). Figure 5 John Phillip, The Spanish Gipsy Sisters, engraved by Orrin Smith(ILN, 27 January 1855, p. 88). Figure 6 William Heysman Overend, Sketches of Gipsy Life: A n Encampment Near Latimer-Road, Notting-Hill, unsigned engraving(ILN, 29 November 1879, p. 504). Figure 7 [William Heysman Overend], Sketches of Gipsy Life: Interior of Van Near Latimer-Road, Notting-Hill, engraved by W. J. Palmer(ILN , 13 December 1879, p. 545). Abstract Nineteenth-century texts that focus on Gypsies construct a figure who ought to be locatable in a racial hierarchy, in a class system, and along gender lines. When read psychoanalytically, however, the texts reveal signs of having repressed uncertainty about where such boundaries may be drawn and what they signify. The figure of the Gypsy, existing literally and metaphorically on the verges of society, disrupts the stable locations of identity fenced off by discourse even as texts hope to offer the Gypsy as an example of how one may categorise others. Chapter One studies the figure of the Gypsy in the work of Walter Scott (1771— 1832) and its relationship to that of a later writer, George Borrow (1803—1881). Chapter Two concentrates on the work of the Romany Ryes, examining the discursive implications of their impulse to conserve Gypsy culture in the face of its perceived annihilation. Chapter Three explores the construction of the Gypsy between engraved image and written text in the Illustrated London Nem, reading the ways in which the two forms work together on the page. Chapter Four looks at George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and Daniel Deronda (1876) to examine the differences in the representation of a male Jew and female Gypsy in her work. The final chapter discusses the pervasive stereotype of Gypsies kidnapping children in the context of children’s literature. The readings performed throughout the thesis are underpinned by a deconstructive psychoanalysis (drawing on Jacques Derrida’s rethinking of the work of Sigmund Freud), which not only lends the project a methodology but demands an exploration of the ethics and responsibilities of reading and writing now, in the past, and for the future The texts are thus under analysis and are seen to preserve traces of the nineteenth-century discourses in which they are woven (and which they also weave). Such conservation also always institutes a difference, however, and the attempted repression, silencing, banishment and fetishization of all the uncontained features of the figure of the Gypsy do not mean that the text has the Gypsy under control; all of these things come back to haunt it. Acknowledgements I acknowledge the financial support of the AHRC for years two and three of my doctoral research, and Cardiff University for supporting several research trips and conferences. My research was greatly aided by the assistance of staff at the Arts and Social Studies library of Cardiff University, Cardiff City library, the British Library, and the Wellcome library, London. Access to the letters of Francis Hindes Groome, part of the Scott MacFie collection, was granted by Liverpool University library. Personally, I have many people to thank, but I will keep it short; I apologise for any omissions. Firsdy, thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Carl Plasa, for a decade of acerbic wit, good advice and pedantry. Thank you to the other staff at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff who have taught and inspired me over the years, in particular Professor Diane Elam, Dr. Laurent Milesi and Professor Stephen Knight. I owe a huge intellectual debt to Professor Catherine Belsey. Thank you to Graham Finch who, before all that, taught me to take literature seriously. The support of friends and colleagues has been invaluable: thank you, especially, to Laura Wainwright and Lydia Howland; to Dr. Charlotte Boyce for turning me on to the Victorians in the first place; to Dr. Jessica Mordsley for cocktails and conversation; to Dr. Gareth Gordon for ranting and kindness; to Mareile Pfannerbecker, for being a Seoul sister and everything after; and to Roger Christofides,ctyanr\ pou, thank you for taking a risk. The support of my family, and of Andy Poppleton, has been unwavering in my academic pursuits: it doesn’t need saying, but thanks. 1 Introduction ‘Arabs of Europe!*:1 Who Were the Gypsies? One way of answering the question Vho were the Gypsies?’ is to respond that it is unanswerable. Without reinscribing the assumptions made by writers mired in racial discourse investigated throughout this thesis, it is difficult to say, exacdy, who the Gypsies living in nineteenth-century Britain were, where they came from and what made them distinct from non-Gypsies. One of the presumptions made by all the texts analysed here, however, is that their authors thought they could say, with certainty, to whom they referred when the word ‘Gypsy’ was used. As the thesis demonstrates, this certainty does not stand up to close scrutiny; profound anxiety about how to classify people and what that classification signified is revealed. The thesis problematises the various myths that surround the figure of the Gypsy, so it would be disingenuous to recount the history and origins of a people as fact, as if one could at any point step outside discourse. Ideas about the history of the people and where they came from change in different cultural contexts as the figure of the Gypsy serves various ideological purposes at different times. With that proviso, this section briefly engages with some of the many theories about the arrival of Gypsies in Europe in order to contextualise the writing examined in the rest of the thesis. Donald Kenrick, a renowned scholar of Gypsy culture, makes several suggestions about the Gypsies’ past based on a lecture given in Amsterdam in 1875 by M. J. de Goeje.2 Kenrick’s hypothesis is that the distinct group known today as Gypsies formed outside India between the seventh and tenth centuries AD. With this proposition, he draws on a source that differs from most late-nineteenth-century scholarship, which usually suggested that the Gypsies existed as a recognisable group before leaving the subcontinent. Victorian ethnologists were keen to establish the precise geographical origins of a Gypsy race, while Kenrick proposes an origin in diaspora itself. Instead of tracing where the Gypsies came from, he explores how a group of people came to be the Gypsies. He suggests that ‘Indian immigrants from various tribes intermarried and intermixed in Persia [...] and a large number of them moved into Europe’ (p. 4). He goes on to explain that those Gypsies who arrived in Western Europe in the fourteenth century ‘said they had recently come from Little Egypt — an area in Greece near Epirus — and this became confused with Egypt itself, hence the appellation ‘Gypsy’ (p.
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