1841 was the year of the second national British census. It was also the year that Charles Dickens completed the serial publication of The Old Curiosity Shop and published it in book form. Less famously, 1841 saw the appearance of a two-volume travelogue called The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain. The author was the little-known George Borrow (1803-1881). In the 1820s and 1830s, Borrow traveled extensively through England, France, Germany, Spain, Morocco, and Russia. His official business, sponsored by the British Bible Association, was selling vernacular Bibles to promote Protestantism, at which he was not particularly successful. He was, however, an unusually able linguist, speaking by his count twelve languages, including Rommany or Romany (twentieth-century ‘Romani’). Consequently, he ‘lived in “habits of intimacy”‘ with his gypsy subjects, Borrow claimed.
In 1842, Borrow started work on a semi-autobiographical novel, Lavengro. Lavengro and its sequel, The Romany Rye, consciously reference seventeenth- and eighteenth-century picaresque novels. The author, ‘young George’, is an educated version of a professional wanderer. As he walks or rides through England and Wales, he meets a variety of itinerants, substantial numbers of whom Borrow identified as gypsies.
The 1841 national census sought to establish the total population of each county of Great Britain, ‘distinguishing males from females, and showing the rate per cent. increase or decrease in each county compared with population 1831; also the number of houses inhabited, uninhabited and building’ (1841 British Census, Subseries within HO 107). Householders were tasked with giving information ‘for each person who abode there the preceding night [Sunday 6 June]’. Designated enumerators collected forms on 7 June, at which time the enumerator assisted any illiterate householder. Census forms were thus designed to catch temporary members of households, primarily lodgers. So how might we learn about those unlikely to ever see a census form? That numbers of them existed is admitted by the British government, who clearly defined certain recalcitrant individuals in the 1824 Vagrancy Act, calling them a class of idle and disorderly persons to be henceforth deemed rogues and vagabonds, subject to a month’s worth of detention in a house of correction. The act specifies any person pretending or professing to tell fortunes; ‘every person wandering abroad and lodging in any barn or outhouse, or in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or waggon’; unlicensed peddlers, beggars, or ‘any person not having any visible means of subsistence’. The act was in the hands of local justices of the peace (5 Geo. 4. c. c. 83), and targeted persons who might turn up in any rural village or small town in the 1820s and 1830s selling goods and services or begging. However, sleeping under hedgerows in June weather, such ‘persons’ were unlikely to be among those captured by the census. We must, then, turn to other literature to find them.
Sketches by Boz and The Old Curiosity Shop
Dickens was a close and mostly affectionate observer of British popular culture, hence the subtitle of his first book, Sketches by Boz (1836): ‘every-day life and every-day people’. His portrait of the entertainment offered at the Easter Monday Greenwich Fair includes a gypsy fortune teller – who, despite the Vagrancy Act, isn’t arrested (Boz 85). Dickens witnesses a sunburnt woman in a red cloak engaging courting couples and identifies her as gipsy (his spelling). She prophesies ‘husbands’, thus delighting a young woman and earning a lavish tip from the gentleman (Boz 86). At nightfall, company members of the travelling show ‘Richardsons’ promenade before the outdoor stage ‘in all the dignity of wigs, spangles, red-ochre, and whitening’. A popular side-show features freaks, a dwarf, a giantess, and a living skeleton. Another features a lion who has killed on average three keepers a year. Price of admission: sixpence. A later sketch notes that, while England is largely rural, the writer anticipates when ‘stations shall have superintended stables and corn shall have given place to smoke’ (Boz 502).
In The Old Curiosity Shop, in which the action takes place principally in the 1820s, the reader meets a miscellany of itinerants, including the travelling showwoman Mrs Jarley. The novel’s initial exposure of the class Dickens calls ‘itinerant showmen’ are the Punch and Judy men, Codlin and Short. They are on their way to ‘the Races’ when Nell and her grandfather meet up with them (Curiosity Shop 103). The ‘two monstrous shadows’ that terrify Nell turn out to be a man and a woman on stilts, ‘Grinder’s Lot’, accompanied by a man with a drum (111).
A dog act – ‘four very dismal dogs’ – a giant, a little lady without legs or arms, and a conjurer join the itinerants headed for the Races. The morning of the event, the dancing dogs, the stilts, the little lady and the tall man, and all the other attractions, ’emerge from the holes and corners in which they had passed the night. Black-eyed gipsy girls, hooded in showy handkerchiefs, sallied forth to tell fortunes’ (Curiosity Shop 124).
Nell has some vague design of travelling to a great distance among streams and mountains, ‘where only very poor and simple people lived’ (171). When Nell and her grandfather encounter the ‘lady of the caravan’ (Chapters XXVI and XXVII), Mrs Jarney asks, ‘What do you call yourselves. Not beggars?’ Nell replies she doesn’t know what else they are (166). Jarley herself is conscious that she is an entrepreneur and is comically careful to distinguish her travelling exhibition from ‘open-air wagrancy’ of the ‘Richardson’s’ type. Her snug caravan sets her apart from any gypsy riff-raff living in tents.
Nell and the grandfather also see gypsy camps on their wanderings. Dickens mentions ‘low, arched gipsy tents, common to those people’ (253). A semi-deserted camp is the location of the card playing scene in Chapter XLII. A solitary male gypsy is a projected accomplice in the theft of Mrs. Jarley’s cash box by Nell’s heavily indebted grandfather. Gypsy and gamblers Jowl and List talk in a ‘Jargon’ (likely Dickens means the Romani language), which Nell naturally does not comprehend, other than its threatening character.
Borrow’s Zingali and sequels
Borrow’s introductory chapter to Zincali includes paragraphs concerned with his view of the situation of English gypsies. He begins with the declaration: ‘No country appears less adapted for that wandering life, which seems so natural to these people [gypsies], than England.’ Unlike Eastern European gypsies, they have no ‘wildernesses and forests’ to retreat to; ‘every inch of land is cultivated, and its produce watched with a jealous eye’ (19). He puts the number of English gypsies at a very modest 10,000 or fewer, out of a population of England and Wales of roughly 16 million. Yet, gypsies survive, and to a degree, flourish: Borrow explains this briefly in Zincali, and at length in his semi-autobiographical novels Lavengro (1851), begun in 1843, and The Romany Rye: A Sequel to Lavengro (1857).
Borrow’s English gypsies are, for the author, closer to the historical gypsy tribes of the storied European past. While the debased gypsies of Spain are compelled by the authorities to live in fixed abodes; ‘in England the covered cart and the little tent are the houses of the Gypsy, and he seldom remains more than three days in the same place’ (Zincali 19). Borrow’s semi-fictional gypsy spokesperson Ursula Herne declares, ‘We are not over fond of gorgios, brother, and we hates basket makers, and folks that live in caravans … I hate houses, brother, and those who live in them’ (Romany Rye 69). A gorgio is a person who is not a gypsy, whoever she or he might be otherwise.
That Nell and her grandfather encounter gypsies on their wanderings is hardly surprising: ‘Were there not gypsies on the common half a mile from one’s homestead, and a dingle at the end of the lane?’, commented Borrow’s editor in the introduction to Lavengro. Quoting his folk hero, Jasper Petulengro, in the introduction to the second edition of Zincali (1842), Borrow is more pessimistic: ‘the chok-engre (police) pursue us from place to place, and the gorgios are become either so poor or miserly, that they grudge our cattle a bite of grass by the way side, and ourselves a yard of ground to light a fire upon’ (Zincali, 248). The comment reflects the 1835 legal requirement that boroughs have their own police forces.
Petulengro, as effective hero of Lavengro and The Romany Rye, has the unusual distinction of bearing a strictly Romany name, meaning ‘head of the clan “Smith”‘, from petul/petalo (horseshoe) and engro (master, fellow). A lavengro is a word master, referring in this instance to Borrow. A rye (rai) is a gentleman, hence Romany Rye. Borrow lists some number of Anglicised clan names: Stanleys, Lovells, Coopers (Wardo-engres or wheelwrights), Hernes, Balors. Clans informally divide England into territories: Lovells gravitate towards London; Coopers the Thames Valley; Hernes, Yorkshire (Zincali 25-6). Typically, Borrow’s English gypsies speak fluent English intermixed with Romany words or phrases. Here is Jasper Petulengro speaking about his father and mother being transported for theft:
‘When my father and mother were bitchadey pawdel, which, to tell you the truth, they were, for chiding wafodo dloovu, they left me all they had, which was not a little’ (Lavengro 102-3).
It is not clear if Petulengro and his family speak Romany exclusively ‘at home’. As far as they are concerned, Romany is a purely oral language. ‘George’ asks Jasper if he regrets not being able to read or write and is told no (Romany Rye 54-5).
Petulengro is an ex-pugilist and a horse dealer. Borrow characterises those occupations as typical of the English male gypsy, with horse trading predominating. Chapter XVI of Romany Rye begins with the Petulengro tribe preparing for a horse fair, ‘a great bustle, clipping and trimming certain ponies and old horses’, preparing to sell them. By two that afternoon, they have sold them at a profit. Gypsies, explains Petulengro, do not trade in the better class of horses because they will be inevitably accused of having stolen them. One of the gypsy trademarks is a great whip ‘which are at present in general use amongst horse-traffickers, under the title of jockey whips’ (Zingali 21). Petulengro cracks his so loudly ‘that the report was nearly equal to that of a pocket pistol’ (Lavengro 99). The horse fair at Norwich attracts a gypsy encampment of carts and low tents: men on horseback ‘clad something after the fashion of rustic jockeys, form a circus-like ring and … exhibit their horsemanship, rushing past each other, in and out, after the manner of a reel, the tall man occasionally balancing himself upon the saddle, and standing erect on one foot’ (Lavengro 99).
‘George’ meets other itinerants on his travels. A wandering Methodist preacher and his wife never sleep under a roof unless the weather is very severe (Lavengro 401). A family of tinkers named Slingsby – what could be finer than to be one’s own master, declares George – are being driven off the roads by a half-and-half (half gypsy, half gorgio)(Lavengro LXVIII, passim). The tinker fills a need in a rural economy that depends on itinerants to mend kettles and saucepans, fabricate horseshoes, weave and sell baskets, and supply villagers with dress fabrics: Borrow’s (semi-fictional?) temporary partner Isopel Berners drives a donkey cart from village to village, selling silks and linen (Lavengro 465-6).
Borrow tells us that ‘many remarkable characters have travelled the roads of England.’ Some were entertainers, broadly speaking. The English villager of Borrow’s 1820s and 30s was addicted to wagering, hence the popularity itinerant boxers and wrestlers enjoyed by challenging locals. ‘George’ was present at a prize fight ‘staged in a green meadow a few miles from N (Norwich).’ It was ‘got up’ by an impresario called Thurtell; he who ‘first introduced bruising and bloodbath amid rural scenes’ (Zincali, 22). Borrow describes three itinerants with evocative names: Hopping Ned, Biting Giles, Hull over the Head Jack. For a while they supposedly made good livings out of challenging credulous villagers to feats of strength that look simple enough until they fail to match them (R. R. 261 continued).
In the 1820s and 30s, it was common for villagers to observe an informal radius of maybe twenty miles from home. Hence itinerants’ value to the rural community; including gypsies, who brought certain skills with them and functioned as entertainers. The 1841 census set out to record the British population by using the household as the census metric. A vivid miscellany of men and women who did not fit this mould is to be found, in semi-fictionalised form, in the writings of two sympathetic observers/novelists. Dickens’ genius was to create a subculture of itinerants that was sufficiently exaggerated to catch the reader’s attention. Borrow dealt partially in fact (as he saw it) and partially in fiction to present a vivid picture of British gypsy life: overly romantic, yet surprisingly straightforward considering the period’s prejudices and preconceptions.
Addendum: Enumerators conducting the 1851 census attached ‘gapes’ or ‘gypsy’ to a small number of families recorded in various places in the South and North of England. Subjects were able to give years of birth, relationships (husbands, wives, children), and occasionally male professions (hawker, horse dealer). A family may be recorded ‘sleeping in tents’; ‘tent or covered wagon’. A few families had addresses. Some lived in workhouses. See more here.
Notes & references
Borrow, George. The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1914.
—- Lavengro: The Scholar—the Gypsy—The Priest. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1907.
—- The Romany Rye. 2 vols. London, J.M. Dent & Co., 1906
Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz, London: Hazell,Watson & Viney, Ltd. N.d.
—- The Old Curiosity Shop. London: Hazell, Watson & Viney Ltd. N.d.