of England,” brought forth my first letter upon the condition of the poor Gipsy children as it appeared in the Standard, Daily Chronicle, and nearly every other daily paper on August 14th of last year:—“Some years since my attention was drawn to the condition of these poor neglected children, of whom there are many families eking out an existence in the Leicestershire, Derbyshire, and Staffordshire lanes. Two years since a pitiful appeal was made in one of our local papers asking me to take up the cause of the poor Gipsy children; but I have deferred doing so till now, hoping that some one with time and money at his disposal would come to the rescue. Sir, a few weeks since our legislators took proper steps to prevent the maiming of the little show children, who are put through excruciating practices to please a British public, and they would have done well at the same time if they had taken steps to prevent the warping influence of a vagrant’s life having its full force upon the tribes of little Gipsy children, dwelling in calico tents, within the sound of church bells—if living under the body of an old cart, protected by patched coverlets, can be called living in tents—on the roadside in the midst of grass, sticks, stones, and mud; and they would have done well also if they had put out their hand to rescue from idleness, ignorance, and heathenism our roadside arabs, i.e., the children living in vans, and who attend fairs, wakes, &c. Recently I came across some of these wandering tribes, and the following facts gleaned from them will show that missionaries and schoolmasters have not done much for them. Moses Holland, who has been a Gipsy nearly all his life, says he knows about two hundred and fifty families of Gipsies in ten of the Midland counties and thinks that a similar proportion will be found in the rest of the United Kingdom. He has seen as many as ten tents of Gipsies within a distance of five miles. He thinks there will be an average of five children in each tent. He has seen as many as ten or twelve children in some tents, and not many of
them able to read or write. His child of six months old—with his wife ill at the same time in the tent—sickened, died, and was ‘laid out’ by him, and it was also buried out of one of those wretched abodes on the roadside at Barrow-upon-Soar, last January. When the poor thing died he had not sixpence in his pocket. In shaking hands with him as we parted his face beamed with gladness, and he said that I was the first who had held out the hand to him during the last twenty years. At another time later on I came across Bazena Clayton, who said that she had had sixteen children, fifteen of whom are alive, several of them being born in a roadside tent. She says that she was married out of one of these tents; and her brother died and was buried out of a tent at Packington, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch. This poor woman knows about three hundred families of Gipsies in eleven of the Midland and Eastern counties, and has herself, so she says, four lots of Gipsies travelling in Lincolnshire at the present time. She said she could not read herself, and thinks that not one Gipsy in twenty can. She has travelled all her life. Her mother, named Smith, of whom there are not a few, is the mother of fifteen children, all of whom were born in a tent. A Gipsy lives, but one can scarcely tell how; they generally locate for a time near hen-roosts, potato-camps, turnip-fields, and game-preserves. They sell a few clothes-lines and clothes-pegs, but they seldom use such things themselves. Washing would destroy their beauty. Telling fortunes to servant girls and old maids is a source of income to some of them. They sleep, but in many instances lie crouched together, like so many dogs, regardless of either sex or age. They have blood, bone, muscle, and brains, which are applied in many instances to wrong purposes. To have between three and four thousand men and women, and fifteen thousand children classed in the census as vagrants and vagabonds, roaming all over the country, in ignorance and evil training, that carries peril with it, is not a pleasant look-out for the future; and I
claim on the grounds of justice and equity, that if these poor children, living in vans and tents and under old carts, are to be allowed to live in these places, they shall be registered in a manner analogous to the Canal Boats Act of 1877, so that the children may be brought under the Compulsory Clauses of the Education Acts, and become Christianised and civilised as other children.”
The foregoing letter, as it appeared in the Standard, brought forth the following leading article upon the subject the following day, August 15th, in which the writer says:—“We yesterday published a letter from Mr. George Smith, whose efforts to ameliorate and humanise the floating and transitory population of our canals and navigable rivers have already borne good fruit, in which he calls attention to the deserted and almost hopeless lot of English Gipsy children. Moses Holland—the Hollands are a Gipsy family almost as old as the Lees or the Stanleys, and a Holland always holds high rank among the ‘Romany’ folk—assures Mr. Smith that in ten of the Midland counties he knows some two hundred and fifty families of Gipsies, and that none of their children can read or write. Bazena Clayton, an old lady of caste, almost equal to that of a Lee or a Holland, confirms the story. She has lived in tents all her life. She was born in a tent, married from a tent, has brought up a family of sixteen children, more or less, under the same friendly shelter, and expects to breathe her last in a tent. That she can neither read nor write goes without saying; although doubtless she knows well enough how to ‘kair her patteran,’ or to make that strange cross in the dust which a true Gipsy alway leaves behind him at his last place of sojourn, as a mark for those of his tribe who may come upon his track. ‘Patteran,’ it may be remarked, is an almost pure Sanscrit word cognate with our own ‘path;’ and the least philological raking among the chaff of the Gipsy dialect will show their secret argot to be, as Mr. Leland calls it, ‘a curious old tongue, not merely allied to Sanscrit, but perhaps in
point of age an elder though vagabond sister or cousin of that ancient language.’ No Sanscrit or even Greek scholar can fail to be struck by the fact that, in the Gipsy tongue, a road is a ‘drum,’ to see is to ‘dicker,’ to get or take to ‘lell,’ and to go to ‘jall;’ or, after instances so pregnant, to agree with Professor von Kogalnitschan that ‘it is interesting to be able to study a Hindu dialect in the heart of Europe.’ Mr. Smith, however, being a philanthropist rather than a philologist, takes another view of the question. His anxiety is to see the Gipsies—and especially the Gipsy children—reclaimed. ‘A Gipsy,’ he reminds us, ‘lives, but one can scarcely tell how; they generally locate for a time near hen-roosts, potato-camps, turnip-fields, and game-preserves. They sell a few clothes-lines and clothes-pegs; but they seldom use such things themselves. Washing would destroy their beauty . . . To have between three and four thousand men and women, and eight or ten thousand children, classed in the census as vagrants and vagabonds, roaming all over the country in ignorance and evil training, is not a pleasant look-out for the future; and I claim that if these poor children, living in vans and tents and under old carts, are to be allowed to live in these places, they shall be registered in a manner analogous to the Canal Boats Act, so that the children may be brought under the Education Acts, and become Christianised and civilised.’
“Mr. Smith, it is to be feared, hardly appreciates the insuperable difficulty of the task he proposes. The true Gipsy is absolutely irreclaimable. He was a wanderer and a vagabond upon the face of the earth before the foundations of Mycenæ were laid or the plough drawn to mark out the walls of Rome; and such as he was four thousand years ago or more, such he still remains, speaking the same tongue, leading the same life, cherishing the same habits, entertaining the same wholesome or unwholesome hatred of all civilisation, and now, as then, utterly devoid of even the simplest rudiments of religious belief. His whole attitude of mind is
negative. To him all who are not Gipsies, like himself, are ‘Gorgios,’ and to the true Gipsy a ‘Gorgio’ is as hateful as is a ‘cowan’ to a Freemason. It would be interesting to speculate whether, when the Romany folk first began their wanderings, the ‘Gorgios’ were not—as the name would seem to indicate—the farmers or permanent population of the earth; and whether the nomad Gipsy may not still hate the ‘Gorgio’ as much as Cain hated Abel, Ishmael Isaac, and Esau Jacob. Certain in any case it is that the Gipsy, however civilised he may appear, remains, as Mr. Leland describes him, ‘a character so entirely strange, so utterly at variance with our ordinary conceptions of humanity, that it is no exaggeration whatever to declare that it would be a very difficult task for the best writer to convey to the most intelligent reader any idea of such a nature.’ The true Gipsy is, to begin with, as devoid of superstition as of religion. He has no belief in another world, no fear of a future state, nor hope for it, no supernatural object of either worship or dread—nothing beyond a few old stories, some Pagan, some Christian, which he has picked up from time to time, and to which he holds—much as a child holds to its fairy tales—uncritically and indifferently. Ethical distinctions are as unknown to him as to a kitten or a magpie. He is kindly by nature, and always anxious to please those who treat him well, and to win their affection. But the distinction between affection and esteem is one which he cannot fathom; and the precise shade of meum and tuum is as absolutely unintelligible to him as was the Hegelian antithesis between nichts and seyn to the late Mr. John Stuart Mill. To make the true Gipsy we have only to add to this an absolute contempt for all that constitutes civilisation. The Gipsy feels a house, or indeed anything at all approaching to the idea of a permanent dwelling, to amount to a positive restraint upon his liberty. He can live on hedgehog and acorns—though he may prefer a fowl and potatoes not strictly his own. Wherever a hedge gives shelter he will roll himself
up and sleep. And it is possibly because he has no property of his own that he is so slow to recognise the rights of property in others. But above all, his tongue—the weird, corrupt, barbarous Sanscrit ‘patter’ or ‘jib,’ known only to himself and to those of his blood—is the keynote of his strange life. In spite of every effort that has been made to fathom it, the Gipsy dialect is still unintelligible to ‘Gorgios’—a few experts such as Mr. Borrow alone excepted. But wherever the true Gipsy goes he carries his tongue with him, and a Romany from Hungary, ignorant of English as a Chippeway or an Esquimaux, will ‘patter’ fluently with a Lee, a Stanley, a Locke, or a Holland, from the English Midlands, and make his ‘rukkerben’ at once easily understood. Nor is this all, for there are certain strange old Gipsy customs which still constitute a freemasonry. The marriage rites of Gipsies are a definite and very significant ritual. Their funeral ceremonies are equally remarkable. Not being allowed to burn their dead, they still burn the dead man’s clothes and all his small property, while they mourn for him by abstaining—often for years—from something of which he was fond, and by taking the strictest care never to even mention his name.
“What are we to do with children in whom these strange habits and beliefs, or rather wants of belief, are as much part of their nature as is their physical organisation? Darwin has told us how, after generations had passed, the puppy with a taint of the wolf’s blood in it would never come straight to its master’s feet, but always approach him in a semicircle. Not Kuhleborhn nor Undine herself is less susceptible of alien culture than the pure-blooded Gipsy. We can domesticate the goose, we can tame the goldfinch and the linnet; but we shall never reclaim the guinea-fowl, or accustom the swallow to a cage. Teach the Gipsy to read, or even to write; he remains a Gipsy still. His love of wandering is as keen as is the instinct of a migratory bird for its annual passage; and exactly as the prisoned cuckoo
of the first year will beat itself to death against its bars when September draws near, so the Gipsy, even when most prosperous, will never so far forsake the traditions of his tribe as to stay long in any one place. His mind is not as ours. A little of our civilisation we can teach him, and he will learn it, as he may learn to repeat by rote the signs of the zodiac or the multiplication table, or to use a table napkin, or to decorously dispose of the stones in a cherry tart. But the lesson sits lightly on him, and he remains in heart as irreclaimable as ever. Already, indeed, our Gipsies are leaving us. They are not dying out, it is true. They are making their way to the Far West, where land is not yet enclosed, where game is not property, where life is free, and where there is always and everywhere room to ‘hatch the tan’ or put up the tent. Romany will, in all human probability, be spoken on the other side of the Atlantic years after the last traces of it have vanished from amongst ourselves. We begin even now to miss the picturesque aspects of Gipsy life—the tent, the strange dress, the nomadic habits. English Gipsies are no longer pure and simple vagrants. They are tinkers, or scissor-grinders, or basket-makers, or travel from fair to fair with knock-’em-downs, or rifle galleries, or itinerant shows. Often they have some ostensible place of residence. But they preserve their inner life as carefully as the Jews in Spain, under the searching persecution of the Inquisition, preserved their faith for generation upon generation; and even now it is a belief that when, for the sake of some small kindness or gratuity, a Gipsy woman has allowed her child to be baptised, she summons her friends, and attempts to undo the effect of the ceremony by subjecting the infant to some weird, horrible incantation of Eastern origin, the original import of which is in all probability a profound mystery to her. There is a quaint story of a Yorkshire Gipsy, a prosperous horse-dealer, who, becoming wealthy, came up to town, and, amongst other sights, was shown a goldsmith’s window. His sole