I answer, No.
No children in lovely, beautiful England, the bright star of the West, stand so much in need of help as do our poor canal and gipsy children, who are living outside our factory, educational, and sanitary laws, and, with some bright exceptions, religious influences.
Short Excursions and Rambles in the Bypaths of Gipsydom.
Some time ago a gipsy named Shaw was found in a Northamptonshire churchyard at midnight, asleep between the gravestones, with his fiddle by his side. When awakened by a wandering policeman crying out, “Now then, move on,” gipsy Shaw grunted and growled out, “Who’s there? What do you want, Mr. Devil? Wake these others up; they’ve been here longer than me, and when they goes I’ll go, and not till then, Mr. Devil; and so make yourself scarce.” The policeman saw, and in fact knew, that Shaw was a queer kind of customer, and he therefore let him snore and sleep among dead men’s bones till morning. On the following morning Mr. Policeman met gipsy Shaw with his fiddle (Boshomengro) under his arm, when he called out, “Halloo, Shaw, you’ve left your companions behind you after all.” “Yes,” said gipsy Shaw; “when I opened my eyes it was daylight, and the sun was shining in my face, and I thought over fresh considerations.”
At the present time the gipsies and other travellers in this country are among the dead men’s bones of backwood gipsy writers and their present-day sins and wrong-doings, with Mr. John Bull standing by, saying in effect to the lost gipsies and their children, “Snore on, sleep on; stick to your fiddles and the devil; care not a straw for either parsons or priests.”
If John Bull cares not, will not and won’t do for the children of travellers the same as he is doing for other children within his dominions, and what his Continental neighbours are doing for theirs, it is time the gipsies themselves “thought over fresh considerations,” and walked out into open day, and demanded the blessings of English civilized life in a way that will readily secure an attentive ear to the cries and wails of their children.
Thank God, a few writers of tales and stories of a healthy, interesting, elevating, and heavenly kind are coming to the rescue of the poor gipsy, canal, and other travelling children. May their name be Legion and their motto be Fairelie Thornton’s lines in the Sunday School Chronicle—
“Direct the words I say,
Oh, let them reach the heart;
Let there be wingèd words alway,
And light and life impart.”
On my way to Edinburgh in October, 1880, to read a paper before the Social Science Congress, upon the condition of our gipsies and their children, I took occasion to call at Leicester races on my way, and paddled ankle deep in mud and quagmire to try to ascertain how many gipsy and other travelling children there were upon the course living in tents and vans. At a rough calculation there would be fully four hundred children and two hundred men and women huddling together in eighty of these wretched temporary abodes. Not a score of the children, except a few snatches in the winter, were receiving any education other than such as is obtained upon a racecourse and its associations, giving and taking lessons in the initiatory stage of a gambler’s life. The following cases will give some idea of the state of morality amongst the wandering classes. Phillips, a gipsy from Maidstone, had in his van one woman and eleven children; Green, a gipsy from Bristol, had in his van two men, two women, and eleven children; Brinklow, a gipsy, had in his van two women and seven children; Lee, a gipsy from London, had in his tent two young men, one woman, and seven children; making a total of forty-seven men, women, and children of all ages and sizes, huddling together in these four tents and vans, not two of whom could read or write a sentence. Mrs. Brinklow said her eldest girl attended a Bible-class at Bristol in the winter, which led me to think that the gipsy girl could read, but on inquiry I found she could not tell a letter. Those who are spellbound by gipsy fascination and admire the “witching eyes” of picturesque human degradation and depravity, will consider this in the nineteenth century a state of civilization preparing us for the millennium, when the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and all tears be wiped away.
Last autumn I visited the gipsies at Cherry Island, near London, and found about thirty tents, in which there were between one and two hundred gipsy children growing up worse than Zulus. For one minute let us get inside one of the gipsy tents in which these children are born, and in which they live and die. It is about seven feet wide, sixteen feet long, and where the round top is highest, is about four feet and a half in height. It is covered with pieces of old canvas or sacking to keep out the cold and rain, and the entrance is closed with a kind of curtain; the fire by which they cook their meals is placed in a tin bucket pierced with holes. Some of the smoke from the burning sticks goes out of an opening in the top of the tent that serves as a chimney, while the rest of it fills the place and helps to keep their faces and hands a proper gipsy colour. The bed is a little straw laid on the damp ground, covered with a sack or sheet, as the case may be; an old soap-box or tea-chest serves both as cupboard and table. Here they live, father and mother, brothers and sisters, huddled up together. They live like pigs, and die like dogs. Washing is but little known amongst them; and of such luxuries as knives and forks, chairs and tables, plates and cups, they are very independent. They take their meals, and do what work they do, squatting on the ground; and the knives and forks they use are of the kind that Adam used, and sensitive when dipped in hot water. Lying, begging, and pretended fortune-telling have as much to do with their living as chair-mending, tinkering, and hawking. The heaviest work falls to the lot of the women, who may often be seen with a child upon their backs, another in their arms, and a heavily-laden basket by their side. The men lounge about the lanes and hedges with their dogs, whilst the children grow up in such ignorance and sin as to deserve the name of ditch-dwelling heathens.