Was John Bunyan a Gipsy?

by James Simson

New York, 2d October, 1882.

WAS JOHN BUNYAN A GIPSY?

I. [9]

The first notice of my pamphlet, under the title of John Bunyan and the Gipsies, that has come under my observation I found in the Daily News of the 15th August. In the preface to it I said:—“This little publication is intended, in the first place, for the British Press,” as an appeal for a hearing on the subjects discussed in it. The time that elapsed between receiving the pamphlet and writing the notice of it was too short to enable almost any one to do justice to it, for that required time to think over it as having reference to my previous writings, to which the two letters to an English clergyman contained in it were merely an allusion.

The writer is hardly correct when he speaks of the “long debated question of whether the illustrious author of the Pilgrim’s Progress was of Gipsy race.” This question has not been even once “debated” in England, so far as I, living in America, am aware of. I stated it fully in Notes and Queries on the 12th December, 1857, and more fully in the History of the Gipsies, published by Sampson, Low & Co. in 1865; again in Notes and Queries on the 27th March, 1875, with reference to the “fairish appearance” of Bunyan, and the existence of his surname (variously spelt) in England before the Gipsies arrived in it; then in Contributions to Natural History and Papers on Other Subjects, and The English Universities and John Bunyan, and The Encyclopædia Britannica and the Gipsies; then in The Scottish Churches and the Gipsies; and, finally, in the pamphlet alluded to. So that, instead of having “nothing to say” to the “fairish appearance” and the surname of Bunyan, I fully anticipated these questions, and disposed of them as they were brought forward by people at a venture, who seemed to know nothing of the subject they were treating. Much as I have published on this question, I am not aware that any one has ever attempted to set aside my facts, arguments, and proof that John Bunyan was of the Gipsy race. My “opponents” (so called) assume that he was of the ordinary English race, and therefore was, and must be held to have been, such till it is proved that he was not that, but of the Gipsy race, or something else; a most unreasonable position for any one to take up. So far from people stating the kind of proof they want, they simply pass over everything I have written on the subject, and repeat their untenable, meaningless, and oft-refuted assertions. Thus the Rev. John Brown, of Bunyan Church, Bedford, apparently knowing nothing of the Gipsy subject, and disregarding everything printed on it, and looking neither to the right nor the left, makes out from the surname that the illustrious dreamer’s family was a broken-down branch of the English aristocracy, instead of, as Bunyan himself told us, “the meanest and most despised of all the families in the land,” and “not of the Israelites,” that is, not Jews, but tinkers, that is, Gipsies of more or less mixed blood; so that his having been a tinker was in itself amply sufficient to prove Bunyan to have been of the Gipsy race; while it illustrated and confirmed his admission about “his father’s house” having been of the Gipsy tribe.

Having written so frequently, and at such length, on this subject, it would be impossible, at least unreasonable, to repeat in a newspaper article what I have done, and I must refer the reader to the various publications mentioned. I may allude to the scepticism of Blackwood, who will not believe that Bunyan was of the Gipsy race because he did not say so plainly, in the face of the legal and social responsibility; [10a] and to that of Mr. Groome, the writer on the Gipsies in the Encyclopædia Britannica, because he alluded to a Gipsy woman carrying off a child, and because his children did not bear the old-fashioned Gipsy Christian names which were adopted by the race after their arrival in Europe. I disposed of these trifling and meaningless objections in their proper places, and need not reproduce them here. [10b] The strangest thing advanced about Bunyan is the assertion that it is impossible he could have been a Gipsy, because the name existed in England before the race arrived in it. From this it would follow that there can be no Gipsies in England, or anywhere else, because they bear surnames common to the natives of the soil. The circumstances under which they adopted these, and how Gipsies of mixed blood are found of all colours, I have on previous occasions elaborately explained. Hence it can be said that the writer in the Daily News is not strictly correct when, in allusion to the two letters to an English clergyman, contained in the pamphlet, he says that I “have nothing to say to all this;” and that “this is really all the evidence, as well as all the argument, forthcoming on the subject.” This subject has no standing if we do not admit of the existence of a “ferocious prejudice of caste against the name of Gipsy”; and that in regard to the nationality of John Bunyan, “the question at issue is really not one of evidence, but of an unfortunate feeling of caste that bars the way against all investigation and proof.”

Apart from John Bunyan personally, the subject of the race to which he belonged has a very important bearing on the “social emancipation of the Gipsies” in the British Isles. There cannot be less than several hundred thousand of these in various positions in life—many, perhaps most of them, differing in no other way from the “ordinary natives” but that in respect to that part of their blood which is Gipsy, they have sprung, really or representatively, from the tent—the hive from which the whole of the Gipsy tribe have swarmed. Notwithstanding that, this fact carries certain mental peculiarities with it, which should be admitted as a preliminary step to a full social equality, should the incognito Gipsy element in society present itself for that purpose.

Since the above was written I have read with great interest the letter from “Thomas Bunyan, chief warder, Tower of London, and born in Roxburghshire,” in the Daily News of the 17th. The origin which he gives of the name is apparently the correct one, viz.: that “the first Bunyan was an Italian mason, who came to Melrose, and was at the building of that famous abbey in the year 1136;” and that “the oldest gravestone in the graveyard around Melrose Abbey has on it the name of Bunyan.” In my Disquisition on the Gipsies, published in 1865, I said:—“The name Bunyan would seem to be of foreign origin” (p. 519). It does not necessarily follow that the blood of the Italian mason flowed in John Bunyan’s veins, except by it having in some way got mixed with and merged in that of the Gipsy race. [11a]

II. [11b]

The following letter, which I addressed to-day to a clergyman of the Church of England, applies so well to the Rev. John Brown of Bunyan Church, Bedford, that it may be considered as the first part of my reply to his letter in the Daily News of the 22d August. The remainder will follow soon.