Deborah Epstein Nord. Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-023113704. Price: US$41.50.

Deborah Epstein Nord’s Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807 – 1930 has been long-awaited by those researching the representation of Gypsies in Britain and, of course, by appreciators of her 1995 work, Walking the Streets: Women, Representation and the Victorian City. This new text marks a significant development in scholarship on Gypsies in the nineteenth century and beyond, as the first monograph entirely devoted to an in-depth study of the construction of this strangely ubiquitous yet enigmatic figure in the literature and non-fiction of the period from a literary-critical perspective. Nord’s breadth of study is ambitious, particularly in a work of just over two hundred pages. Starting with, in the first chapter, “A ‘Mingled Race’: Walter Scott’s Gypsies”, a reading of his memorable character, Meg Merrilies, in Guy Mannering (1815) as a culturally inscribed “genderless primal ancestor”, she nonetheless emphasises the importance of history and the narrative of empire in this early figuring of the Gypsy (41). The two most impressive chapters are those dealing with “‘Marks of Race’: The Impossible Gypsy in George Eliot” (Chapter Four) and, by way of a conclusion, “The Phantom Gypsy: Invisibility, Writing, and History”(Chapter Six). In dealing with Eliot, Nord makes intelligent connections between her narrative poem, The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1874 – 1876). These are, she notes, “the two end points […] of Eliot’s long meditation on the outsider”, and the differences between them reveal much about not only the narrative of race, but also, fascinatingly, gender as well (101). Chapter Six contains crucial, if brief, readings of the novella that marks the chronological boundary of Nord’s perspective, D. H. Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930) and the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1891). However, following brilliant assertions about the visibility of the Gypsy in British fiction and the deliberately mythologized origins of the Gypsy diaspora, it is troubling to find speculations about the transparency of the Gypsies’ past, had a written record existed. This seems to be rather a betrayal of the rigorously textual approach taken throughout the book, a last-minute mourning for some lost, authentic Gypsy that gorgio writings have somehow displaced. The point, one might argue, is that the fruitless search for the authentic Gypsy is precisely what has led to so many of the problematic images analysed in this work. Included in this study is the concept of the Gypsy as a rural anachronism, looking to the poetry of Matthew Arnold, John Clare and William Wordsworth for pertinent and easily recognisable examples in “Vagrant and Poet: The Gypsy and the ‘Strange Disease of Modern Life’” (Chapter Two). It is refreshing to find a reading of Arnold’s “transcendent” Gypsy that goes beyond the oft-quoted poem, “The Scholar-Gipsy” (1853), using “Resignation” (1849) and “Thyrsis” (1866) to broaden the scope and deepen the analysis (45). Nord’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s attitude to vagrancy is debatable, however. Basing much of her conclusion about the poet’s relationship with Gypsies on her own close reading of “Gypsies” (1807), where the poet finds a group around a campfire sitting apparently motionless, she notes that “he could only imagine himself as the detached witness of change and walker ‘to and fro,’ failing to see that vagrancy could involve peripatetic and perhaps contemplative, not just sedentary, phases of life” (68). On the contrary, several of Wordsworth’s poems demonstrate him embracing characters engaged in precisely this kind of peripatetic contemplation. For example, in “The Pedlar” (1798), a young man’s poetic obsession with “the shades of difference / As they lie hid in all exterior forms” leads him to …