These two letters, dated the 5th and 19th of May, 1882, were in answer to a short one from a clergyman of the Church of England, acknowledging the receipt of a copy of my Reminiscences of Childhood, etc., which contained an Appendix on John Bunyan and the Gipsies. The text represents the article as originally written. I endeavoured, unsuccessfully, to get another reading of this book before saying that “no reference was made in it to mine.” I alluded, from memory, to my part of it. On examination I find that the only indirect reference to it is the following:—“Mr. Simson, in his History of the Gipsies [that is, in the Disquisition on the Gipsies] asserts that there is not a tinker or scissors-grinder in Great Britain that cannot talk this language; and my own experience agrees with his declaration, to this extent—that they all have some knowledge of it, or claim to have it, however slight it may be,” (p. 4). I did not express myself so absolutely as represented by Mr. Leland, who did not see fit to mention the double authorship of the book; the subject of which I took up from where it was left by Walter Simson. This double authorship may prove a little confusing to the reader when the book is alluded to. See second note at page 19. In The English Gipsies, etc., Mr. Leland writes:—“I asked a Copt scribe if he were Muslim, and he replied, ‘La, ana Gipti’ (‘No, I am a Copt’) pronouncing the word Gipti, or Copt, so that it might readily be taken for ‘Gipsy.’ And learning that romi is the Coptic for a man, I was again startled; and when I found tema (tem, land) and other Romany words in ancient Egyptian (vide Brugsch. Grammaire, etc.) it seemed as if there were still many mysteries to solve in this strange language.” Of some Egyptian Gipsies Mr. Leland says that “they all resembled the one whom I have described . . . They all differed slightly, as I thought, from the ordinary Egyptians in their appearance” (p. 193). Tacitus makes Caius Cassius, in the time of Nero, say:—“At present we have in our service whole nations of slaves, the scum of mankind, collected from all quarters of the globe; a race of men who bring with them foreign rites, and the religion of their country, or probably no religion at all.”—Murphy’s Translation. Perhaps the most interesting scene connected with the Gipsy language in Scotland, given in the History, is that at St. Boswell’s (pp. 309–318). The word “Tinkler,” assumed by and applied to the Scotch Gipsies, seems to have been used from a desire to escape the legal responsibility attaching to the word “Gipsy.” It is not only puzzling, but provoking to decide how to treat a writer like Mr. Leland, for sometimes he shows a great deal of knowledge of his subject, and sometimes apparently nothing of it—one assertion contradicting another on the same question. What in reality has an antipathy between birds, or the idea of “people of self-conscious culture and the man and factory,” or the destiny of the American Indians to do with the destiny of the Gipsies? For he says, “Gipsies in England are passing away as rapidly as Indians in North America” (The English Gipsies, Pref. X.). As a native of the United States, Mr. Leland must know that these Indians become extinct, and of the Gipsies in England that although there are comparatively few “dwellers in tents” of full blood, so called, there are many, many thousands of more or less mixed blood following various callings, or in various positions in life, as he has frequently admitted. The distinction between “old-fashioned” Gipsies and other members of the tribe is but trifling with the subject.
The following extracts from The English Gipsies and their Language are interesting:—
“Other writers have had much to say of their incredible distrust of Gorgios and unwillingness to impart their language, but I have always found them obliging and communicative” (Pref. V.).—“In every part of the world it is extremely difficult to get Romany words even from intelligent Gipsies, although they may be willing with all their heart to communicate them” (p. 17).—“Now the reader is possibly aware that of all difficult tasks, one of the most difficult is to induce a disguised Gipsy, or even a professed one, to utter a word of Romany to a man not of the blood” (p. 37).—“Be it remembered, reader, that in Germany, at the present day, the mere fact of being a Gipsy is still treated as a crime” (p. 74).—“Though the language of the Gipsies has been kept a great secret for centuries, still a few words have in England oozed out here and there from some unguarded crevice” (p. 78).—“The very fact that they hide as much as they can of their Gipsy life and nature from the Gorgios would of itself indicate the depths of singularity concealed beneath their apparent life” (p. 153).—“Behind it all . . . . the fierce spirit of social exile from the world in which they lived . . . and the joyous consciousness of a secret tongue and hidden ways” (p. 156).—“A feeling of free-masonry, and of guarding a social secret, long after they leave the roads and become highly reputable members of society. But they have a secret, and no one can know them who has not penetrated it” (p. 174).
With all that has been said, the words which I have put in italics have a curious meaning—that the Gipsies in giving their language to “strangers” “may be willing with all their heart to communicate them”! I have explained this subject at length in the Disquisition (pp. 281 and 282) in reference to Mr. Borrow and others, not in regard to the willingness and stupidity, but the shuffling of the Gipsy in giving the meaning of words, although isolated and abstract ideas might occasionally puzzle some of them; for they translated to Mr. Borrow the Apostles’ Creed, sentence by sentence. The Lord’s Prayer, given by Mr. Borrow, Mr. Leland admits to be “pure English Gipsy” (p. 70). I do not think Mr. Leland states, with what stock of words and how acquired, he first approached the Gipsies, and how he used them, to get inside of the guard of the tribe. In the Preface to The English Gipsies and their Language, Mr. Leland says that all that it contains “was gathered directly from the Gipsies themselves” (v.); that he did not take “anything from Simson, Hoyland, or any other writer on the Romany race in England”; and that nothing is a “re-warming of that which was gathered by others” (x.). All that appears strictly true; yet he says nothing of how he was “put on the track for repeating or illustrating an ‘oft-told tale.’” But he says:—
“If I have not given in this book a sketch of the history of the Gipsies, or statistics of their numbers, or accounts of their social condition in different countries, it is because nearly everything of the kind may be found in the works of George Borrow and Walter Simson” (xi.).
He did not find much of the kind mentioned in Mr. Borrow’s books, so far as I remember, and omitted to say that I had written very fully on the points stated. It would have been interesting to have been told by Mr. Leland about his being “puzzled and muddled” at what he saw at Cobham Fair, how he came to write, nine years before that, as follows:—
“There have been thousands of swell Romany chals who have moved in sporting circles of a higher class than they are to be found in at the present day” (p. 92).—“It may be worth while to state, in this connection, that Gipsy blood intermingled with Anglo-Saxon, when educated, generally results in intellectual and physical vigour” (p. 174).—And where was it that he found the idea that John Bunyan was a member of the Gipsy race (p. 63), if it was not as elaborately given in my Disquisition?
One of Mr. Leland’s “confident assertions” is that “the English Gipsy cares not a farthing ‘to know anything about his race as it exists in foreign countries, or whence it came’”; which is not a fact. He seems to have misinterpreted the English Gipsy peculiarity which assimilates in appearance to the native English one, as I have written thus in the History of the Gipsies:—“Though Gipsies everywhere, they differ in some respects in the various countries which they inhabit. For example, an English Gipsy of pugilistic tendencies will, in a vapouring way, engage to thrash a dozen of his Hungarian brethren” (p. 359). And of the more mixed kind of Gipsies, I have said:—“In Great Britain the Gipsies are entitled, in one respect at least, to be called Englishmen, Scotchmen, or Irishmen; for their general ideas as men, as distinguished from their being Gipsies, and their language indicate them at once to be such, nearly as much as the common natives of these countries” (p. 372).—What is described very fully throughout the History, and especially in the note at pp. 342 and 343, about the different colours or castes of the Gipsies, meets Mr. Leland’s remarks about those who left India. Thus:—“What are full-blood Gipsies, to commence with? The idea itself is intangible; for, by adopting, more or less, wherever they have been, others into their body, during their singular history, a pure Gipsy, like the pure Gipsy language, is doubtless nowhere to be found” (p. 342). With the limited space at his disposal for his cyclopÆdia article, Mr. Leland could not be expected to tell us much in it about the Gipsies. In it he says that “their hair seldom turns gray, even in advanced age, unless there be ‘white’ blood in their veins”; that, “like North American Indians, the Gipsies all walk with their feet straight”; and that “there are nearly 100 English Gipsy family names, most of which are represented in America.” And further:—“At the present day the Romany is the life of the entire vagabond population of the roads in England, it being almost impossible to find a tinker or petty hawker who is not part Gipsy. There are now but a few hundred full-blooded tent Gipsy persons in England (1874), but of . . . house-dwellers, who keep their Gipsy blood a secret, and of half-breeds . . . or of those affiliated by blood, all of whom possess the great secret of the Romany language to a greater or less degree, there are perhaps 20,000.” “The tinkers in England are all Gipsies.”
Including all of “the blood” in various positions in life, there are doubtless vastly more of the tribe in England than 20,000, considering the time they have been in the country, and the healthy and prolific nature of the race. The same remark applies to The English Gipsies and their Language.
