William Cowper’s Gypsies

Within William Cowper’s The Task is a short description of a “tribe” of gypsies. Exploring the situation of the gypsies when Cowper wrote, and examining the position of the gypsy passage within the text, this article offers a close reading of the poem that argues that these lines add an interestingly troublesome edge to Cowper’s work, disrupting in various subtle ways many of the conclusions and interpretations regularly drawn from Cowper’s long poem regarding wandering, idleness, and difference and simultaneously revealing a good deal about the perception of “the gypsy” in the later eighteenth century.