“These gipsy humanities”: G. P. R. James and the Fictionalization of Gypsies in the 1830s

Abstract Studies of the representations of Gypsies in nineteenth-century English literature generally skirt the 1820s and 1830s, even though arguments have been made that there was a significant shift in the image of the Gypsy at this time, from a romantically unknowable figure to a familiar part of the British landscape and, increasingly, an alter ego for the writer. This article fills the gap and tests the argument by examining Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Disowned (1828) and, at greater length, G. P. R. James’s The Gipsy (1835). Both writers use the plot devices available to them as romance novelists to create characters who mediate between Gypsies and non-Gypsies and function as spokesmen for Gypsy ways. It is these characters who idealize Gypsy life, yet their idealizations are ironized and psychologized in such a way that the objectivity of their views is in doubt. As characters, they powerfully anticipate the Victorian notion of the “Romany rye”—the non-Gypsy who lives with Gypsies for extended periods, adopting their lifestyle. Yet before that particular literary construction emerged, Bulwer-Lytton and James were putting pressure on the assumptions behind it, questioning the idea that Gypsy culture was open to meaningful appropriation and highlighting the near impossibility of truly mediating Gypsy experience to non-Gypsy readers.