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If English literature of the nineteenth century contains within it a constant, ubiquitous marker of otherness, of non-Englishness or foreignness, it is the gypsy. A figure of literary origins and anthropological interest, the gypsy could signify social marginality, nomadism, alienation, and lawlessness. Unlike the colonial subject, who remained a remote and wholly foreign figure, or the Jew, who, though outsider, functioned within English society, the gypsy hovered on the outskirts of the English world, unassimilable, a domestic and visible but socially peripheral character. Indeed, much of the literary and folkloric power of the gypsy was derived from the notion that, through error or kidnapping (a crime with which gypsies were commonly thought to be associated), an English child might end up in the gypsy world or a gypsy child in the English.l The two realms were imagined as contiguous but separate, making possible dramas of mistaken and transformed identity. In Walter Scott's Guy Mannering (1815), gypsies help to kidnap and then to rescue from obscurity a Scottish laird's son; in George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy (1868), in a reversal of Scott's plot, a gypsy princess is raised by Spanish Christians and then reclaimed by her people (Semmel 104-06) . Even Matthew Arnold's "Scholar-Gipsy" (1853) depends upon the notion that an Oxford student could disappear and be absorbed into "that wild brotherhood" (line 38) to be glimpsed only occasionally by passersby.
In nineteenth-century lore, gypsies were considered not merely a distinct group with specific social practices and means of subsistence but a separate race. Many who romanticized gypsies and many who regarded them as pariahs shared the belief that the Romany "race," however mixed with other races it might have become, was a breed apart, possessed of "black blood," swarthy complexion, and curling dark hair (Mayall 75). The gypsy kidnapping or switching of babies served as a literary trope for representing-and indeed accounting for-anomalous types within a homogeneous and insular middle-class English world. A writer for the Illustrated London News in 1856 described the appeal of a wayside gypsy camp as "racy in [its] savour of wood smoke and open air, . . . suggesting of escape from the mill-horse round of daily life." By contrast, ordinary English life seemed "formal, hedge-clipped, much-inclosed, well-farmed, law-respecting" (qtd....