Gypsies have been featured as main or incidental characters in various forms of fictional writing from the sixteenth century through to the present day, and, perhaps inevitably, this has occupied the attention of many scholars and commentators on the Gypsy presence in Britain. Nord contributes to this ever-growing field of investigation by focusing on a select body of writers at a particular if extended historical moment, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To a large extent the writers studied by Nord are self-selecting in that Gypsies provided a recurrent motif in their writings and were indicative of a broader fascination with the group or at least their symbolic potential. The main focus of the study is on works by such established poets and writers as John Clare, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, D. H. Lawrence, Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, and George Borrow, alongside the lesser known writers associated with the Gypsy Lore Society (GLS). Although the study claims to look at poems, novels, sketches, ethnographies, periodical articles, laws, memoirs, and graphic images, the emphasis is primarily on verse and fiction.

Nord's approach is to provide extensive descriptive passages to assist those unfamiliar with the works of these writers. She provides nuanced and perceptive glimpses into the texts and into the lives, character, nature, and motives of the writers themselves. John Clare, for example, is revealed as the collector of gypsy artifacts who learned to play gypsy songs and speak their slang. Indeed, Nord claims that he “had an imaginative and psychic identification with Gypsies in all phases of his life” (50). Such an identification, though, did not exist with all the writers, and Nord shows how they each adopted various inconsistent and ambiguous moral positions and responses to the Gypsies’ impermanence, alienation, and difference. Despite such differences, Nord concludes that the Gypsy has formed a “stock pastoral figure” (46) in these writings with repeated images of primitivism, lawlessness, mystery, cunning, sexual excess, savagery, and exoticism. The Gypsy is identified, following the work of Edward Said, as the perennial other, a marker of difference, and as a symbolic figure in a changing and urbanizing landscape. To this familiar argument about the romanticized image of the bucolic Gypsys and their function as “the other,” Nord adds an interesting and incisive gender analysis that picks up unconventional representations of masculinity and femininity, notably portrayed in the character of Meg Merrilees from Walter Scott's novel Guy Mannering. The book ends not with a conclusion but with the atypical writings of the Gypsy Sylvester Gordon Boswell and then, oddly, with a short coda on Gypsy representation on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council.

The strength of this book lies in its detailed author and textual analysis. However, the study becomes more problematic when the specific becomes extended into a range of associated ideas about the British imagination and British culture. The reader is told that Gypsy plots and characters, and encounters with Gypsies, were common features of nineteenth-century fiction (24–25), that nineteenth-century historians and other commentators were fascinated by Gypsies, that the single most important literary influence on the nineteenth-century fascination with Gypsies and their role in the cultural imagination was Walter Scott's novel Guy Mannering, and that the character Meg Merrilees should be seen as part of the unconscious memory of the Scottish nation. Nord claims that there was a general cultural preoccupation with the origin of the Gypsies (41). She finds the writers and scholars grouped beneath the GLS umbrella sophisticated, academically respectable, excellent linguists, and painstaking researchers. In broader terms Nord argues that there was a British “obsession” with Gypsies throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, seen in a distinctive British imagination and evidenced in the ubiquity and widespread dependence on the idea of the Gypsy and images of Gypsy life in British literature and culture.

Such assertions raise a set of questions. Nord's perspective on the GLS does not sufficiently engage with alternative analyses, including that presented in my own recent study, which is listed in the bibliography but for some reason not in the chapter dealing with this subject. The same is true for Nord's analysis of George Borrow, which neglects to consider the recent, incisive analysis of Wim Willems in a book again listed in the bibliography but not mentioned in the section dealing with this distinctive and controversial author. We are told that nineteenth-century historians were fascinated by Gypsies, but no example is given or any reference provided to any work by a historian investigating this group. While the idea of a literary character being representative of the unconscious memory of a nation is intriguing, the problems with proving this are not considered. More important, the assertion that the works of a selective, self-selecting group of writers can be taken as indicative of a much broader, distinctive, British fascination, obsession, or imagination is surely open to more critical examination. This group of authors, representative of a highbrow cultural tradition, certainly included Gypsy themes and references in many of their works, more than might have been expected, but the extent to which these influenced the popular imagination in relation to Gypsies or contributed to a more general obsession is far more difficult to substantiate. How, for example, can this be measured? Similarly, the idea that there was a dependence in British literature and culture on the idea of the Gypsy “other” is again to make a leap too far and sidelines the literary use of representations of blacks, Jews, and the Irish, around whom a similar set of images were created and about whom the same arguments could be made. The writers and scholars associated with the GLS could hardly be termed mainstream or representative and were rather a group of marginal and marginalized students of Gypsy life. The other writers considered are undoubtedly exceptional and gifted in their writing talents, imagination, and concerns about and views of the changing world, but the extent to which we can generalize from this to a wider British consciousness or understanding is much more problematic than is allowed in this study.

The title suggests that this book is a general investigation into a distinctive British imagination and what is termed an obsession with Gypsies. We are shown that this was the case with the select group of poets and writers examined in this study, for the most part drawn from what might be termed the respected and respectable literary establishment representing high rather than low culture. The analysis of the representation of Gypsies, and the cultural meanings of those representations, in the writings of the selected authors is detailed and perceptive. However, while it is possible, even probable, that the works of these writers had a much wider influence across a broader cultural spectrum, this is not critically examined. For the moment, the generalizations about Gypsies and the British imagination, obsession, and fascination remain intriguing propositions rather than proven arguments.