Note 268 — Chapter XV · BORROW’S GYPSYISM

There was a curious reference in the debate on the Second Reading of the Children’s Bill (House of Commons, March 24th, 1908) to Borrow and his gypsies. Mr. Thomas Shaw, the Lord Advocate, was describing the measures proposed by the Bill for dealing with tramp or wandering children, and “reminded the House that the most beautiful parts of the United Kingdom were often infested by such children, going about under the charge, not of any regular type of gypsy, but of mere wandering vagabonds. These children went from parish to parish, and no local authority got hold of them. What the Bill did was to say that, if they had no settled home, or if they were with a guardian who was unfit to take care of them, they should be subject to seizure. Not begging alone, but the mere fact of living in a wandering state and not receiving the education which they would otherwise receive, would bring them within the range of the provisions of the Bill. They could be taken before the magistrates and committed to an industrial school. George Borrow never did a worse service to his country than by writing ‘Lavengro,’ in which he praised this tramping and wandering life till even the most well-disposed citizens came to think that there might be something beautiful in it. The life of children brought up in this way was a life of squalor, and sometimes of very little else but immorality, and it was high time the State saw that they were rescued from it” (The Times, March 25th). One does not propose to criticise the provisions of the Children’s Bill, but it is strange that a Minister should quote “Lavengro” in this way. Borrow was always insisting upon the very facts that Mr. Shaw cites about the squalor and misery of the mumpers, “pikers,” “Abrahamites,” and the other vagrom denizens of the roads, and his praise was reserved (in so far as it was praise at all) for the life of the “regular type of gypsy.”