Note 2 — APPENDIX

There are those to whom the notion will seem monstrous that the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress should have been ‘a gipsy!’ I would remind such that at the present day there is Mr. George Smith, the Converted Gypsy, of the Potteries, who conducts missions in Edinburgh and other large cities. I have never heard him myself, but I am assured by a competent judge that he is a really eloquent preacher. Then there was William Mitchel (1672–1740), the Edinburgh ‘Tinklarian Doctor,’ author of a score of prophetical pamphlets. There was Thomas Wright, the tinker Berean of Barnsley, who baptized Ebenezer Elliott in 1781. And there was the founder of the American Shakers, ‘Mother’ Ann Lee (1736–86), a Manchester blacksmith’s illiterate daughter, who married in 1762 the blacksmith Abraham Stanley. The conjunction of the surnames Lee and Stanley, of the smith’s craft, and of the illiteracy, renders it almost certain in my mind that these were Gypsies. ↑