Content area
Full Text
The Gypsies captured Matthew Arnold's imagination. Between 1849 and 1866, Arnold published four poems in which Gypsies play a central or significant role. Both "To a Gipsy Child by the Sea-Shore" and "Resignation" appeared in the volume of 1849. Four years later, Arnold's "The Scholar-Gipsy" considers Joseph Glanvill's seventeenthcentury tale of an Oxford student who runs away to live with the Gypsies. Then, in 1866, Arnold returns to the Scholar-Gypsy in "Thyrsis."
That Arnold was aware of the Gypsies is certainly no surprise. Nineteenth-century British minds turned to them often. Although the Roma/Gypsies have been in the British Isles at least since 1505, interest in them exploded in the nineteenth century when the socalled "Gypsy Problem" fascinated British legislators, clergy, reformers, scholars, and writers of all kinds. This "problem" found its way into parliament, the arts, economics, religion, and other areas of culture, stoking discussion and anxiety about wide-ranging issues such as Christian evangelism, public health, race, national identity, morality, capitalism, poverty laws, industrialism, and enclosure.1
Why, though, did Arnold himself return to the topic so often? For Arnold's poems, as Antony Harrison has put it, "why gipsies?" In the only significant examination of all four of Arnold's Gypsy poems together, Harrison argues the Gypsies provide Arnold with an evolving, "intertextually sanctioned poetic metaphor" by which he explores his "self-positioning" in society. As the metaphor evolves through the poems, it reflects, in "Gipsy Child," Arnold's own "stoicism and early skepticism" and even nihilism. In "Resignation," it goes on to act "as a contrast to his image of the ideal poet detached from worldly activity." Finally, in the Gypsy trope of the Cumnor poems, Arnold understands that "attaining power over men's minds" needs not only simple detachment but also paradoxically a "simultaneous estrangement from society and involvement with it."2
More recently, Deborah Nord has taken up the question but focuses especially on "Resignation" and "Scholar-Gipsy" and does not mention "Gipsy Child" at all. Of those two poems, though, she argues convincingly that they participate in the mid-century figuring of the Gypsy as "a remnant of prelapserian England, a marker of the transition from rural to industrial society," taking on for Arnold an "association with a world that no longer existed."3
With what Harrison acknowledges as "a...