Back where they belong
Gypsies, kidnapping and assimilation in Victorian children's literature
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12757283 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jodie Matthews (0000-0001-8876-4264, University of Huddersfield, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 137-159 |
| Publication date | 2010-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Romani Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1528-0748 • E-ISSN: 1757-2274 |
| Publisher | Liverpool University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3828/rs.2010.6 |
| OpenAlex | W2057192052 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 16 |
Examples of Victorian children’s literature are examined to consider the recycling of the ‘Gypsy’ child-stealing myth, with attention drawn to common features of the stories as an indicator of the narratives’ cultural function. Fictions about the adoption and conversion of Gypsy children are read not as texts that tell opposite stories about where Gypsy and non-Gypsy children should reside – with their own or adoptive parents – but as narratives that perform the same ostensible task: demonstrating the subject’s proper place in a social order. The article suggests that rather than offer reassurance about where children belong, however, both genres betray anxieties about the legitimacy and naturalness of that social order; they trouble the forms and meaning of ‘family’, an institution supposed to act as a pillar of Victorian society and its divisions. The compulsive repetition of familial disorder results in the powerful association between Gypsies and kidnapping, an arbitrary connection made to seem obvious and natural through ubiquity
Art · Epistemology · Genealogy · Literature · Meaning (existential · Mythology · Narrative · Naturalness · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Social order · Sociology · Subject (documents · History · Law · Philosophy · Romani and Gypsy Studies
Education for extinction
The Subject and Power
The Post Card
The Gypsy as Trope in Victorian and Modern British Literature
Policing Nomads
A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and Beggars and Begging
Colonial Desire
Outside the Fold
The Sunday-school movement in England and Wales
Class Law in Victorian England
The Significances of the Captivity Narrative
The Time of the Gypsies
| Citations per year | 0.15 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2013 - 2021 (9) |
| Highly cited | No |