The caravan of deplorables: perspectives on Romani Anglophobia in late modern Britain

• Main Author: Lidstone, Michael Trent
• Other Authors: Hammond, Mitch Lewis
• Format: Others
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: gypsy; gipsy; roma; romani; gladstone; welfare; britain; england; freedom; thaddeus; sanger; circus; show; traveler; victorian; nineteenth; edwardian; war
• Online Access: https://dspace.library.uvic.ca//handle/1828/10028

Scholars researching Britain from the 1880s to the First World War have often failed to portray a diverse range of British attitudes towards the period’s state-sanctioned efforts to assimilate the Romani people. In most academic works, British voices that called for the elimination of Romani culture drown out those that were opposed to their assimilation into sedentary industrial wage-labour and formal education. They also mostly engage in only a surface analysis of the relationships between perspectives on the Romani and the great shifts occurring in British society. This thesis reveals a greater complexity of viewpoints within British society over issues of Romani assimilation that were increasingly fueled by the age’s rapid social and technological change. Poets, journalists, evangelical reformers, romantic gypsiologists and progressive politicians were some of the groups in Britain whose projections of fears and desires upon the Romani created an unintended referendum on the quickening forces of modernity. === Graduate