Susannah Fullerton is President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia and the author of Jane Austen and Crime (2004), A Dance with Jane Austen: How a Novelist and her Characters went to the Ball (2012), and Happily Ever After: Celebrating Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (2013). She writes about her wide-ranging literary interests for her Google Classic Novels site and in her newsletter, “Notes from a Book Addict,” and she leads literary tours to Jane Austen country, and to France, USA, Ireland, and Italy for Australians Studying Abroad. Sometimes, she takes her tour groups to one of my own favourite places, Prince Edward Island, to visit Green Gables and other literary sites. Susannah is Patron of the Kipling Society of Australia, and she’s the author and presenter of the audio CD Finding Katherine Mansfield (2009). I’m pleased to introduce her guest post for Emma in the Snow.
The encounter with the gypsies—such a small incident in the novel, and yet it achieves so much. The day after the Crown Inn Ball Harriet Smith and her school friend Miss Bickerton go out for a walk and encounter a group of gypsies: “half a dozen children, headed by a stout woman and a great boy, all clamorous and impertinent” (Volume 3, Chapter 3). The gypsies want money from the two girls and seem prepared to use violence to get it. Miss Bickerton runs away as fast as her legs will carry her, but Harriet suffers cramp as a result of all her energetic dancing the night before, and is left to the mercies of these gypsies. She gives them a shilling, but they demand more and poor Harriet is terrified. She begs the group not “to use her ill.” Of course, as every reader of Emma knows, she is then rescued by Frank Churchill, who gets her safely to Hartfield where she faints dead away.
A modern reader might condemn Harriet for her timidity and her fainting, but Jane Austen’s contemporary readers would all have known just why Harriet faints. Gypsies were seen as a major problem in England in Austen’s time. There had been an attempt in 1563 to expel every gypsy from the country, but that failed and for the next centuries gypsies eked out an existence on the margins of society—pilfering and moving on, raiding hen-houses and moving on, avoiding the authorities as much as possible. In Jane Austen’s juvenile work Evelyn, the not very heroic hero Mr. Gower is terrified as he rides home at night and closes his eyes “to prevent his seeing either Gypsies or Ghosts.” Such was society’s hatred of gypsies that it actually became a hanging offence to be found “conversing with gypsies.” The legal authorities of England took it for granted that if you were in conversation with a gypsy, then it must be for no good purpose. In 1782 a fourteen-year-old girl, desperately protesting her innocence, was hanged for being found in the company of gypsies. Of course any humane judge would be most unlikely to put poor Harriet to death for her misadventure, but technically Harriet Smith commits a serious crime that could result in her life being terminated. No wonder she faints! Contemporary readers would have been far more sympathetic to her peril and would have totally understood her reaction.
“The Gypsies did not wait for the operations of justice: they took themselves off in a hurry.” Emma promises Frank that she will give “notice of there being such a set of people in the neighbourhood to Mr Knightley.” He is, of course, the local magistrate, and knows how to deal with such a gang. Emma’s nephews then regularly demand the exciting tale of Harriet and the gypsies, “tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original recital” and that seems to be the end of the business. But of course it is these very gypsies and their attack which start Emma linking Harriet and her rescuer romantically in her own mind—and we all know into what trouble that leads her.
“The terror … was then their own portion.” Illustration by C.E. Brock (Source: Mollands.net).
But do those gypsies make a second appearance in the novel? In the final chapter “Mrs Weston’s poultry-house was robbed one night of all her turkies—evidently by the ingenuity of man. Other poultry-yards in the neighbourhood also suffered.—Pilfering was housebreaking to Mr Woodhouse’s fears.—He was very uneasy; and but for the sense of his son-in-law’s protection, would have been under wretched alarm every night of his life” (Volume 3, Chapter 19). It is for this reason that he agrees, far more willingly than anyone expected, to Emma’s marriage, so that Mr Knightley can live at Hartfield and protect them all. We do not know for certain that the poultry is stolen by gypsies, but they must be the first suspects—they surely scouted out the neighbourhood when there previously, and a quick raid back to grab some chickens and turkeys is highly likely. If so, they are responsible for bringing about the marriage of the hero and heroine of the novel—no mean accomplishment by the novel’s most unsavoury characters.
The gypsies in Emma give us a glimpse of the crime that was so prevalent in Georgian society. This may not be an obvious feature of Jane Austen’s novels, but it is an important one, as I discovered when I wrote my book Jane Austen and Crime. Jane Austen does have her darker side—duels, thefts, elopement, hangings, adultery, gaols, and even murder all have a place in her writings, and learning more about the crimes she depicts adds much to contemporary understanding of her novels.
Tenth in a series of blog posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Emma. To read more about all the posts in the series, visit Emma in the Snow. Coming soon: guest posts by Janet Todd, Carol Chernega, and Elisabeth Lenckos.
Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the celebrations! And/or follow along by connecting with me on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter (@Sarah_Emsley).
Sarah Emsley 
Nice piece. I am fascinated by Emma’s gypsies.
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It was interesting to read about why Gypsies were so feared – that puts Harriet’s fainting into perspective, doesn’t it?
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A really interesting article on an almost hidden corner of Austen’s work. Thank you!
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Very informative! I had no idea of the penalties Harriet might have been exposed to. While this information does indeed make Harriet’s panic more understandable, I have to note a few things.
1. Austen makes no reference to this penalty. The text doesn’t imply that Harriet is in danger from that.
2. Austen calls into question, to a certain extent, Harriet’s behavior during the event as a possible incitement. “How the trampers might have behaved, had the young ladies been more courageous, must be doubtful.” And, later “her terror and her purse were too tempting.”
3. Austen tends to downplay the incident. “The young ladies of Highbury might have walked away in safety before their panic began…” Also, Mr. Woodhouse is the one, not Emma, who “trembles” and we know Mr. Woodhouse’s irrational fears.
4. What especially struck me – Austen’s brilliant comedic touch at work again – is Emma’s meditation on the “adventure.” Mathematicians could have witnessed it & would have thought this an interesting situation. “How much more must an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight!”
And that paragraph reminded me of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. There are of course, huge differences between Catherine and Emma – of fortune and apparently of physical beauty (Austen is pretty condescending to Catherine.) But, this is a characteristic they have in common and it illuminates Emma for me. I have often wondered about what Austen was trying to get across with Emma – with Elizabeth Bennet it’s obvious, as with others like Marianne Dashwood or Anne in Persuasion. But Emma is elusive – is her chief flaw dilettantism? She’s compared unfavorably in that regard to Jane Fairfax? Matchmaking, yes, but what’s the character flaw behind that? Possibly pride, as was noted in an earlier post.
But Emma’s musings point me in a direction of an over-active imagination. Perhaps in Emma, Austen is having another go at this kind of character.
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Yes another story to enlighten me to the wonders of Emma. I too didn’t realize what a problem they were and something young girls were probably very fearful of at the time.
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Thank you so much for an enlightening post on a fascinating scene.
As so much of the unpleasantness of life, crime seems to be downplayed in the novel. All we have are a few cases of poultry theft that cause unease to a nervous old man and a rather aggressive begging incident all but blamed on the teenage victims’ lack of aplomb.
More and more puzzled by JA’s treatment of what I didn’t know was a hanging offence, I’ve been trying to come up with an explanation of sorts. On the one hand, crime rates were lower outside towns and cities. Highbury is just a rural village, which might partly account for the more relaxed attitude – and the encounter takes place beyond it, on the Richmond road. Mr Knightley wouldn’t send a young girl for trial on the charge of “conversing with gypsies,” and perhaps Harriet herself doesn’t even know she might be convicted. On the other hand, illness and to some extent death from natural causes are made light of in the book, although they would have posed a far more real and frequent threat. Laughter might be a means to defy fear, and comedy might provide a safe setting for writer and readers to poke fun at serious issues.
You needed to be tough in those days to brave the perils and uncertainties of everyday life, and JA might have used humour to build her own shell. Darker instances of this survival strategy can be found in chapters 6 and 8 of Persuasion and the letters – that dreadful joke about Mrs Hall … 😦 Not to mention the Juvenilia 🙂
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I was wondering if it was no longer as urgent a problem by the time of the writing of Emma. Maybe Ms. Fullerton will come back and enlighten us. The post says the 14-year old girl was hanged (!) in 1782. That’s over 30 years before the publication of Emma. It doesn’t say what impact that had – maybe there was an outcry and people stopped hanging people for talking to the wrong people or the problem was just less serious or…something. But, yes, it seems to me that Austen does not seem to treat this as the calamity it might have been if Harriet was in serious danger of hanging.
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This is all so very interesting! According to my brief online research, it seems it wasn’t just talking to gypsies that was punished by hanging: “conversing” might have meant “associating” or “consorting” with them. The crime would have been “being in the company of gypsies for a month,” which of course could never have been Harriet’s case. And then there’s another question: were they Roma people or just vagrants?
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Very interesting. I don’t know if Susannah has seen the comments yet, but I’ll ask her.
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The crime of conversing with gypsies was still on the statute books and was technically a hanging offence. However, it was some time since anyone had actually been hanged for the offence, and any judge would have needed to be certain that the conversing was planning some crime. As I said in my article, any judge would have been incredibly unlikely to comvict silly Harriet.
However, there would definitely have been a strong public perception that being with gypsies was dangerous, for that reason or for the chance of being attacked. Harriet wowuld have known little of the laws of England, but she would have known that being with gypsies was NOT a good idea.
Jane Austen makes no reference to the penalty, but then she never does when she writes of crimes. She assumes her readers know. For example, when Wickham elopes with an underage girl, we are told nothing about the penalties for that. Nor do we hear about the penalties for duelling when Colonel Brandon and Willoughby fight a duel. Nor does she explain about Crim. Con. cases when Maria and Henry commit adultery in Mansfield Park. She assumes knowledge of the crimes and misdemeanours and their penalties in her contemporary readers. That was what got me started on writing my book Jane Austen and Crime – I wanted to find out about these crimes and their consequences. Jane Austen is such a subtle writer, and she was interested in crime. That interest is there in the background. Did you know she visited a prison while writing Mansfield Park? The prison imagery in that novel and references to gaols and being shut in are intriguing.
She makes a clever use if the gypsies in the plot. They make Emma first start to pair Frank and Harriet in her mind. Gypsies were associated with fortune telling, so Emma starts to plan Harriet’s fortune in a new direction. And there is that hint at the end of the book that Mrs Weston’s poultynhouse is robbed by the gypsies, which brings Emma’s good fortune in marrying Mr Knightley.
You never stop speculating and thinking about this superbly rich novel.
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Could you please clarify what is the murder you refer to in the final paragraph of your post? Thank you!
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There are a few murders in Jane Austen’s juvenilia. In one of the short pieces, Letter from a Young Lady, the writer of the letter kills her parents, her sister and plans other murders. All very tongue in cheek on the part of Jane Austen, but still murder!
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There’s murder by poison at the end of Jack and Alice, for which “the perfidious Sukey” Simpson is “speedily raised to the gallows.”
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Another fascinating, entertaining and educational post.
Funnily enough, after reading this passage about a week before Susannah’s post, I had been researching online to find out more about the gypsies. I came across an interesting article in History Today – by Becky Taylor – ‘Britain’s Gypsy Travellers: A People on the Outside,’ which also is an interesting read.
Thanks to both these excellent articles, I now know a lot more about this mysterious, stigmatised culture; not the least that the Roma and Gypsy population of Europe are thought to have originated from an Indian diaspora in the tenth century. It is also incredible to imagine that conversing with gypsies was a hanging offence in the late 18th century! This case brought to mind the ill-fated, falsely-accused character Justine in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
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I wonder if any of the Austen sequels/spin-offs have explored this scene from the point of view of the gypsies. During the #Emma200th readalong in December, I read a blog post (at Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau) about how “their side of the story goes untold.” I’d be interested to read more (in criticism or fiction) about what their perspective might have been.
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Yes, it would be intriguing to have a view of Highbury from the point of view of the gypsies. However, such a work would need to be kept well away from Mr Woodhouse. He would never have a moment’s peace!
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Good point!
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