3-052-356 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches of gipsy life round London - encampment at Mitcham Common, 1880. 'There lurks the free and fearless Gipsy scamp, if scamp he truly be, with his squaw and his piccaninnies, in a wigwam hastily constructed of hoops and poles and blankets, or perhaps, if he be the wealthy sheikh of his wild Bedouin tribe, in a caravan drawn from place to place by some lost and strayed plough-horse, the lawful owner of which is a farmer in Northamptonshire...These gipsies, Zingari, Bohemians, whatever they be called in the kingdoms of Europe, are masters of a secret science of mysterious acquisition, as remote from proved crime of theft or fraud as from the ways of earning or winning by ordinary industry and trade. There is many a rich and splendid establishment at the West-End supported by a different application of the same mysterious craft. Solicitors and stockbrokers may have seen it in action. It is that of silently appropriating what no other person may be quite prepared to claim'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.