Books: The Life of George Borrow

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He was seventy years of age when, one March day during a bitterly-
cold east wind, he stripped and plunged into one of the Fen Ponds in
Richmond Park, which was covered with ice, and dived and swam under
the water for a time, reappearing some distance from the spot where
he had entered the water. {469b}

The remaining years of Borrow's life were spent in Suffolk. He would
frequently go to Norwich, however; for the old city seemed to draw
him irresistibly from his hermitage. He would take a lodging there,
and spend much of his time occupying a certain chair in the Norfolk
Hotel in St Giles. There were so many old associations with Norwich
that made it appear home to him. He was possessed of sentiment in
plenty, it had caused his old mother to wish that "dear George would
not have such fancies about THE OLD HOUSE" in Willow Lane.

Later, Dr and Mrs MacOubrey removed to Oulton (about 1878), and
Borrow's life became less dismal and lonely; but he was nearing his
end. Sometimes there would be a flash of that old unconquerable
spirit. His stepdaughter relates how,

"on the 21st of November [1878], the place [the farm] having been
going to decay for fourteen months, Mr Palmer [the tenant] called to
demand that Mr Borrow should put it in repair; otherwise he would do
it himself and send in the bills, saying, 'I don't care for the old
farm or you either,' and several other insulting things; whereupon Mr
Borrow remarked very calmly, 'Sir, you came in by that door, you can
go out by it'--and so it ended." {470a}

It was on an occasion such as this that Borrow yearned for a son to
knock the rascal down. He was an infirm man, his body feeling the
wear and tear of the strenuous open-air life he had led. In 1879,
according to Mrs MacOubrey, he was "unable to walk as far as the
white gate," the boundary of his estate. He was obviously breaking-
up very rapidly. The surroundings appear to have reflected the
gloomy nature of the master of the estate. The house was
dilapidated, "with everything about it more or less untidy," {470b}
although at this period his income amounted to upwards of five
hundred pounds a year.

"During his latter years," writes Mr W. A. Dutt, "his tall, erect,
somewhat mysterious figure was often seen in the early hours of
summer mornings or late at night on the lonely pathways that wind in
and out from the banks of Oulton Broad . . . the village children
used to hush their voices and draw aside at his approach. They
looked upon him with fear and awe. . . . In his heart, Borrow was
fond of the little ones, though it amused him to watch the impression
his strange personality made upon them. Older people he seldom spoke
to when out on his solitary rambles; but sometimes he would flash out
such a glance from beneath his broad-brimmed hat and shaggy eyebrows
as would make timid country folk hasten on their way filled with
vague thoughts and fears of the evil eye." {470c}

Even to the last the old sensitiveness occasionally flashed out, as
on the occasion of a visit from the Vicar of Lowestoft, who drove
over with an acquaintance of Borrow's to make the hermit's
acquaintance. The visitor was so incautious as to ask the age of his
host, when, with Johnsonian emphasis, came the reply: "Sir, I tell
my age to no man!" This occurred some time during the year 1880.
Immediately his discomfited guest had departed, Borrow withdrew to
the summer-house, where he drew up the following apothegm on
"People's Age": -

"Never talk to people about their age. Call a boy a boy, and he will
fly into a passion and say, 'Not quite so much of a boy either; I'm a
young man.' Tell an elderly person that he's not so young as he was,
and you will make him hate you for life. Compliment a man of eighty-
five on the venerableness of his appearance, and he will shriek out:
'No more venerable than yourself,' and will perhaps hit you with his
crutch."

On 1st December 1880 Borrow sent for his solicitor from Lowestoft,
and made his will, by which he bequeathed all his property, real and
personal, to his stepdaughter Henrietta, devising that it should be
held in trust for her by his friend Elizabeth Harvey. It was
evidently Borrow's intention so to tie up the bequest that Dr
MacOubrey could not in any way touch his wife's estate.

The end came suddenly. On the morning of 26th July 1881 Dr and Mrs
MacOubrey drove into Lowestoft, leaving Borrow alone in the house.
When they returned he was dead. Throughout his life Borrow had been
a solitary, and it seems fitting that he should die alone. It has
been urged against his stepdaughter that she disregarded Borrow's
appeals not to be left alone in the house, as he felt himself to be
dying. He may have made similar requests on other occasions; still,
whatever the facts, it was strange to leave so old and so infirm a
man quite unattended.

On 4th August the body was brought to London, and buried beside that
of Mrs George Borrow in Brompton Cemetery. On the stone, which is
what is known as a saddle-back, is inscribed:

IN LOVING REMEMBRANCE OF
GEORGE HENRY BORROW, ESQ.,
WHO DIED JULY 26TH, 1881 (AT HIS RESIDENCE "OULTON
COTTAGE, SUFFOLK")
IN HIS 79TH YEAR.
(AUTHOR OF THE BIBLE IN SPAIN, LAVENGRO--AND
OTHER WORKS.)
"IN HOPE OF A GLORIOUS RESURRECTION."

A fruitless effort was made by the late J. J. Colman of Carrow to
purchase the whole of Borrow's manuscripts, library, and papers for
the Carrow Abbey Library; but the price asked, a thousand pounds, was
considered too high, and they passed into the possession of another.
Eventually they found their way into the reverent hands of the man
who subsequently made Borrow his hero, and who devoted years of his
life to the writing of his biography--Dr W. J. Knapp.

It was Borrow's fate, a tragic fate for a man so proud, to outlive
the period of his fame. Not only were his books forgotten, but the
world anticipated his death by some seven or eight years. His was a
curiously complex nature, one that seems specially to have been
conceived by Providence to arouse enmity among the many, and to
awaken in the hearts of the few a sterling, unwavering friendship.
It is impossible to reconcile the accounts of those who hated him
with those whose love and respect he engaged.

He was in sympathy with vagrants and vagabonds--a taste that was
perhaps emphasised by the months he spent in preparing Celebrated
Trials. If those months of hack work taught him sympathy with
pariahs, it also taught him to write strong, nervous English.

He was one of the most remarkable characters of his century--
whimsical, eccentric, lovable, inexplicable; possessed of an odd, dry
humour that sometimes failed him when most he needed it. He lived
and died a stranger to the class to which he belonged, and was the
intimate friend and associate of that dark and mysterious personage,
Mr Petulengro. He hated his social equals, and admired Tamerlane and
Jerry Abershaw. It has been said that he was born three centuries
too late, and that he belonged to the age when men dropped
mysteriously down the river in ships, later to return with strange
stories and great treasure from the Spanish Main. Mr Watts-Dunton
has said:-

"When Borrow was talking to people in his own class of life there was
always in his bearing a kind of shy, defiant egotism. What Carlyle
called the 'armed neutrality' of social intercourse oppressed him.
He felt himself to be in the enemy's camp. In his eyes there was
always a kind of watchfulness, as if he were taking stock of his
interlocutor and weighing him against himself. He seemed to be
observing what effect his words were having, and this attitude
repelled people at first. But the moment he approached a gypsy on
the heath, or a poor Jew in Houndsditch, or a homeless wanderer by
the wayside, he became another man. He threw off the burden of
restraint. The feeling of the 'armed neutrality' was left behind,
and he seemed to be at last enjoying the only social intercourse that
could give him pleasure. This it was that enabled him to make
friends so entirely with the gypsies. Notwithstanding what is called
'Romany guile' (which is the growth of ages of oppression), the basis
of the Romany character is a joyous frankness. Once let the
isolating wall which shuts off the Romany from the 'Gorgio' be broken
through, and the communicativeness of the Romany temperament begins
to show itself. The gypsies are extremely close observers; they were
very quick to notice how different was Borrow's bearing towards
themselves from his bearing towards people of his own race, and
Borrow used to say that 'old Mrs Herne and Leonora were the only
gypsies who suspected and disliked him.'" {474a}

This convincing character sketch seems to show the real Borrow. It
accounts even for that high-piping, artificial voice (a gypsy trait)
that he assumed when speaking with those who were not his intimate
friends, and which any sudden interest in the conversation would
cause him to abandon in favour of his own deep, rich tones. Mr F. J.
Bowring, himself no friend of Borrow's for very obvious reasons, has
described this artificial intonation as something between a beggar's
whine and the high-pitched voice of a gypsy--in sort, a falsetto. He
tells how, on one occasion, when in conversation with Borrow, he
happened to mention to him something of particular interest
concerning the gypsies, Borrow became immensely interested,
immediately dropped the falsetto and spoke in his natural voice,
which Mr Bowring describes as deep and manly.

Even his friends were led sometimes into criticisms that appear
unsympathetic. {474b} He was, Dr Hake has said, "essentially
hypochondriacal. Society he loved and hated alike: he loved it that
he might be pointed out and talked of; he hated it because he was not
the prince that he felt himself in its midst." {474c} It is the son
who shows the better understanding, although there is no doubt about
Dr Hake's loyalty to Borrow. There is a faithful presentation of a
man such as Borrow really seems to have been, in the following
words:-

"Few men have ever made so deep an impression on me as George Borrow.
His tall, broad figure, his stately bearing, his fine brown eyes, so
bright yet soft, his thick white hair, his oval beardless face, his
loud rich voice and bold heroic air were such as to impress the most
indifferent lookers-on. Added to this there was something not easily
forgotten in the manner in which he would unexpectedly come to our
gates, singing some gypsy song, and as suddenly depart." {475a}

If Borrow wrote that he was ashamed of being an Englishman and
referred to their "pinched and mortified expressions," if he found
the virtues of the Saxons "uncouth and ungracious," he never
permitted others to make disparaging remarks about his country or his
countrymen. {475b} He was typically English in this: agree with his
strictures, add a word or two of dispraise of the English, and there
appeared a terrifying figure of a patriot; "not only an Englishman
but an East Englishman," which in Borrow's vocabulary meant the
finest of the breed. He might with more truth have said a
Cornishman. "I could not command myself when I heard my own glorious
land traduced in this unmerited manner," {475c} he once exclaimed.
He permitted to himself, and to himself only, a certain latitude in
such matters.

That Borrow exaggerated is beyond all question, but it must not be
called deliberate. He desired to give impressions of scenes and
people, and he was inclined to emphasize certain features. Isopel
Berners he wished it to be known was a queenly creature, and he
described her as taller than himself (he was 6 feet 2 inches without
his shoes). Exaggeration is colour, not form. A disbelief in his
having encountered the convict son of the old apple-woman near
Salisbury does not imply that the old woman herself is a fiction.
Borrow insisted upon Norfolk as his county, "where the people eat the
best dumplings in the world, and speak the purest English." He even
spoke with a strong, if imperfect, East Anglian accent. As a matter
of fact his father was Cornish and his mother of Huguenot stock. It
would be absurd to argue from this obvious exaggeration of the actual
facts that Borrow was a myth.

Then he has been taken to task for not being a philologist as well as
a linguist. He may have used the word philologist somewhat loosely
on occasion. "Think what the reader would have lost," says one
eminent but by no means prejudiced critic {476a} with real sympathy
and insight, "had Borrow waited to verify his etymologies." In all
probability Nature will never produce a Humboldt-Le Sage combination
of intellect. Language was to Borrow merely the key that permitted
him access to the chamber of men's minds. It must be confessed that
sometimes he invaded the sacred precincts of philology. His chapter
on the Basque language in The Bible in Spain has been described as
"utterly frantic," and German philologists, speechless in their
astonishment, have expressed themselves upon his conclusions in marks
of exclamation! He was not qualified to discourse upon the science
of language.

He was a staunch member of the Church of England, because he believed
there was in it more religion than in any other Church; but this did
not hinder him from consorting with the godless children of the
tents, or contributing towards the upkeep of Nonconformist-schools.
The gypsies honoured and trusted him because, crooked themselves,
they appreciated straightness and clean living in another. They had
never known him use a bad word or do a bad thing. He was, on
occasion, arrogant, overbearing, ungracious, in short all the
unattractive things that a proud and masterful man can be; but his
friendship was as strong as the man himself; his charity above the
narrow prejudices of sect. When he threw his tremendous power into
any enterprise or undertaking, it was with the determination that it
should succeed, if work and self-sacrifice could make it. "The
wisest course," he thought, was, " . . . to blend the whole of the
philosophy of the tombstone with a portion of the philosophy of the
publican and something more, to enjoy one's pint and pipe and other
innocent pleasures, and to think every now and then of death and
judgment."

Borrow loved mystery for its own sake, and none were ever able quite
to penetrate into the inner fastness of his personality. Those who
came nearest to it were probably Hasfeldt and Ford, whose persistent
good-humour was an armour against a reserve that chilled most men.
Of all Borrow's friends it is probable that none understood him so
well as Hasfeldt. He recognised the strength of character of the
white-haired man who sang when he was happy, and he refused to be
affected by his gloomy moods. "Write and tell me," he requests, "if
you have not fallen in love with some nun or Gypsy in Spain, or have
met with some other romantic adventure worthy of a roaming knight."
On another occasion (June 1845) he boasts with some justification,
"Heaven be praised, I can comprehend you as a reality, while many
regard you as an imaginary, fantastic being. But they who portray
you have not eaten bread and salt with you."

Borrow's contemporary recognition was a chance; he was writing for
another generation, and some of the friends that he left behind have
loyally striven to erect to him the only monument an artist desires--
the proclaiming of his works.

Nature it appeared had framed Borrow in a moment of magnificence,
and, lest he should be enticed away from her, had instilled into his
soul a hatred of all things artificial and at variance with her
august decrees. He was shy and suspicious with the men and women who
regulated their lives by the narrow standards of civilisation and
decorum; but with the children of the tents and the vagrants of the
wayside he was a single-minded man, eager to learn the lore of the
open air. He recognised in these vagabonds the true sons and
daughters of "the Great Mother who mixes all our bloods."

APPENDIX: LIST OF BORROW'S WORKS

1825

Celebrated Trials, and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence,
from the Earliest Records to the Year 1825. Six volumes, with
plates. London.

Faustus: His Life, Death, and Descent into Hell. Translated from
the German [of F. M. von Klinger]. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall,
London.

1826

Romantic Ballads. Translated from the Danish: and Miscellaneous
Pieces. S. Wilkin, Norwich.

1835

Targum: or, Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and
Dialects. St Petersburgh. Reprinted later by Jarrold & Sons,
Norwich.

The Talisman. From the Russian of Alexander Pushkin. With Other
Pieces. St Petersburg.

1841

The Zincali; or, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain. With an
Original Collection of their Songs and Poetry, and a Copious
Dictionary of their Language. Two volumes. John Murray, London.

1842

The Bible in Spain; or, the Journeys, Adventures, and Imprisonments
of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the
Peninsula. Three volumes. John Murray, London.

Lavengro: The Scholar--The Gypsy--The Priest. Three volumes. John
Murray, London.

The Romany Rye: a Sequel to Lavengro. Two volumes. John Murray,
London.

The Sleeping Bard; or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell. By
Elis Wyn. Translated from the Cambrian British. John Murray,
London.

1862

Wild Wales: Its People, Language, and Scenery. Three volumes. John
Murray, London.

Romano Lavo-Lil: Word-Book of Romany; or, English Gypsy Language.
With Many Pieces in Gypsy, Illustrative of the Way of Speaking and
Thinking of the English Gypsies; with Specimens of Their Poetry, and
an Account of Certain Gypsyries or Places Inhabited by Them, and of
Various Things Relating to Gypsy Life in England. John Murray,
London.

1884

The Turkish Jester; or, the Pleasantries of Cogia Nasr Eddin Effendi.
Translated from the Turkish. Jarrold & Sons, Norwich.

1892

The Death of Balder. Translated from the Danish of Evald. Jarrold &
Sons, Norwich.

From the foregoing list has been omitted the mysterious Life and
Adventures of Joseph Sell, the Great Traveller, and those works that
Borrow edited or translated for the British and Foreign Bible
Society.

Footnotes:

{3a} Afterwards General Morshead and friend of the Duke of York.
Captain Morshead, himself a Cornishman, is credited with doing
everything in his power to dissuade Thomas Borrow from enlisting, but
without result.

{4a} Lavengro, page 2. References to Borrow's works throughout this
volume are to the Standard Edition, published by John Murray.

{4b} Ann, the third of eight children born to Samuel Perfrement and
Mary his wife, 23rd January 1772.

{4c} Locally, the name is pronounced "PARfrement." This is quite in
accordance with the Norfolk dialect, which changes "e" into "a."
Thus "Ernest" becomes "Arnest"; "Earlham," "Arlham"; "Erpingham,"
"Arpingham," and so on. In Norfolk there are grave peculiarities of
pronunciation, which have caused many a stranger to wish that he had
never enquired his way, so puzzling are the replies hurled at him in
an incomprehensible vernacular.

{5a} Married the Rev. Wm. Holland, rector of Walmer and afterwards
rector of Brasted, Kent.

{6a} Lavengro, page 5.

{6b} Lavengro, page 5.

{7a} George in honour of the King, it is said, and Henry after his
father's eldest brother.

{7b} Lavengro, page 6.

{7c} Lavengro, page 6.

{7d} Lavengro, page 6.

{7e} Lavengro, page 7.

{7f} Lavengro, page 7.

{9a} Lavengro, page 16.

{9b} The widow of Sir John Fenn, editor of the Paston Letters.

{9c} Lavengro, page 15.

{10a} Lavengro, pages 398-9.

{10b} "Many years have not passed over my head, yet during those
which I can call to remembrance, how many things have I seen
flourish, pass away, and become forgotten, except by myself, who, in
spite of all my endeavours, never can forget anything."--Lavengro,
page 166.

{10c} Lavengro, page 16.

{11a} Lavengro, pages 19-20.

{11b} Lavengro, page 22.

{12a} The gypsies "have a double nomenclature, each tribe or family
having a public and private name, one by which they are known to the
Gentiles, and another to themselves alone . . . There are only two
names of trades which have been adopted by English gypsies as proper
names, Cooper and Smith: these names are expressed in the English
gypsy dialect by Vardo-mescro and Petulengro (Romano Lavo-Lil, page
185). Thus the Smiths are known among themselves as the Petulengros.
Petul, a horse shoe, and engro a "masculine affix used in the
formation of figurative names." Thus Boshomengro (a fiddler) comes
from Bosh a fiddle, Cooromengro (a soldier, a pugilist) from Coor =
to fight.

{12b} The Rev. Wentworth Webster heard narrated at a provincial
Bible Society's meeting that when Borrow first called at Earl Street
"he said that he had been stolen by gypsies in his boyhood, had
passed several years with them, but had been recognised at a fair in
Norfolk and brought home to his family by his uncle." There is,
however, nothing to confirm this story.

{13a} Lavengro, page 164.

{13b} The prisoners occupied much of their time in straw-plait
making; but the quality of their work was so much superior to that of
the English that it was forbidden, and consequently destroyed when
found.

{13c} Lavengro, page 45.

{14a} David Haggart, born 24th June 1801, was an instinctive
criminal, who, at Leith Races, in 1813, enlisted, whilst drunk, as a
drummer in the West Norfolks. Eventually he obtained his discharge
and continued on his career of crime and prison-breaking, among other
things murdering a policeman and a gaoler, until, on 18th July 1821,
he was hanged at Edinburgh.

{15a} Lavengro, page 138.

{15b} John Crome (1768-1821), landscape painter. Apprenticed 1783
as sign-painter; introduced into Norwich the art of graining; founded
the Norwich School of Painting; first exhibited at the Royal Academy
1806.

{17a} Borrow was always a magnificent horseman. "Vaya! how you
ride! It is dangerous to be in your way!" said the Archbishop of
Toledo to him years later. In The Bible in Spain he wrote that he
had "been accustomed from . . . childhood to ride without a saddle."
The Rev. Wentworth Webster states that in Madrid "he used to ride
with a Russian skin for a saddle and WITHOUT STIRRUPS."

{20a} Letter from "A School-fellow of Lavengro" in The Britannia,
26th April 1851.

{21a} "It is probable, that had I been launched about this time into
some agreeable career, that of arms, for example, for which, being
the son of a soldier, I had, as was natural, a sort of penchant, I
might have thought nothing more of the acquisition of tongues of any
kind; but, having nothing to do, I followed the only course suited to
my genius which appeared open to me."--Lavengro, page 89.

{21b} The Rev. Thomas D'Eterville, M.A., "Poor Old Detterville," as
the Grammar School boys called him, of Caen University, who arrived
at Norwich in 1793. He acquired a small fortune by teaching
languages. There were rumours that he was engaged in the contraband
trade, an occupation more likely to bring fortune than teaching
languages.

{21c} Letter from "A School-fellow of Lavengro" in The Britannia,
26th April 1851.

{22a} It was here, in 1827, that he saw the world's greatest
trotter, Marshland Shales, and in common with other lovers of horses
lifted his hat to salute "the wondrous horse, the fast trotter, the
best in mother England." In Lavengro Borrow antedated this event by
some nine years.

{23a} Manuscript autobiographical notes supplied by Borrow to Mr
John Longe, 1862.

{24a} Lavengro, page 134.

{25a} This account is taken from a letter by "A Schoolfellow of
Lavengro" in The Britannia, 26th April 1851.

{25b} In a letter to Borrow, dated 15th October 1862, John Longe,
J.P., of Spixworth Park, Norwich, in acknowledging some biographical
particulars that Borrow had sent him for inclusion in Burton's
Antiquities of the Royal School of Norwich, wrote:-

"You have omitted an important and characteristic anecdote of your
early days (fifteen years of age). When at school you, with
Theodosius and Francis W. Purland, ABSENTED yourself from home and
school and took up your abode in a certain 'Robber's Cave' at Acle,
where you RESIDED three days, and once more returned to your homes."

{26a} According to the original manuscript of Lavengro, it appears
that Roger Kerrison, a Norwich friend of Borrow's, strongly advised
the law as "an excellent profession . . . for those who never intend
to follow it."--Life of George Borrow, by Dr Knapp, i., 66.

{27a} The Rev. Wm. Drake of Mundesley, in a letter which appeared in
The Eastern Daily Press, 22nd September 1892:-

" . . . I was at the Norwich Grammar School nine years, from 1820 to
1829, and during that time (probably in 1824 and 1825) George Borrow
was lodging in the Upper Close . . . The house was a low old-
fashioned building with a garden in front of it, and the fact of
Borrow's residence there is fixed in my memory because I had spent
the first five or six years of my own life in the same house, from
1811 to 1816 or 1817. My father occupied it in virtue of his being a
minor canon in Norwich Cathedral. I remember Borrow very distinctly,
because he was fond of chatting with the boys, who used to gather
round the railings of his garden, and occasionally he would ask one
or two of them to have tea with him. I have a faint recollection
that he gave us some of our first notions of chess, but I am not sure
of this. I . . . remember him a tall, spare, dark-complexioned man,
usually dressed in black. In person he was not unlike another
Norwich man, who obtained in those days a very different notoriety
from that which now belongs to Borrow's name. I mean John Thurtell,
who murdered Mr Weare."

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