George Henry Borrow

From a painting by Henry Wyndham Phillips

GEORGE BORROW

AND HIS CIRCLE

WHEREIN MAY BE FOUND MANY HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF BORROW AND HIS
FRIENDS

BY

CLEMENT KING SHORTER

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1913

TO

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL

A FRIEND OF LONG YEARS AND A TRUE

LOVER OF GEORGE BORROW

C. K. S.

Transcriber’s Notes: Minor typos have been corrected. There is Persian and Russian writing in this
book, which have been marked as [Persian] or as [Russian]. In this text, full page illustrations used
the same page number as the previous non illustration page, so, for example, there were two page 16. I have
added an a after the illustration page number for the sake of clarity.

[Pg v]

PREFACE

I have to express my indebtedness first of all to the executors of
Henrietta MacOubrey, George Borrow’s stepdaughter, who kindly placed
Borrow’s letters and manuscripts at my disposal. To the survivor of
these executors, a lady who resides in an English provincial town, I
would particularly wish to render fullest acknowledgment did she not
desire to escape all publicity and forbid me to give her name in print.
I am indebted to Sir William Robertson Nicoll without whose kindly and
active intervention I should never have taken active steps to obtain the
material to which this biography owes its principal value. I am under
great obligations to Mr. Herbert Jenkins, the publisher, in that,
although the author of a successful biography of Borrow, he has, with
rare kindliness, brought me into communication with Mr. Wilfrid J.
Bowring, the grandson of Sir John Bowring. To Mr. Wilfrid Bowring I am
indebted in that he has handed to me the whole of Borrow’s letters to
his grandfather. I have to thank Mr. James Hooper of Norwich for the
untiring zeal with which he has unearthed for me a valuable series of
notes including[Pg vi] certain interesting letters concerning Borrow. Mr.
Hooper has generously placed his collection, with which he at one time
contemplated writing a biography of Borrow, in my hands. I thank Dr.
Aldis Wright for reading my chapter on Edward FitzGerald; also Mr. W.H.
Peet, Mr. Aleck Abrahams, and Mr. Joseph Shaylor for assistance in the
little known field of Sir Richard Phillips’s life. I have further to
thank my friends, Edward Clodd and Thomas J. Wise, for reading my
proof-sheets. To Theodore Watts-Dunton, an untiring friend of thirty
years, I have also to acknowledge abundant obligations.

C. K. S.

[Pg vii]

CONTENTS

[Pg xi]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FULL-PAGE PLATES

ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

[Pg xv]

INTRODUCTION

It is now exactly seventeen years ago since I published a volume not
dissimilar in form to this under the title of Charlotte Brontë and her
Circle. The title had then an element of novelty, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti’s Dante and his Circle, at the time the only book of this
particular character, having quite another aim. There are now some
twenty or more biographies based upon a similar plan.[1] The method has
its convenience where there are earlier lives of a given writer, as one
can in this way differentiate the book from previous efforts by making
one’s hero stand out among his friends. Some such apology, I feel, is
necessary, because, in these days of the multiplication of books, every
book, at least other than a work of imagination, requires ample apology.
In Charlotte Brontë and her Circle I was able to claim that, even
though following in the footsteps of Mrs. Gaskell, I had added some four
hundred new letters by Charlotte Brontë to the world’s knowledge of that
interesting woman, and still more considerably enlarged our knowledge of
her sister Emily. This achievement has been generously acknowledged, and
I am most proud of the testimony of the most accomplished of living
biographers, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, who once rendered me the
following quite spontaneous tribute:[Pg xvi]

With such a testimony before me I cannot hesitate to present my second
biography in similar form. In the case of George Borrow, however, I am
not in a position to supplement one transcendent biography, as in the
case of Charlotte Brontë and Mrs. Gaskell. I have before me no less than
four biographies of Borrow, every one of them of distinctive merit.
These are:

All of these books have contributed something of value and importance to
the subject. Dr. Knapp’s work it is easiest to praise because he is
dead.[2] His biography of Borrow was the effort of a lifetime. A scholar
with great linguistic qualifications for writing the biography of an
author whose knowledge of languages was one of[Pg xvii] his titles to fame, Dr.
Knapp spared neither time nor money to achieve his purpose. Starting
with an article in The Chautauquan Magazine in 1887, which was
reprinted in pamphlet form, Dr. Knapp came to England—to Norwich—and
there settled down to write a Life of Borrow, which promised at one
time to develop into several volumes. As well it might, for Dr. Knapp
reached Norfolk at a happy moment for his purpose. Mrs. MacOubrey,
Borrow’s stepdaughter, was in the humour to sell her father’s
manuscripts and books. They were offered to the city of Norwich; there
was some talk of Mr. Jeremiah Coleman, M.P., whose influence and wealth
were overpowering in Norwich at the time, buying them. Finally, a very
considerable portion of the collection came into the hands of Mr.
Webber, a bookseller of Ipswich, who later became associated with the
firm of Jarrold of Norwich. From Webber Dr. Knapp purchased the larger
portion, and, as his bibliography indicates (Life, vol. ii. pp.
355-88), he became possessed of sundry notebooks which furnish a record
of certain of Borrow’s holiday tours, about a hundred letters from and
to Borrow, and a considerable number of other documents. The result, as
I have indicated, was a book that abounded in new facts and is rich in
new material. It was not, however, a book for popular reading. You must
love the subject before you turn to this book with any zest. It is a
book for your true Borrovian, who is thankful for any information about
the word-master, not for the casual reader, who might indeed be
alienated from the subject by this copious memoir. The result was
somewhat discouraging. There were not enough of true Borrovians in those
years, and the book was not received too generously. The two volumes
have gone out of[Pg xviii] print and have not reached a second edition. Time
however, will do them justice. As it is, your good Borrow lover has
always appreciated their merits. Take Lionel Johnson for example, a good
critic and a master of style. After saying that these ‘lengthy and rich
volumes are a monument of love’s labour, but not of literary art or
biographical skill,’ he adds: ‘Of his over eight hundred pages there is
not one for which I am not grateful’ and every new biographer of Borrow
is bound to re-echo that sentiment. Dr. Knapp did the spade work and
other biographers have but entered into his inheritance. Dr. Knapp’s
fine collection of Borrow books and manuscripts was handed over by his
widow to the American nation—to the Hispanic Society of New York. Dr.
Knapp’s biography was followed nine years later by a small volume by Mr.
R. A. J. Walling, whose little book adds considerably to our knowledge
of Borrow’s Cornish relatives, and is in every way a valuable monograph
on the author of Lavengro. Mr. Herbert Jenkins’s book is more
ambitious. Within four hundred closely printed pages he has compressed
every incident in Borrow’s career, and we would not quarrel with him nor
his publisher for calling his life a ‘definitive biography’ if one did
not know that there is not and cannot be anything ‘definitive’ about a
biography except in the case of a Master. Boswell, Lockhart, Mrs.
Gaskell are authors who had the advantage of knowing personally the
subjects of their biographies. Any biographer who has not met his hero
face to face and is dependent solely on documents is crippled in his
undertaking. Moreover, such a biographer is always liable to be in a
manner superseded or at least supplemented by the appearance of still
more documents. However, Mr. Jenkins’s excellent biography has the[Pg xix]
advantage of many new documents from Mr. John Murray’s archives and from
the Record Office Manuscripts. His work was the first to make use of the
letters of George Borrow to the Bible Society, which the Rev. T. H.
Darlow has published as a book under that title, a book to which I owe
him an acknowledgment for such use of it as I have made, as also for
permission to reproduce the title-page of Borrow’s Basque version of St.
Luke’s gospel. There only remains for me to say a word in praise of Mr.
Edward Thomas’s fine critical study of Borrow which was published under
the title of George Borrow: The Man and his Books. Mr. Thomas makes no
claim to the possession of new documents. This brings me to such excuse
as I can make for perpetrating a fifth biography. When Mrs. MacOubrey,
Borrow’s stepdaughter, the ‘Hen.’ of Wild Wales and the affectionate
companion of his later years, sold her father’s books and
manuscripts—and she always to her dying day declared that she had no
intention of parting with the manuscripts, which were, she said, taken
away under a misapprehension—she did not, of course, part with any of
his more private documents. All the more intimate letters of Borrow were
retained. At her death these passed to her executors, from whom I have
purchased all legal rights in the publication of Borrow’s hitherto
unpublished manuscripts and letters. I trust that even to those who may
disapprove of the discursive method with which—solely for my own
pleasure—I have written this book, will at least find a certain
biographical value in the many new letters by and to George Borrow that
are to be found in its pages. The book has taken me ten years to write,
and has been a labour of love.

[Pg 1]

CHAPTER I

CAPTAIN BORROW OF THE WEST NORFOLK MILITIA

George Henry Borrow was born at Dumpling Green near East Dereham,
Norfolk, on the 5th of July 1803. It pleased him to state on many an
occasion that he was born at East Dereham.

he writes in the opening lines of Lavengro, using almost the identical
phraseology that we find in the opening lines of Goethe’s Wahrheit und
Dichtung. Here is a later memory of Dereham from Lavengro:

[Pg 2]

Then follows an exquisite eulogy of the poet Cowper, which readers of
Lavengro know full well. Three years before Borrow was born William
Cowper died in this very town, leaving behind him so rich a legacy of
poetry and of prose, and moreover so fragrant a memory of a life in
which humour and pathos played an equal part. It was no small thing for
a youth who aspired to any kind of renown to be born in the
neighbourhood of the last resting-place of the author of The Task.

Yet Borrow was not actually born in East Dereham, but a mile and a half
away, at the little hamlet of Dumpling Green, in what was then a
glorious wilderness of common and furze bush, but is now a quiet
landscape of fields and hedges. You will find the home in which the
author of Lavengro first saw the light without much difficulty. It is
a fair-sized farm-house, with a long low frontage separated from the
road by a considerable strip of garden. It suggests a prosperous yeoman
class, and I have known farm-houses in East Anglia not one whit larger
dignified by the name of ‘hall.’ Nearly opposite is a pond. The trim
hedges are a delight to us to-day, but you must cast your mind back to a
century ago when they were entirely absent. The house belonged to George
Borrow’s maternal grandfather, Samuel Perfrement, who farmed the
adjacent land at this time. Samuel and Mary Perfrement had eight
children, the third of whom, Ann, was born in 1772.

In February 1793 Ann Perfrement, aged twenty-one, married Thomas Borrow,
aged thirty-five, in the Parish Church of East Dereham, and of the two
children that were born to them George Henry Borrow was the younger.
Thomas Borrow was the son of one John Borrow of St. Cleer in Cornwall,
who[Pg 3] died before this child was born, and is described by his
grandson[3] as the scion ‘of an ancient but reduced
Cornish family,[Pg 4]
tracing descent from the de Burghs, and entitled to carry their arms.’
This claim, of which I am thoroughly sceptical, is endorsed by Dr.
Knapp,[4] who, however, could find no trace of the family earlier than
[Pg 5]1678, the old parish registers having been destroyed. When Thomas Borrow
was born the family were in any case nothing more than small farmers,
and Thomas Borrow and his brothers were working on the land in the
intervals of attending the parish school. At the age of eighteen Thomas
was apprenticed to a maltster at Liskeard, and about this time he joined
the local Militia. Tradition has it that his career as a maltster was
cut short by his knocking his master down in a scrimmage. The victor
fled from the scene of his prowess, and enlisted as a private soldier in
the Coldstream Guards. This was in 1783, and in 1792 he was transferred
to the West Norfolk Militia; hence his appearance at East Dereham,
where, now a serjeant, his occupations for many a year were recruiting
and drilling.[5] It is recorded that at a theatrical performance at East
Dereham he first saw, presumably on the stage of the county-hall, his
future wife—Ann Perfrement. She was, it seems, engaged in a minor part
in a travelling company, not, we may assume, altogether with the
sanction of her father, who, in spite of his inheritance of French
blood, doubtless shared the then very strong English prejudice against
the stage. However, Ann was[Pg 6] one of eight children, and had, as we shall
find in after years, no inconsiderable strength of character, and so may
well at twenty years of age have decided upon a career for herself. In
any case we need not press too hard the Cornish and French origin of
George Borrow to explain his wandering tendencies, nor need we wonder at
the suggestion of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that he was ‘supposed to be of
gypsy descent by the mother’s side.’ You have only to think of the
father, whose work carried him from time to time to every corner of
England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of the mother with her reminiscence
of life in a travelling theatrical company, to explain in no small
measure the glorious vagabondage of George Borrow.

Behold then Thomas Borrow and Ann Perfrement as man and wife, he being
thirty-five years of age, she twenty-one. A roving, restless life was in
front of the pair for many a day, the West Norfolk Militia being
stationed in some eight or nine separate towns within the interval of
ten years between Thomas Borrow’s marriage and his second son’s birth.
The first child, John Thomas Borrow, was born on the 15th April 1801.[6]
The second son, George Henry Borrow, the subject of this memoir, was
born in his grandfather’s house at Dumpling Green, East Dereham, his
mother having found a natural refuge with her father while her husband
was busily recruiting in Norfolk. The two children passed with their
parents from place to place, and in 1809 we find them once again in
East[Pg 7] Dereham. From his son’s two books, Lavengro and Wild Wales, we
can trace the father’s later wanderings until his final retirement to
Norwich on a pension. In 1810 the family were at Norman Cross in
Huntingdonshire, when Captain Borrow had to assist in guarding the
French prisoners of war; for it was the stirring epoch of the Napoleonic
conflict, and within the temporary prison ‘six thousand French and other
foreigners, followers of the Grand Corsican, were now immured.’

But here we have only to do with Thomas Borrow, of whom we get many a
quaint glimpse in Lavengro, our first and our last being concerned
with him in the one quality that his son seems to have inherited, as the
associate of a prize-fighter—Big Ben Brain. Borrow records in his
opening chapter that Ben Brain and his father met in Hyde Park probably
in 1790, and that after an hour’s conflict ‘the champions shook hands
and retired, each having experienced quite enough of the other’s
prowess.’ Borrow further relates that four months afterwards Brain ‘died
in the arms of my father, who read to him the Bible in his last[Pg 8]
moments.’ Dr. Knapp finds Borrow in one of his many inaccuracies or
rather ‘imaginings’ here, as Brain did not die until 1794. More than
once in his after years the old soldier seems to have had a shy pride in
that early conflict, although the piety which seems to have come to him
with the responsibilities of wife and children led him to count any
recalling of the episode as a ‘temptation.’ When Borrow was about
thirteen years of age, he overheard his father and mother discussing
their two boys, the elder being the father’s favourite and George the
mother’s:

Borrow throughout his narrative refers to his father as ‘a man of
excellent common sense,’ and he quotes the opinion of William Taylor,
who had rather a bad reputation as a ‘freethinker’ with all the
church-going citizens of Norwich, with no little pride. Borrow is of
course the ‘young man’ of the dialogue. He was then eighteen years of
age:

When Borrow is twenty years of age we have another glimpse of father and
son, the father in his last illness, the son eager as usual to draw out
his parent upon the one subject that appeals to his adventurous spirit,
‘I should like to know something about Big Ben,’ he says:

Concerning the career of Borrow’s father there seem to be no documents
other than one contained in Lavengro, yet no Life of Borrow can
possibly he complete that does not draw boldly upon the son’s priceless
tributes. And so we come now to the last scene in the career of the
elder Borrow—his death-bed—which is also the last page of the first
volume of Lavengro. George Borrow’s brother has arrived from abroad.
The little house in Willow Lane, Norwich, contained the mother and her
two sons sorrowfully awaiting the end, which came on 28th February 1824.

Did Borrow’s father ever really fight Big Ben Brain or Bryan in Hyde
Park, or is it all a fantasy of the artist’s imagining? We shall never
know. Borrow called his Lavengro ‘An Autobiography’ at one stage of
its inception, although he wished to repudiate the autobiographical
nature of his story at another. Dr. Knapp in his anxiety to prove that
Borrow wrote his own memoirs in Lavengro and Romany Rye tells us
that he had no creative faculty—an absurd proposition. But I think we
may accept the contest between Ben Brain and Thomas Borrow, and what a
revelation of heredity that impressive death-bed scene may be counted.
Borrow on one occasion in later life declared that his favourite hooks
were the Bible and the Newgate Calendar. We know that he specialised on
the Bible and Prize-Fighting in no ordinary fashion—and here we see his
father on his death-bed struggling between the religious sentiments of
his maturity and the one great worldly escapade of his early manhood.

[Pg 12]

CHAPTER II

BORROW’S MOTHER

Throughout his whole life George Borrow adored his mother, who seems to
have developed into a woman of great strength of character far remote
from the pretty play-actor who won the heart of a young soldier at East
Dereham in the last years of the eighteenth century. We would gladly
know something of the early years of Ann Perfrement. Her father was a
farmer, whose farm at Dumpling Green we have already described. He did
not, however, ‘farm his own little estate’ as Borrow declared. The
grandfather—a French Protestant—came, if we are to believe Borrow,
from Caen in Normandy after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but
there is no documentary evidence to support the contention. However, the
story of the Huguenot immigration into England is clearly bound up with
Norwich and the adjacent district. And so we may well take the name of
‘Perfrement’ as conclusive evidence of a French origin, and reject as
utterly untenable the not unnatural suggestion of Nathaniel Hawthorne,
that Borrow’s mother was ‘of gypsy descent.’[9] She was one of the eight
children of Samuel[Pg 13] and Mary Perfrement, all of whom seem to have
devoted their lives to East Anglia.[10] We owe to Dr. Knapp’s edition of
Lavengro one exquisite glimpse of Ann’s girlhood that is not in any
other issue of the book. Ann’s elder sister, curious to know if she was
ever to be married, falls in with the current superstition that she must
wash her linen and ‘watch’ it drying before the fire between eleven and
twelve at night. Ann Perfrement was ten years old at the time. The two
girls walked over to East Dereham, purchased the necessary garment,
washed it in the pool near the house that may still be seen, and watched
and watched. Suddenly when the clock struck twelve they heard, or
thought they heard, a footstep on the path, the wind howled, and the
elder sister sprang to the door, locked and bolted it, and then fell in
convulsions on the floor. The superstition, which Borrow seems to have
told his mother had a Danish origin, is common enough in Ireland and in
Celtic lands. It could scarcely have been thus rehearsed by two Norfolk
children had they not had the blood of a more imaginative race in their
veins. In addition to this we find more than one effective glimpse of
Borrow’s mother in Lavengro. We have already noted the episode in
which she takes the side of her younger boy against her husband, with
whom John was the favourite. We meet her again in the following
dialogue, with its pathetic allusions to Dante and to the complaint—a
kind of nervous exhaustion which he called ‘the horrors’—that was to
trouble Borrow all his days:[Pg 14]

Our next glimpse of Mrs. Borrow is when after his father’s death George
had shouldered his knapsack and made his way to London to seek his
fortune by literature. His elder brother had remained at home,
determined upon being a painter, but joined George in[Pg 15] London, leaving
the widowed mother momentarily alone in Norwich.

Ann Borrow lived in Willow Lane, Norwich, for thirty-three years. That
Borrow was a devoted husband these pages will show. He was also a
devoted son. When he had made a prosperous marriage he tried hard to
persuade his mother to live with him at Oulton, but all in vain. She had
the wisdom to see that such an arrangement is rarely conducive to a
son’s domestic happiness. She continued to live in the little cottage
made sacred by many associations until almost the end of her days. Here
she had lived in earlier years with her husband and her two ambitious
boys, and in Norwich, doubtless, she had made her own friendships,
although of these no record remains. The cottage still stands in its
modest court, but is[Pg 16] at the moment untenanted. There is a letter extant
from Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, who wrote The Life of Mrs. Opie, to Mary
Borrow at Oulton, when Mrs. Borrow the elder had gone to live there,
which records the fact that in 1851, two years after Mrs. Borrow had
left the cottage in Willow Lane, it had already changed its appearance.
Mrs. Brightwell writes:

The house was the property of Thomas King, a carpenter. You enter from
Willow Lane through a covered passage into what was then known as King’s
Court. Here the little house faces you, and you meet it with a
peculiarly agreeable sensation, recalling more than one incident in
Lavengro that transpired there. In 1897 the then mayor made the one
attempt of his city of a whole half century to honour Borrow by calling
this court Borrow’s Court—thereby conferring a ridiculously small
distinction upon Borrow,[13] and removing a landmark connected with one
of its own worthy citizens. For Thomas King, the carpenter, was in
direct descent in the maternal line from the family of Parker, which
gave to Norwich one of its most distinguished sons in the famous
Archbishop of Queen Elizabeth’s day. He extended his business as
carpenter sufficiently to die a prosperous builder. Of his two sons one,
also named Thomas, became physician to Prince Talleyrand, and married a
sister of John Stuart Mill.[14] All this by the way, but there is little
more to record of Borrow’s mother apart from the letters addressed to
her by her son, which occur in their due place in these records. Yet one
little memorandum among my papers which bears Mrs. Borrow’s signature
may well find place here:

[Pg 16a]

THE BORROW HOUSE, NORWICH

The house is situated in Borrow’s Court, formerly King’s Court, Willow
Lane, St. Giles’s, Norwich, and here Borrow lived at intervals from 1816
to his marriage in 1839. His mother lived here for thirty-three years
until 1849; his father died here, and is buried in the neighbouring
churchyard of St. Giles’s.

[Pg 17]

Ann Borrow.

[Pg 18]

CHAPTER III

JOHN THOMAS BORROW

John Thomas Borrow was born two years before his younger brother, that
is, on the 15th April 1801. His father, then Serjeant Borrow, was
wandering from town to town, and it is not known where his elder son
first saw the light. John Borrow’s nature was cast in a somewhat
different mould from that of his brother. He was his father’s pride.
Serjeant Borrow could not understand George with his extraordinary taste
for the society of queer people—the wild Irish and the ragged Romanies.
John had far more of the normal in his being. Borrow gives us in
Lavengro our earliest glimpse of his brother:

John received his early education at the Norwich Grammar School, while
the younger brother was kept under the paternal wing. Father and mother,
with their younger boy George, were always on the move, passing from
county to county and from country to country, as Serjeant Borrow, soon
to be Captain, attended to his duties of drilling and recruiting, now in
England, now in Scotland, now in Ireland. We are given a fascinating
glimpse of John Borrow in Lavengro by way of a conversation between
Mr. and Mrs. Borrow over the education of their children. It was agreed
that while the family were in Edinburgh the boys should be sent to the
High School, and so at the historic school that Sir Walter Scott had
attended a generation before the two boys were placed, John being
removed from the Norwich Grammar School for the purpose. Among his many
prejudices of after years Borrow’s dislike of Scott was perhaps the most
regrettable, otherwise he would have gloried in the fact that their
childhood had had one remarkable point in common. Each boy took part in
the feuds between the Old Town and the New Town. Exactly as Scott
records his prowess at ‘the manning of the Cowgate Port,’ and the
combats maintained with great vigour, ‘with stones, and sticks, and
fisticuffs,’ as set forth in the first volume of Lockhart, so we have
not dissimilar feats set down in Lavengro. Side[Pg 20] by side also with the
story of ‘Green-Breeks,’ which stands out in Scott’s narrative of his
school combats, we have the more lurid account by Borrow of David
Haggart. Literary biography is made more interesting by such episodes of
likeness and of contrast.

We next find John Borrow in Ireland with his father, mother, and
brother. George is still a child, but he is precocious enough to be
learning the language, and thus laying the foundation of his interest in
little-known tongues. John is now an ensign in his father’s regiment.
‘Ah! he was a sweet being, that boy soldier, a plant of early promise,
bidding fair to become in after time all that is great, good, and
admirable.’ Ensign John tells his little brother how pleased he is to
find himself, although not yet sixteen years old, ‘a person in authority
with many Englishmen under me. Oh! these last six weeks have passed like
hours in heaven.’ That was in 1816, and we do not meet John again until
five years later, when we hear of him rushing into the water to save a
drowning man, while twenty others were bathing who might have rendered
assistance. Borrow records once again his father’s satisfaction:

In the interval the war had ended, and Napoleon had departed for St.
Helena. Peace had led to the pensioning of militia officers, or reducing
to half-pay of the juniors. The elder Borrow had settled in Norwich.
George was set to study at the Grammar School there,[Pg 21] while his brother
worked in Old Crome’s studio, for here was a moment when Norwich had its
interesting Renaissance, and John Borrow was bent on being an artist. He
had worked with Crome once before—during the brief interval that
Napoleon was at Elba—but now he set to in real earnest, and we have
evidence of a score of pictures by him that were catalogued In the
exhibitions of the Norwich Society of Artists between the years 1817 and
1824. They include one portrait of the artist’s father, and two of his
brother George.[15] Old Crome died in 1821, and then John went to London
to study under Haydon. Borrow declares that his brother had real taste
for painting, and that ‘if circumstances had not eventually diverted his
mind from the pursuit, he would have attained excellence, and left
behind him some enduring monument of his powers,’ ‘He lacked, however,’
he tells us, ‘one thing, the want of which is but too often fatal to the
sons of genius, and without which genius is little more than a splendid
toy in the hands of the possessor—perseverance, dogged perseverance.’
It is when he is thus commenting on his brother’s characteristics that
Borrow gives his own fine if narrow eulogy of Old Crome. John Borrow
seems to have continued his studies in London under Haydon for a year,
and then to have gone to Paris to copy pictures at the[Pg 22] Louvre. He
mentions a particular copy that he made of a celebrated picture by one
of the Italian masters, for which a Hungarian nobleman paid him well.
His three years’ absence was brought to an abrupt termination by news of
his father’s illness. He returned to Norwich in time to stand by that
father’s bedside when he died. The elder Borrow died, as we have seen,
in February 1824. The little home in King’s Court was kept on for the
mother, and as John was making money by his pictures it was understood
that he should stay with her. On the 1st April, however, George started
for London, carrying the manuscript of Romantic Ballads from the
Danish to Sir Richard Phillips, the publisher. On the 29th of the same
month he was joined by his brother John. John had come to London at his
own expense, but in the interests of the Norwich Town Council. The
council wanted a portrait of one of its mayors for St. Andrew’s
Hall—that Valhalla of Norwich municipal worthies which still strikes
the stranger as well-nigh unique in the city life of England. The
municipality would fain have encouraged a fellow-citizen, and John
Borrow had been invited to paint the portrait. ‘Why,’ it was asked,
‘should the money go into a stranger’s pocket and be spent in London?’
John, however, felt diffident of his ability and declined, and this in
spite of the fact that the £100 offered for the portrait must have been
very tempting. ‘What a pity it was,’ he said, ‘that Crome was dead.’
‘Crome,’ said the orator of the deputation that had called on John
Borrow,

At the mention of the heroic John bethought himself of Haydon, and
suggested his name; hence his visit to London, and his proposed
interview with Haydon. The two brothers went together to call upon the
‘painter of the heroic’ at his studio in Connaught Terrace, Hyde Park.
There was some difficulty about their admission, and it turned out
afterwards that Haydon thought they might be duns, as he was very hard
up at the time. His eyes glistened at the mention of the £100. ‘I am not
very fond of painting portraits,’ he said, ‘but a mayor is a mayor, and
there is something grand in that idea of the Norman arch.’ And thus
Mayor Hawkes came to be painted by Benjamin Haydon, and his portrait may
be found, not without diligent search, among the many municipal worthies
that figure on the walls of that most picturesque old Hall in Norwich.
Here is Borrow’s description of the painting:

John Borrow described Robert Hawkes to his brother as a person of many
qualifications:

Haydon, who makes no mention of the Borrows in his Correspondence or
Autobiography, although there is one letter of George Borrow’s to him
in the latter work, had been in jail for debt three years prior to the
visit of the Borrows. He was then at work on his greatest success in
‘the heroic’—The Raising of Lazarus, a canvas nineteen feet long by
fifteen high. The debt was one to house decorators, for the artist had
ever large ideas. The bailiff, he tells us,[17] was so agitated at the
sight of the painting of Lazarus in the studio that he cried out, ‘Oh,
my God! Sir, I won’t arrest you. Give me your word to meet me at twelve
at the attorney’s, and I’ll take it.’ In 1821 Haydon married, and a
little later we find him again ‘without a single shilling in the
world—with a large picture before me not half done.’ In April 1822 he
is arrested at the instance of his colourman, ‘with whom I had dealt for
fifteen years,’ and in November of the same year he is arrested again at
the instance of ‘a miserable apothecary.’ In April 1823 we find him in
the King’s Bench Prison, from which he was released in July. The
Raising of Lazarus meanwhile had gone to pay his upholsterer £300, and
his Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem had been sold for £240, although it
had brought him £3000 in receipts at exhibitions. Clearly heroic
pictures did not pay, and Haydon here took up ‘the torment of
portrait-painting’ as he called it.

[Pg 24a]

ROBERT HAWKES, MAYOR OF NORWICH in 1824.

From the painting by Benjamin Haydon in St. Andrew’s Hall, Norwich. This
portrait has its association with Borrow in that his brother John was
sent to London to request Haydon to paint it, and Borrow describes the
picture in Lavengro.

[Pg 25]

Perhaps it was Mayor Hawkes who helped to inspire this feeling.[18] Yet
the hundred pounds that John Borrow was able to procure must have been a
godsend, for shortly before this we find him writing in his diary of the
desperation that caused him to sell his books. ‘Books that had cost me
£20 I got only £3 for. But it was better than starvation.’ Indeed it was
in April of this year that the very baker was ‘insolent,’ and so in May
1824, as we learn from Tom Taylor’s Life, he produced ‘a full-length
portrait of Mr. Hawkes, a late Mayor of Norwich, painted for St.
Andrew’s Hall in that city.’ But I must leave Haydon’s troubled career,
which closes so far as the two brothers are concerned with a letter from
George to Haydon written the following year from 26 Bryanston Street,
Portman Square:

George Borrow.[19]
[Pg 26]

As Borrow was at the time in a most impoverished condition, it is not
easy to believe that he would have wished to be taken at his word. He
certainly had not a thousand pounds to lose. But he did undoubtedly, as
we shall see, take that journey on foot through the south of France,
after the manner of an earlier vagabond of literature—Oliver Goldsmith.
Haydon was to be far too much taken up with his own troubles during the
coming months to think any more about the Borrows when he had once
completed the portrait of the mayor, which he had done by July of this
year. Borrow’s letter to him is, however, an obvious outcome of a remark
dropped by the painter on the occasion of his one visit to his studio
when the following conversation took place:

[Pg 27]

We wish that the acquaintance had extended further, but this was not to
be. Borrow was soon to commence the wanderings which were to give him
much unsatisfactory fame, and the pair never met again. Let us, however,
return to John Borrow, who accompanied Haydon to Norwich, leaving his
brother for some time longer to the tender mercies of Sir Richard
Phillips. John, we judge, seems to have had plenty of shrewdness, and
was not without a sense of his own limitations. A chance came to him of
commercial success in a distant land, and he seized that chance. A
Norwich friend, Allday Kerrison, had gone out to Mexico, and writing
from Zacatecas in 1825 asked John to join him. John accepted. His salary
in the service of the Real del Monte Company was to be £300 per annum.
He sailed for Mexico in 1826, having obtained from his Colonel, Lord
Orford, leave of absence for a year, it being understood that renewals
of that leave of absence might be granted. He was entitled to half-pay
as a Lieutenant of the West Norfolk Militia, and this he settled upon
his mother during his absence. His career in Mexico was a failure. There
are many of his letters to his mother and brother extant which tell of
the difficulties of his situation. He was in three Mexican companies in
succession, and was about to be sent to Columbia to take charge of a
mine when he was stricken with a fever, and died at Guanajuato on 22nd
November 1838. He had far exceeded any leave that his Colonel could in
fairness grant, and before his death his name had been taken off the
army rolls. The question of his pay produced a long correspondence,
which can be found in the archives of the Rolls Office. I have the
original drafts of these letters in Borrow’s handwriting.[Pg 28] The first
letter by Borrow is dated 8th September 1831; it is better to give the
correspondence in its order.[20] The letters speak for themselves, and
require no comment.

I

To the Rt. Hon. The Secretary at War

Willow Lane, Norwich, September 8, 1831.

George Borrow.

II

To the Right Hon. The Secretary at War

Willow Lane, Norwich, 17th Septr. 1831.

George Borrow.

III

To the Right Hon. The Secretary at War

Norwich, Novr. 24, 1831.

George Borrow.

IV

To the Rt. Hon. The Secretary at War

Norwich, Decr. 13, 1831.

George Borrow.

[Pg 32]

V

To the Rt. Hon. The Secretary at War

Willow Lane, Norwich, May 24, 1833.

George Borrow.

[Pg 32a]

GEORGE BORROW

From a portrait by his brother John Thomas Borrow taken in early youth
when his hair was black. This portrait is now in the National Portrait
Gallery, London.

[Pg 33]

The last of these letters is in another handwriting than that of Borrow,
who by this time had started for St. Petersburg for the Bible Society.
The officials were adamant. To one letter the War Office replied that
they could not consider any claims until Lieutenant Borrow of the West
Norfolk Militia should have arrived in England to attend the training of
his regiment. These five letters are, as we have said, in the Rolls
Office, although the indefatigable Professor Knapp seems to have dropped
across only two of them there. Their chief interest is in that they are
the earliest in order of date of the hitherto known letters of Borrow.
There is one further letter on the subject written somewhat later by old
Mrs. Borrow. She also appeals to the War Office for her son’s
allowance.[22] It would seem clear that the arrears were never paid.

To the Rt. Hon. The Earl of Orford

Willow Lane, Norwich, 26 May 1834.

Ann Borrow.

I have said that there are letters of John Borrow’s extant. Fragments of
these will be found in Dr. Knapp’s book. These show a keen intelligence,
great practicality, and common sense. George—in 1829—had asked his
brother as to joining him in Mexico. ‘If the country is soon settled I
shall say “yes,”‘ John answers. With equal wisdom he says to his
brother, ‘Do not enter the army; it is a bad spec.’ In this same year,
1829, John writes to ask whether his mother and brother are ‘still
living in that windy house of old King’s; it gives me the rheumatism to
think of it.’ In 1830 he writes to his mother that he wishes his brother
were making money. ‘Neither he nor I have any luck, he works hard and
remains poor.’ In February of 1831 John writes to George suggesting that
he should endeavour to procure a commission in the regiment, and in July
of the same year to try the law again:

John, as we have seen, died in Mexico of fever. George was at St.
Petersburg working for the Bible Society when his mother writes from
Norwich to tell him the news. John had died on 22nd November 1833. ‘You
are now my only hope,’ she writes, ‘ … do not grieve, my dear George.
I trust we shall all meet in heaven. Put a crape on your hat for[Pg 35] some
time.’ Had George Borrow’s brother lived it might have meant very much
in his life. There might have been nephews and nieces to soften the
asperity of his later years. Who can say? Meanwhile, Lavengro contains
no happier pages than those concerned with this dearly loved brother.

GEORGE BORROW’S BIRTHPLACE AT DUMPLING GREEN

From a drawing by Fortunino Matania

[Pg 36]

CHAPTER IV

A WANDERING CHILDHOOD

We do not need to inquire too deeply as to Borrow’s possible gypsy
origin in order to account for his vagabond propensities. The lives of
his parents before his birth, and the story of his own boyhood,
sufficiently account for the dominant tendency in Borrow. His father and
mother were married in 1793. Almost every year they changed their
domicile. In 1801 a son was born to them—they still continued to change
their domicile. Captain Borrow followed his regiment from place to
place, and his family accompanied him on these journeys. Dover,
Colchester, Sandgate, Canterbury, Chelmsford—these are some of the
towns where the Borrows sojourned. It was the merest accident—the Peace
of Amiens, to be explicit—that led them back to East Dereham in 1803,
so that the second son was born in his grandfather’s house. George was
only a month old when he was carried off to Colchester; in 1804 he was
in the barracks of Kent, in 1805 of Sussex, in 1806 at Hastings, in 1807
at Canterbury, and so on. The indefatigable Dr. Knapp has recorded every
detail for all who love the minute, the meticulous, in biography. The
whole of the first thirteen years of Borrow’s life is filled up in this
way, until in 1816 he and his parents found a home of some permanence in
Norwich. In 1809-10 they were at East[Pg 37] Dereham, in 1810-11 at Norman
Cross, in 1812 wandering from Harwich to Sheffield, and in 1813
wandering from Sheffield to Edinburgh; in 1814 they were in Norwich, and
in 1815-16 in Ireland. In this last year they returned to Norwich, the
father to retire on full pay, and to live in Willow Lane until his
death. How could a boy, whose first twelve years of life had been made
up of such continual wandering, have been other than a restless,
nomad-loving man, envious of the free life of the gypsies, for whom
alone in later life he seemed to have kindliness? Those twelve years are
to most boys merely the making of a moral foundation for good or ill; to
Borrow they were everything, and at least four personalities captured
his imagination during that short span, as we see if we follow his
juvenile wanderings more in detail to Dereham, Norman Cross, Edinburgh,
and Clonmel, and the personalities are Lady Fenn, Ambrose Smith, David
Haggart, and Murtagh. Let us deal with each in turn:

A. East Dereham and Lady Fenn.—In our opening chapter we referred to
the lines in Lavengro, where Borrow recalls his early impressions of
his native town, or at least the town in the neighbourhood of the hamlet
in which he was born. Borrow, we may be sure, would have repudiated
‘Dumpling Green’ if he could. The name had a humorous suggestion. To
this day they call boys from Norfolk ‘Norfolk Dumplings’ in the
neighbouring shires. But East Dereham was something to be proud of. In
it had died the writer who, through the greater part of Borrow’s life,
remained the favourite poet of that half of England which professed the
Evangelical creed in which Borrow was brought up. Cowper was buried here
by the side of[Pg 38] Mary Unwin, and every Sunday little George would see his
tomb just as Henry Kingsley was wont to see the tombs in Chelsea Old
Church. The fervour of devotion to Cowper’s memory that obtained in
those early days must have been a stimulus to the boy, who from the
first had ambitions far beyond anything that he was to achieve. Here was
his first lesson. The second came from Lady Fenn—a more vivid
impression for the child. Twenty years before Borrow was born Cowper had
sung her merits in his verse. She and her golden-headed cane are
commemorated in Lavengro. Dame Eleanor Fenn had made a reputation in
her time. As ‘Mrs. Teachwell’ and ‘Mrs. Lovechild’ she had published
books for the young of a most improving character, The Child’s
Grammar, The Mother’s Grammar, A Short History of Insects, and
Cobwebs to Catch Flies being of the number. The forty-fourth edition
of The Child’s Grammar by Mrs. Lovechild appeared in 1851, and the
twenty-second edition of The Mother’s Grammar in 1849. But it is her
husband that her name most recalls to us. Sir John Fenn gave us the
delightful Paston Letters—of which Horace Walpole said that ‘they make
all other letters not worth reading.’ Walpole described ‘Mr. Fenn of
East Dereham in Norfolk’ as ‘a smatterer in antiquity, but a very good
sort of man.’ Fenn, who held the original documents of the Letters, sent
his first two volumes, when published, to Buckingham Palace, and the
King acknowledged the gifts by knighting the editor, who, however, died
in 1794, before George Borrow was born. His widow survived until 1813,
and Borrow was in his seventh or eighth year when he caught these
notable glimpses of his ‘Lady Bountiful,’ who lived in ‘the
half-aristocratic mansion’ of the[Pg 39] town. But we know next to nothing of
Borrow in East Dereham, from which indeed he departed in his eighth
year. There are, however, interesting references to his memories of the
place in Lavengro. The first is where he recalls to his author friend,
who had offered him comet wine of 1811, his recollection of gazing at
the comet from the market-place of ‘pretty D——’ in 1811.[23] The
second reference is when he goes to church with the gypsies and dreams
of an incident in his childhood:

But Borrow, as I have said, left Dereham in his eighth year, and the
author of a History of East Dereham[Pg 40] thus accounts for several
inaccuracies in his memory, both as to persons and things.

B. Norman Cross and Ambrose Smith.—In Lavengro Borrow recalls
childish memories of Canterbury and of Hythe, at which latter place he
saw the church vault filled with ancient skulls as we may see it there
to-day. And after that the book which impressed itself most vividly upon
his memory was Robinson Crusoe. How much he came to revere Defoe the
pages of Lavengro most eloquently reveal to us. ‘Hail to thee, spirit
of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee?’ In 1810-11 his
father was in the barracks at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire. Here the
Government had bought a large tract of land, and built upon it a huge
wooden prison, and overlooking this a substantial barrack also of wood,
the only brick building on the land being the house of the Commandant.
The great building was destined for the soldiers taken prisoners in the
French wars. The place was constructed to hold 5000 prisoners, and 500
men were employed by the War Office in 1808 upon its construction. The
first batch of prisoners were the victims of the battle of Vimeiro in
that year. Borrow’s description of the hardships of the prisoners has
been called in question by a later writer, Arthur Brown,[24] who denies
the story of bad food and ‘straw-plait hunts,’ and charges Borrow with
recklessness of statement. ‘What could have been the matter with the man
to write such stuff as this?’ asks[Pg 41] Brown in reference to Borrow’s story
of bad meat and bad bread: which was not treating a great author with
quite sufficient reverence. Borrow was but recalling memories of
childhood, a period when one swallow does make a summer. He had
doubtless seen examples of what he described, although it may not have
been the normal condition of things. Brown’s own description of the
Norman Cross prison was interwoven with a love romance, in which a
French officer fell in love with a girl of the neighbouring village of
Yaxley, and after Waterloo returned to England and married her. When he
wrote his story a very old man was still living at Yaxley, who
remembered, as a boy, having often seen the prisoners on the road, some
very well dressed, some in tatters, a few in uniform. The milestone is
still pointed out which marked the limit beyond which the
officer-prisoners might not walk. The buildings were destroyed in 1814,
when all the prisoners were sent home, and the house of the Commandant,
now a private residence, alone remains to recall this episode in our
history. But Borrow’s most vivid memory of Norman Cross was connected
with the viper given to him by an old man, who had rendered it harmless
by removing the fangs. It was the possession of this tame viper that
enabled the child of eight—this was Borrow’s age at the time—to
impress the gypsies that he met soon afterwards, and particularly the
boy Ambrose Smith, whom Borrow introduced to the world in Lavengro as
Jasper Petulengro. Borrow’s frequent meetings with Petulengro[25] are no
doubt many of them mythical. He was an imaginative writer, and Dr.
Knapp’s worst banality is to suggest that he ‘invented nothing.’ But[Pg 42]
Petulengro was a very real person, who lived the usual roving gypsy
life. There is no reason to assume otherwise than that Borrow did
actually meet him at Norman Cross when he was eight years old, and
Ambrose a year younger, and not thirteen as Borrow states. In the
original manuscript of Lavengro in my possession, as in the copy of it
in Mrs. Borrow’s handwriting that came into the possession of Dr. Knapp,
‘Ambrose’ is given instead of ‘Jasper,’ and the name was altered as an
afterthought. It is of course possible that Borrow did not actually meet
Jasper until his arrival in Norwich, for in the first half of the
nineteenth century various gypsy families were in the habit of
assembling their carts and staking their tents on the heights above
Norwich, known as Mousehold Heath, that glorious tract of country that
has been rendered memorable in history by the tragic life of Kett the
tanner, and has been immortalised in painting by Turner and Crome. Here
were assembled the Smiths and Hernes and Boswells, names familiar to
every student of gypsy lore. Jasper Petulengro, as Borrow calls him, or
Ambrose Smith, to give him his real name, was the son of Fāden Smith,
and his name of Ambrose was derived from his uncle, Ambrose Smith, who
was transported for stealing harness. Ambrose was twice married, and it
was his second wife, Sanspirella Herne, who comes into the Borrow story.
He had families by both his wives. Ambrose had an extraordinary varied
career. It will be remembered by readers of the Zincali that when he
visited Borrow at Oulton in 1842 he complained that ‘There is no living
for the poor people, brother, the chokengres (police) pursue us from
place to place, and the gorgios are become either so poor or miserly
that they grudge our cattle a bite of grass by the wayside, and
ourselves a yard of[Pg 43] ground to light a fire upon.’ After a time Ambrose
left the eastern counties and crossed to Ireland. In 1868 he went to
Scotland, and there seems to have revived his fortunes. In 1878 he and
his family were encamped at Knockenhair Park, about a mile from Dunbar.
Here Queen Victoria, who was staying at Broxmouth Park near by with the
Dowager Duchess of Roxburghe, became interested in the gypsies, and paid
them a visit.[26] This was in the summer of 1878. Ambrose was then a
very old man. He died in the following October. His wife, Sanspi or
Sanspirella, received a message of sympathy from the Queen. Very shortly
after Ambrose’s death, however, most of the family went off to America,
where doubtless they are now scattered, many of them, it may be, leading
successful lives, utterly oblivious of the association of one of their
ancestors with Borrow and his great book. Ambrose Smith was buried in
Dunbar cemetery, the Christian service being read over his grave, and
his friends erected[Pg 44] a stone to him which bears the following
inscription, the hymn not being very accurately rendered:

In December 1912 a London newspaper contained an account of a gypsy
meeting at which Jasper Petulengro was present. Not only was this
obviously impossible, but no relative of Ambrose Smith is apparently
alive in England who could by any chance have justified the imposition.

I have said that it is probable that Borrow did not meet Jasper or
Ambrose until later days in Norwich. I assume this as possible because
Borrow misstates the age of his boy friend in Lavengro. Ambrose was
actually a year younger than Borrow, whereas when George was eight years
of age he represents Ambrose as ‘a lad of some twelve or thirteen
years,’ and he[Pg 45] keeps up this illusion on more than one later occasion.
However, we may take it as almost certain that Borrow received his first
impression of the gypsies in these early days at Norman Cross.

C. Edinburgh and David Haggart.—Three years separated the sojourn of
the Borrow family at Norman Cross from their sojourn in Edinburgh—three
years of continuous wandering. The West Norfolk Militia were watching
the French prisoners at Norman Cross for fifteen months. After that we
have glimpses of them at Colchester, at East Dereham again, at Harwich,
at Leicester, at Huddersfield, concerning which place Borrow
incidentally in Wild Wales writes of having been at school, in
Sheffield, in Berwick-on-Tweed, and finally the family are in Edinburgh,
where they arrive on 6th April 1813. We have already referred to
Borrow’s presence at the High School of Edinburgh, the school sanctified
by association with Walter Scott and so many of his illustrious
fellow-countrymen. He and his brother were at the High School for a
single session, that is, for the winter session of 1813-14, although
with the licence of a maker of fiction he claimed, in Lavengro, to
have been there for two years. But it is not in this brief period of
schooling of a boy of ten that we find the strongest influence that
Edinburgh gave to Borrow. Rather may we seek it in the acquaintanceship
with the once too notorious David Haggart. Seven years later than this
all the peoples of the three kingdoms were discussing David Haggart, the
Scots Jack Sheppard, the clever young prison-breaker, who was hanged at
Edinburgh in 1821 for killing his jailer in Dumfries prison. How much
David Haggart filled the imagination of every one who could read in the
early years of last[Pg 46] century is demonstrated by a reference to the
Library Catalogue of the British Museum, where we find pamphlet after
pamphlet, broadsheet after broadsheet, treating of the adventures,
trial, and execution of this youthful jailbird. Even George Combe, the
phrenologist, most famous in his day, sat in judgment upon the young man
while he was in prison, and published a pamphlet which made a great
impression upon prison reformers. Combe submitted his observations to
Haggart in jail, and told the prisoner indeed that he had a greater
development of the organs of benevolence and justice than he had
anticipated. There cannot be a doubt but that Combe started in a
measure, through his treatment of this case, the theory that many of our
methods of punishment led to the making of habitual criminals.[28] But
by far the most valuable publication with regard to Haggart is one that
Borrow must have read in his youth. This was a life of Haggart written
by himself,[29] a little book that had a[Pg 47] wide circulation, and
containing a preface by George Robertson, Writer to the Signet, dated
Edinburgh, 20th July 1821. Mr. Robertson tells us that a portion of the
story was written by Haggart, and the remainder taken down from his
dictation. The profits of this book, Haggart arranged, were to go in
part to the school of the jail in which he was confined, and part to be
devoted to the welfare of his younger brothers and sister. From this
little biography we learn that Haggart was born in Golden Acre, near
Canon-Mills, in the county of Edinburgh in 1801, his father, John
Haggart, being a gamekeeper, and in later years a dog-trainer. The boy
was at school under Mr. Robin Gibson at Canon-Mills for two years. He
left school at ten years of age, and from that time until his execution
seems to have had a continuous career of thieving. He tells us that
before he was eleven years old he had stolen a bantam cock from a woman
belonging to the New Town of Edinburgh. He went with another boy to
Currie, six miles from Edinburgh, and there stole a pony, but this was
afterwards returned. When but twelve years of age he attended Leith
races, and it was here that he enlisted in the Norfolk Militia, then
stationed in Edinburgh Castle. This may very well have brought him into
contact with Borrow in the way described in Lavengro. He was only,
however, in the regiment for a year, for when it was sent back to
England the Colonel in command of it obtained young Haggart’s discharge.
These dates coincide with Borrow’s presence in Edinburgh. Haggart’s
history for the next five or six years was in truth merely that of a
wandering pickpocket, sometimes in Scotland, sometimes in England, and
finally he became a notorious burglar. Incidentally he refers to a girl[Pg 48]
with whom he was in love. Her name was Mary Hill She belonged to
Ecclefechan, which Haggart more than once visited. He must therefore
have known Carlyle, who had not then left his native village. In 1820 we
find him in Edinburgh, carrying on the same sort of depredations both
there and at Leith—now he steals a silk plaid, now a greatcoat, and now
a silver teapot. These thefts, of course, landed him in jail, out of
which he breaks rather dramatically, fleeing with a companion to Kelso.
He had, indeed, more than one experience of jail. Finally, we find him
in the prison of Dumfries destined to stand his trial for ‘one act of
house-breaking, eleven cases of theft, and one of prison-breaking.’
While in prison at Dumfries he planned another escape, and in the
attempt to hit a jailer named Morrin on the head with a stone he
unexpectedly killed him. His escape from Dumfries jail after this
murder, and his later wanderings, are the most dramatic part of his
book. He fled through Carlisle to Newcastle, and then thought that he
would be safer if he returned to Scotland, where he found the rewards
that were offered for his arrest faced him wherever he went. He turned
up again in Edinburgh, where he seems to have gone about freely,
although reading everywhere the notices that a reward of seventy guineas
was offered for his apprehension. Then he fled to Ireland, where he
thought that his safety was assured. At Dromore he was arrested and
brought before the magistrate, but he spoke with an Irish brogue, and
declared that his name was John McColgan, and that he came from Armagh.
He escaped from Dromore jail by jumping through a window, and actually
went so far as to pay three pound ten shillings for his passage to
America, but he was afraid of the sea, and changed his mind, and lost
his[Pg 49] passage money at the last moment. After this he made a tour right
through Ireland, in spite of the fact that the Dublin Hue and Cry had
a description of his person which he read more than once. His assurance
was such that in Tullamore he made a pig-driver apologise before the
magistrate for charging him with theft, although he had been living on
nothing else all the time he was in Ireland. Finally, he was captured,
being recognised by a policeman from Edinburgh. He was brought from
Ireland to Dumfries, landed in Calton jail, Edinburgh, and was tried and
executed. In addition to composing this biography Haggart wrote while in
Edinburgh jail a rather long set of verses, of which I give the
following two as specimens (the original autograph is in Lord Cockburn’s
copy in the British Museum):

D. Ireland and Murtagh.—We may pass over the brief sojourn in Norwich
that was Borrow’s lot in 1814, when the West Norfolk Militia left
Scotland. When Napoleon escaped from Elba the West Norfolk Regiment was
despatched to Ireland, and Captain Borrow again took his family with
him. We find the boy with his family at Clonmel from May to December of
1815. Here Borrow’s elder brother, now a boy of fifteen, was promoted
from Ensign to Lieutenant, gaining in a year, as Dr. Knapp reminds us, a
position that it[Pg 50] had taken his father twelve years to attain. In
January 1816 the Borrows moved to Templemore, returning to England in
May of that year. Borrow, we see, was less than a year in Ireland, and
he was only thirteen years of age when he left the country. But it seems
to have been the greatest influence that guided his career. Three of the
most fascinating chapters in Lavengro were one outcome of that brief
sojourn, a thirst for the acquirement of languages was another, and
perhaps a taste for romancing a third. Borrow never came to have the
least sympathy with the Irish race, or its national aspirations. As the
son of a half-educated soldier he did not come in contact with any but
the vagabond element of Ireland, exactly as his father had done before
him.[30] Captain Borrow was asked on one occasion what language is being
spoken:

And Borrow followed his father’s prejudices throughout his life,
although in the one happy year in which he wrote The Bible in Spain he
was able to do justice to the country that had inspired so much of his
work:

In later years Orangemen were to him the only attractive element in the
life of Ireland, and we may be sure[Pg 51] that he was not displeased when his
stepdaughter married one of them. Yet the creator of literature works
more wisely than he knows, and Borrow’s books have won the wise and
benign appreciation of many an Irish and Roman Catholic reader, whose
nationality and religion Borrow would have anathematised. Irishmen may
forgive Borrow much, because he was one of the first of modern English
writers to take their language seriously.[32] It is true that he had but
the most superficial knowledge of it. He admits—in Wild Wales—that
he only knew it ‘by ear.’ The abundant Irish literature that has been so
diligently studied during the last quarter of a century was a closed
book to Borrow, whose few translations from the Irish have but little
value. Yet the very appreciation of Irish as a language to be seriously
studied in days before Dr. Sigerson, Dr. Douglas Hyde, and Dr. Kuno
Meyer had waxed enthusiastic and practical kindles our gratitude. Then
what a character is Murtagh. We are sure there was a Murtagh, although,
unlike Borrow’s other boyish and vagabond friend Haggart, we know
nothing about him but what Borrow has to tell. Yet what a picture is
this where Murtagh wants a pack of cards:

With what distrust as we learn again and again in Lavengro did Captain
Borrow follow his son’s inclination towards languages, and especially
the Irish language, in his early years, although seeing that he was well
grounded in Latin. Little did the worthy Captain dream that this, and
this alone, was to carry down his name through the ages:

Borrow was never a philologist, but this first inclination was to lead
him to Spanish, to Welsh, and above all to Romany, and to make of him
the most beloved traveller and the strangest vagabond in all English
literature.

[Pg 54]

CHAPTER V

GEORGE BORROW’S NORWICH—THE GURNEYS

Norwich may claim to be one of the most fascinating cities in the
kingdom. To-day it is known to the wide world by its canaries and its
mustard, although its most important industry is the boot trade, in
which it employs some eight thousand persons. To the visitor it has many
attractions. The lovely cathedral with its fine Norman arches, the
Erpingham Gate so splendidly Gothic, the noble Castle Keep so imposingly
placed with the cattle-market below—these are all as Borrow saw them
nearly a century ago. So also is the church of St. Peter Mancroft, where
Sir Thomas Browne lies buried. And to the picturesque Mousehold Heath
you may still climb and recall one of the first struggles for liberty
and progress that past ages have seen, the Norfolk rising under Robert
Kett which has only not been glorified in song and in picture, because—

And Kett’s so-called rebellion was destined to failure, and its leader
to cruel martyrdom. Mousehold Heath has been made the subject of
paintings by Turner and Crome, and of fine word pictures by George
Borrow. When Borrow and his parents lighted upon Norwich[Pg 55] in 1814 and
1816 the city had inspiring literary associations. Before the invention
of railways it seemed not uncommon for a fine intellectual life to
emanate from this or that cathedral city. Such an intellectual life was
associated with Lichfield when the Darwins and the Edgeworths gathered
at the Bishop’s Palace around Dr. Seward and his accomplished daughters.
Norwich has more than once been such a centre. The first occasion was in
the period of which we write, when the Taylors and the Gurneys
flourished in a region of ideas; the second was during the years from
1837 to 1849, when Edward Stanley held the bishopric. This later period
does not come into our story, as by that time Borrow had all but left
Norwich. But of the earlier period, the period of Borrow’s more or less
fitful residence in Norwich—1814 to 1833—we are tempted to write at
some length. There were three separate literary and social forces in
Norwich in the first decades of the nineteenth century—the Gurneys of
Earlham, the Taylor-Austin group, and William Taylor, who was in no way
related to Mrs. John Taylor and her daughter, Sarah Austin. The Gurneys
were truly a remarkable family, destined to leave their impress upon
Norwich and upon a wider world. At the time of his marriage in 1773 to
Catherine Bell, John Gurney, wool-stapler of Norwich, took his young
wife, whose face has been preserved in a canvas by Gainsborough, to live
in the old Court House in Magdalen Street, which had been the home of
two generations of the Gurney family. In 1786 John Gurney went with his
continually growing family to live at Earlham Hall, some two or three
miles out of Norwich on the Earlham Road. Here that family of eleven
children—one boy had died in infancy—grew[Pg 56] up. Not one but has an
interesting history, which is recorded by Mr. Augustus Hare and other
writers.[34] Elizabeth, the fourth daughter, married Joseph Fry, and as
Elizabeth Fry attained to a world-wide fame as a prison reformer. Hannah
married Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton of Slave Trade Abolition; Richenda, the
Rev. Francis Cunningham, who sent George Borrow upon his career; while
Louisa married Samuel Hoare of Hampstead. Of her Joseph John Gurney said
at her death in 1836 that she was ‘superior in point of talent to any
other of my father’s eleven children.’ It is with the eleventh child,
however, that we have mainly to do, for this son, Joseph John Gurney,
alone appears in Borrow’s pages. The picture of these eleven Quaker
children growing up to their various destinies under the roof of Earlham
Hall is an attractive one. Men and women of all creeds accepted the
catholic Quaker’s hospitality. Mrs. Opie and a long list of worthies of
the past come before us, and when Mr. Gurney, in 1802, took his six
unmarried daughters to the Lakes Old Crome accompanied them as
drawing-master. There is, however, one picture in the story of
unforgettable charm, the episode of the courtship of Elizabeth Gurney by
Joseph Fry, and this I must quote from Mr. Augustus Hare’s pleasant
book:

In 1803—the year of Borrow’s birth—John Gurney became a partner in the
great London Bank of Overend and Gurney, and his son, Joseph John, in
that same year went up to Oxford. In 1809 Joseph returned to take his
place in the bank, and to preside over the family of unmarried sisters
at Earlham, father and mother being dead, and many members of the family
distributed. Incidentally, we are told by Mr. Hare that the Gurneys of
Earlham at this time drove out with four black horses, and that when
Bishop Bathurst, Stanley’s predecessor, required horses for State
occasions to drive him to the cathedral, he borrowed these, and the more
modest episcopal horses took the Quaker family to their meeting-house.
It does not come within the scope of this book, discursive as I choose
to[Pg 58] make it, to trace the fortunes of these eleven remarkable Gurney
children, or even of Borrow’s momentary acquaintance, Joseph John
Gurney. His residence at Earlham, and his life of philanthropy, are a
romance in a way, although one wonders whether if the name of Gurney had
not been associated with so much of virtue and goodness the crash that
came long after Joseph John Gurney’s death would have been quite so full
of affliction for a vast multitude. Joseph John Gurney died in 1847, in
his fifty-ninth year; his sister, Mrs. Fry, had died two years earlier.
The younger brother and twelfth child—Joseph John being the
eleventh—Daniel Gurney, the last of the twelve children, lived till
1880, aged eighty-nine. He had outlived by many years the catastrophe to
the great banking firm with which the name of Gurney is associated. This
great firm of Overend and Gurney, of which yet another brother, Samuel,
was the moving spirit, was organised nine years after his death—in
1865—into a joint-stock company, which failed to the amount of eleven
millions in 1866. At the time of the failure, which affected all
England, much as did the Liberator smash a generation later, the only
Gurney in the directorate was Daniel Gurney, to whom his sister, Lady
Buxton, allowed a pension of £2000 a year. This is a long story to tell
by way of introduction to one episode in Lavengro. Dr. Knapp places
this episode in the year 1817, when Borrow was but fourteen years of age
and Gurney was twenty-nine. I need not apologise at this point for a
very lengthy quotation from a familiar book:

It is doubtful if Borrow met Joseph John Gurney more than on the one
further occasion to which he refers above. At the commencement of his
engagement with the Bible Society he writes to its secretary, Mr. Jowett
(March 18, 1833), to say that he must procure from Mr. Cunningham ‘a
letter of introduction from him to John Gurney,’ and this second and
last interview must have taken place at Earlham before his departure for
Russia.

But if Borrow was to come very little under the influence of Joseph John
Gurney, his destiny was to be considerably moulded by the action of
Gurney’s brother-in-law, Cunningham, who first put him in touch with the
Bible Society. Joseph John Gurney and his sisters were the very life of
the Bible Society in those years.

[Pg 63]

CHAPTER VI

GEORGE BORROW’S NORWICH—THE TAYLORS

With the famous ‘Taylors of Norwich’ Borrow seems to have had no
acquaintance, although he went to school with a connection of that
family, James Martineau. These socially important Taylors were in no way
related to William Taylor of that city, who knew German literature, and
scandalised the more virtuous citizens by that, and perhaps more by his
fondness for wine and also for good English beer—a drink over which his
friend Borrow was to become lyrical. When people speak of the Norwich
Taylors they refer to the family of Dr. John Taylor, who in 1783 was
elected to the charge of the Presbyterian congregation in Norwich. His
eldest son, Richard, married Margaret, the daughter of a mayor of
Norwich of the name of Meadows; and Sarah, another daughter of that same
worshipful mayor, married David Martineau, grandson of Gaston Martineau,
who fled from France at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes.[35] Harriet and James Martineau were grandchildren of this
David. The second son of Richard and Margaret Taylor was John, who
married Susannah Cook. Susannah is the clever Mrs. John Taylor of this
story, and her daughter of even greater ability was Sarah Austin, the
wife of the[Pg 64] famous jurist. Their daughter married Sir Alexander
Duff-Gordon. She was the author of Letters from Egypt, a book to which
George Meredith wrote an ‘Introduction,’ so much did he love the writer.
Lady Duff-Gordon’s daughter, Janet Ross, wrote the biography of her
mother, her grandmother, and Mrs. John Taylor, in Three Generations of
Englishwomen. A niece, Lena Duff-Gordon (Mrs. Waterfield), has written
pleasant books of travel, and so, for five generations, this family has
produced clever women-folk. But here we are only concerned with Mrs.
John Taylor, called by her friends the ‘Madame Roland of Norwich.’ Lucy
Aikin describes how she ‘darned her boy’s grey worsted stockings while
holding her own with Southey, Brougham, or Mackintosh.’ One of her
daughters married Henry Reeve, and, as I have said, another married John
Austin. Borrow was twenty years of age and living in Norwich when Mrs.
Taylor died. It is to be regretted that in the early impressionable
years his position as a lawyer’s clerk did not allow of his coming into
a circle in which he might have gained certain qualities of savoir
faire and joie de vivre, which he was all his days to lack. Of the
Taylor family the Duke of Sussex said that they reversed the ordinary
saying that it takes nine tailors to make a man. The witticism has been
attributed to Sydney Smith, but Mrs. Ross gives evidence that it was the
Duke’s—the youngest son of George III. In his Life of Sir James
Mackintosh Basil Montagu, referring to Mrs. John Taylor, says:

We note here the reference to ‘the high-minded and intelligent William
Taylor,’ because William Taylor, whose influence upon Borrow’s destiny
was so pronounced, has been revealed to many by the slanders of Harriet
Martineau, that extraordinary compound of meanness and generosity, of
poverty-stricken intelligence and rich endowment. In her
Autobiography, published in 1877, thirty-four years after Robberds’s
Memoir of William Taylor, she dwells upon the drinking propensities of
William Taylor, who was a schoolfellow of her father’s. She admits,
indeed, that Taylor was an ideal son, whose ‘exemplary filial duty was a
fine spectacle to the whole city,’ and she continues:

Well, Harriet Martineau is not much to be trusted as to Taylor’s virtues
or his vices, for her early recollections are frequently far from the
mark. Thus she refers under the date 1833 to the fact that:

As a matter of fact, in this year, 1833, Mrs. Fry was[Pg 66] the mother of
fifteen children, and had nine grandchildren, and Joseph John Gurney had
been twice a widower. Both brother and sister were zealous
philanthropists at this date. And so we may take with some measure of
qualification Harriet Martineau’s many strictures upon Taylor’s drinking
habits, which were, no doubt, those of his century and epoch; although
perhaps beyond the acceptable standard of Norwich, where the Gurneys
were strong teetotallers, and the Bishop once invited Father Mathew,
then in the glory of his temperance crusade, to discourse in his
diocese. Indeed, Robberds, his biographer, tells us explicitly that
these charges of intemperance were ‘grossly and unjustly exaggerated.’
William Taylor’s life is pleasantly interlinked with Scott and Southey.
Lucy Aikin records that she heard Sir Walter Scott declare to Mrs.
Barbauld that Taylor had laid the foundations of his literary
career—had started him upon the path of glory through romantic verse to
romantic prose, from The Lay of the Last Minstrel to Waverley. It
was the reading of Taylor’s translation of Bürger’s Lenore that did
all this. ‘This, madam,’ said Scott, ‘was what made me a poet. I had
several times attempted the more regular kinds of poetry without
success, but here was something that I thought I could do.’ Southey
assuredly loved Taylor, and each threw at the feet of the other the
abundant literary learning that both possessed. This we find in a
correspondence which, reading more than a century after it was written,
still has its charm.[36] The son of a[Pg 67] wealthy manufacturer of Norwich,
Taylor was born in that city in 1765. He was in early years a pupil of
Mrs. Barbauld. At fourteen he was placed in his father’s counting-house,
and soon afterwards was sent abroad, in the company of one of the
partners, to acquire languages. He learnt German thoroughly at a time
when few Englishmen had acquaintance with its literature. To Goethe’s
genius he never did justice, having been offended by that great man’s
failure to acknowledge a book that Taylor sent to him, exactly as
Carlyle and Borrow alike were afterwards offended by similar
delinquencies on the part of Walter Scott. When he settled again in
Norwich he commenced to write for the magazines, among others for Sir
Richard Phillips’s Monthly Magazine, and to correspond with Southey.
At the time Southey was a poor man, thinking of abandoning literature
for the law, and hopeful of practising in Calcutta. The Norwich
Liberals, however, aspired to a newspaper to be called The Iris.
Taylor asked Southey to come to Norwich and to become its editor.
Southey declined and Taylor took up the task. The Norwich Iris lasted
for two years. Southey never threw over his friendship for Taylor,
although their views ultimately came to be far apart. Writing to Taylor
in 1803 he says:

[Pg 68]

But the correspondence went on apace, indeed it occupies the larger part
of Robberds’s two substantial volumes. It is in the very last letter
from Taylor to Southey that we find an oft-quoted reference to Borrow.
The letter is dated 12th March 1821:

Although this was the last letter to Southey that is published in the
memoir, Taylor visited Southey at Keswick in 1826. Taylor’s three
volumes of the Historic Survey of German Poetry appeared in 1828,
1829, and 1830. Sir Walter Scott, in the last year of his life, wrote
from Abbotsford on 23rd April 1832 to Taylor to protest against an
allusion to ‘William Scott of Edinburgh’ being the author of a
translation of Goetz von Berlichingen. Scott explained that he (Walter
Scott) was that author, and also made allusion to the fact that he had
borrowed with acknowledgment two lines from Taylor’s Lenore for his
own—

adding that his recollection of the obligation was infinitely stronger
than of the mistake. It would seem, however, that the name ‘William’ was
actually on the title-page of the London edition of 1799 of Goetz von
Berlichingen. When Southey heard of the death of Taylor in 1836 he
wrote:[Pg 69]

Taylor’s many books are now all forgotten. His translation of Bürger’s
Lenore one now only recalls by its effect upon Scott; his translation
of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise has been superseded. His voluminous
Historic Survey of German Poetry only lives through Carlyle’s severe
review in the Edinburgh Review[37] against the many strictures in
which Taylor’s biographer attempts to defend him. Taylor had none of
Carlyle’s inspiration. Not a line of his work survives in print in our
day, but it was no small thing to have been the friend and correspondent
of Southey, whose figure in literary history looms larger now than it
did when Emerson asked contemptuously, ‘Who’s Southey?’; and to have
been the wise mentor of George Borrow is in itself to be no small thing
in the record of letters. There is a considerable correspondence between
Taylor and Sir Richard Phillips in Robberds’s Memoir, and Phillips
seemed always anxious to secure articles from Taylor for the Monthly,
and even books for his publishing-house. Hence the introduction from
Taylor that Borrow carried to London might have been most effective if
Phillips had had any use for poor and impracticable would-be authors.

[Pg 70]

CHAPTER VII

GEORGE BORROW’S NORWICH—THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL

When George Borrow first entered Norwich after the long journey from
Edinburgh, Joseph John Gurney, born 1788, was twenty-six years of age,
and William Taylor, born 1765, was forty-nine. Borrow was eleven years
of age. Captain Borrow took temporary lodgings at the Crown and Angel
Inn in St. Stephen’s Street, George was sent to the Grammar School, and
his elder brother started to learn drawing and painting with John Crome
(‘Old Crome’) of many a fine landscape. But the wanderings of the family
were not yet over. Napoleon escaped from Elba, and the West Norfolk
Militia were again put on the march. This time it was Ireland to which
they were destined, and we have already shadowed forth, with the help of
Lavengro, that momentous episode. The victory of Waterloo gave Europe
peace, and in 1816 the Borrow family returned to Norwich, there to pass
many quiet years. In 1819 Captain Borrow was pensioned—eight shillings
a day. From 1816 till his father’s death in 1824 Borrow lived in Norwich
with his family. Their home was in King’s Court, Willow Lane, a modest
one-storey house in a cul de sac, which we have already described. In
King’s Court, Willow Lane, Borrow lived at intervals until his marriage
in 1840, and his[Pg 71] mother continued to live in the house until, in 1849,
she agreed to join her son and daughter-in-law at Oulton. Yet the house
comes little into the story of Borrow’s life, as do the early houses of
many great men of letters, nor do subsequent houses come into his story;
the house at Oulton and the house at Hereford Square are equally barren
of association; the broad highway and the windy heath were Borrow’s
natural home. He was never a ‘civilised’ being; he never shone in
drawing-rooms. Let us, however, return to Borrow’s schooldays, of which
the records are all too scanty, and not in the least invigorating. The
Norwich Grammar School has an interesting tradition. We pass to the
cathedral through the beautiful Erpingham Gate built about 1420 by Sir
Thomas Erpingham, and we find the school on the left. It was originally
a chapel, and the porch is at least five hundred years old. The
schoolroom is sufficiently old-world-looking for us to imagine the
schoolboys of past generations sitting at the various desks. The school
was founded in 1547, but the registers have been lost, and so we know
little of its famous pupils of earlier days. Lord Nelson and Rajah
Brooke are the two names of men of action that stand out most honourably
in modern times among the scholars[38]. In literature Borrow had but one
schoolfellow, who afterwards came to distinction—James Martineau.
Borrow’s headmaster was the Reverend Edward Valpy, who held the office
from 1810 to 1829, and to whom is credited the destruction of the
school[Pg 72] archives. Borrow’s two years of the Grammar School were not
happy ones. Borrow, as we have shown, was not of the stuff of which
happy schoolboys are made. He had been a wanderer—Scotland, Ireland,
and many parts of England had assisted in a fragmentary education; he
was now thirteen years of age, and already a vagabond at heart. But let
us hear Dr. Augustus Jessopp, who was headmaster of the same Grammar
School from 1859 to 1879. Writing of a meeting of old Norvicensians to
greet the Rajah, Sir James Brooke, in 1858, when there was a great
‘whip’ of the ‘old boys,’ Dr. Jessopp tells us that Borrow, then living
at Yarmouth, did not put in an appearance among his schoolfellows:

[Pg 72a]

THE ERPINGHAM GATE AND THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL, NORWICH

We pass through the Erpingham Gate direct to the Cathedral, the Grammar
School being on our left. Here it is on our right. Facing the school is
a statue of Lord Nelson, who was at school here about 1768-70. Borrow
was at school here 1816-18.

[Pg 73]

Yet the only real influence that Borrow carried away from the Grammar
School was concerned with foreign languages. He did take to the French
master and exiled priest, Thomas d’Eterville, a native of Caen, who had
emigrated to Norwich in 1793. D’Eterville taught French, Italian, and
apparently, to Borrow, a little Spanish; and Borrow, with his wonderful
memory, must have been his favourite pupil. In his edition of Lavengro
Dr. Knapp publishes a brief dialogue between master and pupil, which
gives us an amusing glimpse of the worthy d’Eterville, whom the boys
called ‘poor old Detterville.’ In the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters
of Lavengro he is pleasantly described by his pupil, who adds, with
characteristic ‘bluff,’ that d’Eterville said ‘on our arrival at the
conclusion of Dante’s Hell, “vous serez un jour un grand philologue,
mon cher.”‘

Borrow’s biographers have dwelt at length upon one episode of his
schooldays—the flogging he received from Valpy for playing truant with
three other boys. One, by name John Dalrymple, faltered on the way, the
two faithful followers of George in his escapade being two brothers
named Theodosius and Francis Purland, whose father kept a chemist’s shop
in Norwich. The three boys wandered away as far as Acle, eleven miles
from Norwich, whence they were ignomimously brought back and birched.
John Dalrymple’s brother Arthur, son of a distinguished Norwich surgeon,
who became Clerk of the Peace at Norwich in 1854, and died in 1868, has
left a memorandum concerning Borrow, from which I take the following
extract[40]:

James Martineau, afterwards a popular preacher and a distinguished
theologian of the Unitarian creed, here comes into the story. He was a
contemporary with Borrow at the Norwich Grammar School as already
stated, but the two boys had little in common. There was nothing of the
vagabond about James Martineau, and concerning Borrow—if on no other
subject—he would probably have agreed with his sister Harriet, whose
views we shall quote in a later chapter. In Martineau’s Memoirs,
voluminous and dull, there is only one reference to Borrow;[41] but a
correspondent once ventured to approach the eminent divine concerning
the rumour as to Martineau’s part in the birching of the author of The
Bible in Spain, and received the following letter:

35 Gordon Square, London, W.C., December 6, 1895.

James Martineau.[42]

Yet it is amusing to trace the story through various phases. Dr.
Martineau’s letter was the outcome of his attention being called to a
statement made in a letter written by a lady in Hampstead to a friend in
Norwich, which runs as follows:

11th Nov. 1893.

Miss Frances Power Cobbe, who lived next door to Borrow in Hereford
Square, Brompton, in the ‘sixties, as we shall see later, has a word to
say on the point:

James Martineau died in 1900, but the last of Borrow’s schoolfellows to
die was, I think, Mr. William Edmund Image, a Justice of the Peace and
Deputy Lieutenant for Suffolk. He resided at Herringswell House, near
Mildenhall, where he died in 1903, aged 96 years.

Mr. Valpy of the Norwich Grammar School is scarcely to be blamed that he
was not able to make separate rules for a quite abnormal boy. Yet, if
he[Pg 78] could have known, Borrow was better employed playing truant and
living up to his life-work as a glorified vagabond than in studying in
the ordinary school routine. George Borrow belonged to a type of
boy—there are many such—who learn much more out of school than in its
bounds; and the boy Borrow, picking up brother vagabonds in Tombland
Fair, and already beginning, in his own peculiar way, his language
craze, was laying the foundations that made Lavengro possible.

[Pg 79]

CHAPTER VIII

GEORGE BORROW’S NORWICH—THE LAWYER’S OFFICE

Doubts were very frequently expressed in Borrow’s lifetime as to his
having really been articled to a solicitor, but the indefatigable Dr.
Knapp set that point at rest by reference to the Record Office. Borrow
was articled to Simpson and Rackham of Tuck’s Court, St. Giles’s,
Norwich, ‘for the term of five years’—from March 1819 to March
1824—and these five years were spent in and about Norwich, and were
full of adventure of a kind with which the law had nothing to do. If
Borrow had had the makings of a lawyer he could not have entered the
profession under happier auspices. The firm was an old established one
even in his day. It had been established in Tuck’s Court as Simpson and
Rackham, then it became Rackham and Morse, Rackham, Cooke and Rackham,
and Rackham and Cooke; finally, Tom Rackham, a famous Norwich man in his
day, moved to another office, and the firm of lawyers who occupy the
original offices in our day is called Leathes Prior and Sons. Borrow has
told us frankly what a poor lawyer’s clerk he made—he was always
thinking of things remote from that profession, of gypsies, of
prize-fighters, and of word-makers. Yet he loved the head of the firm,
William Simpson, who must have been a kind and tolerant guide to the
curious youth. Simpson was for a time Town Clerk of Norwich,[Pg 80] and his
portrait hangs in the Blackfriars Hall. Borrow went to live with Mr.
Simpson in the Upper Close near the Grammar School. Archdeacon Groome
recalled having seen Borrow ‘reserved and solitary’ haunting the
precincts of the playground; another schoolboy, William Drake,
remembered him as ‘tall, spare, dark-complexioned.’[44] Here is Borrow’s
account of his master and of his work:

[Pg 80a]

WILLIAM SIMPSON

From a portrait by Thomas Phillips, R.A.

Mr. Simpson was Chamberlain of the city of Norwich and Treasurer of the
county of Norfolk. He was Town-Clerk of Norwich in 1826, and has an
interest in connection with George Borrow in that Borrow was articled to
him as a lawyer’s clerk and describes him in Wild Wales as ‘the
greatest solicitor in East Anglia—indeed I may say the prince of all
English solicitors.’

The portrait hangs in the Black Friars Hall, Norwich.

[Pg 81]

And he goes on to tell us that he studied the Welsh language and later
the Danish; his master said that his inattention would assuredly make
him a bankrupt, and his father sighed over his eccentric and
impracticable son. The passion for languages had indeed caught hold of
Borrow. Among my Borrow papers I find a memorandum in the handwriting of
his stepdaughter in which she says:

We have no difficulty in recognising here the heroine of the Moll
Flanders episode in Lavengro. But it was not from casual meetings with
Welsh grooms and Danes and Dutchmen that Borrow acquired even such
command of various languages as was undoubtedly his. We have it on the
authority of an old fellow-pupil at the Grammar School, Burcham,
afterwards a London police-magistrate, that William[Pg 82] Taylor gave him
lessons in German,[46] but he acquired most of his varied knowledge in
these impressionable years in the Corporation Library of Norwich. Dr.
Knapp found, in his most laudable examination of some of the books,
Borrow’s neat pencil notes, the making of which was not laudable on the
part of his hero. One book here marked was on ancient Danish literature,
the author of which, Olaus Wormius, gave him the hint for calling
himself Olaus Borrow for a time—a signature that we find in some of
Borrow’s published translations. Borrow at this time had aspirations of
a literary kind, and Thomas Campbell accepted a translation of
Schiller’s Diver, which was signed ‘O. B.’ There were also
translations from the German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish, in the
Monthly Magazine. Clearly Borrow was becoming a formidable linguist,
if not a very exact master of words. Still he remained a vagabond, and
loved to wander over Mousehold Heath, to the gypsy encampment, and to
make friends with the Romany folk; he loved also to haunt the horse
fairs for which Norwich was so celebrated; and he was not averse from
the companionship of wilder spirits who loved pugilism, if we may trust
Lavengro, and if we may assume, as we justly may, that he many times
cast youthful, sympathetic eyes on John Thurtell in these years, the
to-be murderer of Weare, then actually living with his father in a house
on the Ipswich Road, Thurtell, the father, being in no mean position in
the city—an alderman, and a sheriff in 1815. Yes, there was plenty to
do and to see in Norwich, and Borrow’s memories of it were nearly always
kindly:

But at the very centre of Borrow’s Norwich life was William Taylor,
concerning whom we have already written much. It was a Jew named Mousha,
a quack it appears, who pretended to know German and Hebrew, and had but
a smattering of either language, who first introduced Borrow to Taylor,
and there is a fine dialogue between the two in Lavengro, of which
this is the closing fragment:

Taylor it was who, when Borrow determined to try his fortunes in London
with those bundles of unsaleable manuscripts, gave him introductions to
Sir Richard Phillips and to Thomas Campbell. It was in the agnostic
spirit that he had learned from Taylor that he wrote during this period
to his one friend in London, Roger Kerrison. Kerrison was grandson of
Sir Roger Kerrison, Mayor of Norwich in 1778, as his son Thomas was
after him in 1806. Roger was articled, as was Borrow, to the firm of
Simpson and Rackham, while his brother Allday was in a drapery store in
Norwich, but with mind bent on commercial life in Mexico. George was
teaching him Spanish in these years as a preparation for his great
adventure. Roger had gone to London to continue his professional
experience. He finally became a Norwich solicitor and died in 1882.
Allday went to Zacatecas, Mexico, and acquired riches. John Borrow
followed him there and met with an early death, as we have seen. Borrow
and[Pg 85] Roger Kerrison were great friends at this time; but when Lavengro
was written they had ceased to be this, and Roger is described merely as
an ‘acquaintance’ who had found lodgings for him on his first visit to
London. As a matter of fact that trip to London was made easy for Borrow
by the opportunity given to him of sharing lodgings with Roger Kerrison
at Milman Street, Bedford Row, where Borrow put in an appearance on 1st
April 1824, some two months after the following letter was written:

To Mr. Roger Kerrison, 18 Milman Street, Bedford Row.

Norwich, Jany. 20, 1824.

George Borrow.[47]
[Pg 86]

Borrow might improve his German—not sufficiently as we shall see in our
next chapter—but he would certainly never make a lawyer. Long years
afterwards, when, as an old man, he was frequently in Norwich, he not
seldom called at that office in Tuck’s Court, where five strange years
of his life had been spent. A clerk in Rackham’s office in these later
years recalls him waiting for the principal as he in his youth had
watched others waiting.[48]

[Pg 87]

CHAPTER IX

SIR RICHARD PHILLIPS

Borrow lost his father on the 28th February 1824. He reached London on
the 2nd April of the same year, and this was the beginning of his many
wanderings. He was armed with introductions from William Taylor, and
with some translations in manuscript from Danish and Welsh poetry. The
principal introduction was to Sir Richard Phillips, a person of some
importance in his day, who has so far received but inadequate treatment
in our own.[49] Phillips was active in the cause of reform at a certain
period in his life, and would seem to have had many sterling qualities
before he was spoiled by success. He was born in the neighbourhood of
Leicester, and his father was ‘in the farming line,’ and wanted him to
work on the farm, but he determined to seek his fortune in London. After
a short absence, during which he clearly proved to himself that he was
not at present qualified to capture London, young Phillips returned to
the farm. Borrow refers to his patron’s vegetarianism, and on this point
we have an amusing story from his own[Pg 88] pen! He had been, when previously
on the farm, in the habit of attending to a favourite heifer:

Farming not being congenial, Phillips hired a small room in Leicester,
and opened a school for instruction in the three R’s, a large blue flag
on a pole being his ‘sign’ or signal to the inhabitants of Leicester,
who seem to have sent their children in considerable numbers to the
young schoolmaster. But little money was to be made out of schooling,
and a year later Phillips was, by the kindness of friends, started in a
small hosiery shop in Leicester. Throwing himself into politics on the
side of reform, Phillips now started the Leicester Herald, to which
Dr. Priestley became a contributor. The first number was issued gratis
in May 1792. His Memoir informs us that it was an article in this
newspaper that secured for its proprietor and editor eighteen months
imprisonment in Leicester gaol,[Pg 89] but he was really charged with selling
Paine’s Rights of Man. The worthy knight had probably grown ashamed of
The Rights of Man in the intervening years, and hence the reticence of
the memoir. Phillips’s gaoler was the once famous Daniel Lambert, the
notorious ‘fat man’ of his day. In gaol Phillips was visited by Lord
Moira and the Duke of Norfolk. It was this Lord Moira who said in the
House of Lords in 1797 that ‘he had seen in Ireland the most absurd, as
well as the most disgusting tyranny that any nation ever groaned under.’
Moira became Governor-General of Bengal and Commander-in-Chief of the
Army in India. The Duke of Norfolk, a stanch Whig, distinguished himself
in 1798 by a famous toast at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, Arundel
Street, Strand:—’Our sovereign’s health—the majesty of the people!’
which greatly offended George III., who removed Norfolk from his
lord-lieutenancy. Phillips seems to have had a very lax imprisonment, as
he conducted the Herald from gaol, contributing in particular a weekly
letter. Soon after his release he disposed of the Herald, or permitted
it to die. It was revived a few years later as an organ of Toryism. He
had started in gaol another journal, The Museum, and he combined this
with his hosiery business for some time longer, when an opportune fire
relieved him of an apparently uncongenial burden, and with the insurance
money in his pocket he set out for London once more. Here he started as
a hosier in St. Paul’s Churchyard, lodging meantime in the house of a
milliner, where he fell in love with one of the apprentices, Miss
Griffiths, ‘a native of Wales.’ His affections were won, we are naïvely
informed in the Memoir, by the young woman’s talent in the preparation
of a vegetable pie. This is[Pg 90] our first glimpse of Lady Phillips—’a
quiet, respectable woman,’ whom Borrow was to meet at dinner long years
afterwards. Inspired, it would seem, by the kindly exhortation of Dr.
Priestley, he now transformed his hosiery business in St. Paul’s
Churchyard into a ‘literary repository,’ and started a singularly
successful career as a publisher. There he produced his long-lived
periodical, The Monthly Magazine, which attained to so considerable a
fame. Dr. Aikin, a friend of Priestley’s, was its editor, but with him
Phillips had a quarrel—the first of his many literary quarrels—and
they separated. This Dr. Aikin was the father of the better-known Lucy
Aikin, and was a Nonconformist who suffered for his opinions in these
closing years of the eighteenth century, even as Priestley did. He was
the author of many works, including the once famous Evenings at Home,
written in conjunction with his sister, Mrs. Barbauld;[51] and after his
quarrel with Phillips he founded a new publication issued by the house
of Longman, and entitled The Athenæum. Hereupon he and Phillips
quarrelled again, because Dr. Aikin described himself in advertisements
of The Athenæum as ‘J. Aikin, M.D., late editor of The Monthly
Magazine.’ Aikin’s contributors to The Monthly included Capell Lofft,
of whom we know too little, and Dr. Wolcot, of whom we know too much.
Meanwhile Phillips’s publishing business grew apace, and he removed to
larger premises in Bridge Street, Blackfriars, an address which we find
upon many famous publications of his period. A catalogue of his[Pg 91] books
lies before me dated ‘January 1805.’ It includes many works still upon
our shelves. Almon’s Memoirs and Correspondence of John Wilkes, Samuel
Richardson’s Life and Correspondence, for example, several of the
works of Maria Edgeworth, including her Moral Tales, many of the works
of William Godwin, including Caleb Williams, and the earlier books of
that still interesting woman and once popular novelist, Lady Morgan,
whose Poems as Sydney Owenson bears Phillips’s name on its title-page,
as does also her first successful novel The Wild Irish Girl, and other
of her stories. My own interest in Phillips commenced when I met him in
the pages of Lady Morgan’s Memoirs.[52] Thomas Moore, Lady Morgan
tells us,

Here, in a little room over the shop, Sydney heard him sing two of his
songs, and was inspired thereby to write her first novels, St. Clair
and The Novice of St. Dominick. The first was published in Dublin;
over the second she corresponded with Phillips, and his letters to her
commence with one dated from Bridge Street, 6th April 1805, in which he
wishes[Pg 92] her to send the manuscript of The Novice to him as one ‘often
(undeservedly) complimented as the most liberal of my trade!’ She
determined, fresh from a governess situation, to bring the manuscript
herself. Phillips was charmed with his new author, and really seems to
have treated her very liberally. He insisted, however, on having The
Novice cut down from six volumes to four, and she was wont to say that
nothing but regard for her feelings prevented him from reducing it to
three.[53] The Novice of St. Dominick was a favourite book with the
younger Pitt, who read it over again in his last illness. Then
followed—in 1806—Sydney Owenson’s new novel, The Wild Irish Girl,
and it led to an amusing correspondence with its author on the part of
Phillips on the one side, and Johnson, who, it will be remembered, was
Cowper’s publisher, on the other. Phillips was indignant that, having
first brought Sydney into fame, she should dare to ask more money on
that account. As is the case with every novelist to-day who scores one
success, Miss Owenson had formed a good idea of her value, and there is
a letter to Johnson in which she admitted that Phillips’s offer was a
generous one. Johnson had offered her £300 for the copyright of The
Wild Irish Girl. Phillips had offered only £200 down and £50 each for
the second and third editions. When Phillips heard that Johnson had
outbidden him, he described the offer as ‘monstrous,’ and that it was
‘inspired by a spirit of revenge.’ He would not, he declared, increase
his offer, but a little later he writes from Bridge Street to Sydney
Owenson as his ‘dear, bewitching, and deluding Syren,’ and promises the
£300. A few months later he gave her a hundred[Pg 93] pounds for a slight
volume of poems, which certainly never paid for its publication,
although Scott and Moore and many another were making much money out of
poetry in those days. In any case Phillips did not accept Miss Owenson’s
next story with alacrity, in spite of the undoubted success of The Wild
Irish Girl. She no doubt asked too much for Ida of Athens. Phillips
probably thought, after reading the first volume in type, that it was
very inferior work, as indeed it was. Athens was described without the
author ever having seen the city. After much wrangling, in which the
lady said that her ‘prince of publishers,’ as she had once called him,
had ‘treated her barbarously,’ the novel went into the hands of the
Longmans, who published it, not without some remonstrance as to certain
of its sentiments. The successful Lady Morgan afterwards described Ida
as a bad book, so perhaps here, as usually, Phillips was not far wrong
in his judgment. A similar quarrel seems to have taken place over the
next novel, The Missionary. Here Phillips again received the
manuscript, discussed terms with its author, and returned it. The firm
of Stockdale and Miller were his successful rivals. Later and more
prosperous novels, O’Donnel in particular, were issued by Henry
Colburn, and Phillips now disappears from Lady Morgan’s life. I have
told the story of Phillips’s relation with Lady Morgan at length because
at no other point do we come into so near a contact with him. In Fell’s
Memoir Phillips is described—in 1808—as ‘certainly now the first
publisher in London,’ but while he may have been this in the volume of
his trade—and school-books made an important part of it—he was not in
mere ‘names.’ Most of his successful writers—Sydney Owenson, Thomas
Skinner Surr,[Pg 94] Dr. Gregory, and the rest—have now fallen into oblivion.
The school-books that he issued have lasted even to our own day, notably
Dr. Mavor’s Spelling Book. Dr. Mavor was a Scotsman from Aberdeen, who
came to London and became Phillips’s chief hack. There are no less than
twenty of Mavor’s school-books in the catalogue before me. They include
Mavor’s History of England, Mavor’s Universal History, and Mavor’s
History of Greece. In the Memoir of 1808 it is claimed that ‘Mavor’
is but a pseudonym for Phillips, and the claim is also made, quite
wrongfully, by John Timbs, who, before he became acting editor of the
Illustrated London News under Herbert Ingram, and an indefatigable
author, was Phillips’s private secretary.[54] It seems clear, however,
that in the case of Blair’s Catechism and Goldsmith’s Geography, and
many another book for schools, Phillips was ‘Blair’ and ‘Goldsmith’ and
many another imaginary person, for the books in question numbered about
two hundred in all. For these books there must have been quite an army
of literary hacks employed during the twenty years prior to the
appearance of George Borrow in that great army. On 9th November 1807,
the Lord Mayor’s procession through London included Richard Phillips
among its sheriffs, and he was knighted by George III. in the following
year. During his period of office he effected many reforms in the City
prisons. John Timbs, in his Walks and Talks about London, tells us
that Phillips’s colleague in the[Pg 95] shrievalty was one Smith, who
afterwards became Lord Mayor:

Two volumes before me show Phillips as the precursor of many of the
publishers of one-volume books of reference so plentiful in our day. A
Million of Facts is one of them, and A Chronology of Public Events
Within the Last Fifty Years from 1771 to 1821 is another, while one of
the earliest and most refreshing guides to London and its neighbourhood
is afforded us in A Morning Walk from London to Kew, which first
appeared in The Monthly Magazine, but was reprinted in 1817 with the
name ‘Sir Richard Phillips’ as author on the title-page. Phillips was
now no longer a publisher. Here we have some pleasant glimpses of a
bygone era, many trite reflections, but not enough topography to make
the book one of permanent interest. It would not, in fact, be worth
reprinting.[55]

This, then, was the man to whom George Borrow presented himself in 1824.
Phillips was fifty-seven years of age. He had made a moderate fortune
and lost it, and was now enjoying another perhaps less satisfying; it
included the profits of The Monthly Review,[Pg 96] repurchased after his
bankruptcy, and some rights in many of the school-books. But the great
publishing establishment in Bridge Street had long been broken up.
Borrow would have found Taylor’s introduction to Phillips quite useless
had the worthy knight not at the moment been keen on a new magazine and
seen the importance of a fresh ‘hack’ to help to run it. Moreover, had
he not written a great book which only the Germans could appreciate,
Twelve Essays on the Phenomena of Nature? Here, he thought, was the
very man to produce this book in a German dress. Taylor was a thorough
German scholar, and he had vouched for the excellent German of his pupil
and friend. Hence a certain cordiality which did not win Borrow’s
regard, but was probably greater than many a young man would receive
to-day from a publisher-prince upon whom he might call laden only with a
bundle of translations from the Danish and the Welsh. Here—in
Lavengro—is the interview between publisher and poet, with the
editor’s factotum Bartlett, whom Borrow calls Taggart, as witness:

[Pg 96a]

SIR JOHN BOWRING in 1826

From a portrait by John King now in the National Portrait Gallery.

JOHN P. HASFELD in 1835

From a portrait by an Unknown Artist formerly belonging to George
Borrow

WILLIAM TAYLOR

From a portrait by J. Thomson, printed in the year 1821, and engraved in
Robberds’s Life of Taylor.

SIR RICHARD PHILLIPS

From a portrait by James Saxon, painted in 1828, now in the National
Portrait Gallery.

FRIENDS OF BORROW’S EARLY YEARS

[Transcriber’s Note: This is the caption for the page of four portraits, each portrait’s
caption is shown above.]

[Pg 97]

Phillips explains that he has given up publishing, except ‘under the
rose,’ had only The Monthly Magazine, here[56] called The Magazine,
but contemplated yet another monthly, The Universal Review, here
called The Oxford. He gave Borrow much the same sound advice that a
publisher would have given him to-day—that poetry is not a marketable
commodity, and that if you want to succeed in prose you must, as a rule,
write trash—the most acceptable trash of that day being The Dairyman’s
Daughter,[57] which has sold in hundreds of thousands, and is still
much prized by the Evangelical folk who buy the publications of the
Religious Tract Society. Phillips, moreover, asked him to dine to meet
his wife, his son, and his son’s wife,[58] and we know what an amusing
account of that dinner Borrow gives in Lavengro. Moreover, he set
Borrow upon his first piece of hack-work, the Celebrated Trials, and
gave him something to do upon The Universal Review and also upon The
Monthly. The Universal lasted only for six numbers, dying in January
1825. In that year appeared the six volumes of the Celebrated Trials,
of which we have something to[Pg 98] say in our next chapter. Borrow found
Phillips most exacting, always suggesting the names of new criminals,
and leaving it to the much sweated author to find the books from which
to extract the necessary material:

[Pg 99]

Then came the final catastrophe. Borrow could not translate Phillips’s
great masterpiece, Twelve Essays on the Proximate Causes, into German
with any real effectiveness although the testimonial of the enthusiastic
Taylor had led Phillips to assume that he could. Borrow, as we shall
see, knew many languages, and knew them well colloquially, but he was
not a grammarian, and he could not write accurately in any one of his
numerous tongues. His wonderful memory gave him the words, but not
always any thoroughness of construction. He could make a good
translation of a poem by Schiller, because he brought his own poetic
fancy to the venture, but he had no interest in Phillips’s philosophy,
and so he doubtless made a very bad translation, as German friends were
soon able to assure Phillips, who had at last to go to a German for a
translation, and the book appeared at Stuttgart in 1826.[60] Meanwhile,
Phillips’s new magazine, The Universal Review, went on its course. It
lasted only for a few numbers, as we have said—from March 1824 to
January 1825—and it was entirely devoted to reviews, many of them
written by Borrow, but without any distinction calling for comment
to-day. Dr. Knapp thought that Gifford was the editor, with Phillips’s
son and George Borrow assisting. Gifford translated Juvenal, and it
was for a long time assumed that Borrow wished merely to disguise
Gifford’s identity when he referred to his editor as the translator of
Quintilian. But Sir Leslie Stephen has pointed out in Literature
that John Carey (1756-1826), who actually edited Quintilian in 1822,
was Phillips’s editor, ‘All the poetry which I reviewed,’[Pg 100] Borrow tells
us, ‘appeared to be published at the expense of the authors. All the
publications which fell under my notice I treated in a gentlemanly …
manner—no personalities, no vituperation, no shabby insinuations;
decorum, decorum was the order of the day.’ And one feels that Borrow
was not very much at home. But he went on with his Newgate Lives and
Trials, which, however, were to be published with another imprint,
although at the instance of Phillips. By that time he and that worthy
publisher had parted company. Probably Phillips had set out for
Brighton, which was to be his home for the remainder of his life.

[Pg 101]

CHAPTER X

FAUSTUS AND ROMANTIC BALLADS

In the early pages of Lavengro Borrow tells us nearly all we are ever
likely to know of his sojourn in London in the years 1824 and 1825,
during which time he had those interviews with Sir Richard Phillips
which are recorded in our last chapter. Dr. Knapp, indeed, prints a
little note from him to his friend Kerrison, in which he begs his friend
to come to him as he believes he is dying. Roger Kerrison, it would
seem, had been so frightened by Borrow’s depression and threats of
suicide that he had left the lodgings at 16 Milman Street, Bedford Row,
and removed himself elsewhere, and so Borrow was left friendless to
fight what he called his ‘horrors’ alone. The depression was not
unnatural. From his own vivid narrative we learn of Borrow’s bitter
failure as an author. No one wanted his translations from the Welsh and
the Danish, and Phillips clearly had no further use for him after he had
compiled his Newgate Lives and Trials (Borrow’s name in Lavengro for
Celebrated Trials), and was doubtless inclined to look upon him as an
impostor for professing, with William Taylor’s sanction, a mastery of
the German language which had been demonstrated to be false with regard
to his own book. No ‘spirited publisher’ had come forward to give
reality to his dream thus set down:[Pg 102]

He has a tale to tell us in Lavengro of a certain Life and Adventures
of Joseph Sell, the Great Traveller, the purchase of which from him by
a publisher at the last moment saved him from starvation and enabled him
to take to the road, there to meet the many adventures that have become
immortal in the pages of Lavengro. Dr. Knapp has encouraged the idea
that Joseph Sell was a real book, ignoring the fact that the very
title suggests doubts, and was probably meant to suggest them. In
Norfolk, as elsewhere, a ‘sell’ is a word in current slang used for an
imposture or a cheat, and doubtless Borrow meant to make merry with the
credulous. There was, we may be perfectly sure, no Joseph Sell, and it
is more reasonable to suppose that it was the sale of his translation of
Klinger’s Faustus that gave him the much needed money at this crisis.
Dr. Knapp pictures Borrow as carrying the manuscript of his translation
of Faustus with him to London. There is not the slightest evidence of
this. It may be reasonably assumed that Borrow made the translation from
Klinger’s novel during his sojourn in London. It is true the preface is
dated ‘Norwich, April 1825,’ but Borrow did not leave London until the
end of May 1825, that is to[Pg 103] say, until after he had negotiated with ‘W.
Simpkin and R. Marshall,’ now the well-known firm of Simpkin and
Marshall, for the publication of the little volume. That firm,
unfortunately, has no record of the transaction. My impression is that
Borrow in his wandering after old volumes on crime for his great
compilation, Celebrated Trials, came across the French translation of
Klinger’s novel published at Amsterdam. From that translation he
acknowledges that he borrowed the plate which serves as frontispiece—a
plate entitled ‘The Corporation Feast.’ It represents the corporation of
Frankfort at a banquet turned by the devil into various animals. It has
been erroneously assumed that Borrow had had something to do with the
designing of this plate, and that he had introduced the corporation of
Norwich in vivid portraiture into the picture. Borrow does, indeed,
interpolate a reference to Norwich into his translation of a not too
complimentary character, for at that time he had no very amiable
feelings towards his native city. Of the inhabitants of Frankfort he
says:

In the original German version of 1791 we have the town of Nuremberg
thus satirised. But Borrow was not the first translator to seize the
opportunity of adapting the reference for personal ends. In the French
translation of 1798, published at Amsterdam, and entitled Les Aventures
du Docteur Faust, the[Pg 104] translator has substituted Auxerre for
Nuremberg. What makes me think that Borrow used only the French version
in his translation is the fact that in his preface he refers to the
engravings of that version, one of which he reproduced; whereas the
engravings are in the German version as well.

Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger (1752-1831), who was responsible for
Borrow’s ‘first book,’ was responsible for much else of an epoch-making
character. It was he who by one of his many plays, Sturm und Drang,
gave a name to an important period of German Literature. In 1780 von
Klinger entered the service of Russia, and in 1790 married a natural
daughter of the Empress Catherine. Thus his novel, Faust’s Leben,
Thaten und Höllenfahrt, was actually first published at St. Petersburg
in 1791. This was seventeen years before Goethe published his first part
of Faust, a book which by its exquisite poetry was to extinguish for
all self-respecting Germans Klinger’s turgid prose. Borrow, like the
translator of Rousseau’s Confessions and of many another classic,
takes refuge more than once in the asterisk. Klinger’s Faustus, with
much that was bad and even bestial, has merits. The devil throughout
shows his victim a succession of examples of ‘man’s inhumanity to man.’
Borrow’s translation of Klinger’s novel was reprinted in 1864 without
any acknowledgment of the name of the translator, and only a few stray
words being altered.[62] Borrow nowhere[Pg 105] mentions Klinger’s name in his
latter volume, of which the title-page runs:

I doubt very much if he really knew who was the author, as the book in
both the German editions I have seen as well as in the French version
bears no author’s name on its title-page. A letter of Borrow’s in the
possession of an American collector indicates that he was back in
Norwich in September 1825, after, we may assume, three months’ wandering
among gypsies and tinkers. It is written from Willow Lane, and is
apparently to the publishers of Faustus:

This letter clearly demonstrates that the guileless Simpkin and the
equally guileless Marshall had paid Borrow for the right to publish
Faustus, and even though part of the payment was met by a bill, I
think we may safely find in the transaction whatever verity there may be
in the Joseph Sell episode. ‘Let me know how you sold your manuscript,’
writes Borrow’s brother to him so late as the year 1829. And this was
doubtless Faustus. The action of the Norwich libraries in burning the
book would clearly have had the sympathy of one of its few reviewers had
he been informed of the[Pg 106] circumstance. It is thus that the Literary
Gazette for 16th July 1825 refers to Borrow’s little book:

Borrow returned then to Norwich in the autumn of 1825 a disappointed man
so far as concerned the giving of his poetical translations to the
world, from which he had hoped so much. No ‘spirited publisher’ had been
forthcoming, although Dr. Knapp’s researches have unearthed a ‘note’ in
The Monthly Magazine, which, after the fashion of the anticipatory
literary gossip of our day, announced that Olaus Borrow was about to
issue Legends and Popular Superstitions of the North, ‘in two elegant
volumes.’ But this never appeared. Quite a number of Borrow’s
translations from divers languages had appeared from time to time,
beginning with a version of Schiller’s ‘Diver’ in The New Monthly
Magazine for 1823, continuing with Stolberg’s ‘Ode to a Mountain
Torrent’ in The Monthly Magazine, and including the ‘Deceived Merman.’
These he collected into book form and, not to be deterred by the
coldness of heartless London publishers, issued them by subscription.
Three copies of the slim octavo book lie before me, with separate
title-pages:

The book contains an introduction in verse by Allan Cunningham, whose
acquaintance Borrow seems to have made in London. It commences:

Sing, sing, my friend, breathe life again
Through Norway’s song and Denmark’s strain:
On flowing Thames and Forth, in flood,
Pour Haco’s war-song, fierce and rude.

Cunningham had not himself climbed very far up the literary ladder in
1825, although he was forty-one years of age. At one time a stonemason
in a Scots village, he had entered Chantrey’s studio, and was
‘superintendent of the works’ to that eminent sculptor at the time when
Borrow called upon him in London, and made an acquaintance which never
seems to have extended beyond this courtesy to the younger man’s Danish
Ballads. The point of sympathy of course was that in the year 1825
Cunningham had published The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern.
But Allan Cunningham, whose Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters
is his best remembered book to-day, scarcely comes into this story.
There are four letters from Cunningham to Borrow in Dr. Knapp’s Life,
and two from Borrow to Cunningham. The latter gave his young friend much
good advice. He told him, for example, to send copies of his book to the
newspapers—to the Literary Gazette in particular, and ‘Walter[Pg 108] Scott
must not be forgotten.’ Dr. Knapp thinks that the newspapers were
forgotten, and that Borrow neglected to send to them. In any case not a
single review appeared. But it is not exactly true that Borrow ignored
the usual practice of authors so entirely as Dr. Knapp supposes. There
is a letter to Borrow among my Borrow Papers from Francis Palgrave the
historian, who became Sir Francis Palgrave seven years later, which
throws some light upon the subject:

To George Borrow

Parliament St., 17 June 1826.

Francis Palgrave.

It is probable that he did also send a copy to Scott, and it is Dr.
Knapp’s theory that ‘that busy writer forgot to acknowledge the
courtesy.’ It may be that this is so. It has been the source of many a
literary prejudice. Carlyle had a bitterness in his heart against Scott
for much the same cause. Rarely indeed can the struggling author endure
to be ignored by the radiantly successful one. It must have been the
more galling in that a few years earlier Scott had been lifted by the
ballad from obscurity to fame. Borrow did not in any case lack
encouragement from Allan Cunningham: ‘I like your Danish ballads much,’
he writes. ‘Get out of[Pg 109] bed, George Borrow, and be sick or sleepy no
longer. A fellow who can give us such exquisite Danish ballads has no
right to repose.’[64] Borrow, on his side, thanks Cunningham for his
‘noble lines,’ and tells him that he has got ‘half of his Songs of
Scotland by heart.’

Five hundred copies of the Romantic Ballads were printed in Norwich by
S. Wilkin, about two hundred being subscribed for, mainly in that city,
the other three hundred being dispatched to London—to Taylor, whose
name appears on the London title-page, although he seems to have passed
on the book very quickly to Wightman and Cramp, for what reason we are
not informed. Borrow tells us that the two hundred subscriptions of half
a guinea ‘amply paid expenses,’ but he must have been cruelly
disappointed, as he was doomed to be more than once in his career, by
the lack of public appreciation outside of Norwich. Yet there were many
reasons for this. If Scott had made the ballad popular, he had also
destroyed it for a century—perhaps for ever—by substituting the novel
as the favourite medium for the storyteller. Great ballads we were to
have in every decade from that day to this, but never another ‘best
seller’ like Marmion or The Lady of the Lake. Our popular poets
had to express themselves in other ways. Then Borrow, although his verse
has been underrated by those who have not seen it at its best, or who
are incompetent to appraise poetry, was not very effective here,
notwithstanding that the stories in verse in Romantic Ballads are all
entirely interesting. This fact is most in evidence in a case where a
real poet, not of the greatest, has told the same story. We owe a
rendering of ‘The Deceived Merman’[Pg 110] to both George Borrow and Matthew
Arnold, but how widely different the treatment! The story is of a merman
who rose out of the water and enticed a mortal—fair Agnes or
Margaret—under the waves; she becomes his wife, bears him children, and
then asks to return to earth. Arriving there she refuses to go back when
the merman comes disconsolately to the churchdoor for her. Here are a
few lines from the two versions, which demonstrate that here at least
Borrow was no poet and that Arnold was a very fine one:

It says much for the literary proclivities of Norwich at this period
that Borrow should have had so kindly a reception for his book as the
subscription list implies. At the end of each of Wilkin’s two hundred
copies a ‘list of subscribers’ is given. It opens with the name of the
Bishop of Norwich, Dr. Bathurst; it includes the equally familiar names
of the Gurdons, Gurneys, Harveys, Rackhams, Hares (then as now of Stow[Pg 111]
Hall), Woodhouses—all good Norfolk or Norwich names that have come down
to our time. Mayor Hawkes, who is made famous in Lavengro by Haydon’s
portrait, is there also. Among London names we find ‘F. Arden,’ which
recalls his friend ‘Francis Ardry’ in Lavengro, John Bowring, Borrow’s
new friend, and later to be counted an enemy, Thomas Campbell, Benjamin
Haydon, and John Timbs, But the name that most strikes the eye is that
of ‘Thurtell.’ Three of the family are among the subscribers, including
Mr. George Thurtell of Eaton, near Norwich, brother of the murderer;
there also is the name of John Thurtell, executed for murder exactly a
year before. This would seem to imply that Borrow had been a long time
collecting these names and subscriptions, and doubtless before the
all-too-famous crime of the previous year he had made Thurtell promise
to become a subscriber, and, let us hope, had secured his half-guinea.
That may account, with so sensitive and impressionable a man as our
author, for the kindly place that Weare’s unhappy murderer always had in
his memory. Borrow, in any case, was now, for a few years, to become
more than ever a vagabond. Not a single further appeal did he make to an
unsympathetic literary public for a period of five years at least.

[Pg 112]

CHAPTER XI

CELEBRATED TRIALS AND JOHN THURTELL

Borrow’s first book was Faustus, and his second was Romantic
Ballads, the one being published, as we have seen, in 1825, the other
in 1826. This chronology has the appearance of ignoring the Celebrated
Trials, but then it is scarcely possible to count Celebrated
Trials[65] as one of Borrow’s books at all. It is largely a
compilation, exactly as the Newgate Calendar and Howell’s State
Trials are compilations. In his preface to the work Borrow tells us
that he has differentiated the book from the Newgate Calendar[66] and
the State Trials[67] by the fact that he had made considerable
compression. This was so, and in fact in many cases he has used the blue
pencil rather than the pen—at least in the earlier volumes. But Borrow
attempted something much more comprehensive than the Newgate Calendar
and the State Trials in his book. In the former work the trials range
from 1700 to 1802; in the latter from the[Pg 113] trial of Becket in 1163 to
the trial of Thistlewood in 1820. Both works are concerned solely with
this country. Borrow went all over Europe, and the trials of Joan of
Arc, Count Struensee, Major André, Count Cagliostro, Queen Marie
Antoinette, the Duc d’Enghien, and Marshal Ney, are included in his
volumes. Moreover, while what may be called state trials are numerous,
including many of the cases in Howell, the greater number are of a
domestic nature, including nearly all that are given in the Newgate
Calendar. In the first two volumes he has naturally mainly state trials
to record; the later volumes record sordid everyday crimes, and here
Borrow is more at home. His style when he rewrites the trials is more
vigorous, and his narrative more interesting. It is to be hoped that the
exigent publisher, who he assures us made him buy the books for his
compilation out of the £50 that he paid for it, was able to present him
with a set of the State Trials, if only in one of the earlier and
cheaper issues of the work than the one that now has a place in every
lawyer’s library.[68]

The third volume of Celebrated Trials, although it opens with the
trial of Algernon Sidney, is made up largely of crime of the more
ordinary type, and this sordid note continues through the three final
volumes.[Pg 114] I have said that Faustus is an allegory of ‘man’s inhumanity
to man.’ That is emphatically, in more realistic form, the
distinguishing feature of Celebrated Trials. Amid these records of
savagery, it is a positive relief to come across such a trial as that of
poor Joseph Baretti. Baretti, it will be remembered, was brought to
trial because, when some roughs set upon him in the street, he drew a
dagger, which he usually carried ‘to carve fruit and sweetmeats,’ and
killed his assailant. In that age, when our law courts were a veritable
shambles, how cheerful it is to find that the jury returned a verdict of
‘self-defence.’ But then Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Dr. Johnson,
and David Garrick gave evidence to character, representing Baretti as ‘a
man of benevolence, sobriety, modesty, and learning.’ This trial is an
oasis of mercy in a desert of drastic punishment. Borrow carries on his
‘trials’ to the very year before the date of publication, and the last
trial in the book is that of ‘Henry Fauntleroy, Esquire,’ for forgery.
Fauntleroy was a quite respectable banker of unimpeachable character, to
whom had fallen at a very early age the charge of a banking business
that was fundamentally unsound. It is clear that he had honestly
endeavoured to put things on a better footing, that he lived simply, and
had no gambling or other vices. At a crisis, however, he forged a
document, in other words signed a transfer of stock which he had no
right to do, the ‘subscribing witness’ to his power of attorney being
Robert Browning, a clerk in the Bank of England, and father of the
distinguished poet.[69] Well, Fauntleroy was sentenced to be hanged—and
he was duly hanged at Newgate on 30th October[Pg 115] 1824, only thirteen years
before Queen Victoria came to the throne!

Borrow has affirmed that from a study of the Newgate Calendar and the
compilation of his Celebrated Trials he first learned to write genuine
English, and it is a fact that there are some remarkably dramatic
effects in these volumes, although one here withholds from Borrow the
title of ‘author’ because so much is ‘scissors and paste,’ and the
purple passages are only occasional. All the same I am astonished that
no one has thought it worth while to make a volume of these dramatic
episodes, which are clearly the work of Borrow, and owe nothing to the
innumerable pamphlets and chap-books that he brought into use. Take such
an episode as that of Schening and Harlin, two young German women, one
of whom pretended to have murdered her infant in the presence of the
other because she madly supposed that this would secure them bread—and
they were starving. The trial, the scene at the execution, the
confession on the scaffold of the misguided but innocent girl, the
respite, and then the execution—these make up as thrilling a narrative
as is contained in the pages of fiction. Assuredly Borrow did not spare
himself in that race round the bookstalls of London to find the material
which the grasping Sir Richard Phillips required from him. He found, for
example, Sir Herbert Croft’s volume, Love and Madness, the supposed
correspondence of Parson Hackman and Martha Reay, whom he murdered. That
correspondence is now known to be an invention of Croft’s. Borrow
accepted it as genuine, and incorporated the whole of it in his story of
the Hackman trial.

But after all, the trial which we read with greatest interest in these
six volumes is that of John Thurtell,[Pg 116] because Borrow had known Thurtell
in his youth, and gives us more than one glimpse of him in Lavengro
and The Romany Rye. We recall, for example, Lavengro’s interview with
the magistrate when a visitor is announced:

[Pg 117]

In the original manuscript in my possession the name ‘John Thurtell’ is
given as the answer to that inquiry. In the printed book the chapter
ends more abruptly as we see. The second reference is even more
dramatic. It occurs when Lavengro has a conversation with his friend the
gypsy Petulengro in a thunderstorm—when all are hurrying to the
prize-fight. Here let Borrow tell his story:

There is yet another reference by Borrow to Thurtell in The Gypsies of
Spain, which runs as follows:

Rarely in our criminal jurisprudence has a murder trial excited more
interest than that of John Thurtell for the murder of Weare—the Gill’s
Hill Murder, as it was called. Certainly no murder of modern times has
had so many indirect literary associations. Borrow, Carlyle, Hazlitt,
Walter Scott, and Thackeray are among those who have given it lasting
fame by comment of one kind or another; and the lines ascribed to
Theodore Hook are perhaps as well known as any other memory of the
tragedy:

Carlyle’s division of human beings of the upper classes into ‘noblemen,
gentlemen, and gigmen,’ which occurs[Pg 119] in his essay on Richter, and a
later reference to gig-manhood which occurs in his essay on Goethe’s
Works, had their inspiration in an episode in the trial of Thurtell,
when the question being asked, ‘What sort of a person was Mr. Weare?’
brought the answer, ‘He was always a respectable person.’ ‘What do you
mean by respectable?’ the witness was asked. ‘He kept a gig,’ was the
reply, which brought the word ‘gigmanity’ into our language.[70]

I have said that John Thurtell and two members of his family became
subscribers for Borrow’s Romantic Ballads,[71] and it is certain that
Borrow must often have met Thurtell, that is to say looked at him from a
distance, in some of the scenes of prize-fighting which both affected,
Borrow merely as a youthful spectator, Thurtell as a reckless backer of
one or other combatant. Thurtell’s father was an alderman of Norwich
living in a good house on the Ipswich Road when the son’s name rang
through England as that of a murderer. The father was born in 1765 and
died in 1846. Four years after his son John was hanged he was elected
Mayor of Norwich, in recognition of his violent ultra-Whig[Pg 120] or blue and
white political opinions. He had been nominated as mayor both in 1818
and 1820, but it was perhaps the extraordinary ‘advertisement’ of his
son’s shameful death that gave the citizens of Norwich the necessary
enthusiasm to elect Alderman Thurtell as mayor in 1828. It was in those
oligarchical days a not unnatural fashion to be against the Government.
The feast at the Guildhall on this occasion was attended by four hundred
and sixty guests. A year before John Thurtell was hanged, in 1823, his
father moved a violent political resolution in Norwich, but was
out-Heroded by Cobbett, who moved a much more extreme one over his head
and carried it by an immense majority. It was a brutal time, and there
cannot be a doubt but that Alderman Thurtell, while busy setting the
world straight, failed to bring up his family very well. John, as we
shall see, was hanged; Thomas, another brother, was associated with him
in many disgraceful transactions; while a third brother, George, also a
subscriber, by the way, to Borrow’s Romantic Ballads, who was a
landscape gardener at Eaton, died in prison in 1848 under sentence for
theft. Apart from a rather riotous and bad bringing up, which may be
pleaded in extenuation, it is not possible to waste much sympathy over
John Thurtell. He had thoroughly disgraced himself in Norwich before he
removed to London. There he got further and further into difficulties,
and one of the many publications which arose out of his trial and
execution was devoted to pointing the moral of the evils of
gambling.[72] It was bad luck at cards,[Pg 121] and the loss of much money to
William Weare, who seems to have been an exceedingly vile person, that
led to the murder. Thurtell had a friend named Probert who lived in a
quiet cottage in a byway of Hertfordshire—Gill’s Hill, near Elstree. He
suggested to Weare in a friendly way that they should go for a day’s
shooting at Gill’s Hill, and that Probert would put them up for the
night. Weare went home, collected a few things in a bag, and took a
hackney coach to a given spot, where Thurtell met him with a gig. The
two men drove out of London together. The date was 24th October 1823. On
the high-road they met and passed Probert and a companion named Joseph
Hunt, who had even been instructed by Thurtell to bring a sack with
him—this was actually used to carry away the body—and must therefore
have been privy to the intended murder. By the time the second gig
containing Probert and Hunt arrived near Probert’s cottage, Thurtell met
it in the roadway, according to their accounts, and told the two men
that he had done the deed; that he had killed Weare first by
ineffectively shooting him, then by dashing out his brains with his
pistol, and finally by cutting his throat. Thurtell further told his
friends, if their evidence was to be trusted, that he had left the body
behind a hedge. In the night the three men placed the body in a sack and
carried it to a pond near Probert’s house and threw it in. The next
night they fished it out and threw it into another pond some distance
away.[Pg 122]

Thurtell meanwhile had divided the spoil—some £20, which he said was
all that he had obtained from Weare’s body—with his companions. Hunt,
it may be mentioned, afterwards declared his conviction that Thurtell,
when he first committed the murder, had removed his victim’s principal
treasure, notes to the value of three or four hundred pounds. Suspicion
was aroused, and the hue and cry raised through the finding by a
labourer of the pistol in the hedge, and the discovery of a pool of
blood on the roadway. Probert promptly turned informer; Hunt also tried
to save himself by a rambling confession, and it was he who revealed
where the body was concealed, accompanying the officers to the pond and
pointing out the exact spot where the corpse would be found. When
recovered the body was taken to the Artichoke Inn at Elstree, and here
the coroner’s inquest was held. Meanwhile Thurtell had been arrested in
London, and taken down to Elstree to be present at the inquest. A
verdict of guilty against all three miscreants was given by the
coroner’s jury, and Weare’s body was buried in Elstree Churchyard.[73]

[Pg 123]

In January 1824 John Thurtell was brought to trial at Hertford Assizes,
and Hunt also. But first of all there were some interesting proceedings
in the Court of King’s Bench, before the Chief Justice and two other
judges,[74] complaining that Thurtell had not been allowed to see his
counsel. And there were other points at issue. Thurtell’s counsel moved
for a criminal injunction against the proprietor of the Surrey Theatre
in that a performance had been held there, and was being held, which
assumed Thurtell’s guilt, the identical horse and gig being exhibited in
which Weare was supposed to have ridden to the scene of his death.
Finally this was arranged, and a mandamus was granted ‘commanding the
admission of legal advisers to the prisoner.’ At last the trial came on
at Hertford before Mr. Justice Park. It lasted two days, although the
judge wished to go on all night in order to finish in one. But the
protest of Thurtell, supported by the jury, led to an adjournment.
Probert had been set free and appeared as a witness. The jury gave a
verdict of guilty, and Thurtell and Hunt were sentenced to be hanged,
but Hunt escaped with[Pg 124] transportation. Thurtell made his own speech for
the defence, which had a great effect upon the jury, until the judge
swept most of its sophistries away. It was, however, a very able
performance. Thurtell’s line of defence was to declare that Hunt and
Probert were the murderers, and that he was a victim of their perjuries.
If hanged, he would be hanged on circumstantial evidence only, and he
gave, with great elaboration, the details of a number of cases where men
had been wrongfully hanged upon circumstantial evidence. His lawyers had
apparently provided him with books containing these examples from the
past, and his month in prison was devoted to this defence, which showed
great ability. The trial took place on 6th January 1824, and Thurtell
was hanged on the 9th, in front of Hertford Gaol: his body was given to
the Anatomical Museum in London. A contemporary report says that
Thurtell, on the scaffold,

The reader of Lavengro might speculate whether that ‘young gentleman’
was Borrow, but Borrow was in Norwich in January 1824, his father dying
in the following month. In his Celebrated Trials Borrow tells the
story of the execution with wonderful vividness, and supplies effective
quotations from ‘an eyewitness.’ Borrow no doubt exaggerated his
acquaintance with Thurtell, as in his Robinson Crusoe romance he was
fully entitled to do for effect. He was too young at the time to have
been much noticed by a man so much[Pg 125] his senior. The writer who accepts
Borrow’s own statement that he really gave him ‘some lessons in the
noble art’ is too credulous,[75] and the statement that Thurtell’s house
‘on the Ipswich Road was a favourite rendezvous for the Fancy’ is
unsupported by evidence. Old Alderman Thurtell owned the house in
question, and we find no evidence that he encouraged his son’s
predilection for prize-fighting. In The Romany Rye he gives his friend
the jockey as his authority for the following apologia:

[Pg 126]

CHAPTER XII

BORROW AND THE FANCY

George Borrow had no sympathy with Thurtell the gambler. I can find no
evidence in his career of any taste for games of hazard or indeed for
games of any kind, although we recall that as a mere child he was able
to barter a pack of cards for the Irish language. But he had certainly
very considerable sympathy with the notorious criminal as a friend and
patron of prize-fighting. This now discredited pastime Borrow ever
counted a virtue. Was not his God-fearing father a champion in his way,
or, at least, had he not in open fight beaten the champion of the
moment, Big Ben Brain? Moreover, who was there in those days with blood
in his veins who did not count the cultivation of the Fancy as the
noblest and most manly of pursuits! Why, William Hazlitt, a prince among
English essayists, whose writings are a beloved classic in our day,
wrote in The New Monthly Magazine in these very years[76] his own
eloquent impression, and even introduces John Thurtell more than once as
‘Tom Turtle,’ little thinking then of the fate that was so soon to
overtake him. What could be more lyrical than this:[Pg 127]

And then the best historian of prize-fighting, Henry Downes Miles, the
author of Pugilistica, has his own statement of the case. You will
find it in his monograph on John Jackson, the pugilist who taught Lord
Byron to box, and received the immortality of an eulogistic footnote in
Don Juan. Here is Miles’s defence:

From Samuel Johnson to George Bernard Shaw literary England has had a
kindness for the pugilist, although the magistrate has long, and
rightly, ruled him out as impossible. Borrow carried his enthusiasm
further than any, and no account of him that concentrates attention upon
his accomplishment as a distributor of Bibles and ignores his delight in
fisticuffs, has any grasp of the real George Borrow. Indeed it may be
said, and will be shown in the course of our story, that Borrow entered
upon Bible distribution in the spirit of a pugilist rather than that of
an evangelist. But to return to Borrow’s pugilistic experiences. He
claims, as we have seen, occasionally to have put on the gloves with
John Thurtell. He describes vividly enough his own conflicts with the
Flaming Tinman[Pg 128] and with Petulengro. His one heroine, Isopel Berners,
had ‘Fair Play and Long Melford’ as her ideal, ‘Long Melford’ being the
good right-handed blow with which Lavengro conquered the Tinman. Isopel,
we remember, had learned in Long Melford Union to ‘Fear God and take
your own part!’

George Borrow, indeed, was at home with the whole army of
prize-fighters, who came down to us like the Roman Cæsars or the Kings
of England in a noteworthy procession, their dynasty commencing with
James Fig of Thame, who began to reign in 1719, and closing with Tom
King, who beat Heenan in 1863, or with Jem Mace, who flourished in a
measure until 1872. With what zest must Borrow have followed the account
of the greatest battle of all, that between Heenan and Tom Sayers at
Farnborough in 1860, when it was said that Parliament had been emptied
to patronise a prize-fight; and this although Heenan complained that he
had been chased out of eight counties. For by this time, in spite of
lordly patronage, pugilism was doomed, and the more harmless boxing had
taken its place. ‘Pity that corruption should have crept in amongst
them,’ sighed Lavengro in a memorable passage, in which he also has his
pæan of praise for the bruisers of England:

[Pg 128a]

THE FAMILY OF JASPER PETULENGRO

‘Jasper’ or Ambrose Smith was a very old man when this picture was taken
by Mr. Andrew Innes of Dunbar in 1878. In both pictures we see
Sanspirella, Jasper’s wife, seated and holding a child. We are indebted
to Mr. Charles Spence of Dunbar for these interesting groups.

[Pg 129]

Yes: Borrow was never hard on the bruisers of England, and followed
their achievements, it may be said, from his cradle to his grave. His
beloved father had brought him up, so to speak, upon memories of one who
was champion before George was born—Big Ben Brain of Bristol. Brain,
although always called ‘Big Ben,’ was only 5 feet 10 in. high. He was
for years a coal porter at a wharf off the Strand. It was in 1791 that
Ben Brain won the championship which placed him upon a pinnacle in the
minds of all robust people. The Duke of Hamilton then backed him against
the then champion, Tom Johnson, for five hundred guineas. ‘Public
expectation,’ says The Oracle, a contemporary newspaper, ‘never was
raised so high by any pugilistic contest; great bets were laid, and it
is estimated £20,000 was wagered on this occasion.’ Ben Brain was the
undisputed conqueror, we are told, in eighteen rounds, occupying no more
than twenty-one minutes.[78] Brain died in 1794, and all the biographers
tell of the piety of his end, so that Borrow’s father may have read the
Bible to him in his last moments, as Borrow avers,[79] but I very much
doubt the accuracy of the following:

We have already shown that Brain lived for four years after his fight
with Johnson. Perhaps the fight in Hyde Park between Borrow’s father and
Ben, as narrated in Lavengro, is all romancing. It makes[Pg 130] good reading
in any case, as does Borrow’s eulogy of some of his own contemporaries
of the prize-ring:

All this is very accurate history. We know that there really was this
wonderful gathering of the bruisers of England assembled in the
neighbourhood of Norwich in July 1820, that is to say, sixteen miles
away at North Walsham. More than 25,000 men, it is estimated, gathered
to see Edward Painter of Norwich fight Tom Oliver of London for a purse
of a hundred guineas. There were three Belchers, heroes of the
prize-ring, but Borrow here refers to Tom, whose younger brother, Jem,
had died in 1811 at the age of thirty. Tom Belcher died in 1854 at the
age of seventy-one. Thomas Cribb was champion of England from 1805 to
1820. One of Cribb’s greatest fights was with Jem Belcher in 1807, when,
in the forty-first and last round, as we are told by the chroniclers,
‘Cribb proving the stronger man put in two weak blows, when Belcher,
quite exhausted, fell upon the ropes and gave up the combat.’ Cribb had
a prolonged career of glory, but he died in poverty in 1848. Happier was
an earlier champion, John Gully, who held the glorious honour for three
years—from 1805 to 1808. Gully turned tavern-keeper, and making a
fortune out of sundry speculations, entered Parliament as member for
Pontefract, and lived to be eighty years of age.

It is necessary to dwell upon Borrow as the friend of prize-fighters,
because no one understands Borrow who does not realise that his real
interests were not in literature but in action. He would have liked to
join the army but could not obtain a commission. And so[Pg 132] he had to be
content with such fighting as was possible. He cared more for the men
who could use their fists than for those who could but wield the pen. He
would, we may be sure, have rejoiced to know that many more have visited
the tomb of Tom Sayers in Highgate Cemetery than have visited the tomb
of George Eliot in the same burial-ground. A curious moral obliquity
this, you may say. But to recognise it is to understand one side of
Borrow, and an interesting side withal.

[Pg 133]

CHAPTER XIII

EIGHT YEARS OF VAGABONDAGE

There has been much nonsense written concerning what has been called the
‘veiled period’ of George Borrow’s life. This has arisen from a letter
which Richard Ford of the Handbook for Travellers in Spain wrote to
Borrow after a visit to him at Oulton in 1844. Borrow was full of his
projected Lavengro, the idea of which he outlined to his friends. He
was a genial man in those days, on the wave of a popular success. Was
not The Bible in Spain passing merrily from edition to edition!
Borrow, it is clear, told Ford that he was writing his
‘Autobiography’—he had no misgiving then as to what he should call
it—and he evidently proposed to end it in 1825 and not in 1833, when
the Bible Society gave him his real chance in life. Ford begged him, in
letters that came into Dr. Knapp’s possession, and from which he quotes
all too meagrely, not to ‘drop a curtain’ over the eight years
succeeding 1825. ‘No doubt,’ says Ford, ‘it will excite a mysterious
interest,’ but then he adds in effect it will lead to a wrong
construction being put upon the omission. Well, there can be but one
interpretation, and that not an unnatural one. Borrow had a very rough
time during these eight years. His vanity was hurt, and no wonder. It
seems a small matter to us[Pg 134] now that Charles Dickens should have been
ashamed of the blacking-bottle episode of his boyhood. Genius has a
right to a penurious, and even to a sordid, boyhood. But genius has no
right to a sordid manhood, and here was George ‘Olaus’ Borrow, who was
able to claim the friendship of William Taylor, the German scholar; who
was able to boast of his association with sound scholastic foundations,
with the High School at Edinburgh and the Grammar School at Norwich; who
was a great linguist and had made rare translations from the poetry of
many nations, starving in the byways of England and of France. What a
fate for such a man that he should have been so unhappy for eight years;
should have led the most penurious of roving lives, and almost certainly
have been in prison as a common tramp.[80] It was all very well to
romance about a poverty-stricken youth. But when youth had fled there
ceased to be romance, and only sordidness was forthcoming. From his
twenty-third to his thirty-first year George Borrow was engaged in a
hopeless quest for the means of making a living. There is, however, very
little mystery. Many incidents of each of these years are revealed at
one or other point. His home, to which he returned from time to time,
was with his mother at the cottage in Willow Lane, Norwich. Whether he
made sufficient profit out of a horse, as in The Romany Rye, to enable
him to travel upon the proceeds, as Dr. Knapp thinks, we cannot say. Dr.
Knapp is doubtless right in assuming that during this period he led ‘a
life of roving adventure,’ his own authorised version of his career at
the time, as we have quoted from the biography in his handwriting from
Men of the Time. But[Pg 135] how far this roving was confined to England, how
far it extended to other lands, we do not know. We are, however,
satisfied that he starved through it all, that he rarely had a penny in
his pocket. At a later date he gave it to be understood at times that he
had visited the East, and that India had revealed her glories to him. We
do not believe it. Defoe was Borrow’s master in literature, and he
shared Defoe’s right to lie magnificently on occasion. Dr. Knapp has
collected the various occasions upon which Borrow referred to his
supposed earlier travels abroad prior to his visit to St. Petersburg in
1833. The only quotation that carries conviction is an extract from a
letter to his mother from St. Petersburg, where he writes of ‘London,
Paris, Madrid, and other capitals which I have visited.’ I am not,
however, disinclined to accept Dr. Knapp’s theory that in 1826-7 Borrow
did travel to Paris and through certain parts of Southern Europe. It is
strange, all the same, that adventures which, had they taken place,
would have provoked a thousand observations, provoked but two or three
passing references. Yet there is no getting over that letter to his
mother, nor that reference in The Gypsies of Spain, where he
says—’Once in the south of France, when I was weary, hungry, and
penniless….’ Borrow certainly did some travel in these years, but it
was sordid, lacking in all dignity—never afterwards to be recalled. For
the most part, however, he was in England. We know that Borrow was in
Norwich in 1826, for we have seen him superintending the publication of
the Romantic Ballads by subscription in that year. In that year also
he wrote the letter to Haydon, the painter, to say that he was ready to
sit for him, but that he was ‘going to the south of France in a little
better than a[Pg 136] fortnight.’[81] We know also that he was in Norwich in
1827, because it was then, and not in 1818 as described in Lavengro,
that he ‘doffed his hat’ to the famous trotting stallion Marshland
Shales, when that famous old horse was exhibited at Tombland Fair on the
Castle Hill. We meet him next as the friend of Dr. Bowring. The letters
to Bowring we must leave to another chapter, but they commence in 1829
and continue through 1830 and 1831. Through them all Borrow shows
himself alive to the necessity of obtaining an appointment of some kind,
and meanwhile he is hard at work upon his translations from various
languages, which, in conjunction with Dr. Bowring, he is to issue as
Songs of Scandinavia. Dr. Knapp thinks that in 1829 he made the
translation of the Memoirs of Vidocq, which appeared in that year with
a short preface by the translator.[82] But these little volumes bear no
internal evidence of Borrow’s style, and there is no external evidence
to support the assumption that he had a hand in their publication. His
occasional references to Vidocq are probably due to the fact that he had
read this little book.

I have before me one very lengthy manuscript of Borrow’s of this period.
It is dated December 1829,[Pg 137] and is addressed, ‘To the Committee of the
Honourable and Praiseworthy Association, known by the name of the
Highland Society.’[83] It is a proposal that they should publish in two
thick octavo volumes a series of translations of the best and most
approved poetry of the ancient and modern Scots-Gaelic bards. Borrow was
willing to give two years to the project, for which he pleads ‘with no
sordid motive.’ It is a dignified letter, which will be found in one of
Dr. Knapp’s appendices—so presumably Borrow made two copies of it. The
offer was in any case declined, and so Borrow passed from disappointment
to disappointment during these eight years, which no wonder he desired,
in the coming years of fame and prosperity, to veil as much as possible.
The lean years in the lives of any of us are not those upon which we
delight to dwell, or upon which we most cheerfully look back.[84]

[Pg 138]

CHAPTER XIV

SIR JOHN BOWRING

‘Poor George…. I wish he were making money. He works hard and remains
poor’—thus wrote John Borrow to his mother in 1830 from Mexico, and it
disposes in a measure of any suggestion of mystery with regard to five
of those years that he wished to veil. They were not spent, it is clear,
in rambling in the East, as he tried to persuade Colonel Napier many
years later. They were spent for the most part in diligent attempt at
the capture of words, in reading the poetry and the prose of many lands,
and in making translations of unequal merit from these diverse tongues.
This is indisputably brought home to me by the manuscripts in my
possession, supplemented by those that fell to Dr. Knapp. These
manuscripts represent years of work. Borrow has been counted a
considerable linguist, and he had assuredly a reading and speaking
acquaintance with a great many languages. But this knowledge was
acquired, as all knowledge is, with infinite trouble and patience. I
have before me hundreds of small sheets of paper upon which are written
English words and their equivalents in some twenty or thirty languages.
These serve to show that Borrow learnt a language as a small boy in an
old-fashioned system of education learns his Latin or French—by writing
down simple words—’father,’ ‘mother,’ ‘horse,’ ‘dog,’ and so on with[Pg 139]
the same word in Latin or French in front of them. Of course Borrow had
a superb memory and abundant enthusiasm, and so he was enabled to add
one language to another and to make his translations from such books as
he could obtain, with varied success. I believe that nearly all the
books that he handled came from the Norwich library, and when Mrs.
Borrow wrote to her elder son to say that George was working hard, as we
may fairly assume, from the reply quoted, that she did, she was
recalling this laborious work at translation that must have gone on for
years. We have seen the first fruit in the translation from the
German—or possibly from the French—of Klinger’s Faustus; we have
seen it in Romantic Ballads from the Danish, the Irish, and the
Swedish. Now there really seemed a chance of a more prosperous
utilisation of his gift, for Borrow had found a zealous friend who was
prepared to go forward with him in this work of giving to the English
public translations from the literatures of the northern nations. This
friend was Dr. John Bowring, who made a very substantial reputation in
his day.

Bowring has told his own story in a volume of Autobiographical
Recollections,[85] a singularly dull book for a man whose career was at
once so varied and so full of interest. He was born at Exeter in 1792 of
an old Devonshire family, and entered a merchant’s office in his native
city on leaving school. He early acquired a taste for the study of
languages, and learnt French from a refugee priest precisely in the way
in which Borrow had done. He also acquired Italian, Spanish, German and
Dutch, continuing with a great variety of other languages. Indeed, only
the very year after[Pg 140] Borrow had published Faustus, he published his
Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain, and the year after Borrow’s
Romantic Ballads came Bowring’s Servian Popular Poetry. With such
interest in common it was natural that the two men should be brought
together, but Bowring had the qualities which enabled him to make a
career for himself and Borrow had not. In 1811, as a clerk in a London
mercantile house, he was sent to Spain, and after this his travels were
varied. He was in Russia in 1820, and in 1822 was arrested at Calais and
thrown into prison, being suspected by the Bourbon Government of
abetting the French Liberals. Canning as Foreign Minister took up his
cause, and he was speedily released. He assisted Jeremy Bentham in
founding The Westminster Review in 1824. Meanwhile he was seeking
official employment, and in conjunction with Mr. Villiers, afterwards
Earl of Clarendon, and that ambassador to Spain who befriended Borrow
when he was in the Peninsula, became a commissioner to investigate the
commercial relations between England and France. After the Reform Bill
of 1832 Bowring was frequently a candidate for Parliament, and was
finally elected for Bolton in 1841. In the meantime he assisted Cobden
in the formation of the Anti-Corn Law League in 1838. Having suffered
great monetary losses in the interval, he applied for the appointment of
Consul at Canton, of which place he afterwards became Governor, being
knighted in 1854. At one period of his career at Hong Kong his conduct
was made the subject of a vote of censure in Parliament, Lord
Palmerston, however, warmly defending him. Finally returning to England
in 1862, he continued his literary work with unfailing zest. He died at
Exeter, in a house very near that in which he was born, in 1872. His
extraordinary[Pg 141] energies cannot be too much praised, and there is no
doubt but that in addition to being the possessor of great learning he
was a man of high character. His literary efforts were surprisingly
varied. There are at least thirty-six volumes with his name on the
title-page, most of them unreadable to-day; even such works, for
example, as his Visit to the Philippine Isles and Siam and the
Siamese, which involved travel into then little-known lands. Perhaps
the only book by him that to-day commands attention is his translation
of Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl. The most readable of many books by him
into which I have dipped is his Servian Popular Poetry of 1827, in
which we find interesting stories in verse that remind us of similar
stories from the Danish in Borrow’s Romantic Ballads published only
the year before. The extraordinary thing, indeed, is the many points of
likeness between Borrow and Bowring. Both were remarkable linguists;
both had spent some time in Spain and Russia; both had found themselves
in foreign prisons. They were alike associated in some measure with
Norwich—Bowring through friendship with Taylor—and I might go on to
many other points of likeness or of contrast. It is natural, therefore,
that the penniless Borrow should have welcomed acquaintance with the
more prosperous scholar. Thus it is that, some thirty years later,
Borrow described the introduction by Taylor:

The quarrels of authors are frequently amusing but rarely edifying, and
this hatred of Bowring that possessed the soul of poor Borrow in his
later years is of the same texture as the rest. We shall never know the
facts, but the position is comprehensible enough. Let us turn to the
extant correspondence[87] which, as far as we know, opened when Borrow
paid what was probably his third visit to London in 1829:

To Dr. John Bowring

17 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. [Dec. 6, 1829.]

George Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

17 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. [Dec. 28, 1829.][89]

George Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

17 Great Russell Street, Decr. 31, 1829.

George Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

17 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, Jany. 14, 1830.

G. Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

17 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, Jany. 7, 1830.

George Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum Street, Jany. 1830.

G. Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum Street, Jany. 25, 1830.

G. Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum Street, Feby. 20, 1830.

George Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum Street, March 9, 1830.

George Borrow.

To this letter Bowring replied the same day, and his reply is preserved
by Dr. Knapp. He promised to help in the Museum project ‘by every sort
of counsel and creation.’ ‘I should rejoice to see you nicked in the
British Museum,’ he concludes.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum Street, Friday Evening, May 21, 1830.

G. Borrow.

This letter is printed in part by Dr. Knapp, and almost in its entirety
by Mr. Herbert Jenkins. Dr. Knapp has much sound worldly reflection upon
its pathetic reference to ‘drifting on the sea of the world.’ If only,
he suggests, Borrow had not received that unwise eulogy from Allan
Cunningham about his ‘exquisite Danish ballads,’ if only he had listened
to Richard Ford’s advice—which came too late in any case—’Avoid poetry
and translations of poets’—how much better it would have been. But
Borrow had not the makings in him of a ‘successful’ man, and we who
enjoy his writings to-day must be contented with the reflection that he
had just the kind of life-experience which gave us what he had to give.
Here Borrow holds his place among the poets—an unhappy race. In any
case the British Museum appointment was not for him, nor the military
career. Had one or other fallen to his lot, we might have had much
literary work[Pg 149] of a kind, but certainly not Lavengro. To return to the
correspondence:

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum St., June 1, 1830.

G. Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum Street, June 7, 1830.

G. Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum St., Sept. 14, 1830.

G. Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

Willow Lane, Norwich, Sept. 11, 1831.

George Borrow.

[Pg 152]

Borrow’s next letter to Bowring that has been preserved is dated 1835
and was written from Portugal. With that I will deal when we come to
Borrow’s travels in the Peninsula. Here it sufficeth to note that during
the years of Borrow’s most urgent need he seems to have found a kind
friend if not a very zealous helper in the ‘Old Radical’ whom he came to
hate so cordially.

[Pg 153]

CHAPTER XV

BORROW AND THE BIBLE SOCIETY

That George Borrow should have become an agent for the Bible Society,
then in the third decade of its flourishing career, has naturally
excited doubts as to his moral honesty. The position was truly a
contrast to an earlier ideal contained in the letter to his Norwich
friend, Roger Kerrison, that we have already given, in which, with all
the zest of a Shelley, he declares that he intends to live in London,
‘write plays, poetry, etc., abuse religion, and get myself prosecuted.’
But that was in 1824, and Borrow had suffered great tribulation in the
intervening eight years. He had acquired many languages, wandered far
and written much, all too little of which had found a publisher. There
was plenty of time for his religious outlook to have changed in the
interval, and in any case Borrow was no theologian. The negative outlook
of ‘Godless Billy Taylor,’ and the positive outlook of certain
Evangelical friends with whom he was now on visiting terms, were of
small account compared with the imperative need of making a living—and
then there was the passionate longing of his nature for a wider
sphere—for travelling activity which should not be dependent alone upon
the vagabond’s crust. What matter if, as Harriet Martineau—most
generous and also most malicious of women, with much kinship with Borrow
in temperament—said,[Pg 154] that his appearance before the public as a devout
agent of the Bible Society excited a ‘burst of laughter from all who
remembered the old Norwich days’; what matter if another ‘scribbling
woman,’ as Carlyle called such strident female writers as were in vogue
in mid-Victorian days—Frances Power Cobbe—thought him ‘insincere’;
these were unable to comprehend the abnormal heart of Borrow, so
entirely at one with Goethe in Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre:

Here was Borrow’s opportunity indeed. Verily I believe that it would
have been the same had it been a society for the propagation of the
writings of Defoe among the Persians. With what zest would Borrow have
undertaken to translate Moll Flanders and Captain Singleton into the
languages of Hafiz and Omar! But the Bible Society was ready to his
hand, and Borrow did nothing by halves. A good hater and a staunch
friend, he was loyal to the Bible Society in no half-hearted way, and
not the most pronounced[Pg 155] quarrel with forces obviously quite out of tune
with his nature led to any real slackening of that loyalty. In the end a
portion of his property went to swell the Bible Society’s funds.[93]

When Borrow became one of its servants, the Bible Society was only in
its third decade. It was founded in the year 1804, and had the names of
William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, and Zachary Macaulay on its first
committee. To circulate the authorised version of the Bible without note
or comment was the first ideal that these worthy men set before them;
never to the entire satisfaction of the great printing organisations,
which already had a considerable financial interest in such a
circulation. For long years the words ‘Sold under cost price’ upon the
Bibles of the Society excited mingled feelings among those interested in
the book trade[94]. The Society’s first idea was limited to Bibles in
the English tongue. This was speedily modified. A Bible Society was set
up in Nuremberg to which money was granted by the parent organisation. A
Bible in the Welsh language was circulated broadcast through the
Principality, and so the movement grew. From the first it had one of its
principal centres in Norwich, where Joseph John Gurney’s house was open
to its committee, and at its annual gatherings at Earlham his sister
Elizabeth Fry took a leading part, while Wilberforce, Charles Simeon,
the famous preacher, and Legh Richmond, whose Dairyman’s Daughter
Borrow failed to appreciate, were of[Pg 156] the company. ‘Uncles Buxton and
Cunningham are here,’ we find one of Joseph John Gurney’s daughters
writing in describing a Bible Society gathering. This was John
Cunningham, rector of Harrow, and it was his brother who helped Borrow
to his position in connection with the Society, as we shall see. At the
moment of these early meetings Borrow is but a boy, meeting Joseph
Gurney on the banks of the river near Earlham, and listening to his
discourse upon angling. The work of the Bible Society in Russia may be
said to have commenced when one John Paterson of Glasgow, who had been a
missionary of the Congregational body, went to St. Petersburg during
those critical months of 1812 that Napoleon was marching into Russia.
Paterson indeed, William Canton tells us,[95] was ‘one of the last to
behold the old Tartar wall and high brick towers’ and other splendours
of the Moscow which in a month or two were to be consumed by the flames.
Paterson was back again in St. Petersburg before the French were at the
gates of Moscow, and it is noteworthy that while Moscow was burning and
the Czar was on his way to join his army, this remarkable Scot was
submitting to Prince Galitzin a plan for a Bible Society in St.
Petersburg, and a memorial to the Czar thereon:

The Society was formed in January 1813, and when the Czar returned to
St. Petersburg in 1815, after the shattering of Napoleon’s power, he
authorised a new translation of the Bible into modern Russian. From
Russia it was not a far cry, where the spirit of evangelisation held
sway, to Manchuria and to China. To these remote lands the Bible Society
desired to send its literature. In 1822 the gospel of St. Matthew was
printed in St. Petersburg in Manchu. Ten years later the type of the
whole New Testament in that language was lying in the Russian capital.
‘All that was required was a Manchu scholar to see the work through the
press’.[97] Here came the chance for Borrow. At this period there
resided at Oulton Hall, Suffolk, but a few miles from Norwich, a family
of the name of Skepper, Edward and Anne his wife, with their two
children, Breame and Mary. Mary married in 1817 one Henry Clarke, a
lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He died a few months afterwards of
consumption. Of this marriage there was a posthumous child, Henrietta
Mary, born but two months after her father’s death. Mary Clarke, as she
now was, threw herself with zest into all the religious enthusiasms of
the locality, and the Rev. Francis Cunningham, Vicar of St. Margaret’s,
Lowestoft, was one of her friends. Borrow had met Mary Clarke on one of
his visits to Lowestoft, and she had doubtless been impressed with his
fine presence, to say nothing of the intelligence and varied learning of
the young man. The following note, the first communication[Pg 158] I can find
from Borrow to his future wife, indicates how matters stood at the time:

To Mrs. Clarke

St. Giles, Norwich, 22 October 1832.

George Borrow.

That Borrow owed his introduction to Mr. Cunningham to Mrs. Clarke is
clear, although Cunningham, in his letter to the Bible Society urging
the claims of Borrow, refers to the fact that a ‘young farmer’ in the
neighbourhood had introduced him. This was probably her brother, Breame
Skepper. Dr. Knapp was of the opinion that Joseph John Gurney obtained
Borrow his appointment, but the recently published correspondence of
Borrow with the Bible Society makes it clear that Cunningham wrote—on
27th December 1832—recommending Borrow to the secretary, the Rev.
Andrew Brandram. How little he knew of Borrow is indicated by the fact
that he referred to him as ‘independent in circumstances.’ Brandram told
Caroline Fox many years afterwards that Gurney had effected the
introduction, but this was merely a lapse of memory. In fact we find
Borrow asking to be allowed to meet Gurney before his departure. In any
case he has himself told us, in one of the brief biographies of himself
that he wrote, that he promptly walked to London, covering the whole
distance of 112 miles[Pg 159] in twenty-seven hours, and that his expenses
amounted to 5-1/2d. laid out in a pint of ale, a half-pint of milk, a
roll of bread, and two apples. He reached London in the early morning,
called at the offices of the Bible Society in Earl Street, and was
kindly received by Andrew Brandram and Joseph Jowett, the two
secretaries. He was asked if he would care to learn Manchu, and go to
St. Petersburg. He was given six months for the task, and doubtless also
some money on account. He returned to Norwich more luxuriously—by mail
coach. In June 1833 we find a letter from Borrow to Jowett, dated from
Willow Lane, Norwich, and commencing, ‘I have mastered Manchu, and I
should feel obliged by your informing the committee of the fact, and
also my excellent friend, Mr. Brandram.’ A long reply to this by Jowett
is among my Borrow Papers, but the Bible Society clearly kept copies of
its letters, and a portion of this one has been printed.[98] It shows
that Borrow went through much heart-burning before his destiny was
finally settled. At last he was again invited to London, and found
himself as one of two candidates for the privilege of going to Russia.
The examination consisted of a Manchu hymn, of which Borrow’s version
seems to have proved the more acceptable, and he afterwards printed it
in his Targum. Finally, on the 5th of July 1833, Borrow received a
letter from Jowett offering him the appointment, with a salary of £200 a
year and expenses. The letter contained his first lesson in the then
unaccustomed discipline of the Evangelical vocabulary. Borrow had spoken
of the prospect of becoming ‘useful to the Deity, to man, and to
himself.’[Pg 160]

‘Doubtless you meant,’ commented Jowett, ‘the prospect of glorifying
God,’ and Jowett frankly tells him that his tone of confidence in
speaking of himself ‘had alarmed some of the excellent members of our
committee.’ Borrow adapted himself at once, and is congratulated by
Jowett in a later communication upon the ‘truly Christian’ spirit of his
next letter.

By an interesting coincidence there was living in Norwich at the moment
when Borrow was about to leave it, a man who had long identified himself
with good causes in Russia, and had lived in that country for a
considerable period of his life. John Venning[99] was born in Totnes in
1776, and he is buried in the Rosary Cemetery at Norwich, where he died
in 1858, after twenty-eight years’ residence in that city. He started
for St. Petersburg four years after John Howard had died, ostensibly on
behalf of the commercial house with which he was associated, but with
the intention of carrying on the work of that great man in prison
reform. Alexander I. was on the throne, and he made Venning his friend,
frequently conversing with him upon religious subjects. He became the
treasurer of a society for the humanising of Russian prisons; but when
Nicholas became Czar in 1825 Venning’s work became more difficult,
although the Emperor was sympathetic. Venning returned to England in
1830, and thus opportunely, in 1833, was able to give his
fellow-townsman letters of introduction to Prince Galitzin and other
Russian notables, so that Borrow was able to set forth under the
happiest auspices—with an entire[Pg 161] change of conditions from those eight
years of semi-starvation that he was now to leave behind him for ever.
Borrow left London for St. Petersburg on 31st July 1833, not forgetting
to pay his mother before he left the £17 he had had to borrow during his
time of stress. Always devoted to his mother, Borrow sent her sums of
money at intervals from the moment the power of earning came to him. We
shall never know, we can only surmise something of the self-sacrificing
devotion of that mother during the years in which Borrow had failed to
find remunerative work. Wherever he wandered there had always been a
home in the Willow Lane cottage. It is probable that much the greater
part of the period of his eight years of penury was spent under her
roof. Yet we may be sure that the good mother never once reproached her
son. She had just that touch of idealism in her character that made for
faith and hope. In any case never more was Borrow to suffer penury, or
to be a burden on his mother. Henceforth she was to be his devoted care
to her dying day.

[Pg 162]

CHAPTER XVI

ST. PETERSBURG AND JOHN P. HASFELD

Borrow travelled by way of Hamburg and Lübeck to Travemünde, whence he
went by sea to St. Petersburg, where he arrived on the twentieth of
August 1833. He was back in London in September 1835, and thus it will
be seen that he spent two years in Russia. After the hard life he had
led, everything was now rose-coloured. ‘Petersburg is the finest city in
the world,’ he wrote to Mr. Jowett; ‘neither London nor Paris nor any
other European capital which I have visited has sufficient pretensions
to enter into comparison with it in respect to beauty and grandeur.’ But
the striking thing about Borrow in these early years was his capacity
for making friends. He had not been a week in St. Petersburg before he
had gained the regard of one, William Glen, who, in 1825, had been
engaged by the Bible Society to translate the Old Testament into
Persian. The clever Scot, of whom Borrow was informed by a competent
judge that he was ‘a Persian scholar of the first water,’ was probably
too heretical for the Society which recalled him, much to his chagrin.
‘He is a very learned man, but of very simple and unassuming manners,’
wrote Borrow to Jowett.[100] His[Pg 163] version of the Psalms appeared in
1830, and of Proverbs in 1831. Thus he was going home in despair, but
seems to have had good talk on the way with Borrow in St. Petersburg. In
1845 his complete Old Testament in Persian appeared in Edinburgh. This
William Glen has been confused with another William Glen, a law student,
who taught Carlyle Greek, but they had nothing in common. Borrow and
Carlyle could not possibly have had friends in common. Borrow was drawn
towards this William Glen by his enthusiasm for the Persian language.
But Glen departed out of his life very quickly. Hasfeld, who entered it
about the same time, was to stay longer. Hasfeld was a Dane, now
thirty-three years of age, who, after a period in the Foreign Office at
Copenhagen, had come to St. Petersburg as an interpreter to the Danish
Legation, but made quite a good income as a professor of European
languages in cadet schools and elsewhere. The English language and
literature would seem to have been his favourite topic. His friendship
for Borrow was a great factor in Borrow’s life in Russia and elsewhere.
If Borrow’s letters to Hasfeld should ever turn up, they will prove the
best that he wrote. Hasfeld’s letters to Borrow were preserved by him.
Three of them are in my possession. Others were secured by Dr. Knapp,
who made far too little use of them. They are all written in Danish on[Pg 164]
foreign notepaper: flowery, grandiloquent productions we may admit, but
if we may judge a man by his correspondents, we have a revelation of a
more human Borrow than the correspondence with the friends at Earl
Street reveals:

St. Petersburg, 6/18 November 1836.

J. P. Hasfeld.

St. Petersburg, 9th/21st July 1842.

J. P. H.

St. Petersburg, 26th April/8th May 1858.

John P. Hasfeld.[102]

[Pg 169]

CHAPTER XVII

THE MANCHU BIBLE—TARGUM—THE TALISMAN

The Bible Society wanted the Bible to be set up in the Manchu language,
the official language of the Chinese Court and Government. A Russian
scholar named Lipóftsof, who had spent twenty years in China, undertook
in 1821 to translate the New Testament into Manchu for £560. Lipóftsof
had done his work in 1826, and had sent two manuscript copies to London.
In 1832 the Rev. William Swan of the London Missionary Society in
passing through St. Petersburg discovered a transcript of a large part
of the Old and New Testament in Manchu, made by one Pierot, a French
Jesuit, many years before. This transcript was unavailable, but a second
was soon afterwards forthcoming for free publication if a qualified
Manchu scholar could be found to see it through the Press. Mr. Swan’s
communication of these facts to the Bible Society in London gave Borrow
his opportunity. It was his task to find the printers, buy the paper,
and hire the qualified compositors for setting the type. It must be
admitted Borrow worked hard for his £200 a year. First he had to ask the
diplomatists for permission from the Russian Government, not now so
friendly to British Missionary zeal. The Russian Bible Society had been
suppressed in 1826. He succeeded here. Then he had to continue his[Pg 170]
studies in the Manchu language. He had written from Norwich to Mr.
Jowett on 9th June 1833, ‘I have mastered Manchu,’ but on 20th January
1834 we find him writing to the same correspondent: ‘I pay about six
shillings, English, for each lesson, which I grudge not, for the perfect
acquirement of Manchu is one of my most ardent wishes.’[103] Then he
found the printers—a German firm, Schultz and Beneze—who probably
printed the two little books of Borrow’s own for him as a ‘make weight.’
He purchased paper for his Manchu translation with an ability that would
have done credit to a modern newspaper manager. Every detail of these
transactions is given in his letters to the Bible Society, and one
cannot but be amused at Borrow’s explanation to the Reverend Secretary
of the little subterfuges by which he proposed to ‘best’ the godless for
the benefit of the godly:

Then came the composing or setting up of the type of the book. When
Borrow was called to account by his London employers, who were not sure
whether he was wasting time, he replied: ‘I have been working in the
printing-office, as a common compositor, between ten and thirteen hours
every day.’ In another letter Borrow records further difficulties with
the printers after the composition had been effected. Several of[Pg 171] the
working printers, it appears, ‘went away in disgust,’ Then he adds:

It is not my intention to add materially to the letters of Borrow from
Russia and from Spain that have already been published, although many
are in my possession. They reveal an aspect of the life of Borrow that
has been amply dealt with by other biographers, and it is an aspect that
interests me but little. Here, however, is one hitherto unpublished
letter that throws much light upon Borrow’s work at this time:

To the Rev. Andrew Brandram

St. Petersburg, 18th Oct. 1833.

George Borrow.

When the work was done at so great a cost of money,[107] and of energy
and enthusiasm on the part of George Borrow, it was found that the books
were useless. Most of these New Testaments were afterwards sent out to
China, and copies distributed by the missionaries there as opportunities
offered. It was found, however, that the Manchus in China were able to
read Chinese, preferring it to their own language, which indeed had
become almost confined to official use.[108] In the year[Pg 174] 1859 editions
of St. Matthew and St. Mark were published in Manchu and Chinese
side by side, the Manchu text being a reprint of that edited by Borrow,
and these books are still in use in Chinese Turkestan. But Borrow had
here to suffer one of the many disappointments of his life. If not
actually a gypsy he had all a gypsy’s love of wandering. No impartial
reader of the innumerable letters of this period can possibly claim that
there was in Borrow any of the proselytising zeal or evangelical fervour
which wins for the names of Henry Martyn and of David Livingstone so
much honour and sympathy even among the least zealous. At the best
Borrow’s zeal for religion was of the order of Dr. Keate, the famous
headmaster of Eton—’Blessed are the pure in heart … if you are not
pure in heart, by God, I’ll flog you!’ Borrow had got his New Testaments
printed, and he wanted to distribute them because he wished to see still
more of the world, and had no lack of courage to carry out any well
defined scheme of the organisation which was employing him. Borrow had
thrown out constant hints in his letters home. People had suggested to
him, he said, that he was printing Testaments for which he would never
find readers. If you wish for readers, they had said to him, ‘you must
seek them among the natives of Pekin and the fierce hordes of desert
Tartary.’ And it was this last most courageous thing that Borrow
proposed. Let him, he said to Mr. Jowett, fix his headquarters at
Kiachta upon the northern frontier of China. The Society should have an
agent there:

The Bible Committee considered this and other plans through the
intervening months, and it seems clear that at the end they would have
sanctioned some form of missionary work for Borrow in the Chinese
Empire; but on 1st June 1835 he wrote to say that the Russian
Government, solicitous of maintaining good relations with China, would
not grant him a passport across Siberia except on the condition that he
carried not one single Manchu Bible thither.[110] And so Borrow’s dreams
were left unfulfilled. He was never to see China or the farther East,
although, because he was a dreamer and like his hero, Defoe, a bit of a
liar, he often said he had. In September 1835 he was back in England
awaiting in his mother’s home in Norwich further commissions from his
friends of the Bible Society.

Work on the Manchu New Testament did not entirely absorb Borrow’s
activities in St. Petersburg. He seems to have made a proposition to
another organisation, as the following letter indicates. The proposal
does not appear to have borne any fruit:

Prayer Book and Homily Society,
No. 4 Exeter Hall, London, January 16th, 1835.

C. R. Pritchett.

[Pg 177]

During Borrow’s last month or two in St. Petersburg he printed two thin
octavo volumes of translations—some of them verses which, undeterred by
the disheartening reception of earlier efforts, he had continued to make
from each language in succession that he had the happiness to acquire,
although most of the poems are from his old portfolios. These little
books were named Targum and The Talisman. Dr. Knapp calls the latter
an appendix to the former. They are absolutely separate volumes of
verse, and I reproduce their title-pages from the only copies that
Borrow seems to have reserved for himself out of the hundred printed of
each. The publishers, it will be seen, are the German firm that printed
the Manchu New Testament, Schultz and Beneze. Borrow’s preface to
Targum is dated ‘St. Petersburg, June 1, 1835.’ Here in Targum we
find the trial poem which in competition with a rival candidate had won
him the privilege of going to Russia for the Bible Society—The
Mountain Chase. Here also among new verses are some from the Arabic,
the Persian, and the Turkish. If it be true, as his friend Hasfeld said,
that here was a poet who was able to render another without robbing the
garland of a single leaf—that would but prove that the poetry which
Borrow rendered was not of the first order. Nor, taking another
standard—the capacity to render the ballad with a force that captures
‘the common people,’—can we agree with William Bodham Donne, who was
delighted with Targum and said that ‘the language and rhythm are
vastly superior to Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome.’ In The Talisman
we have four little poems from the Russian of Pushkin followed by
another poem, The Mermaid, by the same author. Three other poems in
Russian and Polish complete the booklet. Borrow[Pg 178] left behind him in St.
Petersburg with his friend, Hasfeld, a presentation copy for Pushkin,
who, when he received it, expressed regret that he had not met his
translator while Borrow was in St. Petersburg.

Title Page from “Targum”

Title Page from “The Talisman”