George Borrow, the Man and His Work

STRONG was the appeal made to a very wide public by “The Bible in Spain.” What was the nature of the appeal? It was unique; but it was not inherently surprising. “I woke one mor...

THERE is but one authentic portrait of Borrow, it is the painting in the possession of Mr. John Murray, by whose kind permission it has been reproduced for this work. An engravi...

Any writer who is not a deep gypsiologist must approach such a question with diffidence. The consensus of opinion is all that can be suggested. It is that Borrow was unscientifi...

THE Borrows of Tredinnick, in the parish of St. Cleer, were proud Cornish yeomen. For centuries they had occupied the same house and farmed the same land. Now they have been sca...

BORROW’S only journey to the land of mystery and legend from which his family sprang was made in 1853. It came about curiously. An incident occurred, soon after he had taken up...

WHEN Borrow went to Oulton he was thirty-seven. The comforts of the domesticity to which he settled down were sweet, but its joys were of a very different quality from those gol...

BORROW’S “literary” life in London—where he lodged at 16, Millman Street, Bedford Row, with his friend Kerrison—was a period of the deadliest and most miserable drudgery. No aut...

“THE Pollards,” praised as a “very fine family” in Borrow’s notebooks, lived at Woolston, in the neighbouring parish of St. Ive. He told them they reminded him of Spaniards. “Th...

“ROMANCE brought up” the year 1832. It was a year full of events with an important bearing on the course of Borrow’s life. In the first place, he became acquainted with the Skep...

“WHAT is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?” . . . “There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wi...

He and Mr. Taylor undertook a long moorland tramp by tor and bog that day to Kilmar, a jagged and precipitous hill behind the Cheesewring, where is the huge rock structure popul...

AT this period Borrow suffered frequently from attacks of melancholia; little vexations upset him terribly. He was more than once assaulted by roughs while on his way home to Ou...

WE now have Borrow a youth of twenty-two. His life has been full of weird adventure, but to all appearances quite unprofitable in any worldly sense. His future is nebulous. Drea...

IN these years of the fulness of his manhood, the wandering spirit possessed and compelled Borrow. It dragged him all over the United Kingdom in search of such adventure and dis...

ON the return to Yarmouth, the trials of a crotchety temper were resumed. Murray’s reception of “The Romany Rye” so inflamed Borrow’s anger that in April, 1856, he recalled the...

WHEN “The Romano Lavo-Lil” came out at the beginning of 1874, the public were already in possession of Leland’s great book, which finally “queered the pitch” for Borrow. The two...

DURING the visit to Belfast Mrs. Borrow had been unwell, and her ill-health was her husband’s principal cause of anxiety for the following three years. In 1867 they visited Bogn...