The Life of George Borrow

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.

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...

JOHN THOMAS BORROW was born two years before his younger brother, that is, on the 15th of April, 1801. His father, then Serjeant Borrow, was wandering from town to town, and it...

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 s...

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 indu...

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 fo...

DOUBTS were very frequently expressed in Borrow’s lifetime as to his having really been articled to a solicitor, but that point has been set at rest by reference to the Record O...

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 intr...

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 interv...

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 appearanc...

GEORGE BORROW had no sympathy with Thurtell the gambler. I find no evidence in his career of any taste for games of hazard or indeed for games of any kind, although we recall th...

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 _Handbo...

“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 su...

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. T...

BORROW travelled by way of Hamburg and Lübeck to Travemünde, whence he went by sea to St. Petersburg, now called Petrograd, where he arrived on the twentieth of August, 1833. He...

AS for the absurd object for which Borrow was sent to Russia the less said the better. Any of my readers who care for the survey of human folly associated with undiscriminating...

FROM his journey to Russia Borrow had acquired valuable experience, but nothing in the way of fame, although his mother had been able to record in a letter to St. Petersburg tha...

THERE are many interesting personalities that pass before us in Borrow’s three separate narratives, as they may be considered, of his Spanish experiences. We would fain know mor...

AMONG the many Borrow manuscripts in my possession I find a page of unusual pathos. It is the inscription that Borrow wrote for his wife’s tomb, and it is in the tremulous handw...

BEHOLD George Borrow, then, in a comfortable home on the banks of Oulton Broad—a family man. His mother—sensible woman—declines her son’s invitation to live with the newly-marri...

IN an admirable appreciation of our author, the one in which he gives the oft-quoted eulogy concerning him as “the delightful, the bewitching, the never-sufficiently-to-be-prais...

THE most distinguished of Borrow’s friends in the years that succeeded his return from Spain was Richard Ford, whose interests were so largely wrapped up in the story of that co...

IN 1844 Borrow set out for the most distant holiday that he was ever to undertake. Passing through London in March, 1844, he came under the critical eye of Elizabeth Rigby, afte...

_The Bible in Spain_ bears on its title-page the date 1843. In the intervening eight or nine years he had travelled much—suffered much. During all these years he had been thinki...

IF Borrow had been a normal man of letters he would have been quite satisfied to settle down at Oulton, in a comfortable home, with a devoted wife. The question of money was no...

THE holiday which Borrow gave himself the year following his visit to Wales, that is to say, in September, 1855, is recorded in his unpublished diaries. He never wrote a book as...

GEORGE BORROW wandered far and wide, but he always retraced his footsteps to East Anglia, of which he was so justly proud. From his marriage in 1840 until his death in 1881 he l...

BORROW has himself given us—in _Lavengro_—a picturesque record of his early experiences in Scotland. It is passing strange that he published no account of his two visits to the...

GEORGE BORROW’S three most important books had all a very interesting history. We have seen the processes by which _The Bible in Spain_ was built up from note-books and letters....

EDWARD FITZGERALD once declared that he was about the only friend with whom Borrow had never quarrelled. There was probably no reason for this exceptional amity other than the “...

THE year 1854 was an adventurous one in Borrow’s life, for he, so essentially a Celt, had in that year two interesting experiences of the “Celtic Fringe.” He spent the first mon...

GEORGE BORROW’S earlier visits to London are duly recorded, with that glamour of which he was a master, in the pages of _Lavengro_. Who can cross London Bridge even to-day witho...

WE should know little enough of George Borrow’s later years were it not for his friendship with Thomas Gordon Hake and Theodore Watts-Dunton. Hake was born in 1809 and died in 1...

BORROW never had a child, but happy for him was the part played by his stepdaughter Henrietta in his life. She was twenty-three years old when her mother married him, and it is...

IT is a curious fact that of only two men of distinction in English letters in these later years can it be said that they lived to a good old age and yet failed of recognition f...