Isopel Berners / The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825

Transcribed from the 1901 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
by GEORGE BORROW
The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825: An Episode in the Autobiography of George Borrow .
the text edited with introduction & notes by THOMAS SECCOMBE author of “the age of johnson” assistant editor of the dictionary of national biography
london: hodder and stoughton 27 paternoster row 1901
Printed by Hazell , Watson & Viney , Ld. , London and Aylesbury .
In 1816, after ramblings far and wide both in Ireland and in Scotland, the Borrows settled in Norwich, where George was schooled under a master whose name at
least is still familiar to English youth, Dr. Valpy (brother of Dr. Richard Valpy). Among his schoolfellows at the grammar school were Rajah Brooke and Dr. James Martineau. George Borrow, a hardened truant from his earliest teens, was once horsed, to undergo a flogging, on the back of James Martineau, and he never afterwards took kindly to the philosophy of that remarkable man. We are glad to know that Edward Valpy’s ferule was weak, though his scholarship was strong. Stories were current that even in those days George used to haunt the gipsy tents on that Mousehold Heath which lives eternally in the breezy canvases of “Old Crome,” and that he went so far as to stain his face with walnut-juice to the right Egyptian hue. “Are you suffering from jaundice, Borrow,” asked the Doctor, “or is it merely dirt?” While at Norwich, too, he was greatly influenced in the direction of linguistics by the English “pocket Goethe,” William Taylor, the head of a clan known as the Taylors of Norwich, to distinguish them from a race in which the principle of heredity was even more strikingly developed—the Taylors of Ongar. In February 1824 his father, the gallant Captain Thomas Borrow, died, and his articles in the firm of a Norwich solicitor having determined, George went to London to commence literary man, in the old sense of the servitude, under the well-known bookseller-publisher, Sir Richard Phillipps. In Grub Street he translated and compiled galore, but when the trees began to shoot in 1825 he broke his chain and escaped to the country, to the dingle, and to Isopel Berners.