George Borrow and His Circle / Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters of Borrow and His Friends

by Clement King Shorter

HENRIETTA CLARKE

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 clear to me that she was from the beginning of their friendship and even to the end of his life devoted to her stepfather. Readers of Wild Wales will recall not only the tribute that Borrow pays to her, which we have already quoted, in which he refers to her 'good qualities and many accomplishments,' but the other pleasant references in that book. 'Henrietta,' he says in one passage, 'played on the guitar[252] and sang a Spanish song, to the great delight of John Jones.' When climbing Snowdon he is keen in his praises of the endurance of 'the gallant girl.' As against all this, there is an undercurrent of depreciation of his stepdaughter among Borrow's biographers. The picture of Borrow's home in later life at Oulton is presented by them with sordid details. The Oulton tradition which still survives among the few inhabitants who lived near the Broad at Borrow's death in 1881, and still reside there, is of an ill-kept home, supremely untidy, and it is as a final indictment of his daughter's callousness that we have the following gruesome picture by Dr. Knapp:

On the 26th of July 1881 Mr. Borrow was found dead in his house at Oulton. The circumstances were these. His stepdaughter and her husband drove to Lowestoft in the morning on some business of their own, leaving Mr. Borrow without a living soul in the house with him. He had earnestly requested them not to go away because he felt that he was in a dying state; but the response intimated that he had often expressed the same feeling before, and his fears had proved groundless. During the interval of these few hours of abandonment nothing can palliate or excuse, George Borrow died as he had lived—alone! His age was seventy-eight years and twenty-one days.

Dr. Knapp no doubt believed all this;[253] it is endorsed by the village gossip of the past thirty years, and the mythical tragedy is even heightened by a further story of a farm tumbril which carried poor Borrow's body to the railway station when it was being conveyed to London to be buried beside his wife in Brompton Cemetery.

The tumbril story—whether correct or otherwise—is a matter of indifference to me. The legend of the neglect of Borrow in his last moments is however of importance, and the charge can easily be disproved.[254] I have before me Mrs. MacOubrey's diary for 1881.

I have many such diaries for a long period of years, but this for 1881 is of particular moment. Here, under the date July 26th, we find the brief note, George Borrow died at three o'clock this morning. It is scarcely possible that Borrow's stepdaughter and her husband could have left him alone at three o'clock in the morning in order to drive into Lowestoft, less than two miles distant. At this time, be it remembered, Dr. MacOubrey was eighty-one years of age. Now, as to the general untidiness of Borrow's home at the time of his death—the point is a distasteful one, but it had better be faced. Henrietta was twenty-three years of age when her mother married Borrow. She was sixty-four at the time of his death, and her husband, as I have said, was eighty-one years of age at that time, being three years older than Borrow. Here we have three very elderly people keeping house together and little accustomed overmuch to the assistance of domestic servants. The situation at once becomes clear. Mrs. Borrow had a genius for housekeeping and for management. She watched over her husband, kept his accounts, held the family purse,[255] managed all his affairs. She 'managed' her daughter also, delighting in that daughter's accomplishments of drawing and botany, to which may be added a zeal for the writing of stories which does not seem, judging from the many manuscripts in her handwriting that I have burnt, to have received much editorial encouragement. In short, Henrietta was not domesticated. But just as I have proved in preceding chapters that Borrow was happy in his married life, so I would urge that as far as a somewhat disappointed career would permit to the sadly bereaved author he was happy in his family circle to the end. It was at his initiative that, when he had returned to Oulton after the death of his wife, his daughter and her husband came to live with him. He declared that to live alone was no longer tolerable, and they gave up their own home in London to join him at Oulton.

A new glimpse of Borrow on his domestic side has been offered to the public even as this book is passing through the press. Mr. S. H. Baldrey, a Norwich solicitor, has given his reminiscences of the author of Lavengro to the leading newspaper of that city.[256] Mr. Baldrey is the stepson of the late John Pilgrim of the firm of Jay and Pilgrim, who were Borrow's solicitors at Norwich in the later years of his life. One at least of Mr. Baldrey's many reminiscences has in it an element of romance; that in which he recalls Mrs. Borrow and her daughter:

Mrs. Borrow always struck me as a dear old creature. When Borrow married her she was a widow with one daughter, Henrietta Clarke. The old lady used to dress in black silk. She had little silver-grey corkscrew curls down the side of her face; and she wore a lace cap with a mauve ribbon on top, quite in the Early Victorian style. I remember that on one occasion when she and Miss Clarke had come to Brunswick House they were talking with my mother in the temporary absence of George Borrow, who, so far as I can recall, had gone into another room to discuss business with John Pilgrim.

'Ah!' she said, 'George is a good man, but he is a strange creature. Do you know he will say to me after breakfast, "Mary, I am going for a walk," and then I do not see anything more of him for three months. And all the time he will be walking miles and miles. Once he went right into Scotland, and never once slept in a house. He took not even a handbag with him or a clean shirt, but lived just like any old tramp.'

Mr. Baldrey is clearly in error here, or shall we say that Mrs. Borrow humorously exaggerated? We have seen that Borrow's annual holiday was a matter of careful arrangement, and his knapsack or satchel is frequently referred to in his descriptions of his various tours. But the matter is of little importance, and Mr. Baldrey's pictures of Borrow are excellent, including that of his personal appearance:

As I recall him, he was a fine, powerfully built man of about six feet high. He had a clean-shaven face with a fresh complexion, almost approaching to the florid, and never a wrinkle, even at sixty, except at the corners of his dark and rather prominent eyes. He had a shock of silvery white hair. He always wore a very badly brushed silk hat, a black frock coat and trousers, the coat all buttoned down before; low shoes and white socks, with a couple of inches of white showing between the shoes and the trousers. He was a tireless walker, with extraordinary powers of endurance, and was also very handy with his fists, as in those days a gentleman required to be, more than he does now.

Mr. John Pilgrim lived at Brunswick House, on the Newmarket Road, Norwich, and here Borrow frequently visited him. Mr. Baldrey recalls one particular visit:

A LETTER FROM BORROW TO HIS WIFE WRITTEN FROM ROME IN HIS CONTINENTAL JOURNEY OF 1844

I have a curious recollection of his dining one night at Brunswick House. John Pilgrim, who was a careful, abstemious man, never took more than two glasses of port at dinner. 'John,' said Borrow, 'this is a good port. I prefer Burgundy if you can get it good; but, lord, you cannot get it now.' It so happened that Mr. Pilgrim had some fine old Clos-Vougeot in the cellar. 'I think,' said he, 'I can give you a good drop of Burgundy.' A bottle was sent for, and Borrow finished it, alone and unaided. 'Well,' he remarked, 'I think this is a good Burgundy. But I'm not quite certain. I should like to try a little more.' Another bottle was called up, and the guest finished it to the last drop. I am still,' he said, 'not quite sure about it, but I shall know in the morning.' The next morning Mr. Pilgrim and I were leaving for the office, when Borrow came up the garden path waving his arms like a windmill. 'Oh, John,' he said, 'that was Burgundy! When I woke up this morning it was coursing through my veins like fire.' And yet Borrow was not a man to drink to excess. I cannot imagine him being the worse for liquor. He had wonderful health and digestion. Neither a gourmand nor a gourmet, he could take down anything, and be none the worse for it. I don't think you could have made him drunk if you tried.

And here is a glimpse of Borrow after his wife's death, for which we are grateful to Mr. Baldrey:

After the funeral of Mrs. Borrow he came to Norwich and took me over to Oulton with him. He was silent all the way. When we got to the little white wicket gate before the approach to the house he took off his hat and began to beat his breast like an Oriental. He cried aloud all the way up the path. He calmed himself, however, by the time that Mr. Crabbe had opened the door and asked us in. Crabbe brought in some wine, and we all sat down to table. I sat opposite to Mrs. Crabbe; her husband was on my left hand. Borrow sat at one end of the table, and the chair at the opposite end was left vacant. We were talking in a casual way when Borrow, pointing to the empty chair, said with profound emotion, 'There! It was there that I first saw her.' It was a curious coincidence that though there were four of us we should have left that particular seat unoccupied at a little table of about four feet square.[257]

But this is a lengthy digression from the story of Henrietta Clarke, who married William MacOubrey, an Irishman—and an Orangeman—from Belfast in 1865. The pair lived first in Belfast and afterwards at 80 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. Before his marriage he had practised at 134 Sloane Street, London. MacOubrey, although there has been some doubt cast upon the statement, was a Doctor of Medicine of Trinity College, Dublin, and a Barrister-at-Law. Within his limitations he was an accomplished man, and before me lie not only documentary evidence of his M.D. and his legal status, but several printed pamphlets that bear his name.[258] What is of more importance, the letters from and to his wife that have through my hands and have been consigned to the flames prove that husband and wife lived on most affectionate terms.

It is natural that Borrow's correspondence with his stepdaughter should have been of a somewhat private character, and I therefore publish only a selection from his letters to her, believing however that they modify an existing tradition very considerably: