George Borrow and His Circle / Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters of Borrow and His Friends

by Clement King Shorter

IN SCOTLAND AND IRELAND

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 North in maturer years. Why did he not write Wild Scotland as a companion volume to Wild Wales? He preserved in little leather pocket-books or leather-covered exercise-books copious notes of both tours. Two of his notebooks came into the possession of the late Dr. Knapp, Borrow's first biographer, and are thus described in his Bibliography:

Note Book of a Tour in Scotland, the Orkneys and Shetland in Oct. and Dec. 1858. 1 large vol. leather.

Note Book of Tours around Belfast and the Scottish Borders from Stranraer to Berwick-upon-Tweed in July and August 1866. 1 vol. leather.

Of these Dr. Knapp made use only to give the routes of Borrow's journeys so far as he was able to interpret them. It may be that he was doubtful as to whether his purchase of the manuscript carried with it the copyright of its contents, as it assuredly did not; it may be that he quailed before the minute and almost undecipherable handwriting. But similar notebooks are in my possession, and there are, happily, in these days typists—you pay them by the hour, and it means an infinity of time and patience—who will copy the most minute and the most obscure documents. There are some of the notebooks of the Scottish tour of 1858 before me, and what is of far more importance—Borrow's letters to his wife while on this tour. Borrow lost his mother in August 1858, and this event was naturally a great blow to his heart. A week or two later he suffered a cruel blow to his pride also, nothing less than the return of the manuscript of his much-prized translation from the Welsh of The Sleeping Bard—and this by his 'prince of publishers,' John Murray. 'There is no money in it,' said the publisher, and he was doubtless right.[193] The two disasters were of different character, but both unhinged him. He had already written Wild Wales, although it was not to be published for another four years. He had caused to be advertised—in 1857—a book on Cornwall, but it was never written in any definitive form, and now our author had lost heart, and the Cornish book—Penquite and Pentyre—and the Scots book never saw the light. In these autumn months of 1858 geniality and humour had parted from Borrow; this his diary makes clear. He was ill. His wife urged a tour in Scotland, and he prepared himself for a rough, simple journey, of a kind quite different from the one in Wales. The north of Scotland in the winter was scarcely to be thought of for his wife and stepdaughter Henrietta. He tells us in one of these diaries that he walked 'several hundred miles in the Highlands.' His wife and daughter were with him in Wales, as every reader of Wild Wales will recall, but the Scots tour was meant to be a more formidable pilgrimage, and they went to Great Yarmouth instead. The first half of the tour—that of September—is dealt with in letters to his wife, the latter half is reflected in his diary. The letters show Borrow's experiences in the earlier part of his journey, and from his diaries we learn that he was in Oban on 22nd October, Aberdeen on 5th November, Inverness on the 9th, and thence he went to Tain, Dornoch, Wick, John o'Groat's, and to the island towns, Stromness, Kirkwall, and Lerwick. He was in Shetland on the 1st of December—altogether a bleak, cheerless journey, we may believe, even for so hardy a tramp as Borrow, and the tone of the following extract from one of his rough notebooks in my possession may perhaps be explained by the circumstance. Borrow is on the way to Loch Laggan and visits a desolate churchyard, Coll Harrie, to see the tomb of John Macdonnel or Ian Lom:

I was on a Highland hill in an old Popish burying-ground. I entered the ruined church, disturbed a rabbit crouching under an old tombstone—it ran into a hole, then came out running about like wild—quite frightened—made room for it to run out by the doorway, telling it I would not hurt it—went out again and examined the tombs.... Would have examined much more but the wind and rain blew horribly, and I was afraid that my hat, if not my head, would be blown into the road over the hill. Quitted the place of old Highland Popish devotion—descended the hill again with great difficulty—grass slippery and the ground here and there quaggy, resumed the road—village—went to the door of house looking down the valley—to ask its name—knock—people came out, a whole family, looking sullen and all savage. The stout, tall young man with the grey savage eyes—civil questions—half-savage answers—village's name Achaluarach—the neighbourhood—all Catholic—chiefly Macdonnels; said the English, my countrymen, had taken the whole country—'but not without paying for it,' I replied—said I was soaking wet with a kind of sneer, but never asked me in. I said I cared not for wet. A savage, brutal Papist and a hater of the English—the whole family with bad countenances—a tall woman in the background probably the mother of them all. Bade him good-day, he made no answer and I went away. Learnt that the river's name was Spean.

He passed through Scotland in a disputative vein, which could not have made him a popular traveller. He tells a Roman Catholic of the Macdonnel clan to read his Bible and 'trust in Christ, not in the Virgin Mary and graven images.' He went up to another man who accosted him with the remark that 'It is a soft day,' and said, 'You should not say a "soft" day, but a wet day.' Even the Spanish, for whom he had so much contempt and scorn when he returned from the Peninsula, are 'in many things a wise people'—after his experiences of the Scots. There is abundance of Borrow's prejudice, intolerance, and charm in this fragment of a diary[194]; but the extract I have given is of additional interest as showing how Borrow wrote all his books. The notebooks that he wrote in Spain and Wales were made up of similar disjointed jottings. Here is a note of more human character interspersed with Borrow's diatribes upon the surliness of the Scots. He is at Invergarry, on the Banks of Loch Oich. It is the 5th of October:

Dinner of real haggis; meet a conceited schoolmaster. This night, or rather in the early morning, I saw in the dream of my sleep my dear departed mother—she appeared to be coming out of her little sleeping-room at Oulton Hall—overjoyed I gave a cry and fell down at her knee, but my agitation was so great that it burst the bonds of sleep, and I awoke.

But the letters to Mrs. Borrow are the essential documents here, and not the copious diaries which I hope to publish elsewhere. The first letter to 'Carreta' is from Edinburgh, where Borrow arrived on Sunday, 19th September 1858: