I have said that I possess large portions of Lavengro in manuscript. Borrow's always helpful wife, however, copied out the whole manuscript for the publishers, and this 'clean copy' came to Dr. Knapp, who found even here a few pages of very valuable writing deleted, and these he has very rightly restored in Mr. Murray's edition of Lavengro. Why Borrow took so much pains to explain that his wife had copied Lavengro, as the following document implies, I cannot think. I find in his handwriting this scrap of paper signed by Mary Borrow, and witnessed by her daughter:
Janry. 30, 1869.
This is to certify that I transcribed The Bible in Spain, Lavengro, and some other works of my husband George Borrow, from the original manuscripts. A considerable portion of the transcript of Lavengro was lost at the printing-office where the work was printed.
Mary Borrow.
Witness: Henrietta M., daughter of Mary Borrow.
It only remains here to state the melancholy fact once again that Lavengro, great work of literature as it is now universally acknowledged to be, was not 'the book of the year.' The three thousand copies of the first issue took more than twenty years to sell, and it was not until 1872 that Mr. Murray resolved to issue a cheaper edition. The time was not ripe for the cult of the open road; the zest for 'the wind on the heath' that our age shares so keenly.
FOOTNOTES:
[169] Knapp's Life, vol. ii p. 9.
[170] Ibid. p. 11.
[171] Knapp's Life, vol. ii. p. 19.
[172] Ford was right, however, if authors wrote only for posterity, although 1851 was not a very important year among the great Victorian writers. It produced Carlyle's John Sterling, Ruskin's Stones of Venice, and Kingsley's Yeast.