FOOTNOTES:
[34] See The Gurneys of Earlham by Augustus J. C. Hare, 2 vols., 1895; Memoirs of Joseph Gurney; with Selections from his Journal and Correspondence, edited by Joseph Bevan Braithwaite, 2 vols., 1834.
CHAPTER VI
GEORGE BORROW'S NORWICH—THE TAYLORS
With the famous 'Taylors of Norwich' Borrow seems to have had no acquaintance, although he went to school with a connection of that family, James Martineau. These socially important Taylors were in no way related to William Taylor of that city, who knew German literature, and scandalised the more virtuous citizens by that, and perhaps more by his fondness for wine and also for good English beer—a drink over which his friend Borrow was to become lyrical. When people speak of the Norwich Taylors they refer to the family of Dr. John Taylor, who in 1783 was elected to the charge of the Presbyterian congregation in Norwich. His eldest son, Richard, married Margaret, the daughter of a mayor of Norwich of the name of Meadows; and Sarah, another daughter of that same worshipful mayor, married David Martineau, grandson of Gaston Martineau, who fled from France at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.[35] Harriet and James Martineau were grandchildren of this David. The second son of Richard and Margaret Taylor was John, who married Susannah Cook. Susannah is the clever Mrs. John Taylor of this story, and her daughter of even greater ability was Sarah Austin, the wife of the famous jurist. Their daughter married Sir Alexander Duff-Gordon. She was the author of Letters from Egypt, a book to which George Meredith wrote an 'Introduction,' so much did he love the writer. Lady Duff-Gordon's daughter, Janet Ross, wrote the biography of her mother, her grandmother, and Mrs. John Taylor, in Three Generations of Englishwomen. A niece, Lena Duff-Gordon (Mrs. Waterfield), has written pleasant books of travel, and so, for five generations, this family has produced clever women-folk. But here we are only concerned with Mrs. John Taylor, called by her friends the 'Madame Roland of Norwich.' Lucy Aikin describes how she 'darned her boy's grey worsted stockings while holding her own with Southey, Brougham, or Mackintosh.' One of her daughters married Henry Reeve, and, as I have said, another married John Austin. Borrow was twenty years of age and living in Norwich when Mrs. Taylor died. It is to be regretted that in the early impressionable years his position as a lawyer's clerk did not allow of his coming into a circle in which he might have gained certain qualities of savoir faire and joie de vivre, which he was all his days to lack. Of the Taylor family the Duke of Sussex said that they reversed the ordinary saying that it takes nine tailors to make a man. The witticism has been attributed to Sydney Smith, but Mrs. Ross gives evidence that it was the Duke's—the youngest son of George III. In his Life of Sir James Mackintosh Basil Montagu, referring to Mrs. John Taylor, says:
Norwich was always a haven of rest to us, from the literary society with which that city abounded. Dr. Sayers we used to visit, and the high-minded and intelligent William Taylor; but our chief delight was in the society of Mrs. John Taylor, a most intelligent and excellent woman, mild and unassuming, quiet and meek, sitting amidst her large family, occupied with her needle and domestic occupations, but always assisting, by her great knowledge, the advancement of kind and dignified sentiment and conduct.
We note here the reference to 'the high-minded and intelligent William Taylor,' because William Taylor, whose influence upon Borrow's destiny was so pronounced, has been revealed to many by the slanders of Harriet Martineau, that extraordinary compound of meanness and generosity, of poverty-stricken intelligence and rich endowment. In her Autobiography, published in 1877, thirty-four years after Robberds's Memoir of William Taylor, she dwells upon the drinking propensities of William Taylor, who was a schoolfellow of her father's. She admits, indeed, that Taylor was an ideal son, whose 'exemplary filial duty was a fine spectacle to the whole city,' and she continues:
His virtues as a son were before our eyes when we witnessed his endurance of his father's brutality of temper and manners, and his watchfulness in ministering to the old man's comfort in his infirmities. When we saw, on a Sunday morning, William Taylor guiding his blind mother to chapel ... we could forgive anything that had shocked or disgusted us at the dinner-table.