[142] The following suggestion has, however, been made to me by a friend of Henrietta MacOubrey née Clarke:
'I think Borrow intended "Carreta" for "dearest," It is impossible to think that he would call his wife a "cart." Perhaps he intended "Carreta" for "Querida." Probably their pronunciation was not Castillian, and they spelled the word as they pronounced it. In speaking of her to "Hen." Borrow always called her "Mamma." Mrs. MacOubrey took a great fancy to me because she said I was like "Mamma." She meant in character, not in person.'
[143] Dr. Knapp: Life, vol. ii p. 39.
CHAPTER XXI
'THE CHILDREN OF THE OPEN AIR'
Behold George Borrow, then, in a comfortable home on the banks of Oulton Broad—a family man. His mother—sensible woman—declines her son's invitation to live with the newly-married pair. She remains in the cottage at Norwich where her husband died. The Borrows were married in April 1840, by May they had settled at Oulton. It was a pleasantly secluded estate, and Borrow's wife had £450 a year. He had, a month before his marriage, written to Mr. Brandram to say that he had a work nearly ready for publication, and 'two others in a state of forwardness.' The title of the first of these books he enclosed in his letter. It was The Zincali: Or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain. Mr. Samuel Smiles, in his history of the House of Murray—A Publisher and his Friends—thus relates the circumstances of its publication:—
In November 1840 a tall, athletic gentleman in black called upon Mr. Murray offering a MS. for perusal and publication.... Mr. Murray could not fail to be taken at first sight with this extraordinary man. He had a splendid physique, standing six feet two in his stockings, and he had brains as well as muscles, as his works sufficiently show. The book now submitted was of a very uncommon character, and neither the author nor the publisher were very sanguine about its success. Mr. Murray agreed, after perusal, to print and publish 750 copies of The Gypsies of Spain, and divide the profits with the author.
It was at the suggestion of Richard Ford, then the greatest living English authority on Spain, that Mr. Murray published the book. It did not really commence to sell until The Bible in Spain came a year or so later to bring the author reputation.[144] From November 1840 to June 1841 only three hundred copies had been sold in spite of friendly reviews in some half dozen journals, including The Athenæum and The Literary Gazette. The first edition, it may be mentioned, contained on its title-page a description of the author as 'late agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society in Spain.'[145] There is very marked compression in the edition now in circulation, and a perusal of the first edition reveals many interesting features that deserve to be restored for the benefit of the curious. But nothing can make The Zincali a great piece of literature. It was summarised by the Edinburgh Review at the time as 'a hotch-potch of the jockey, tramper, philologist, and missionary.' That description, which was not intended to be as flattering as it sounds to-day, appears more to apply to The Bible in Spain. But The Zincali is too confused, too ill-arranged a book to rank with Borrow's four great works. There are passages in it, indeed, so eloquent, so romantic, that no lover of Borrow's writings can afford to neglect them. But this was not the book that gypsy-loving Borrow, with the temperament of a Romany, should have written, or could have written had he not been obsessed by the 'science' of his subject. His real work in gypsydom was to appear later in Lavengro and The Romany Rye. For Borrow was not a man of science—a philologist, a folk-lorist of the first order.