The Life of George Borrow

by Clement King Shorter

All this does not ring quite true, and in any case it is too much on the lines of “Sunday reading” to please the small boy, who must, however, have found a thousand things in that volume that were to his taste—some of the wildest adventures, hairbreadth escapes, extraordinary meetings again and again with unique people—with Benedict Mol, for example, who was always seeking for treasure. Gypsies, bull-fighters, quaint and queer characters of every kind, come before us in rapid succession. Rarely, surely, have so many adventures been crowded into the same number of pages. Only when Borrow remembers, as he has to do occasionally, that he is an agent of the Bible Society does the book lose its vigour and its charm. We have already pointed out that the foundations of the volume were contained in certain letters written by Borrow during his five years in Spain to the secretaries of the Bible Society in London. The recent publication of these letters has revealed to us Borrow’s methods. When he had settled down at Oulton he took down his notebooks, one of which is before me, but finding this was not sufficient, he asked the Bible Society for the loan of his letters to them. Other letters that he hoped to use were not forthcoming, as the following note from Miss Gurney to Mrs. Borrow indicates:

To Mrs. George Borrow

Earlham, 12th June, 1840.

Dear Mrs. Borrow,—I am sorry I cannot find any of Mr. Borrow’s letters from Spain. I don’t think we ever had any, but my brother is from home and I therefore cannot inquire of him.

I send you the only two I can find. I am very glad he is going to publish his travels, which I have no doubt will be very interesting. It must be a pleasant object to assist him by copying the manuscripts. If I should visit Lowestoft this summer I shall hope to see you, but I have no immediate prospect of doing so. With kind regards to all your party, I am, Dear Mrs. Borrow, Yours sincerely,

C. Gurney. [155]

The Bible Society, applied to in the same manner, lent Borrow all his letters to that organisation and its secretaries.

Not all were returned. Many came to Dr. Knapp when he purchased the half of the Borrow papers that were sold after Borrow’s death; the remainder are in my possession.

It is a nice point, seventy years after they were written, as to whom they belong. In any case the Bible Society must have kept copies of everything, for when, in 1911, they came to publish the Letters the collection was sufficiently complete. That publication revealed some interesting sidelights. It proved on the one hand that Borrow had drawn more upon his diaries than upon his letters, although he frequently reproduced fragments of his diaries in his letters. It revealed further the extraordinary frankness with which Borrow wrote to his employers. It is true that it further reveals the manner in which he throws a sop of godliness to the worthy secretaries. But the main point is in the discovery revealed to us that Borrow was not an artist in his letters. Borrow was never a good letter writer, although I think that many of the letters that appear for the first time in these pages will prove that his letters are very interesting as contributions to biography. If some of the letters that helped to make up The Bible in Spain are interesting, it is because in them Borrow incorporated considerable fragments of anecdote and adventure from his note-books. It is quite a mistake to assume, as does Dr. Knapp, that the “Rev. and Dear Sir” at the head of a letter was the only variation. You will look in vain in the Bible Society correspondence for many a pearl that is contained in The Bible in Spain, and happily you will look in vain in The Bible in Spain for many an unctuous sentence which concludes some of the original letters. In one case, indeed, a letter concludes with Heber’s hymn—

“From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,”

with which Borrow’s correspondent must already have been sufficiently familiar. But Borrow could not be other than Borrow, and the secretaries of the Bible Society had plentiful matter with which to astonish them. The finished production, however, is a fascinating book. You read it again and it becomes still more entertaining. No wonder that it took the world by storm and made its author the lion of a season. “A queer book will be this same Bible in Spain,” wrote Borrow to John Murray in August, 1841, “containing all my queer adventures in that queer country . . . it will make two nice foolscap octavo volumes.” It actually made three volumes, and Borrow was as irritated at Mr. Murray’s delay in publishing as that publisher afterwards became at Borrow’s own delay over Lavengro. The whole book was laboriously copied out by Mrs. Borrow. When this copy was sent to Mr. Murray, it was submitted to his “reader,” who reported “numerous faults in spelling and some in grammar,” to which criticism Borrow retorted that the copy was the work of “a country amanuensis.” The book was published in December, 1842, but has the date 1843 on its title-page. In its three-volumed form 4750 copies of the book were issued by July, 1843, after which countless copies were sold in cheaper one-volumed form. Success had at last come to Borrow. He was one of the most talked-of writers of the day. His elation may be demonstrated by his discussion with Dawson Turner as to whether he should leave the manuscript of The Bible in Spain to the Dean and Chapter’s Library at Norwich or to the British Museum, by his gratification at the fact that Sir Robert Peel referred to his book in the House of Commons, and by his pleasure in the many appreciative reviews which, indeed, were for the most part all that an ambitious author could desire. “Never,” said The Examiner, “was book more legibly impressed with the unmistakable mark of genius.” “There is no taking leave of a book like this,” said the Athenæum. “Better Christmas fare we have never had it in our power to offer our readers.”

The publication of The Bible in Spain made Borrow famous for a time. Hitherto he had been known only to a small religious community, the coterie that ran the Bible Society. Even the large mass of people who subscribed to that Society knew its agent in Spain only by meagre allusions in the Annual Reports. Now the world was to talk about him, and he enjoyed being talked about. Borrow declared—in 1842—that the five years he passed in Spain were the most happy years of his existence. But then he had not had a happy life during the previous years, as we have seen, and in Russia he had a toilsome task with an added element of uncertainty as to the permanence of his position. The five years in Spain had plentiful adventure, and they closed in a pleasant manner. Yet the year that followed, even though it found him almost a country squire, was not a happy one. Once again the world did not want him and his books—not the Gypsies of Spain for example. Seven weeks after publication it had sold only to the extent of some three hundred copies. But the happiest year of Borrow’s life was undoubtedly the one that followed the publication of The Bible in Spain. Up to that time he had been a mere adventurer; now he was that most joyous of beings—a successful author; and here, from among his Papers, is a carefully preserved relic of his social triumph:

To George Borrow, Esq., at Mr. Murray’s,
Bookseller, Albemarle Street

4 Carlton Terrace, Tuesday, 30th May.