To George Borrow, Esq.

Booton Rectory, Norwich, Nov. 5, 1853.

My dear Mr. Borrow,—You bore your mishap with a philosophic patience, and started with an energy which gives the best earnest that you would arrive safe and sound at Norwich.

I was happy to find yesterday morning, by the arrival of your kind present, a sure notification that you were well home.

Many thanks for the tea, which we drink with great zest and diligence. My legs are not as long as yours, nor my breath either. You soon made me feel that I must either turn back or be left behind, so I chose the former. Mrs. Elwin and my children desire their kind regards. They one and all enjoyed your visit. Believe me, very truly yours,

W. Elwin.

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.

CHAPTER XXV
A Visit to Cornish Kinsmen

If Borrow had been a normal man of letters he would have been quite satisfied to settle down at Oulton, in a comfortable home, with a devoted wife. The question of money was no longer to worry him. He had moreover a money-making gift, which made him independent in a measure of his wife’s fortune. From The Bible in Spain he must have drawn a very considerable amount, considerable, that is, for a man whose habits were always somewhat penurious. The Bible in Spain would have been followed up, were Borrow a quite other kind of man, by a succession of books almost equally remunerative. Even for one so prone to hate both books and bookmen there was always the wind on the heath, the gypsy encampment, the now famous “broad,” not then the haunt of innumerable trippers. But Borrow ever loved wandering more than writing. Almost immediately after his marriage—in 1840—he hinted to the Bible Society of a journey to China; a year later, in June, 1841, he suggested to Lord Clarendon that Lord Palmerston might give him a consulship: he consulted Hasfeld as to a possible livelihood in Berlin, and Ford as to travel in Africa. He seems to have endured residence at Oulton with difficulty during the succeeding three years, and in 1844 we find him engaged upon the continental travel that we have already recorded. In 1847 he had hopes of the consulship at Canton, but Bowring wanted it for himself, and a misunderstanding over this led to an inevitable break of old friendship. Borrow’s passionate love of travel was never more to be gratified at the expense of others. He tried, indeed, to secure a journey to the East from the British Museum Trustees, and then gave up the struggle. Further wanderings, which were many, were to be confined to Europe and indeed to England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. His first journey, however, was not at his own initiative. Mrs. Borrow’s health was unequal to the severe winters at Oulton, and so the Borrows made their home at Yarmouth from 1853 to 1860. During these years he gave his vagabond propensities full play. No year passed without its record of wandering. His first expedition was the outcome of a burst of notoriety that seems to have done for Borrow what the success of his Bible in Spain could not do—reveal his identity to his Cornish relations. The Bury Post of 17th September, 1853, recorded that Borrow had at the risk of his life saved at least one member of a boat’s crew wrecked on the coast at Yarmouth:

The moment was an awful one, when George Borrow, the well-known author of Lavengro and The Bible in Spain, dashed into the surf and saved one life, and through his instrumentality the others were saved. We ourselves have known this brave and gifted man for years, and, daring as was his deed, we have known him more than once to risk his life for others. We are happy to add that he has sustained no material injury.

This paragraph in the Bury St. Edmunds newspaper was copied into the Plymouth Mail, and was there read by the Borrows of Cornwall, who had heard nothing of their relative, Thomas Borrow the army captain, and his family for fifty years or more. One of Borrow’s cousins by marriage, Robert Taylor of Penquite, invited him to his father’s homeland, and Borrow accepted, glad, we may be sure, of any excuse for a renewal of his wanderings. And so on the 23rd of December, 1853, Borrow made his way from Yarmouth to Plymouth by rail, and thence walked twenty miles to Liskeard, where quite a little party of Borrow’s cousins were present to greet him. The Borrow family consisted of Henry Borrow of Looe Down, the father of Mrs. Taylor, William Borrow of Trethinnick, Thomas Nicholas and Elizabeth Borrow, all first cousins, except Anne Taylor. Anne, talking to a friend, describes Borrow on this visit better than any one else has done:

A fine tall man of about six feet three; well-proportioned and not stout; able to walk five miles an hour successively; rather florid face without any hirsute appendages; hair white and soft; eyes and eyebrows dark; good nose and very nice mouth; well-shaped hands;—altogether a person you would notice in a crowd.

Borrow stayed at Penquite with his cousins from 24th December to 9th January, then he went on a walking tour to Land’s End, through Truro and Penzance; he was back at Penquite from 26th January to 1st February, and then took a week’s tramp to Tintagel, King Arthur’s Castle, and Pentire. Naturally he made inquiries into the language, already extinct, but spoken within the memory of the older inhabitants. “My relations are most excellent people,” he wrote to his wife from London on his way back, “but I could not understand more than half of what they said.”