The Life of George Borrow

by Clement King Shorter

Bury St. Edmunds, January 19th, ’49.

My dear Mrs. Borrow,—The sight of your handwriting is always a luxury—but you say nothing about coming to see us. We are pleased to get good accounts of your party, and only wish you could report better of yourself. I must take you fairly in hand when you come again to the ancient quarters, for such they are becoming now from your long absence. You might try bismuth and extract of hop, which is often very strengthening to the stomach. Five grains of extract of hop and five grains of trisnitrate of bismuth made into two pills, which are to be taken at eleven and repeated at four—daily. I am so pleased to learn that Miss Clarke is better, as well as Mr. Borrow. I hope that on some occasion the morphia may be of great comfort to him should his night watchings return. It is good news that the proofs are advancing—I hope towards a speedy end. Messrs. Oakes and Co.’s Bank is as safe as any in the kingdom and more substantial than any in this county. It must be safe, for the partners are men of large property, and of careful habits. I am happy to say we are all well here, but my brother’s house in town is a scene of sad trouble. He is himself laid up with bad scarlet fever as well as five children, all severely attacked. One they have lost of this fearful complaint.

Give our kindest regards to Mr. Borrow and accept them yourselves. Ever, dear Mrs. Borrow, sincerely yours,

T. G. Hake.

I send Beethoven’s epitaph for Miss Clarke’s album according to promise. It is not by Wordsworth.

Bury St. Edmunds, June 24, ’51.

My dear Mrs. Borrow,—I am very sorry to hear that you are not feeling strong, and that these flushes of heat are so frequent and troublesome. I will prescribe a medicine for you which I hope may prove serviceable. Let me hear again about your health, and be assured you cannot possibly give me any trouble.

I am also glad to hear of Mr. Borrow. I envy him his bath. I am looking out anxiously for the new quarterly reviews. I wonder whether the Quarterly will contain anything. Is there a prospect of vol. iv.? I really look to passing a day and two half days with you, and to bringing Mrs. Hake to your classic soil some time in August—if we are not inconveniencing you in your charming and snug cottage. I hope Miss Clarke is well. Our united kind regards to you all. George is quite brisk and saucy—Lucy and the infant have not been well. Mrs. Hake has better accounts from Bath. Believe me, dear Mrs. Borrow, very sincerely yours,

T. G. Hake.

Mr. Donne was pleased that Mr. Borrow liked his notice in Tait. You can take a little cold sherry and water after your dinner.

CHAPTER XXXIV
Henrietta Clarke

Borrow never had a child, but happy for him was the part played by his stepdaughter Henrietta in his life. She was twenty-three years old when her mother married him, and it is clear to me that she was from the beginning of their friendship and even to the end of his life devoted to her stepfather. Readers of Wild Wales will recall not only the tribute that Borrow pays to her, which we have already quoted, in which he refers to her “good qualities and many accomplishments,” but the other pleasant references in that book. “Henrietta,” he says in one passage, “played on the guitar [255] and sang a Spanish song, to the great delight of John Jones.” When climbing Snowdon he is keen in his praises of the endurance of “the gallant girl.” As against all this, there is an undercurrent of depreciation of his stepdaughter among Borrow’s biographers. The picture of Borrow’s home in later life at Oulton is presented by them with sordid details. The Oulton tradition which still survives among the few inhabitants who lived near the Broad at Borrow’s death in 1881, and still reside there, is of an ill-kept home, supremely untidy, and it is as a final indictment of his daughter’s callousness that we have the following gruesome picture by Dr. Knapp:

On the 26th of July 1881 Mr. Borrow was found dead in his house at Oulton. The circumstances were these. His stepdaughter and her husband drove to Lowestoft in the morning on some business of their own, leaving Mr. Borrow without a living soul in the house with him. He had earnestly requested them not to go away because he felt that he was in a dying state; but the response intimated that he had often expressed the same feeling before, and his fears had proved groundless. During the interval of these few hours of abandonment nothing can palliate or excuse, George Borrow died as he had lived—alone! His age was seventy-eight years and twenty-one days.

Dr. Knapp no doubt believed all this; [256] it is endorsed by the village gossip of the past thirty years, and the mythical tragedy is even heightened by a further story of a farm tumbril which carried poor Borrow’s body to the railway station when it was being conveyed to London to be buried beside his wife in Brompton Cemetery.

The tumbril story—whether correct or otherwise—is a matter of indifference to me. The legend of the neglect of Borrow in his last moments is, however, of importance, and the charge can easily be disproved. I have before me Mrs. MacOubrey’s diary for 1881. I have many such diaries for a long period of years, but this for 1881 is of particular moment. Here, under the date July 26th, we find the brief note, George Borrow died at three o’clock this morning. It is scarcely possible that Borrow’s stepdaughter and her husband could have left him alone at three o’clock in the morning in order to drive into Lowestoft, less than two miles distant. At this time, be it remembered, Dr. MacOubrey was eighty-one years of age. Now, as to the general untidiness of Borrow’s home at the time of his death—the point is a distasteful one, but it had better be faced. Henrietta was nineteen years of age when her mother married Borrow. She was sixty-four at the time of his death, and her husband, as I have said, was eighty-one years of age at that time, being three years older than Borrow. Here we have three very elderly people keeping house together and little accustomed overmuch to the assistance of domestic servants. The situation at once becomes clear. Mrs. Borrow had a genius for housekeeping and for management. She watched over her husband, kept his accounts, held the family purse, managed all his affairs. She “managed” her daughter also, delighting in that daughter’s accomplishments of drawing and botany, to which may be added a zeal for the writing of stories which does not seem, judging from the many manuscripts in her handwriting that I have burnt, to have received much editorial encouragement. In short, Henrietta was not domesticated. But just as I have proved in preceding chapters that Borrow was happy in his married life, so I would urge that as far as a somewhat disappointed career would permit to the sadly bereaved author he was happy in his family circle to the end. It was at his initiative that, when he had returned to Oulton after the death of his wife, his daughter and her husband came to live with him. He declared that to live alone was no longer tolerable, and they gave up their own home in London to join him at Oulton.

A new glimpse of Borrow on his domestic side has been offered to the public even as this book is passing through the press. Mr. S. H. Baldrey, a Norwich solicitor, has given his reminiscences of the author of Lavengro to the leading newspaper of that city. Mr. Baldrey is the stepson of the late John Pilgrim of the firm of Jay and Pilgrim, who were Borrow’s solicitors at Norwich in the later years of his life. One at least of Mr. Baldrey’s many reminiscences has in it an element of romance; that in which he recalls Mrs. Borrow and her daughter:

Mrs. Borrow always struck me as a dear old creature. When Borrow married her she was a widow with one daughter, Henrietta Clarke. The old lady used to dress in black silk. She had little silver-grey corkscrew curls down the side of her face; and she wore a lace cap with a mauve ribbon on top, quite in the Early Victorian style. I remember that on one occasion when she and Miss Clarke had come to Brunswick House they were talking with my mother in the temporary absence of George Borrow, who, so far as I can recall, had gone into another room to discuss business with John Pilgrim.

“Ah!” she said, “George is a good man, but he is a strange creature. Do you know he will say to me after breakfast, ‘Mary, I am going for a walk,’ and then I do not see anything more of him for three months. And all the time he will be walking miles and miles. Once he went right into Scotland, and never once slept in a house. He took not even a handbag with him or a clean shirt, but lived just like any old tramp.”

Mr. Baldrey is clearly in error here, or shall we say that Mrs. Borrow humorously exaggerated? We have seen that Borrow’s annual holiday was a matter of careful arrangement, and his knapsack or satchel is frequently referred to in his descriptions of his various tours. But the matter is of little importance, and Mr. Baldrey’s pictures of Borrow are excellent, including that of his personal appearance: