On Monday, February 11th, 1822, Captain Borrow made his will, and perhaps it was not a mere coincidence that it was a Monday, also on February 11th, but back in 1793, that he married his beloved wife at East Dereham. The old soldier again became concerned about the fate of George when out of his articles, and was anything but heartened by being informed that the young lawyer’s clerk had acquired Armenian from a book obtained from a clergyman’s widow, who took a fancy, so he says, to him, and even drew his portrait—the expression of his countenance putting her in mind of Alfieri’s Saul. The worthy Captain died February 28th, 1824, and was buried in St. Giles’s churchyard on March 4th. There never appears to have been any memorial stone, and I have found it impossible to locate the exact position of the grave. As a corner of the churchyard was cut off to widen the street, and to remove a dangerous corner, under the City of Norwich Act of 1867, it is quite likely that the remains are now under the roadway.
In an obituary notice in the Norwich Mercury of March 6th,
1824, Captain Borrow’s passing is described thus: “He rose from his bed about four, apparently as well as he has usually been in the winter time; returned to it without the least assistance, and in less than a quarter of an hour was a corpse in the arms of his sons, leaving those who knew his worth and deeply lament his loss.” “It will be a shocking thing for George and John,” wrote Allday Kerrison to his brother Roger.
Borrow’s articles with Simpson & Rackham expired on March 30th, 1824, and a new epoch, packed with extraordinary vicissitudes, was to follow.
Section III.
(1824-35)—London—Early Writings—A Norwich Mayor—Gypsying—“Veiled Period”—Bible Society.
Borrow describes his father’s death in the following memorable passage in “Lavengro”: “Clasping his hands he uttered another name clearly. It was the name of Christ. With that name upon his lips the brave old soldier sank back upon my bosom, and with his hands still clasped yielded up his soul.” This concluded Volume I. of the original edition of the work.
He begins the first chapter of the second volume abruptly, thus: “One-and-ninepence, sir, or the things which you have brought with you will be taken from you!”
Such was Borrow’s first greeting in London when, on the morning of April 2nd, 1824, he alighted from the Norwich coach in the yard of the Swan with Two Necks, in a lane now swallowed up by Gresham Street. He proceeded to the lodgings of his friend Roger Kerrison, at 16, Millman Street, Bedford Row; but in May he had developed such alarming, even suicidal, symptoms that Kerrison, fearing he might be involved in a tragedy, hastily moved off to Soho. Borrow was now to begin the real battle of life, and he had to put in practice, as best he might, his motto, “Fear God, and take your own part.” He had left behind in Norwich the mother he loved so well, she who ever defended him when his odd speeches and unconventional proceedings called forth criticism or censure. His friend William Taylor had given him introductions in London, and “honest six-foot-three,” conscious of possessing unusual powers, mental and physical, set forth to seek literary work. So, with some papers from a little green box, he looked up Sir Richard Phillips, in Tavistock Square, presented him a letter from Mr. So-and-So (W. Taylor), and was
promptly assured “literature is a drug.” The following Sunday, however, he dined with the old publisher, who was soon to retire to Brighton, and was commissioned to compile six volumes of “Celebrated Trials,” etc., “from the earliest records to the year 1825.” What a caprice of Fate that the young aspirant should, on the very threshold of his adult career, be thrown into these coulisses of criminal biography! That a taste already keen to search out the birds of prey that haunt the fringe of decorous society, should be immersed, as it were, in a stream of criminal records! Old songs of Denmark, the poems of Ab Gwilym (“worth half a dozen of Chaucer”!), the “romance in the German style,” all were ruthlessly swept aside to give place to a catena of lives of notorious evildoers!
The Lives and Trials appeared in March, 1825, with a preface by Sir Richard; but without Borrow’s name. The intellectual impressions which this task, reaching 3,600 pages, produced on Borrow’s mind were, said the publisher, “mournful.” The grisly and sordid stories of crime and criminals he had to edit reduced him to a state of gloomy depression.