In Chapter XV. of “The Romany Rye,” Borrow thus describes the last farewell to Belle, as he called her: “I found the Romany party waiting for me, and everything in readiness for departing. Mr. Petulengro and Tawno Chikno were mounted on two old horses. The rest, who intended to go to the fair, amongst whom were two or
three women, were on foot. On arriving at the extremity of the plain, I looked towards the dingle. Isopel Berners stood at the mouth, the beams of the early morning sun shone full on her noble face and figure. I waved my hand towards her. She slowly lifted up her right arm. I turned away, and never saw Isopel Berners again.”
This little book, concerned chiefly with Norwich, cannot follow the wayfarings of Borrow, so enchantingly described in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” in chapters which justify to the full Mr. Birrell’s enthusiastic admiration when he wrote: “The delightful, the bewitching, the never sufficiently to be praised George Borrow—Borrow, the Friend of Man, at whose bidding lassitude and languor strike their tents and flee; and health and spirits, adventure and human comradeship, take up the reins of life, whistle to the horses and away you go!”
It is much to be hoped that the Borrow Celebration, to which this booklet is a modest contribution, may lead to a warmer appreciation in Norwich of one of the greatest men who ever trod her streets. “The Romany Rye” has a thoroughly Borrovian ending, much in the manner of Sterne, as many of Borrow’s passages are. His pilgrimage of tinkering and adventurous vagrancy between May and August, 1825, came to an end at Boston—“a large town, situate at the entrance of an extensive firth”—where a recruiting sergeant wished to enlist him for the service of the Honourable East India Company. But his references to Petulengro and Tawno Chikno disgusted the soldier, who exclaimed: “Young fellow, I don’t like your way of speaking; no, nor your way of looking. You are mad, sir; you are mad; and what’s this? Why your hair is grey! You won’t do for the Honourable Company—they like red. I’m glad I didn’t give you the shilling.” Then Borrow soliloquizes: “I shouldn’t wonder if Mr. Petulengro and Tawno Chikno came originally from India. I think I’ll go there.” So ends one of the most amazing fragments of autobiography that the world has ever seen; many readers we know leave these unwillingly and return to them again and again with unquenchable zest. Borrow was twenty-three when in the autumn of 1825 he was making his way to Norwich from Lincolnshire, and from
then till his employment by the Bible Society in 1833, his movements were very uncertain. The intervening years have been called “the veiled period”—gloomy and mysterious, says Mr. Jenkins, but not utterly dark. He was in Norwich at Tombland Fair in April, 1827, the real date of his doffing his hat to that celebrated horse, “Marshland Shales,” and towards the end of the year he was still in Willow Lane, as is proved by entries in his mother’s cash book, seen by Dr. Knapp.
Tired of inactivity, Borrow was in London in December, 1829, at 17, Great Russell Street, W.C., eagerly seeking work, scheming for a work on the Songs of Scandinavia, jointly with Bowring, which came to nothing.
It is curious that in a letter to Bowring of September 14th, 1830, he proposes to call on him one evening, as early rising kills him. Quite a strange expression for so open-air a wanderer. That Borrow could not secure employment in the ordinary avenues of the professions and commerce is hardly to be wondered at; he preferred the society of vagabonds, into which he had been driven by his own inclinations as much as, or more than, by force of circumstances. His brother John told him that his want of success in life was more owing to his being unlike other people than to any other cause. His isolating and aggressive pride engendered a tactlessness which often spoilt any chances of advancement that came his way. But he had dogged determination, which, to quote Mr. Jenkins, “was to carry him through the most critical period of his life, enable him to earn the approval of those in whose interests he worked, and eventually achieve fame and an unassailable place in English literature.”
It does not come within the scope of this local souvenir to follow Borrow in his career under the Bible Society in Russia and the Peninsula; but we must just note that he obtained his appointment with that society through the Rev. Francis Cunningham, a brother-in-law of the great banker J. J. Gurney, of Earlham, having married his sister Richenda at Earlham Church in 1816. He became Rector of Pakefield in 1814, and of Lowestoft from 1830 till his death in August, 1863.
