George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

Of course, there was another life than this: his own private life, his intercourse with such friends as he had already in London and with the new acquaintances he made during his unconventional wanderings about the city. His brother John, the artist, reached London on April 29th, commissioned to induce Benjamin Haydon to paint the portrait of a Mr. Robert Hawkes, who was Mayor of Norwich in 1822. John had been asked to do the portrait himself, but distrusted his powers and preferred that the commission should go to Haydon. George went with his brother to interview “the painter of the Heroic,” who was not by way of painting provincial mayors as a matter of preference, but was in the chronic state of impecuniosity which made the fee of a hundred pounds an irresistible bait. The mission was successful. Haydon went down to Norwich, and executed a portrait of the worthy Mr. Hawkes “striding under a Norman arch out of the cathedral.” The Norman arch seems to have been suggested locally, and it appealed strongly to Haydon’s sense of the grandiose, though many people may be inclined to agree with George that the mayors of the day, as a rule, would have been better painted issuing from The Chequers or The Brewers Three.

Whatever distractions he could discover or invent, Borrow’s life was miserable, and brought on severe attacks of melancholia, which he first described as “the Horrors” and afterwards as “the Fear.” “What a life! What a dog’s life!” he tells us he would exclaim after “escaping” from the presence of the publisher. His woes, real and imaginary—and a great many of them were the effect of his morbid imaginings—drove him to desperate thoughts. After his brother’s visit, Knapp tells us, he wrote to Kerrison: “Dear Roger,—Come to me immediately. I believe I am dying.” He was probably very far from dying, but Kerrison had an idea that George was liable to suicidal impulses, did not like assuming the responsibility for such an irresponsible person, and shifted his lodgings. The mood passed, and Borrow went on hawking his ballads among the publishers of London with no more success than before. He relates how he called on “glorious John” twenty times without success. We are not to place too much reliance upon the exactitude of this statement. Meanwhile, the “Celebrated Trials” was going on. It was a tremendous compilation, with little of Borrow’s own work in it. Its 3,600 pages represented nearly a year’s adventures among the bookstalls and the files of old newspapers and fly-sheets. One piece of characteristic literary work with which he endowed the world was his translation of Klinger’s “Faustus,” which shortly appeared. This had been done at Norwich in the Simpson & Rackham days. Finally, the book of “Trials” was completed, and the Universal Review died of inanition. “I did not like reviewing at all . . . I never could understand why reviews were instituted,” says Lavengro. And he continued to detest reviewers and reviewing to the end of his days. In 1853, when Whitwell Elwin was deputising for Lockhart as editor of the Quarterly, he met Borrow. Their interview, Elwin’s son tells us, was characteristic of both: “Borrow was just then very sore with his slashing critics, and, on someone mentioning that Elwin was a quartering reviewer, he said, ‘Sir, I wish you a better employment!’”

At the death of the Universal Review, his relations with Phillips came to an end. He had little money and no resources. Once more he resumed the weary round, tramping in search of purchasers for his translations, and gradually approaching a condition of penury, but maintaining his attitude of aggression and independence. It is into this brief period that he has worked some of the most effective scenes of “Lavengro,” the friendship with the old apple-woman who had a stall on London Bridge, and with the Armenian merchant to whom he suggested that his wealth should be devoted to the liberation and aggrandisement of Armenia. Languages and poetry still obsessed his dreams. But audacious poverty at last bit a deeper wound than could be salved by poetry, and he resolved, only just too late, to accept an engagement the Armenian had offered him. It was sharp upon his disappointment at finding that the Armenian had taken him at his word, and gone away bent upon the conquest of Persia, that, returning from an excursion to Greenwich, Blackheath, and Shooter’s Hill, in the course of which he came upon the “Petulengros” in camp, he saw a notice in a bookseller’s window, “Wanted, a Novel or Tale.” “Lavengro” relates how he shut himself up from the 13th to the 18th of May, and wrote “The Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell,” which he sold to the bookseller for twenty pounds.

How much of all this is truth and how much is fiction it is difficult to determine. There is probably a basis of fact for it. Borrow, with all his imagination and all his romance, was not an inventive writer, and though the idea of “Joseph Sell” may have been suggested by the history of “Rasselas,” it is more probable that by some stroke of luck of this kind he did obtain the money with which to set out on his tour of the English roads. The circumstance that no “Life of Joseph Sell” has ever been discovered is nothing to set against this probability, and against the feeling with which Lavengro narrates its inception and accomplishment. Borrow’s love of mystification entirely accounts for it. There was a choice between saying exactly what he did, what his tale or history was entitled, and obscuring the whole matter by a fictitious name; and it would not have been Borrow if he had not chosen the latter course. By whatever work, he did obtain money enough to allow him to shake the dust of London off his shoes and begin those wanderings through English rural districts which provided the adventures described in the second and better half of “Lavengro.”

Borrow was big and strong and a magnificent walker; never before, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has said, had there appeared on English roads so majestic-looking a tramp, with bundle and stick. He went south-west to Salisbury Plain, and there is a powerful account in “Lavengro” of sunrise at Stonehenge. The only thing to compare with it is Thomas Hardy’s prose-poem of the same magical place by moonlight. One cannot read without a thrill the passage where, “taking off my hat I advanced slowly, and cast myself with my face upon the dewy earth in the middle of the portal of giants. The spirit of Stonehenge was strong upon me.”

There is little, of importance to Borrow’s own life, to decipher in the story of his wayfaring which is not incorporated in the book itself. Perhaps one of the most weird of his adventures was the encounter with the scholar and gentleman afflicted by the “touching” mania; one of the most sensational the attempt made by Mrs. Herne, the gypsy crone, to poison him with a doctored cake; one of the most impressive his meeting with the Welsh Methodist preacher, Peter Williams, and his wife, Winifred—Peter Williams who suffered tortures untold because he imagined that in his boyhood he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. He met Romanist missionaries, who at that time were very active on the highways and byways of England; dog-fighters and prize-fighters; everywhere out-of-the-way adventures occurred to him. He bought the stock-in-trade of Jack Slingsby, a hedgesmith and tinker, who was afraid to remain on the roads because of the enmity of the terrible bully, Blazing Bosvile, alias the Flaming Tinman; and in the course of his wanderings in search of business, he pulled up in Mumper’s Dingle, where was enacted the romance of Isopel Berners. The scene is said to have been identified as Mumber Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire.

In all the writings of Borrow there is but one episode of love. This romantic wanderer, so far as he informs us or we can ascertain, had been only once in love in nearly forty years, and that for a few weeks; nor was he then so deeply immersed that he took any particular pains to bring the lady to his own way of thinking. But this one episode has endowed English literature with a figure which takes a proud place in the gallery of fair women, the figure of Isopel Berners. Like everything else in Lavengro’s life, his sweetheart must be remarkable, his courtship must be unconventional, the adventure must have a vague and misty ending.

Watch Isopel as she descends, with her donkey and cart, behind the Flaming Tinman and Moll, his mort, into Mumper’s Dingle, where Lavengro has camped.

“Dashing past the other horse and cart, which by this time had reached the bottom of the pass, appeared an exceedingly tall woman—or rather girl, for she could scarcely have been above eighteen. She was dressed in a tight bodice and a blue stuff gown; hat, bonnet, or cap she had none, and her hair, which was flaxen, hung down on her shoulders unconfined; her complexion was fair, and her features handsome, with a determined but open expression.”

In conversation with the Flaming Tinman, who is working himself up to the proper pitch of a quarrel with the amateur tinker, the tall girl remarks that she would engage to thrash that weedy-looking youth with one hand. Forth bursts Lavengro, with his eternal Norse lore: “‘You might beat me with no hands at all,’ said I, ‘fair damsel, only by looking at me—I never saw such a face and figure—both regal—why, you look like Ingeborg, Queen of Norway; she had twelve brothers, and could lick them all, though they were heroes: