George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

The truth is that Borrow was exceedingly fond of children. He appealed strongly to them. No such impression as he made upon the Elwin children at Booton, upon the boys of Dr. Gordon Hake’s family at Bury, upon the Cornish children he encountered in 1854 (p. [170]), was ever made by a man who did not understand children and sympathise with them.

The chronicle to the end of 1853 may be very briefly recounted. Borrow’s mother had been persuaded in 1849 to leave the house in Willow Lane, Norwich, where she had lived alone ever since his departure for St. Petersburg, and take up her quarters with the family at Oulton. In the midst of the writing of “The Romany Rye” in 1853, Dr. Hake ordered Borrow’s wife not to remain at Oulton during the coming winter. Borrow himself welcomed the prospect of a change, and in August he and the three women of his household removed to Yarmouth, where they lived in lodgings for seven years, except when they were engaged in the excursions which he presently organised in various parts of the United Kingdom.

CHAPTER VIII
“SUCCESS TO OLD CORNWALL!”

Borrow’s only journey to the land of mystery and legend from which his family sprang was made in 1853. It came about curiously. An incident occurred, soon after he had taken up his residence in lodgings at Yarmouth, which demonstrated both his personal courage and the easy terms on which he always was with the water. [146] In the midst of a terrible storm he dashed into the sea, himself saved one life from an overturned boat, and assisted to rescue the rest of the people in danger. He became the local hero of the hour, and an account of his gallantry was printed in the Bury Post.

The Borrows of Cornwall had been mainly a home-keeping race. The connection of George’s branch with the parent stem had been completely severed half a century before, and the inhabitants of the Caradon Hills had altogether lost sight of old Tom Borrow and his life. Now, however, the Plymouth Mail reprinted from the Bury paper a paragraph about the Yarmouth affair, and in process of time it was read at St. Cleer. The appearance of a person by the name of Borrow in this heroic shape was discussed with curiosity. Putting two and two together, the Cornishmen came to the conclusion that this celebrated author and saviour of drowning men could be none other than the son of that Tom Borrow whose claim to fame among them was that he had knocked down the headborough at Menheniot Fair.

Many of the name were in the district. Henry Borrow, of Looe Down, was a son of another Henry, George’s uncle, and therefore a cousin of the Romany Rye. Henry had a daughter, Ann, married to Mr. Robert Taylor, of Penquite, a person of some consideration in the locality. The upshot of the discussion was that Mr. Taylor was requisitioned by the rest of the family to invite the celebrity to Cornwall. In a letter of acceptance, Borrow expressed the pleasure it gave him to receive such an invitation, and the delight he felt in knowing that there were still some who remembered his honoured father, who, he said, had as true a Cornish heart as ever beat.

Thus he spent the Christmas of 1853 in the county of which he was in the truest sense native; and of this atmosphere, most genial to him, he breathed eagerly. Borrow never accomplished the book he proposed to write about Cornwall. An advertisement of it was published at the end of “The Romany Rye,” when he was fresh home from his visit and full of the romance he had absorbed in the westernmost peninsula of England. But, like many of his plans, it failed to come to anything. If it had been written, it would probably have been as full of good things as his Welsh book, and a better whole, since it was a smaller and more manageable subject. It will be possible presently to attempt to indicate the kind of work this might have been.

He left Yarmouth on December 23rd, and, this time not disdaining the services of the detested railway, was able to reach Plymouth at midnight. In that day Plymouth was the western terminus of the railway system. Brunel’s great bridge, which carries the iron road at a dizzy altitude across the Tamar from Devonshire into Cornwall, was not raised till six years later, and people who adventured into the land of giants and saints, pilchards and pasties, must complete their journey by coach. Having slept a night at the Royal Hotel in Plymouth, Borrow found that the Christmas traffic had crowded the coach, and he arrived at the Borrovian determination to walk to Liskeard, on the main road eighteen miles away, the nearest town to his objective among the hills. Leaving his luggage to be carried on by the mail, he “threw his cloak on his arm (a very old friend which had seen some thirty years’ service, the constant companion of his travels”), and trudged off to Devonport, across the Tamar by the ferry, and along the enchanting sylvan highway to the town whose representative in Parliament was just then laying about the “Puseyites” in a fashion most agreeable to Borrow.

There was a little stir in the bookish circles of the old Cornish borough among whom Mr. Taylor had spread the news that Borrow was coming, and a small party assembled to meet him and lionise him. These were drawn up under the porch of Webb’s Hotel as the huge figure strode into view. There was the ex-Mayor, Mr. Bernard Anstis. There was the Town Clerk, Mr. James Jago, a connection of the Borrows by marriage. There were his own relations. Happily, under these new auspices, he dropped his affectation of objection to be lionised, and took wine with his worshippers at the hotel in quite a conventional manner. Then, after tea with the Jago family, he and Taylor mounted horseback and rode off to Penquite, four miles away, to spend an old-style rural Christmas. “A hospitable reception, with a log on the fire” was Borrow’s own word for it—a brief but hearty tribute to the effect it had upon him. On Christmas Day he walked from Penquite to St. Cleer Church, about which his notebooks mention that it lacked an organ (as it does to this day), but that there was a fiddler in the gallery. Returning over the noble expanse of St. Cleer Down, he was introduced to a family of relations by marriage—the Pollards—and in the afternoon walked to their residence at Woolston to have lively talk of travel with two sons who had been in Australia, and to discuss the prehistoric memorials of the district, which he describes as “Druid stones.” All the Borrows have left St. Cleer, but the Pollards are in possession of Penquite.

It may seem that one lingers over the details of a visit which was but a small incident in Borrow’s life. The excuse must be offered that, if one could but penetrate the mystery of what may be called the Spirit of Old Cornwall, one would be in possession of the key to much that is mysterious in Borrow. He had inherited it fully, and it shaped many of his most pronounced characteristics. Here, if anywhere and at any time, he was at home—far more at home than his father had ever been; what freak of atavism may not account for that? Where eyes look out upon a world of wonder and of miracle, where even yet magic and supernatural intervention have their sway in that world’s affairs, and there is an underworld of faery, where strange Celtic words are of common use and wont, the philological, legend-loving wanderer was in a fitting atmosphere.