George Borrow, the Man and His Work

by R. A. J. Walling

Thomas vanished for several years into the privacy of a private of the Coldstreams. Such a man, however, was not likely to remain permanently in the obscurity of the ranks. He climbed steadily. After eight or nine years, spent mostly with the regiment in London, he emerged into view again as a sergeant, and in 1792 was transferred to the West Norfolk Militia, whose headquarters were at East Dereham. This was the origin of all we hear later about the pretty little town of “D—.”

At Dumpling Green, near by, resided Miss Ann Perfrement, sweet and twenty when Sergeant Borrow marched into her perspective. She was the daughter of a farmer who had descended from a Huguenot family, immigrants to Norfolk among many others—including the Martineaus—after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Miss Perfrement was occasionally engaged to act minor parts in plays performed at Dereham by companies sent to the country towns from the Theatre Royal in Norwich. Her stage presence fascinated the Sergeant, who had reached the age of thirty-eight proof against all feminine blandishments. He pursued his courtship of the amateur actress with ardour and success. She accepted him, and a most happy union began with their wedding on February 11th, 1793.

The movements of a regiment, even of militia, in those stirring days were apt to be incalculable. The West Norfolks threaded the United Kingdom from end to end, combining the swiftness of a bishop with the unexpected evolutions of a knight upon the chessboard. Sergeant Borrow got his commission as captain and adjutant in 1798; in 1800, either at Chelmsford or Colchester, was born his elder son, John, who became first a military officer and then an artist, and was one of Haydon’s pupils. In 1803 he was back in Norfolk, recruiting. At East Dereham, on July 5th in that year, George Borrow opened his eyes upon a world of which he was to see so much more than falls to the lot of most sons, even of soldiers.

This bundle of potentialities was named George in honour of the King his father served, and Henry after a Cornish uncle. The first few years of his life were spent, like those of the young Sternes, at the tail of the regiment, marching and countermarching in Essex, Kent, and Sussex, wandering from barracks to barracks as the exigencies of the army dictated in that day of Napoleonic scares. At the age of six he returned to “pretty D—,” and there received some of the vivid impressions he has reproduced in indelible colours upon the earlier pages of “Lavengro”—the dignified rector and Philo, the clerk, reading “their respective portions of the venerable liturgy,” and rolling “many a portentous word descriptive of the wondrous works of the Most High”; and the “Lady Bountiful, leaning on her gold-headed cane.” There he revelled in the boy’s first flush of delight over “Robinson Crusoe,” and imbibed the germs of that worship of Defoe which shines in all his work.

The next peregrination of the family was to Norman Cross, where George met the snake-catcher and received from him the present of the fangless viper with which he contrived so effectually to subdue the wrath of old Gypsy Smith and his evil-looking mort, who “wore no cap, and her long hair fell on either side of her head like horse-tails half way down her waist; her skin was dark and swarthy, like that of a toad.” We know how he was named “Sapengro,” and how brotherhood was sworn between him and the gypsies’ son Ambrose, who figures immortally as Jasper Petulengro.

The sojourn at Norman Cross lasted fifteen months. Then, in July, 1811, the regiment returned to East Dereham, where George took his introduction to the science of languages. The embryo “polyglot gentleman” laid a sound foundation upon Lilly’s Latin Grammar. However, their wanderings were by no means at an end. For years there was to be little rest and small possibility of regular schooling. In 1812 the West Norfolks were moving again—marching through the Midlands and the North by slow stages towards Edinburgh, stopping a month or two here and there. For example, at Huddersfield they billeted long enough for George to be sent to the local school. The conditions of such a life were hardly favourable to the development of scholarship upon conventional lines. How valuable they were to the cultivation of the kind of genius that lay behind the forehead of George Borrow it is difficult to overestimate. He assimilated rich and varied experience through every pore. He acquired the love of a roving life, the passionate devotion to the road, that never left him till the end of his days. His father was a wanderer before he was born; he was a wanderer himself throughout his boyhood. It was fit training for the man who was afterwards to be dubbed “the Wandering Jew of Literature.”

In April of 1813 the West Norfolks descended upon Edinburgh, Captain Thomas on horseback leading the van, and Mrs. Borrow and her boys bringing up the rear in a “po’-shay.” There were many gay days of military merry-making at Edinburgh Castle before, in the autumn, John and George were entered at the High School. Probably they spent only one session at the academy of classical learning which had, a generation earlier, turned out so great a genius as Sir Walter Scott.

There is not much in Borrow’s record of the time to illustrate that session, or to show what point in his youthful struggle with the dead languages the incipient philologist reached. Here, as ever, his interests were in the by-paths of life and learning. David Haggart was more to him than the ministrations of his painstaking master, Mr. Carson. Borrow had a catholic and withal a discriminating taste in vagabonds. It manifested itself even at this early age. Just as in later years he was fascinated by the personality of John Thurtell, so was he charmed at Edinburgh by that weird brigand Haggart, who enlisted in the West Norfolks as a drummer-boy, having been unearthed at Leith Races by one of Captain Borrow’s recruiting sergeants. The drummer-boy whom George made his companion subsequently became burglar, highway robber, murderer, and prison-breaker, and only suspended his nefarious activities at the end of the hangman’s rope in the year 1821.

The regiment left Edinburgh for home in 1814, on the cessation of the war. The mustering-out took place at Norwich, where feastings and congratulations were the order of many days. George’s parents lodged at the Crown and Angel Inn, while he was sent to the Grammar School. This time there was some hope that he might be able to continue his studies undisturbed. Napoleon prevented its realisation by escaping from Elba and getting the Norfolk militiamen sent to Ireland, where sympathetic disturbances were occurring. They did not embark at Harwich, however, until after the battle of Waterloo. From Cork they went to Clonmel, and George had his first taste of the fascinating country whose very name always seemed to exercise a spell upon him. At Clonmel he was sent to school, and began to learn Greek. What was of greater consequence, he met a wild Irish boy, the Murtagh who figures so finely in “Lavengro.” Murtagh taught him Erse in return for a pack of cards. But even more important still, it was here that he learned to ride on horseback and picked up the love of horse-flesh which was one of the grand passions of his life. Oh, that cob!—on which he rode round the Devil’s Mountain—“may the sod lie lightly over the bones of the strongest, speediest, and most gallant of its kind.”

The wanderings of the elder Borrows finally ceased in 1816. After the Irish campaign, they returned to Norwich to settle down, and took a house in Willow Lane. George, now thirteen, was sent again to the Grammar School to receive his first regular course of “education.” Fortunately, the process was quite unable to interfere with his natural development. It was hardly possible that a boy who had been beating about the roads and townships of the three kingdoms ever since he could toddle, had learnt snake-charming and the Irish language, explored the mysteries of gypsyism and horse-dealing, and picked up such a collection of odds and ends of lore as reposed in his retentive brain, should comfortably abandon his vagrom modes of thought and life for the mechanical lessons and the conventional ways of a Grammar School ruled by a martinet. His wander-years had quite unfitted him for methodical study, and he found even less interest in the common pursuits of the school than does the average healthy rascal of thirteen. Consequently, he had no soft corner in the heart of the “head,” Edward Valpy, a pedagogue of the ancient style who had no toleration for intransigence, and never risked the spoiling of the child by any economy of the rod.