George Borrow and His Circle | Page 9

His father, Thomas Borrow,
who died captain and adjutant of the West Norfolk Militia, was of an
ancient but reduced Cornish family, tracing descent from the de Burghs,
and entitled to carry their arms. His mother, Ann Perfrement, was a
native of Norfolk, and descended from a family of French Protestants
banished from France on the revocation of the edict of Nantes. He was
the youngest of two sons. His brother, John Thomas, who was endowed
with various and very remarkable talents, died at an early age in
Mexico. Both the brothers had the advantage of being at some of the
first schools in Britain. The last at which they were placed was the
Grammar School at Norwich, to which town their father came to reside
at the termination of the French war. In the year 1818 George Borrow
was articled to an eminent solicitor in Norwich, with whom he
continued five years. He did not devote himself much to his profession,
his mind being engrossed by another and very different subject--namely
philology, for which at a very early period he had shown a decided
inclination, having when in Ireland with his father acquired the Irish
language. At the expiration of his clerkship he knew little of the law,
but was well versed in languages, being not only a good Greek and
Latin scholar, but acquainted with French, Italian, and Spanish, all the
Celtic and Gothic dialects, and likewise with the peculiar language of
the English Romany Chals or Gypsies. This speech or jargon,
amounting to about eleven hundred and twenty-seven words, he had
picked up amongst the wandering tribes with whom he had formed

acquaintance on Mousehold, a wild heath near Norwich, where they
were in the habit of encamping. By the time his clerkship was expired
his father was dead, and he had little to depend upon but the exercise of
his abilities such as they were. In 1823 he betook himself to London,
and endeavoured to obtain a livelihood by literature. For some time he
was a hack author, doing common work for booksellers. For one in
particular he prepared an edition of the Newgate Calendar, from the
careful study of which he has often been heard to say that he first
learned to write genuine English. His health failed, he left London, and
for a considerable time he lived a life of roving adventure.
[4] Knapp's Life of Borrow, vol. i. p. 6.
[5] The writer recalls at his own school at Downham Market in Norfolk
an old Crimean Veteran--Serjeant Canham--drilling the boys each week,
thus supplementing his income precisely in the same manner as did
Serjeant Borrow.
[6] The date has always hitherto been wrongly given. I find it in one of
Ann Borrow's notebooks, but although every vicar of every parish in
Chelmsford and Colchester has searched the registers for me, with
agreeable courtesy, I cannot discover a record of John's birthplace, and
am compelled to the belief that Dr. Knapp was wrong in suggesting one
or other of these towns.
[7] Lavengro, ch. xiv.
[8] Lavengro, ch. xxiii.
CHAPTER II
BORROW'S MOTHER
Throughout his whole life George Borrow adored his mother, who
seems to have developed into a woman of great strength of character
far remote from the pretty play-actor who won the heart of a young
soldier at East Dereham in the last years of the eighteenth century. We
would gladly know something of the early years of Ann Perfrement.

Her father was a farmer, whose farm at Dumpling Green we have
already described. He did not, however, 'farm his own little estate' as
Borrow declared. The grandfather--a French Protestant--came, if we are
to believe Borrow, from Caen in Normandy after the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, but there is no documentary evidence to support the
contention. However, the story of the Huguenot immigration into
England is clearly bound up with Norwich and the adjacent district.
And so we may well take the name of 'Perfrement' as conclusive
evidence of a French origin, and reject as utterly untenable the not
unnatural suggestion of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that Borrow's mother
was 'of gypsy descent.'[9] She was one of the eight children of Samuel
and Mary Perfrement, all of whom seem to have devoted their lives to
East Anglia.[10] We owe to Dr. Knapp's edition of Lavengro one
exquisite glimpse of Ann's girlhood that is not in any other issue of the
book. Ann's elder sister, curious to know if she was ever to be married,
falls in with the current superstition that she must wash her linen and
'watch' it drying before the fire between eleven and twelve at night.
Ann Perfrement was ten years old at the time. The two girls walked
over to East Dereham, purchased the necessary garment, washed it in
the