George Borrow

George Borrow

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Title: George Borrow The Man and His Books
Author: Edward Thomas

Release Date: June 14, 2006 [eBook #18588]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEORGE
BORROW***

Transcribed from the 1912 Chapman & Hall edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

GEORGE BORROW THE MAN AND HIS BOOKS

BY EDWARD THOMAS
AUTHOR OF
"THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES," "LIGHT AND TWILIGHT,"
"REST AND UNREST," "MAURICE MAETERLINCK," ETC.
WITH PORTRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD. 1912
Printed by JAS. TRUSCOTT AND SON, LTD., London, E.C.
{picture: George Borrow, (From the painting by H. W. Phillips, R.A.,
in the possession of Mr. John Murray, by whose kind permission the
picture is reproduced.): page0.jpg}

NOTE
The late Dr. W. I. Knapp's Life (John Murray) and Mr. Watts-Dunton's
prefaces are the fountains of information about Borrow, and I have
clearly indicated how much I owe to them. What I owe to my friend,
Mr. Thomas Seccombe, cannot be so clearly indicated, but his prefaces
have been meat and drink to me. I have also used Mr. R. A. J. Walling's
sympathetic and interesting "George Borrow." The British and Foreign
Bible Society has given me permission to quote from Borrow's letters
to the Society, edited in 1911 by the Rev. T. H. Darlow; and Messrs. T.
C. Cantrill and J. Pringle have put at my disposal their publication of
Borrow's journal of his second Welsh tour, wonderfully annotated by
themselves ("Y Cymmrodor," 1910). These and other sources are
mentioned where they are used and in the bibliography.

DEDICATION TO E. S. P. HAYNES
MY DEAR HAYNES,

By dedicating this book to you, I believe it is my privilege to introduce
you and Borrow. This were sufficient reason for the dedication. The
many better reasons are beyond my eloquence, much though I have
remembered them this winter, listening to the storms of Caermarthen
Bay, the screams of pigs, and the street tunes of "Fall in and follow
me," "Yip-i-addy," and "The first good joy that Mary had."
Yours, EDWARD THOMAS.
LAUGHARNE, CAERMARTHENSHIRE, December, 1911.
CHAPTER I
--BORROW'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The subject of this book was a man who was continually writing about
himself, whether openly or in disguise. He was by nature inclined to
thinking about himself and when he came to write he naturally wrote
about himself; and his inclination was fortified by the obvious
impression made upon other men by himself and by his writings. He
has been dead thirty years; much has been written about him by those
who knew him or knew those that did: yet the impression still made by
him, and it is one of the most powerful, is due mainly to his own books.
Nor has anything lately come to light to provide another writer on
Borrow with an excuse. The impertinence of the task can be tempered
only by its apparent hopelessness and by that necessity which Voltaire
did not see.
I shall attempt only a re-arrangement of the myriad details accessible to
all in the writings of Borrow and about Borrow. Such re-arrangement
will sometimes heighten the old effects and sometimes modify them.
The total impression will, I hope, not be a smaller one, though it must
inevitably be softer, less clear, less isolated, less gigantic. I do not wish,
and I shall not try, to deface Borrow's portrait of himself; I can only
hope that I shall not do it by accident. There may be a sense in which
that portrait can be called inaccurate. It may even be true that
"lies--damned lies" {1} helped to make it. But nobody else knows
anything like as much about the truth, and a peddling biographer's

mouldy fragment of plain fact may be far more dangerous than the
manly lying of one who was in possession of all the facts. In most cases
the fact--to use an equivocal term--is dead and blown away in dust
while Borrow's impression is as green as grass. His "lies" are lies only
in the same sense as all clothing is a lie.
For example, he knew a Gypsy named Ambrose Smith, and had sworn
brotherhood with him as a boy. He wrote about this Gypsy, man and
boy, and at first called him, as the manuscripts bear witness, by his real
name, though Borrow thought of him in 1842 as Petulengro. In print he
was given the name Jasper Petulengro--Petulengro being Gypsy for
shoesmith--and as Jasper Petulengro he