Isopel Berners

Isopel Berners

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Isopel Berners, by George Borrow,
Edited by Thomas Seccombe
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Isopel Berners The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire
Dingle, July, 1825
Author: George Borrow
Editor: Thomas Seccombe
Release Date: May 16, 2006 [eBook #18400]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ISOPEL
BERNERS***

Transcribed from the 1901 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David
Price, email [email protected]

ISOPEL BERNERS
BY GEORGE BORROW
_The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825:
An Episode in the Autobiography of George Borrow_.
THE TEXT EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION & NOTES BY
THOMAS SECCOMBE AUTHOR OF "THE AGE OF JOHNSON"
ASSISTANT EDITOR OF THE DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL
BIOGRAPHY
LONDON: HODDER AND STOUGHTON 27 PATERNOSTER
ROW 1901
Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.

INTRODUCTION.
I.
The last century was yet in its infancy when the author of _The
Romany Rye_ first saw the light in the sleepy little East Anglian
township of East Dereham, in the county distinguished by Borrow as
the one in which the people eat the best dumplings in the world and
speak the purest English. "Pretty quiet D[ereham]" was the retreat in
those days of a Lady Bountiful in the person of Dame Eleanor Fenn,
relict of the worthy editor of the Paston Letters. It is better known in
literary history as the last resting-place of a sad and unquiet spirit,
escaped from a world in which it had known nought but sorrow, of
"England's sweetest and most pious bard," William Cowper. But
Destiny was weaving a robuster thread to connect East Dereham with
literature, for George Borrow {1} was born there on July 5th, 1803, and,
nomad though he was, the place was always dear to his heart as his
earliest home.
In 1816, after ramblings far and wide both in Ireland and in Scotland,

the Borrows settled in Norwich, where George was schooled under a
master whose name at least is still familiar to English youth, Dr. Valpy
(brother of Dr. Richard Valpy). Among his schoolfellows at the
grammar school were Rajah Brooke and Dr. James Martineau. George
Borrow, a hardened truant from his earliest teens, was once horsed, to
undergo a flogging, on the back of James Martineau, and he never
afterwards took kindly to the philosophy of that remarkable man. We
are glad to know that Edward Valpy's ferule was weak, though his
scholarship was strong. Stories were current that even in those days
George used to haunt the gipsy tents on that Mousehold Heath which
lives eternally in the breezy canvases of "Old Crome," and that he went
so far as to stain his face with walnut-juice to the right Egyptian hue.
"Are you suffering from jaundice, Borrow," asked the Doctor, "or is it
merely dirt?" While at Norwich, too, he was greatly influenced in the
direction of linguistics by the English "pocket Goethe," William Taylor,
the head of a clan known as the Taylors of Norwich, to distinguish
them from a race in which the principle of heredity was even more
strikingly developed--the Taylors of Ongar. In February 1824 his father,
the gallant Captain Thomas Borrow, died, and his articles in the firm of
a Norwich solicitor having determined, George went to London to
commence literary man, in the old sense of the servitude, under the
well-known bookseller-publisher, Sir Richard Phillipps. In Grub Street
he translated and compiled galore, but when the trees began to shoot in
1825 he broke his chain and escaped to the country, to the dingle, and
to Isopel Berners.
To dwell upon the bare outlines of Borrow's early career would be a
superfluously dull proceeding. We shall only add a few names and
dates to the framework, supplied with a fidelity that is rare in much
more formal works of autobiography, in the pages of Lavengro. From
the same pages we may detach just a few of the earlier influences
which went to make up the rare and complex individuality of the writer.
Borrow's father, a fine old soldier, in revealing his son's youthful
idiosyncrasy, projects a clear mental image of his own habit of mind.
"The boy had the impertinence to say the classics were much
over-valued, and amongst other things that some horrid fellow or other,
some Welshman, I think (thank God it was not an Irishman), was a

better poet than Ovid. {2} That a boy of his years should entertain an
opinion of his own, I mean one which militates against all established