Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration | Page 2

No life was sterile To that

free spirit, wrought by rugged change; Thy heart found rest in strife,
and did outrange The farthest fancy, and woo the sorest peril.
Hardships and lack Were comrades, and the milestones on thy track.
F. W. ORDE WARD.

GEORGE HENRY BORROW.
The time is ripe, and over ripe, for a commemorative celebration of
George Borrow in a city with which he was so long, and so intimately,
associated as he was with Norwich. His increasing fame as a foremost
literary man of the nineteenth century is amply witnessed to by the
various biographies of him, and the numerous appreciations of him by
writers of repute, and Mr. Clement Shorter's forthcoming "Life of
Borrow" will certainly add to the cult.
The following sketch of this wayward genius is mainly devoted to
outstanding characteristics, with necessarily brief accounts of his works
and journeyings. It seems convenient to sum up his career in the four
divisions which follow.

Section I. (1803-15)--EARLY WANDERING DAYS.
Borrow's father, Thomas Borrow, was a patriotic, pugnacious, but
God-fearing Cornishman, born at an old homestead known as
Trethinnick, in the parish of St. Cleer, in which his forbears had been
settled well back in the seventeenth century, probably earlier. To quote
Dr. Knapp: "They feared God, honoured the king, and believed in
'piskies' and Holy Wells."
Thomas Borrow, handsome, tall, and muscular, was an adept in the
athletic sports for which Cornwall is famous, and early signalised
himself by his prowess as a boxer. As he grew up, George Borrow
himself became an ardent admirer of "the Fancy," and when asked
"What is the best way to get through life quietly?" was wont to say,

"Learn to box, and keep a civil tongue in your head."
In 1778, when nineteen years of age, Thomas Borrow was articled for
five years to a maltster; but just as that period expired, at Menheniot
Fair a bicker arose in which Borrow and other young heroes triumphed
over the braves of that town. Constables appeared, but were promptly
felled by the brawny Borrow, and, to crown his misdeeds, he knocked
over the head-borough, who happened to be his maltster master. He
wisely fled, and shortly after enlisted as a private soldier in the
Coldstream Guards, and was soon quartered in London. In 1792, as a
sergeant, he was transferred to the West Norfolk Regiment of Militia,
with headquarters at East Dereham. A company of players from
Norwich frequently visited that nice little town, and in one of them
appeared, as a supernumerary, Ann Perfrement, the pretty daughter of a
small farmer of Dumpling Green, on the outskirts of the town. This
maiden, of Huguenot descent, fascinated the Cornish soldier, and the
two were married at Dereham Church on February 11th, 1793. The
regiment was then about to start a wandering course over the highways
of England--at Colchester; in Norfolk; then at Sheerness, Sandgate, and
Dover; at Colchester once more; in Kent; Essex again, and then, in
1802-3, at East Dereham, where George was born July 5th, 1803, in the
house of his maternal grandparents. On July 17th he was baptized
George Henry, names of the king and of the eldest brother of Captain
Thomas Borrow.
[Picture: Plan of Dumpling Green, East Dereham. By permission of Mr.
Murray]
As a mere infant Borrow was gloomy and fond of solitude, "ever
conscious," he says, "of a peculiar heaviness within me, and at times of
a strange sensation of fear, which occasionally amounted to horror, and
for which I could assign no real cause whatever." Of this earliest period
he tells a characteristic story of drawing strange lines in the dust with
his fingers, when a Jew pedlar came up and said: "The child is a sweet
child, and he has all the look of one of our own people"; but when he
leaned forward to inspect the lines in the dust, "started back, and grew
white as a sheet; then, taking off his hat, he made some strange gestures

to me, cringing, chattering, . . . and shortly departed, muttering
something about 'holy letters,' and talking to himself in a strange
tongue." This, in the first chapter of "Lavengro," is in the true
Borrovian mystery-man style.
[Picture: George Borrow's birthplace, Dumpling Green, East Dereham]
Again and again Borrow, throughout his life, suffered from some
nervous ailment which defied definition; thus, when he was fifteen, his
strength and appetite deserted him and he pined and drooped, but an
ancient female, a kind of doctress, who had been his nurse in his
infancy, gave him a decoction of a bitter root growing on commons and
desolate places, from which he took draughts till he was convalescent.
In any estimate of Borrow's life the strange attacks of what he called
"the Fear" or