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Transcribed from the 1912 Chapman & Hall edition by David Price,email ccx074@pglaf.org

GEORGE BORROW
THE MAN AND HIS BOOKS

by
EDWARD THOMAS

Author of

“THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES,”“LIGHT AND TWILIGHT,” “REST AND UNREST,” “MAURICEMAETERLINCK,” Etc.

WITH PORTRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd.
1912

Printed by
Jas. Truscott and Son, Ltd.,
London, E.C.

NOTE

The late Dr. W. I. Knapp’s Life (John Murray) and Mr. Watts-Dunton’sprefaces are the fountains of information about Borrow, and I have clearlyindicated how much I owe to them.  What I owe to my friend, Mr.Thomas Seccombe, cannot be so clearly indicated, but his prefaces havebeen meat and drink to me.  I have also used Mr. R. A. J. Walling’ssympathetic and interesting “George Borrow.”  The Britishand Foreign Bible Society has given me permission to quote from Borrow’sletters to the Society, edited in 1911 by the Rev. T. H. Darlow; andMessrs. T. C. Cantrill and J. Pringle have put at my disposal theirpublication of Borrow’s journal of his second Welsh tour, wonderfullyannotated by themselves (“Y Cymmrodor,” 1910).  Theseand 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 introduceyou and Borrow.  This were sufficient reason for the dedication. The many better reasons are beyond my eloquence, much though I haveremembered them this winter, listening to the storms of CaermarthenBay, the screams of pigs, and the street tunes of “Fall in andfollow me,” “Yip-i-addy,” and “The first goodjoy that Mary had.”

Yours,
EDWARD THOMAS.

Laugharne,
Caermarthenshire,
December, 1911.

p. 1CHAPTERI—BORROW’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The subject of this book was a man who was continually writing abouthimself, whether openly or in disguise.  He was by nature inclinedto thinking about himself and when he came to write he naturally wroteabout himself; and his inclination was fortified by the obvious impressionmade upon other men by himself and by his writings.  He has beendead thirty years; much has been written about him by those who knewhim or knew those that did: yet the impression still made by him, andit 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 Borrowwith an excuse.  The impertinence of the task can be tempered onlyby its apparent hopelessness and by that necessity which Voltaire didnot see.

I shall attempt only a re-arrangement of the myriad details accessibleto all in the writings of Borrow and about Borrow.  Such re-arrangementwill sometimes heighten the old effects and sometimes modify them. The total impression will, I hope, not be a smaller one, though it mustinevitably be softer, less clear, less isolated, less gigantic. I do not wish, and I shall not try, to deface Borrow’s portraitof 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 muchabout the truth, and a peddling p. 2biographer’smouldy fragment of plain fact may be far more dangerous than the manlylying of one who was in possession of all the facts.  In most casesthe fact—to use an equivocal term—is dead and blown awayin dust while Borrow’s impression is as green as grass. His “lies” are lies only in the same sense as all clothingis a lie.

For example, he knew a Gypsy named Ambrose Smith, and had sworn brotherhoodwith him as a boy.  He wrote about this Gypsy, man and boy, andat first called him, as the manuscripts bear witness, by his real name,though Borrow thought of him in 1842 as Petulengro.  In print hewas given the name Jasper Petulengro—Petulengro being Gypsy forshoesmith—and as Jasper Petulengro he is now one of the most unforgetableof heroes; the name is the man, and for many Englishmen his form andcharacter have probably created quite a new value for the name of Jasper. Well, Jasper Petulengro lives.  Ambrose Smith died in 1878, atthe age of seventy-four, after being visited by the late Queen Victoriaat Knockenhair Park: he was buried in Dunbar Cemetery. {2}

In the matter of his own name Borrow made another creative changeof a significant kind.  He was christened George Henry Borrow onJuly 17th (having been born on the 5th), 1803, at East Dereham, in Norfolk. As a boy he signed his name, George Henry Borrow.  As a young manof the Byronic age and a translator of Scandinavian literature, he called