It says much for the literary proclivities of Norwich at this period that Borrow should have had so kindly a reception for his book as the subscription list implies. At the end of each of Wilkin’s two hundred copies a “list of subscribers” is given. It opens with the name of the Bishop of Norwich, Dr. Bathurst; it includes the equally familiar names of the Gurdons, Gurneys, Harveys, Rackhams, Hares (then as now of Stow Hall), Woodhouses—all good Norfolk or Norwich names that have come down to our time. Mayor Hawkes, who is made famous in Lavengro by Haydon’s portrait, is there also. Among London names we find John Bowring, Borrow’s new friend, and later to be counted an enemy, Thomas Campbell, Benjamin Haydon and John Timbs. But the name that most strikes the eye is that of “Thurtell.” Three of the family are among the subscribers including Mr. George Thurtell of Eaton, near Norwich, brother of the murderer; there also is the name of John Thurtell, executed for murder exactly a year before. This would seem to imply that Borrow had been a long time collecting these names and subscriptions, and doubtless before the all-too-famous crime of the previous year he had made Thurtell promise to become a subscriber, and, let us hope, had secured his half-guinea. That may account, with so sensitive and impressionable a man as our author, for the kindly place that Weare’s unhappy murderer always had in his memory. Borrow, in any case, was now, for a few years, to become more than ever a vagabond. Not a single further appeal did he make to an unsympathetic literary public for a period of five years at least.
Borrow’s first book was Faustus, and his second was Romantic Ballads, the one being published, as we have seen, in 1825, the other in 1826. This chronology has the appearance of ignoring the Celebrated Trials, but then it is scarcely possible to count Celebrated Trials [67a] as one of Borrow’s books at all. It is largely a compilation, exactly as the Newgate Calendar and Howell’s State Trials are compilations. In his preface to the work Borrow tells us that he has differentiated the book from the Newgate Calendar [67b] and the State Trials [67c] by the fact that he had made considerable compression. This was so, and in fact in many cases he has used the blue pencil rather than the pen—at least in the earlier volumes. But Borrow attempted something much more comprehensive than the Newgate Calendar and the State Trials in his book. In the former work the trials range from 1700 to 1802; in the latter from the trial of Becket in 1163 to the trial of Thistlewood in 1820. Both works are concerned solely with this country. Borrow went all over Europe, and the trials of Joan of Arc, Count Struensee, Major André, Count Cagliostro, Queen Marie Antoinette, the Duc d’Enghien, and Marshal Ney, are included in his volumes. Moreover, while what may be called state trials are numerous, including many of the cases in Howell, the greater number are of a domestic nature, including nearly all that are given in the Newgate Calendar. In the first two volumes he has naturally mainly state trials to record; the later volumes record sordid everyday crimes, and here Borrow is more at home. His style when he rewrites the trials is more vigorous, and his narrative more interesting. It is to be hoped that the exigent publisher, who he assures us made him buy the books for his compilation out of the £50 that he paid for it, was able to present him with a set of the State Trials, if only in one of the earlier and cheaper issues of the work than the one that now has a place in every lawyer’s library.
The third volume of Celebrated Trials, although it opens with the trial of Algernon Sidney, is made up largely of crime of the more ordinary type, and this sordid note continues through the three final volumes. I have said that Faustus is an allegory of “man’s inhumanity to man.” That is emphatically, in more realistic form, the distinguishing feature of Celebrated Trials. Amid these records of savagery, it is a positive relief to come across such a trial as that of poor Joseph Baretti. Baretti, it will be remembered, was brought to trial because, when some roughs set upon him in the street, he drew a dagger, which he usually carried “to carve fruit and sweetmeats,” and killed his assailant. In that age, when our law courts were a veritable shambles, how cheerful it is to find that the jury returned a verdict of “self-defence.” But then Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Dr. Johnson, and David Garrick gave evidence to character, representing Baretti as “a man of benevolence, sobriety, modesty, and learning.” This trial is an oasis of mercy in a desert of drastic punishment. Borrow carries on his “trials” to the very year before the date of publication, and the last trial in the book is that of “Henry Fauntleroy, Esquire,” for forgery. Fauntleroy was a quite respectable banker of unimpeachable character, to whom had fallen at a very early age the charge of a banking business that was fundamentally unsound. It is clear that he had honestly endeavoured to put things on a better footing, that he lived simply, and had no gambling or other vices. At a crisis, however, he forged a document, in other words signed a transfer of stock which he had no right to do, the “subscribing witness” to his power of attorney being Robert Browning, a clerk in the Bank of England, and father of the distinguished poet. Well, Fauntleroy was sentenced to be hanged—and he was duly hanged at Newgate on 30th October, 1824, only thirteen years before Queen Victoria came to the throne!
Borrow has affirmed that from a study of the Newgate Calendar and the compilation of his Celebrated Trials he first learned to write genuine English, and it is a fact that there are some remarkably dramatic effects in these volumes, although one here withholds from Borrow the title of “author” because so much is “scissors and paste,” and the purple passages are only occasional. All the same I am astonished that no one has thought it worth while to make a volume of these dramatic episodes, which are clearly the work of Borrow, and owe nothing to the innumerable pamphlets and chap-books that he brought into use. Take such an episode as that of Schening and Harlin, two young German women, one of whom pretended to have murdered her infant in the presence of the other because she madly supposed that this would secure them bread—and they were starving. The trial, the scene at the execution, the confession on the scaffold of the misguided but innocent girl, the respite, and then the execution—these make up as thrilling a narrative as is contained in the pages of fiction. Assuredly Borrow did not spare himself in that race round the bookstalls of London to find the material which the grasping Sir Richard Phillips required from him. He found, for example, Sir Herbert Croft’s volume, Love and Madness, the supposed correspondence of Parson Hackman and Martha Reay, whom he murdered. That correspondence is now known to be an invention of Croft’s. Borrow accepted it as genuine, and incorporated the whole of it in his story of the Hackman trial.
But after all, the trial which we read with greatest interest in these volumes is that of John Thurtell, because Borrow had known Thurtell in his youth, and gives us more than one glimpse of him in Lavengro and The Romany Rye.
Rarely in our criminal jurisprudence has a murder trial excited more interest than that of John Thurtell for the murder of Weare—the Gill’s Hill Murder, as it was called. Certainly no murder of modern times has had so many indirect literary associations. Borrow, Carlyle, Hazlitt, Walter Scott, and Thackeray are among those who have given it lasting fame by comment of one kind or another; and the lines ascribed to Theodore Hook are perhaps as well known as any other memory of the tragedy:
They cut his throat from ear to ear,
His brain they battered in,
His name was Mr. William Weare,
He dwelt in Lyon’s Inn.
Carlyle’s division of human beings of the upper classes into “noblemen, gentlemen, and gigmen,” which occurs in his essay on Richter, and a later reference to gigmanhood which occurs in his essay on Goethe’s Works, had their inspiration in an episode in the trial of Thurtell, when the question being asked, “What sort of a person was Mr. Weare?” brought the answer, “He was always a respectable person.” “What do you mean by respectable?” the witness was asked. “He kept a gig,” was the reply, which brought the word “gigmanity” into our language. [70]
I have said that John Thurtell and two members of his family became subscribers for Borrow’s Romantic Ballads, and it is certain that Borrow must often have met Thurtell, that is to say looked at him from a distance, in some of the scenes of prize-fighting which both affected, Borrow merely as a youthful spectator, Thurtell as a reckless backer of one or other combatant. Thurtell’s father was an alderman of Norwich living in a good house on the Ipswich Road when the son’s name rang through England as that of a murderer. The father was born in 1765 and died in 1846. Four years after his son John was hanged he was elected Mayor of Norwich, in recognition of his violent ultra-Whig or blue and white political opinions. He had been nominated as mayor both in 1818 and 1820, but it was perhaps the extraordinary “advertisement” of his son’s shameful death that gave the citizens of Norwich the necessary enthusiasm to elect Alderman Thurtell as mayor in 1828. It was in those oligarchical days a not unnatural fashion to be against the Government. The feast at the Guildhall on this occasion was attended by four hundred and sixty guests. A year before John Thurtell was hanged, in 1823, his father moved a violent political resolution in Norwich, but was out-Heroded by Cobbett, who moved a much more extreme one over his head and carried it by an immense majority. It was a brutal time, and there cannot be a doubt that Alderman Thurtell, while busy setting the world straight, failed to bring up his family very well. John, as we shall see, was hanged; Thomas, another brother, was associated with him in many disgraceful transactions; while a third brother, George, also a subscriber, by the way, to Borrow’s Romantic Ballads, who was a landscape gardener at Eaton, died in prison in 1848 under sentence for theft. Apart from a rather riotous and bad bringing up, which may be pleaded in extenuation, it is not possible to waste much sympathy over John Thurtell. He had thoroughly disgraced himself in Norwich before he removed to London. There he got further and further into difficulties, and one of the many publications which arose out of his trial and execution was devoted to pointing the moral of the evils of gambling. It was bad luck at cards, and the loss of much money to William Weare, who seems to have been an exceedingly vile person, that led to the murder. Thurtell had a friend named Probert who lived in a quiet cottage in a byway of Hertfordshire—Gill’s Hill, near Elstree. He suggested to Weare in a friendly way that they should go for a day’s shooting at Gill’s Hill, and that Probert would put them up for the night. Weare went home, collected a few things in a bag, and took a hackney coach to a given spot, where Thurtell met him with a gig. The two men drove out of London together. The date was 24th October, 1823. On the high-road they met and passed Probert and a companion named Joseph Hunt, who had even been instructed by Thurtell to bring a sack with him—this was actually used to carry away the body—and must therefore have been privy to the intended murder. By the time the second gig containing Probert and Hunt arrived near Probert’s cottage, Thurtell met it in the roadway, according to their accounts, and told the two men that he had done the deed; that he had killed Weare first by ineffectively shooting him, then by dashing out his brains with his pistol, and finally by cutting his throat. Thurtell further told his friends, if their evidence was to be trusted, that he had left the body behind a hedge. In the night the three men placed the body in a sack and carried it to a pond near Probert’s house and threw it in. The next night they fished it out and threw it into another pond some distance away. Thurtell meanwhile had divided the spoil—some £20, which he said was all that he had obtained from Weare’s body—with his companions. Hunt, it may be mentioned, afterwards declared his conviction that Thurtell, when he first committed the murder, had removed his victim’s principal treasure, notes to the value of three or four hundred pounds. Suspicion was aroused, and the hue and cry raised through the finding by a labourer of the pistol in the hedge, and the discovery of a pool of blood on the roadway. Probert promptly turned informer; Hunt also tried to save himself by a rambling confession, and it was he who revealed where the body was concealed, accompanying the officers to the pond and pointing out the exact spot where the corpse would be found. When recovered the body was taken to the Artichoke inn at Elstree, and here the coroner’s inquest was held. Meanwhile Thurtell had been arrested in London and taken down to Elstree to be present at the inquest. A verdict of murder against all three miscreants was given by the coroner’s jury, and Weare’s body was buried in Elstree Churchyard.
In January, 1824, John Thurtell was brought to trial at Hertford Assizes, and Hunt also. But first of all there were some interesting proceedings in the Court of King’s Bench, before the Chief Justice and two other judges, complaining that Thurtell had not been allowed to see his counsel. And there were other points at issue. Thurtell’s counsel moved for a criminal injunction against the proprietor of the Surrey Theatre in that a performance had been held there, and was being held, which assumed Thurtell’s guilt, the identical horse and gig being exhibited in which Weare was supposed to have ridden to the scene of his death. Finally this was arranged, and a mandamus was granted “commanding the admission of legal advisers to the prisoner.” At last the trial came on at Hertford before Mr. Justice Park. It lasted two days, although the judge wished to go on all night in order to finish in one. But the protest of Thurtell, supported by the jury, led to an adjournment. Probert had been set free and appeared as a witness. The jury gave a verdict of guilty, and Thurtell and Hunt were sentenced to be hanged, but Hunt escaped with transportation. Thurtell made his own speech for the defence, which had a great effect upon the jury, until the judge swept most of its sophistries away. It was, however, a very able performance. Thurtell’s line of defence was to declare that Hunt and Probert were the murderers, and that he was a victim of their perjuries. If hanged, he would be hanged on circumstantial evidence only, and he gave, with great elaboration, the details of a number of cases where men had been wrongfully hanged upon circumstantial evidence. His lawyers had apparently provided him with books containing these examples from the past, and his month in prison was devoted to this defence, which showed great ability. The trial took place on 6th January, 1824, and Thurtell was hanged on the 9th, in front of Hertford Gaol: his body was given to the Anatomical Museum in London. A contemporary report says that Thurtell, on the scaffold,
fixed his eyes on a young gentleman in the crowd, whom he had frequently seen as a spectator at the commencement of the proceedings against him. Seeing that the individual was affected by the circumstances, he removed them to another quarter, and in so doing recognised an individual well known in the sporting circles, to whom he made a slight bow.
The reader of Lavengro might speculate whether that “young gentleman” was Borrow, but Borrow was in Norwich in January, 1824, his father dying in the following month. In his Celebrated Trials Borrow tells the story of the execution with wonderful vividness, and supplies effective quotations from “an eyewitness.” Borrow no doubt exaggerated his acquaintance with Thurtell, as in his Robinson Crusoe romance he was fully entitled to do for effect. He was too young at the time to have been much noticed by a man so much his senior. The writer who accepts Borrow’s own statement that he really gave him “some lessons in the noble art” is too credulous, and the statement that Thurtell’s house “on the Ipswich Road was a favourite rendezvous for the Fancy” is unsupported by evidence. Old Alderman Thurtell owned the house in question, and we find no evidence that he encouraged his son’s predilection for prize-fighting.
George Borrow had no sympathy with Thurtell the gambler. I find no evidence in his career of any taste for games of hazard or indeed for games of any kind, although we recall that as a mere child he was able to barter a pack of cards for the Irish language. But he had certainly very considerable sympathy with the notorious criminal as a friend and patron of prize-fighting. This now discredited pastime Borrow ever counted a virtue. Was not his God-fearing father a champion in his way, or, at least, had he not in open fight beaten the champion of the moment, Big Ben Brain? Moreover, who was there in those days with blood in his veins who did not count the cultivation of the Fancy as the noblest and most manly of pursuits! Why, William Hazlitt, a prince among English essayists, whose writings are a beloved classic in our day, wrote in The New Monthly Magazine in these very years his own eloquent impression, and even introduces John Thurtell more than once as “Tom Turtle,” little thinking then of the fate that was so soon to overtake him. What could be more lyrical than this:
Reader, have you ever seen a fight? If not, you have a pleasure to come, at least if it is a fight like that between the Gas-man and Bill Neate.
And then the best historian of prize-fighting, Henry Downes Miles, the author of Pugilistica, has his own statement of the case. You will find it in his monograph on John Jackson, the pugilist who taught Lord Byron to box, and received the immortality of an eulogistic footnote in Don Juan. Here is Miles’s defence:
No small portion of the public has taken it for granted that pugilism and blackguardism are synonymous. It is as an antidote to these slanderers that we pen a candid history of the boxers; and taking the general habits of men of humble origin (elevated by their courage and bodily gifts to be the associates of those more fortunate in worldly position), we fearlessly maintain that the best of our boxers present as good samples of honesty, generosity of spirit, goodness of heart and humanity, as an equal number of men of any class of society.
From Samuel Johnson onwards literary England has had a kindness for the pugilist, although the magistrate has long, and rightly, ruled him out as impossible. Borrow carried his enthusiasm further than any, and no account of him that concentrates attention upon his accomplishment as a distributor of Bibles and ignores his delight in fisticuffs, has any grasp of the real George Borrow. Indeed it may be said, and will be shown in the course of our story, that Borrow entered upon Bible distribution in the spirit of a pugilist rather than that of an evangelist. But to return to Borrow’s pugilistic experiences. He claims, as we have seen, occasionally to have put on the gloves with John Thurtell. He describes vividly enough his own conflicts with the Flaming Tinman and with Petulengro. His one heroine, Isopel Berners, had “Fair Play and Long Melford” as her ideal, “Long Melford” being the good right-handed blow with which Lavengro conquered the Tinman. Isopel, we remember, had learned in Long Melford Union to “Fear God and take your own part!”
George Borrow, indeed, was at home with the whole army of prize-fighters, who came down to us like the Roman Caesars or the Kings of England in a noteworthy procession, their dynasty commencing with James Fig of Thame, who began to reign in 1719, and closing with Tom King, who beat Heenan in 1863, or with Jem Mace, who flourished in a measure until 1872. With what zest must Borrow have followed the account of the greatest battle of all, that between Heenan and Tom Sayers at Farnborough in 1860, when it was said that Parliament had been emptied to patronise a prize-fight; and this although Heenan complained that he had been chased out of eight counties. For by this time, in spite of lordly patronage, pugilism was doomed, and the more harmless boxing had taken its place. “Pity that corruption should have crept in amongst them,” sighed Lavengro in a memorable passage, in which he also has his paean of praise for the bruisers of England:
Let no one sneer at the bruisers of England—what were the gladiators of Rome, or the bull-fighters of Spain, in its palmiest days, compared to England’s bruisers?
Yes: Borrow was never hard on the bruisers of England, and followed their achievements, it may be said, from his cradle to his grave. His beloved father had brought him up, so to speak, upon memories of one who was champion before George was born—Big Ben Brain of Bristol. Brain, although always called “Big Ben,” was only 5 feet 10 in. high. He was for years a coal porter at a wharf off the Strand. It was in 1791 that Ben Brain won the championship which placed him upon a pinnacle in the minds of all robust people. The Duke of Hamilton once backed him against the then champion, Tom Johnson, for five hundred guineas. “Public expectation,” says The Oracle, a contemporary newspaper, “never was raised so high by any pugilistic contest; great bets were laid, and it is estimated £20,000 was wagered on this occasion.” Ben Brain was the undisputed conqueror, we are told, in eighteen rounds, occupying no more than twenty-one minutes. Brain died in 1794, and all the biographers tell of the piety of his end, so that Borrow’s father may have read the Bible to him in his last moments, as Borrow avers, but I very much doubt the accuracy of the following:
Honour to Brain, who four months after the event which I have now narrated was champion of England, having conquered the heroic Johnson. Honour to Brain, who, at the end of other four months, worn out by the dreadful blows which he had received in his manly combats, expired in the arms of my father, who read the Bible to him in his latter moments—Big Ben Brain.
Brain actually lived for four years after his fight with Johnson, but perhaps the fight in Hyde Park between Borrow’s father and Ben, as narrated in Lavengro, is all romancing. It makes good reading in any case, as does Borrow’s eulogy of some of his own contemporaries of the prize-ring.
It is all very accurate history. We know that there really was this wonderful gathering of the bruisers of England assembled in the neighbourhood of Norwich in July, 1820, that is to say, sixteen miles away at North Walsham. More than 25,000 men, it is estimated, gathered to see Edward Painter of Norwich fight Tom Oliver of London for a purse of a hundred guineas. There were three Belchers, heroes of the prize-ring, but Borrow here refers to Tom, whose younger brother, Jem, had died in 1811 at the age of thirty. Tom Belcher died in 1854 at the age of seventy-one. Thomas Cribb was champion of England from 1805 to 1820. One of Cribb’s greatest fights was with Jem Belcher in 1807, when, in the forty-first and last round, as we are told by the chroniclers, “Cribb proving the stronger man put in two weak blows, when Belcher, quite exhausted, fell upon the ropes and gave up the combat.” Cribb had a prolonged career of glory, but he died in poverty in 1848. Happier was an earlier champion, John Gully, who held the glorious honour for three years—from 1805 to 1808. Gully turned tavern-keeper, and making a fortune out of sundry speculations, entered Parliament as member for Pontefract, and lived to be eighty years of age.
It is necessary to dwell upon Borrow as the friend of prize-fighters, because no one understands Borrow who does not realise that his real interests were not in literature but in action. He would have liked to join the army but could not obtain a commission. And so he had to be content with such fighting as was possible. He cared more for the men who could use their fists than for those who could but wield the pen. He would, we may be sure, have rejoiced to know that many more have visited the tomb of Tom Sayers in Highgate Cemetery than have visited the tomb of George Eliot in the same burial-ground. A curious moral obliquity this, you may say. But to recognise it is to understand one side of Borrow, and an interesting side withal.
There has been much nonsense written concerning what has been called the “veiled period” of George Borrow’s life. This has arisen from a letter which Richard Ford of the Handbook for Travellers in Spain wrote to Borrow after a visit to him at Oulton in 1844. Borrow was full of his projected Lavengro, the idea of which he outlined to his friends. He was a genial man in those days, on the wave of a popular success. Was not The Bible in Spain passing merrily from edition to edition! Borrow, it is clear, told Ford that he was writing his “Autobiography”—he had no misgiving then as to what he should call it—and he evidently proposed to end it in 1825 and not in 1833, when the Bible Society gave him his real chance in life. His friend Ford indeed begged him not to “drop a curtain” over the eight years succeeding 1825. “No doubt,” says Ford, “it will excite a mysterious interest,” but then he adds in effect it will lead to a wrong construction being put upon the omission. Well, there can be but one interpretation, and that not an unnatural one. Borrow had a very rough time during these years. His vanity was hurt, and no wonder. It seems a strange matter to us now that Charles Dickens should have been ashamed of the blacking-bottle episode of his boyhood. Genius has a right to a poverty-stricken—even to a sordid, boyhood. But genius has no right to a sordid manhood, and here was George “Olaus” Borrow, who was able to claim the friendship of William Taylor, the German scholar; who was able to boast of his association with sound scholastic foundations, with the High School at Edinburgh and the Grammar School at Norwich; who was a great linguist and had made rare translations from the poetry of many nations, starving in the byways of England and of France. What a fate for such a man that he should have been so unhappy for eight years; should have led the most penurious of roving lives, and almost certainly have been in prison as a common tramp. [79] It was all very well to romance about a poverty-stricken youth. But when youth had fled there ceased to be romance, and only sordidness was forthcoming. From his twenty-third to his thirty-first year George Borrow was engaged in a hopeless quest for the means of making a living. There is, however, very little mystery. Many incidents of each of these years are revealed at one or other point. His home, to which he returned from time to time, was with his mother at the cottage in Willow Lane, Norwich. Whether he made sufficient profit out of a horse, as in The Romany Rye, to enable him to travel upon the proceeds, as Dr. Knapp thinks, we cannot say. Dr. Knapp is doubtless right in assuming that during this period he led “a life of roving adventure,” his own authorised version of his career at the time, as we may learn from the biography in his handwriting from Men of the Time. But how far this roving was confined to England, how far it extended to other lands, we do not know. We are, however, satisfied that he starved through it all, that he rarely had a penny in his pocket. At a later date he gave it to be understood at times that he had visited the East, and that India had revealed her glories to him. We do not believe it. Defoe was Borrow’s master in literature, and he shared Defoe’s right to lie magnificently on occasion. Borrow certainly did some travel in these years, but it was sordid, lacking in all dignity—never afterwards to be recalled. For the most part, however, he was in England. We know that Borrow was in Norwich in 1826, for we have seen him superintending the publication of the Romantic Ballads by subscription in that year. In that year also he wrote the letter to Haydon, the painter, to say that he was ready to sit for him, but that he was “going to the south of France in a little better than a fortnight.” We know also that he was in Norwich in 1827, because it was then, and not in 1818 as described in Lavengro, that he “doffed his hat” to the famous trotting stallion Marshland Shales, when that famous old horse was exhibited at Tombland Fair on the Castle Hill. We meet him next as the friend of Dr. Bowring. The letters to Bowring we must leave to another chapter, but they commence in 1829 and continue through 1830 and 1831. Through them all Borrow shows himself alive to the necessity of obtaining an appointment of some kind, and meanwhile he is hard at work upon his translations from various languages, which, in conjunction with Dr. Bowring, he is to issue as Songs of Scandinavia. It has been said that in 1829 he made the translation of the Memoirs of Vidocq, which appeared in that year with a short preface by the translator. [80a] But these little volumes bear no internal evidence of Borrow’s style, and there is no external evidence to support the assumption that he had a hand in their publication. His occasional references to Vidocq are probably due to the fact that he had read this little book.
I have before me one very lengthy manuscript of Borrow’s of this period. It is dated December, 1829, and is addressed, “To the Committee of the Honourable and Praiseworthy Association, known by the name of the Highland Society.” [80b] It is a proposal that they should publish in two thick octavo volumes a series of translations of the best and most approved poetry of the ancient and modern Scots-Gaelic bards. Borrow was willing to give two years to the project, for which he pleads “with no sordid motive.” It is a dignified letter, which will be found in one of Dr. Knapp’s appendices—so presumably Borrow made two copies of it. The offer was in any case declined, and so Borrow passed from disappointment to disappointment during these eight years, which no wonder he desired, in the coming years of fame and prosperity, to veil as much as possible. The lean years in the lives of any of us are not those upon which we delight to dwell, or upon which we most cheerfully look back. [80c]
“Poor George. . . . I wish he were making money. He works hard and remains poor”—thus wrote John Borrow to his mother in 1830 from Mexico, and it disposes in a measure of any suggestion of mystery with regard to five of those years that he wished to veil. They were not spent, it is clear, in rambling in the East, as he tried to persuade Colonel Napier many years later. They were spent for the most part in diligent attempt at the capture of words, in reading the poetry and the prose of many lands, and in making translations of unequal merit from these diverse tongues. This is indisputably brought home to me by the manuscripts in my possession. These manuscripts represent years of work. Borrow has been counted a considerable linguist, and he had assuredly a reading and speaking acquaintance with a great many languages. But this knowledge was acquired, as all knowledge is, with infinite trouble and patience. I have before me hundreds of small sheets of paper upon which are written English words and their equivalents in some twenty or thirty languages. These serve to show that Borrow learnt a language as a small boy in an old-fashioned system of education learns his Latin or French—by writing down simple words—“father,” “mother,” “horse,” “dog,” and so on with the same word in Latin or French in front of them. Of course Borrow had a superb memory and abundant enthusiasm, and so was enabled to add one language to another and to make his translations from such books as he could obtain with varied success. I believe that nearly all the books that he handled came from the Norwich library, and when Mrs. Borrow wrote to her elder son to say that George was working hard, as we may fairly assume, from the reply quoted, that she did, she was recalling this laborious work at translation that must have gone on for years. We have seen the first fruit in the translation from the German—or possibly from the French—of Klinger’s Faustus; we have seen it in Romantic Ballads from the Danish, the Irish, and the Swedish. Now there really seemed a chance of a more prosperous utilisation of his gift, for Borrow had found a zealous friend who was prepared to go forward with him in his work of giving to the English public translations from the literatures of the northern nations. This friend was Dr. John Bowring, who made a very substantial reputation in his day.
Bowring has told his own story in a volume of Autobiographical Recollections, a singularly dull book for a man whose career was at once so varied and so full of interest. He was born at Exeter in 1792 of an old Devonshire family, and entered a merchant’s office in his native city on leaving school. He early acquired a taste for the study of languages, and learnt French from a refugee priest precisely in the way in which Borrow had done. He also acquired Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch, continuing with a great variety of other languages. Indeed, only the very year after Borrow had published Faustus, he published his Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain, and the year after Borrow’s Romantic Ballads came Bowring’s Servian Popular Poetry. With such interest in common it was natural that the two men should be brought together, but Bowring had the qualities which enabled him to make a career for himself, and Borrow had not. In 1811, as a clerk in a London mercantile house, he was sent to Spain, and after this his travels were varied. He was in Russia in 1820, and in 1822 was arrested at Calais and thrown into prison, being suspected by the Bourbon Government of abetting the French Liberals. Canning as Foreign Minister took up his cause, and he was speedily released. He assisted Jeremy Bentham in founding The Westminster Review in 1824. Meanwhile he was seeking official employment, and in conjunction with Mr. Villiers, afterwards Earl of Clarendon, and that ambassador to Spain who befriended Borrow when he was in the Peninsula, became a commissioner to investigate the commercial relations between England and France. After the Reform Bill of 1832 Bowring was frequently a candidate for Parliament, and was finally elected for Bolton in 1841. In the meantime he assisted Cobden in the formation of the Anti-Corn Law League in 1838. Having suffered great monetary losses in the interval he applied for the appointment of Consul at Canton, of which place he afterwards became Governor, being knighted in 1854. At one period of his career at Hong Kong his conduct was made the subject of a vote of censure in Parliament, Lord Palmerston, however, warmly defending him. Finally returning to England in 1862, he continued his literary work with unfailing zest. He died at Exeter, in a house very near that in which he was born, in 1872. His extraordinary energies cannot be too much praised, and there is no doubt but that in addition to being the possessor of great learning he was a man of high character. His literary efforts were surprisingly varied. There are at least thirty-six volumes with his name on the title-page, most of them unreadable to-day; even such works, for example, as his Visit to the Philippine Isles and Siam and the Siamese, which involved travel into then little-known lands. Perhaps the only book by him that to-day commands attention is his translation of Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl. The most readable of many books by him into which I have dipped is his Servian Popular Poetry of 1827, in which we find interesting stories in verse that remind us of similar stories from the Danish in Borrow’s Romantic Ballads published only the year before. The extraordinary thing, indeed, is the many points of likeness between Borrow and Bowring. Both were remarkable linguists; both had spent some time in Spain and Russia; both had found themselves in foreign prisons. They were alike associated in some measure with Norwich—Bowring through friendship with Taylor—and I might go on to many other points of likeness or of contrast. It is natural, therefore, that the penniless Borrow should have welcomed acquaintance with the more prosperous scholar. Thus it is that, some thirty years later, Borrow described the introduction by Taylor:
The writer had just entered into his eighteenth year, when he met at the table of a certain Anglo-Germanist an individual, apparently somewhat under thirty, of middle stature, a thin and weaselly figure, a sallow complexion, a certain obliquity of vision, and a large pair of spectacles. This person, who had lately come from abroad, and had published a volume of translations, had attracted some slight notice in the literary world, and was looked upon as a kind of lion in a small provincial capital. After dinner he argued a great deal, spoke vehemently against the Church, and uttered the most desperate Radicalism that was perhaps ever heard, saying, he hoped that in a short time there would not be a king or queen in Europe, and inveighing bitterly against the English aristocracy, and against the Duke of Wellington in particular, whom he said, if he himself was ever president of an English republic—an event which he seemed to think by no means improbable—he would hang for certain infamous acts of profligacy and bloodshed which he had perpetrated in Spain. Being informed that the writer was something of a philologist, to which character the individual in question laid great pretensions, he came and sat down by him, and talked about languages and literature. The writer, who was only a boy, was a little frightened at first.
The quarrels of authors are frequently amusing but rarely edifying, and this hatred of Bowring that possessed the soul of poor Borrow in his later years is of the same texture as the rest. We shall never know the facts, but the position is comprehensible enough. Let us turn to the extant correspondence which, as far as we know, opened when Borrow paid what was probably his third visit to London in 1829:
To Dr. John Bowring
17 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. [Dec. 6, 1829.]
My dear Sir,—Lest I should intrude upon you when you are busy, I write to inquire when you will be unoccupied. I wish to shew you my translation of The Death of Balder, Ewald’s most celebrated production, which, if you approve of, you will perhaps render me some assistance in bringing forth, for I don’t know many publishers. I think this will be a proper time to introduce it to the British public, as your account of Danish literature will doubtless cause a sensation. My friend Mr. R. Taylor has my Kæmpe Viser, which he has read and approves of; but he is so very deeply occupied, that I am apprehensive he neglects them: but I am unwilling to take them out of his hands, lest I offend him. Your letting me know when I may call will greatly oblige,—Dear Sir, your most obedient servant,
George Borrow.
To Dr. John Bowring
17 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. [Dec. 28, 1829.]
My dear Sir,—I trouble you with these lines for the purpose of submitting a little project of mine for your approbation. When I had last the pleasure of being at yours, you mentioned that we might at some future period unite our strength in composing a kind of Danish Anthology. You know, as well as I, that by far the most remarkable portion of Danish poetry is comprised in those ancient popular productions termed Kæmpe Viser, which I have translated. Suppose we bring forward at once the first volume of the Danish Anthology, which should contain the heroic and supernatural songs of the K. V., which are certainly the most interesting; they are quite ready for the press with the necessary notes, and with an introduction which I am not ashamed of. The second volume might consist of the Historic songs and the ballads and Romances, this and the third volume, which should consist of the modern Danish poetry, and should commence with the celebrated “Ode to the Birds” by Morten Borup, might appear in company at the beginning of next season. To Ölenslager should be allotted the principal part of the fourth volume; and it is my opinion that amongst his minor pieces should be given a good translation of his Aladdin, by which alone he has rendered his claim to the title of a great poet indubitable. A proper Danish Anthology cannot be contained in less than 4 volumes, the literature being so copious. The first volume, as I said before, might appear instanter, with no further trouble to yourself than writing, if you should think fit, a page or two of introductory matter.—Yours most truly, my dear Sir,
George Borrow.
To Dr. John Bowring
17 Great Russell Street, Decr. 31, 1829.
My dear Sir,—I received your note, and as it appears that you will not be disengaged till next Friday evening (this day week) I will call then. You think that no more than two volumes can be ventured on. Well! be it so! The first volume can contain 70 choice Kæmpe Viser; viz. all the heroic, all the supernatural ballads (which two classes are by far the most interesting), and a few of the historic and romantic songs. The sooner the work is advertised the better, for I am terribly afraid of being forestalled in the Kæmpe Viser by some of those Scotch blackguards who affect to translate from all languages, of which they are fully as ignorant as Lockhart is of Spanish. I am quite ready with the first volume, which might appear by the middle of February (the best time in the whole season), and if we unite our strength in the second, I think we can produce something worthy of fame, for we shall have plenty of matter to employ talent upon.—Most truly yours,
George Borrow.
To Dr. John Bowring
17 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, Jany. 7, 1830.
My dear Sir,—I send the prospectus for your inspection and for the correction of your master hand. I have endeavoured to assume a Danish style, I know not whether I have been successful. Alter, I pray you, whatever false logic has crept into it, find a remedy for its incoherencies, and render it fit for its intended purpose. I have had for the two last days a rising headache which has almost prevented me doing anything. I sat down this morning and translated a hundred lines of the May-day; it is a fine piece.—Yours most truly, my dear Sir,
George Borrow.
To Dr. John Bowring
17 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, Jany. 14, 1830.
My dear Sir,—I approve of the prospectus in every respect; it is business-like, and there is nothing flashy in it. I do not wish to suggest one alteration. I am not idle: I translated yesterday from your volume longish Kæmpe Visers, among which is the “Death of King Hacon at Kirkwall in Orkney,” after his unsuccessful invasion of Scotland. To-day I translated “The Duke’s Daughter of Skage,” a noble ballad of 400 lines. When I call again I will, with your permission, retake Tullin and attack The Surveyor. Allow me, my dear Sir, to direct your attention to Ölenschlæger’s St. Hems Aftenspil, which is the last in his Digte of 1803. It contains his best lyrics, one or two of which I have translated. It might, I think, be contained within 70 pages, and I could translate it in 3 weeks. Were we to give the whole of it we should gratify Ölenschlæger’s wish expressed to you, that one of his larger pieces should appear. But it is for you to decide entirely on what is or what is not to be done. When you see the foreign editor I should feel much obliged if you would speak to him about my reviewing Tegner, and enquire whether a good article on Welsh poetry would be received. I have the advantage of not being a Welsh-man. I would speak the truth, and would give translations of some of the best Welsh poetry; and I really believe that my translations would not be the worst that have been made from the Welsh tongue.—Most truly yours,
G. Borrow.