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Isopel Berners The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 By: George Henry Borrow (1803-1881) |
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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 authority, is astonishing... Continue reading book >>
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