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My belief is that he never was popular among them, that he never attained a high place in the school, and he was a “free boy.” In those days there were a certain number of day boys at Norwich school, who were nominated by members of the Corporation, and who paid no tuition fees; they had to submit to a certain amount of snubbing at the hands of the boarders, who for the most part were the sons of the county gentry. Of course, such a proud boy as George Borrow would resent this, and it seems to have rankled with him all through his life. . . . To talk of Borrow as a “scholar” is absurd. “A picker-up of learning’s crumbs” he was, but he was absolutely without any of the training or the instincts of a scholar. He had had little education till he came to Norwich, and was at the Grammar School little more than two years. It is pretty certain that he knew no Greek when he entered there, and he never seems to have acquired more than the elements of that language.

p. 46Yet the only real influence that Borrow carried away from the Grammar School was concerned with foreign languages. He did take to the French master and exiled priest, Thomas d’Eterville, a native of Caen, who had emigrated to Norwich in 1793. D’Eterville taught French, Italian, and apparently, to Borrow, a little Spanish; and Borrow, with his wonderful memory, must have been his favourite pupil. In the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of Lavengro he is pleasantly described by his pupil, who adds, with characteristic “bluff,” that d’Eterville said “on our arrival at the conclusion of Dante’s Hell, ‘vous serez un jour un grand philologue, mon cher.’”

Borrow’s biographers have dwelt at length upon one episode of his schooldays—the flogging he received from Valpy for playing truant with three other boys. One, by name John Dalrymple, faltered on the way, the two faithful followers of George in his escapade being two brothers named Theodosius and Francis Purland, whose father kept a chemist’s shop in Norwich. The three boys wandered away as far as Acle, eleven miles from Norwich, whence they were ignominiously brought back and birched. John Dalrymple’s brother Arthur, son of a distinguished Norwich surgeon, who became Clerk of the Peace at Norwich in 1854, and died in 1868, has left a memorandum concerning Borrow, from which I take the following extract:

I was at school with Borrow at the Free School, Norwich, under the Rev. E. Valpy. He was an odd, wild boy, and always wanting to turn Robinson Crusoe or Buccaneer. My brother John was about Borrow’s age, and on one occasion Borrow, John, and another, whose name I forget, determined to run away and turn pirates. John carried an old horse pistol and some potatoes as his contribution to the general stock, but his zeal was soon exhausted, he turned back at Thorpe Lunatic Asylum; but Borrow went off to Yarmouth, and lived on the Caister Denes for a few days. I don’t remember hearing of any exploits. He had a wonderful facility for learning languages, which, however, he never appears to have turned to account.

James Martineau, afterwards a popular preacher and a distinguished theologian of the Unitarian creed, here comes into the story. He was a contemporary with Borrow at the Norwich Grammar School as already stated, but the two boys had little in common. There was nothing of the vagabond about James Martineau, and concerning Borrow—p. 47if on no other subject—he would probably have agreed with his sister Harriet, whose views we shall quote in a later chapter. In Martineau’s Memoirs, voluminous and dull, there is only one reference to Borrow; [47] but a correspondent once ventured to approach the eminent divine concerning the rumour as to Martineau’s part in the birching of the author of The Bible in Spain, and received the following letter:

35 Gordon Square, London, W.C., December 6, 1895.

Dear Sir,—Two or three years ago Mr. Egmont Hake (author, I think, of a life of Gordon) sought an interview with me, as reputed to be Borrow’s sole surviving schoolfellow, in order to gather information or test traditions about his schooldays. This was with a view to a memoir which he was compiling, he said, out of the literary remains which had been committed to him by his executors. I communicated to him such recollections as I could clearly depend upon and leave at his disposal for publication or for suppression as he might think fit. Under these circumstances I feel that they are rightfully his, and that I am restrained from placing them at disposal elsewhere unless and until he renounces his claim upon them. But though I cannot repeat them at length for public use, I am not precluded from correcting inaccuracies in stories already in circulation, and may therefore say that Mr. Arthur Dalrymple’s version of the Yarmouth escapade is wrong in making his brother John a partner in the transaction. John had quite too much sense for that; the only victims of Borrow’s romance were two or three silly boys—mere lackeys of Borrow’s commanding will—who helped him to make up a kit for the common knapsack by pilferings out of their fathers’ shops.

The Norwich gentleman who fell in with the boys lying in the hedgerow near the half-way inn knew one of them, and wormed out of him the drift of their enterprise, and engaging a postchaise packed them all into it, and in his gig saw them safe home.

It is true that I had to hoist (not “horse”) Borrow for his flogging, but not that there was anything exceptional or capable of leaving permanent scars in the infliction. Mr. Valpy was not given to excess of that kind.

I have never read Lavengro, and cannot give any opinion about the correct spelling of the “Exul sacerdos” name.

Borrow’s romance and William Taylor’s love of paradox would doubtless often run together, like a pair of well-matched steeds, and carry them away in the same direction. But there was a strong—almost wild—religious sentiment in Borrow, of which only faint traces appear in W. T. In Borrow it had always a tendency to pass from a sympathetic to an antipathetic form. He p. 48used to gather about him three or four favourite schoolfellows, after they had learned their class lesson and before the class was called up, and with a sheet of paper and book on his knee, invent and tell a story, making rapid little pictures of each dramatis persona that came upon the stage. The plot was woven and spread out with much ingenuity, and the characters were various and well discriminated. But two of them were sure to turn up in every tale, the Devil and the Pope, and the working of the drama invariably had the same issue—the utter ruin and disgrace of these two potentates. I had often thought that there was a presage here of the mission which produced The Bible in Spain.—I am, dear sir, very truly yours,

James Martineau.

Yet it is amusing to trace the story through various phases. Dr. Martineau’s letter was the outcome of his attention being called to a statement made in a letter written by a lady in Hampstead to a friend in Norwich, which runs as follows:

11th Nov. 1893.

Dr. Martineau, to amuse some boys at a school treat, told us about George Borrow, his schoolfellow: he was always reading adventures of smugglers and pirates, etc., and at last, to carry out his ideas, got a set of his schoolfellows to promise to join him in an expedition to Yarmouth, where he had heard of a ship that he thought would take them. The boys saved all the food they could from their meals, and what money they had, and one morning started very early to walk to Yarmouth. They got halfway—to Blofield, I think—when they were so tired they had to rest by the roadside, and eat their lunch. While they were resting a gentleman, whose son was at the Free School, passed in his gig. He thought it was very odd so many boys, some of whom he had seen, should be waiting about, so he drove back and asked them if they would come to dine with him at the inn. Of course they were only too glad, poor boys: but as soon as he had got them all in he sent his servant with a letter to Mr. Valpy, who sent a coach and brought them all back. You know what a cruel man that Dr. V. was. He made Dr. Martineau take poor Borrow on his back, “horse him,” I think he called it, and flogged him so that Dr. M. said he would carry the marks for the rest of his life, and he had to keep his bed for a fortnight. The other boys got off with lighter punishment, but Borrow was the ringleader. Those were the “good old times”! I have heard Dr. M. say that not for another life would he go through the misery he suffered as “town boy” at that school.

Miss Frances Power Cobbe, who lived next door to Borrow in Hereford Square, Brompton, in the ’sixties, as we shall see later, has a word to say on the point:

p. 49Dr. Martineau once told me that he and Borrow had been schoolfellows at Norwich some sixty years before. Borrow had persuaded several of his other companions to rob their fathers’ tills, and then the party set forth to join some smugglers on the coast. By degrees the truants all fell out of line and were picked up, tired and hungry, along the road, and brought back to Norwich School, where condign chastisement awaited them. George Borrow, it seems, received his large share horsed on James Martineau’s back! The early connection between the two old men, as I knew them, was irresistibly comic to my mind. Somehow when I asked Mr. Borrow once to come and meet some friends at our house he accepted our invitation as usual, but, on finding that Dr. Martineau was to be of the party, hastily withdrew his acceptance on a transparent excuse; nor did he ever after attend our little assemblies without first ascertaining that Dr. Martineau was not to be present.

Mr. Valpy of the Norwich Grammar School is scarcely to be blamed that he was not able to make separate rules for a quite abnormal boy. Yet, if he could have known, Borrow was better employed playing truant and living up to his life-work as a glorified vagabond than in studying in the ordinary school routine. George Borrow belonged to a type of boy—there are many such—who learn much more out of school than in its bounds; and the boy Borrow, picking up brother vagabonds in Tombland Fair, and already beginning, in his own peculiar way, his language craze, was laying the foundations that made Lavengro possible.

CHAPTER VII In a Lawyer’s Office

Doubts were very frequently expressed in Borrow’s lifetime as to his having really been articled to a solicitor, but that point has been set at rest by reference to the Record Office. Borrow was articled to Simpson and Rackham of Tuck’s Court, St. Giles’s, Norwich, “for the term of five years”—from March, 1819, to March, 1824,—and these five years were spent in and about Norwich, and were full of adventure of a kind with which the law had nothing to do. If Borrow had had the makings of a lawyer he could not have entered the profession under happier auspices. The firm was an old established one even in his day. It had been established in Tuck’s Court as Simpson and Rackham, then it became Rackham and Morse, Rackham, Cooke and Rackham, and Rackham and Cooke; finally, Tom Rackham, a famous Norwich man in his day, moved to another office, and the firm of lawyers who at present occupy the original offices is called Leathes Prior and Sons. Borrow has told us frankly what a poor lawyer’s clerk he made—he was always thinking of things remote from that profession, of gypsies, of prize-fighters, and of word-makers. Yet he loved the head of the firm, William Simpson, who must have been a kind and tolerant guide to the curious youth. Simpson was for a time Town Clerk of Norwich, and his portrait hangs in the Blackfriars Hall. Borrow went to live with Mr. Simpson in the Upper Close near the Grammar School. Archdeacon Groome recalled having seen Borrow “reserved and solitary” haunting the precincts of the playground; another schoolboy, William Drake, remembered him as “tall, spare, dark-complexioned.” [50]

Borrow tells us how at this time he studied the Welsh language and later the Danish; his master said that his inattention would assuredly make him a bankrupt, and his father sighed over his eccentric and impracticable son. p. 51The passion for languages had indeed caught hold of Borrow. Among my Borrow papers I find a memorandum in the handwriting of his stepdaughter, in which she says:

I have often heard his mother say, that when a mere child of eight or nine years, all his pocket-money was spent in purchasing foreign Dictionaries and Grammars; he formed an acquaintance with an old woman who kept a bookstall in the market-place of Norwich, whose son went voyages to Holland with cattle, and brought home Dutch books, which were eagerly bought by little George. One day the old woman was crying, and told him that her son was in prison. “For doing what?” asked the child. “For taking a silk handkerchief out of a gentleman’s pocket.” “Then,” said the boy, “your son stole the pocket handkerchief?” “No dear, no, my son did not steal,—he only glyfaked.”

We have no difficulty in recognising here the heroine of the Moll Flanders episode in Lavengro. But it was not from casual meetings with Welsh grooms and Danes and Dutchmen that Borrow acquired even such command of various languages as was undoubtedly his. We have it on the authority of an old fellow-pupil at the Grammar School, Burcham, afterwards a London police-magistrate, that William Taylor gave him lessons in German, [51] but he acquired most of his varied knowledge in these impressionable years in the Corporation Library of Norwich. Dr. Knapp found, in his very laudable examination of some of the books, Borrow’s neat pencil notes, the making of which was not laudable on the part of his hero. One book here marked was on ancient Danish literature, the author of which, Olaus Wormius, gave him the hint for calling himself Olaus Borrow for a time—a signature that we find in some of Borrow’s published translations. Borrow at this time had aspirations of a literary kind, and Thomas Campbell accepted a translation of Schiller’s Diver, which was sighed “O. B.” There were also translations from the German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish, in the Monthly Magazine. Clearly Borrow was becoming a formidable linguist, if not a very exact master of words. Still he remained a vagabond, and loved to wander over Mousehold Heath, to the gypsy encampment, and to make friends with the Romany folk; he loved also to haunt the horse fairs for which Norwich was so celebrated; and he was not averse from the companionship of wilder spirits p. 52who loved pugilism, if we may trust Lavengro, and if we may assume, as we justly may, that he many times cast youthful, sympathetic eyes on John Thurtell in these years, the to-be murderer of Weare, then actually living with his father in a house on the Ipswich Road, Thurtell, the father, being in no mean position in the city—an alderman, and a sheriff in 1815. Yes, there was plenty to do and to see in Norwich, and Borrow’s memories of it were nearly always kindly.

At the very centre of Borrow’s Norwich life was William Taylor, concerning whom we have already written much. It was a Jew named Mousha, a quack it appears, who pretended to know German and Hebrew, and had but a smattering of either language, who first introduced Borrow to Taylor, and there is a fine dialogue between the two in Lavengro, of which this is the closing fragment: