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Updated: June 13, 2025
A curious feature of Mrs Borrow's correspondence is her friendly conspiracies, sometimes with John Murray, sometimes with Woodfall, the printer, asking them to send encouraging letters that shall hearten Borrow to greater efforts. It must be borne in mind that Mrs Borrow had been in London a few days previously, in order to deliver to John Murray the manuscript of Lavengro.
"Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye" describe the author's early adventures and, at the same time, his later opinions and mature character.
Of these the most deliberate is the one that emerges from "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye." In these books, written after he had passed forty, he described the first twenty-two years of his life, without, so far as is known, using any notebooks or other contemporary documents.
Now that there was none, he denied that Lavengro was more than "a dream", forgetting that he had so often written of it as an autobiography, had even seen it advertised as such, and insisted that it was fiction. When Lavengro was published Borrow was an unhappy and disappointed man.
According to Borrow, the Petulengros were continually turning up wherever he might wander. Jasper Petulengro’s nature seems something akin to that of the Wandering Jew; and yet, if we may believe “Lavengro” and our own knowledge, the Smiths look upon East Anglia as their native heath.
It has been stated that those who know the gypsies can vouch for the fact that no such suggestion could have been made by a gypsy woman. It would appear that Isopel Berners existed, but the account of her given by Borrow in Lavengro and The Romany Rye is in all probability coloured, just as her stature was heightened by him. If she were taller than he, she must have appeared a giantess.
He stayed at home and he wrote "Lavengro," where, speaking of the rapid flow of time in the years of his youth, he says: "Since then it has flagged often enough; sometimes it has seemed to stand entirely still: and the reader may easily judge how it fares at the present, from the circumstance of my taking pen in hand, and endeavouring to write down the passages of my life a last resource with most people."
Above all, he read Defoe, and in the third chapter of "Lavengro" he has described his first sight of "Robinson Crusoe" as a little child: "The first object on which my eyes rested was a picture; it was exceedingly well executed, at least the scene which it represented made a vivid impression upon me, which would hardly have been the case had the artist not been faithful to nature.
Hence also the unhappy idlers of Verdun. What splendid loyalty there must have been in those humble Frenchmen which never allowed them for one instant to turn bitterly upon the author of all their great misfortunes. It is all brought vividly home by the description of their prisons given by Borrow in "Lavengro." This is the passage
To Borrow, a man must be ready and able to knock another man down if necessity arise. England had become ashamed of its bruisers long before Lavengro was written, and this flaunting in its face of creatures that it considered too low to be mentioned, gave mortal offence. That in Lavengro was the best descriptions of a fight in the language, only made the matter worse.
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