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Updated: June 13, 2025
With regard to this veiled period, people who read the idyllic pictures in ‘Lavengro’ and ‘The Romany Rye’ of the life of a gipsy gentleman working as a hedge-smith in the dingle or by the roadside seem to forget that Borrow was then working not for amusement, but for bread, and they forget how scant the bread must have been that could be bought for the odd sixpence or the few coppers that he was able to earn.
He spoke of Richard Jefferies with an intimate affection as though he had known the man. He gave Harry some of his enthusiasm, and he lent him "Lavengro." He described it and Harry compared mentally Isobel Berners with Mary Bethel. Then they went up to the little drawing-room an ugly room, but redeemed by a great window overlooking the sea, and a large photograph of Mary on the mantelpiece.
To the imaginative intellectual, Truth or Fiction are matters of small importance, he judges by Art; but to the general public of limited intellectual capacity, Truth is appreciated out of all proportion to its artistic importance. If Borrow had published The Bible in Spain after the failure of Lavengro, it would in all probability have been as successful as it was appearing before.
In this work, published in two volumes in 1857, George Borrow continued the "kind of biography in the Robinson Crusoe style" which he had begun in the three volumes of "Lavengro," issued six years earlier.
"The book isn't true," say they. Now one of the principal reasons with those that have attacked Lavengro for their abuse of it is, that it is particularly true in one instance, namely, that it exposes their own nonsense, their love of humbug, their slavishness, their dressings, their goings out, their scraping and bowing to great people; it is the showing up of "gentility-nonsense" in Lavengro that has been one principal reason for raising the above cry; for in Lavengro is denounced the besetting folly of the English people, a folly which those who call themselves guardians of the public taste are far from being above.
Poetry is ageless, and such passages as the description of the sunrise over Stonehenge should have found some, at least, to welcome them, even when found in juxtaposition with bruisers and gypsies. Borrow loved to mystify, but in Lavengro he had overreached himself.
Now as it is clearly demonstrable that a person may be perfectly genteel according to some standard or other, and yet be no gentleman, so it is demonstrable that a person may have no pretensions to gentility, and yet be a gentleman. For example, there is Lavengro! Would the admirers of the emperor, or the admirers of those who admire the emperor, or the admirers of Mr.
A comparison of Lavengro with Borrow's letters to the Bible Society is instructive; it is the same Borrow that appears in both, with the sole difference that in the Letters he is less mysterious, less in the limelight than in Lavengro.
"How do you know so much about them, Bessie, if you never saw anything of them when you were in Hedgeville?" "I read a book about them once. It's called 'Lavengro, and it's by a man who's been dead a long time now; his name was Borrow." "What a funny name! I never heard of that book, but I'll get it and read it when I get home. It tells about the gypsies, you say?" "Yes.
But no one could raise this objection to Borrow. A month's reading even for a leisurely reader will master all that he has written. There are "Lavengro," "The Bible in Spain," "Romany Rye," and, finally, if you wish to go further, "Wild Wales." Only four books not much to found a great reputation upon but, then, there are no other four books quite like them in the language.
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