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Updated: June 20, 2025
There he tells of his astonishment at the success of "The Zincali," and of John Murray bidding him not to think too much of the book but to try again and avoid "Gypsy poetry, dry laws, and compilations from dull Spanish authors." "Borromeo," he makes Murray say to him, "Borromeo, don't believe all you hear, nor think that you have accomplished anything so very extraordinary. . . ."
He was glad the book had sold, as he knew it would, and he would like a rough estimate of the profits. A few days later he writes to John Murray, Junr., with reference to a new edition of The Zincali, saying that he finds "that there is far more connection between the first and second volumes than he had imagined," and begging that the reprint may be the same as the first.
But as a matter of fact "The Zincali" had no great success in either public or literary esteem, and Ford's criticism was passed on the manuscript, not the printed book. Borrow and his wife took about six months to prepare the letters for publication as a book. He took great pains with the writing and only worked when he was in the mood.
When indignant with the Bible Society in 1838 he suggested retiring to "the Wilds of Tartary or the Zigani camps of Siberia." He continued to suggest China even after his engagement to Mrs. Clarke. Just as he played up to the Secretary in conversation, so he played up to the friends and the public who were allured by the stories left untold or half-told in "The Zincali" and "The Bible in Spain."
Reader, do you remember the scene in George Borrow's "Gipsies in Spain," in which the woman blesses the child in Spanish, and mutters curses on it meanwhile in Zincali?
Spain was to him "the most magnificent country in the world": it was also "one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is not treated with contempt, and I may add, where the wealthy are not blindly idolized." His book is a song of wild Spain when Spain was Spain. Borrow, as we already know, had in him many of the powers that go to make a great book, yet "The Zincali" was not a great book.
There was something of the same atmosphere in his letters as in those of John Hasfeldt: a frank, affectionate interest in Borrow and what affected him that it was impossible to resent. "How I wish you had given us more about yourself," he wrote to Borrow apropos of The Zincali, "instead of the extracts from those blunder-headed old Spaniards, who knew nothing about Gypsies!
It was at this town of Badajoz, the capital of Estremadura, that I first fell in with those singular people, the Zincali, Gitanos, or Spanish gypsies. It was here that I first preached the gospel to the gypsy people, and commenced that translation of the New Testament in the Spanish gypsy tongue, a portion of which I subsequently printed at Madrid.
By the end of 1842 he was suggesting a book on his early life, studies and adventures, Gypsies, boxers, philosophers; and he afterwards announced that "Lavengro" was planned and the characters sketched in 1842 and 1843. He saw himself as a public figure that had to be treated heroically. Read, for example, his preface to the second edition of "The Zincali," dated March 1, 1843.
He was now drawing entirely from "his own well," and when the book was out Ford took care to remark that the author had cast aside the learned books which he had used as swimming corks in the "Zincali," and now "leaped boldly into the tide" unaided.
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