East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations. James Ewing Ritchie
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One good anecdote I heard of George Borrow the last time I was in the neighbourhood, which is worth repeating. My informant was an Independent minister, at that time supplying the pulpit at Lowestoft, and staying at Oulton Hall, then inhabited by a worthy Dissenting tenant. One night a meeting of the Bible Society was held at Mutford Bridge, at which the party from the Hall attended, and where George Borrow was one of the speakers. After the meeting was over, all the speakers went back to supper at Oulton Hall, and my friend among them, who, in the course of the supper, found himself attacked very violently by the clergyman for holding Calvinistic opinions. Naturally my friend replied that the clergyman was bound to do the same. ‘How do you make that out?’ ‘Why, the Articles of your Church are Calvinistic, and to them you have sworn assent.’ ‘Oh yes, but there is a way of explaining them away.’ ‘How so?’ said my friend. ‘Oh,’ replied the clergyman, ‘we are not bound to take the words in their natural sense.’ My friend, an honest, blunt East Anglian, intimated that he did not understand that way of evading the difficulty; but he was then a young man, and did not like to continue the discussion further. However, George Borrow, who had not said a word hitherto, entered into the discussion, opening fire on the clergyman in a very unexpected manner, and giving him such a setting down as the hearers, at any rate, never forgot. All the sophistry about the non-natural meaning of terms was held up by Borrow to ridicule, even contempt; and the clergyman was beaten at every point. ‘Never,’ says my friend, ‘did I hear one man give another such a dressing as on that occasion.’ It was not always, however, that Borrow thus shone. In the neighbourhood of Bungay lived a gentleman much given to collect around him men of literary taste and culture. A lecture was to be given in the neighbourhood, and all the men of light and leading around were invited. George Borrow was one of the earliest arrivals, and seated himself before the fire with a book in his hand, over which he nodded superciliously, as the host brought up all his guests in succession to be introduced to the lion of the town. At dinner which followed, which was rather a jovial one, and at which the bottle went round freely, so loud and general was the conversation that my friend, a clever lawyer, with remarkably good ears, was quite unable to catch a sentence from the great author’s lips. Perhaps Borrow really did say nothing, or next to nothing. It is quite as likely that he did as not, as I have already informed the reader that ‘he was a funny-tempered man.’
‘Catherine Gurney,’ writes Caroline Fox, ‘gave us a note to George Borrow, so on him we called – a tall, ungainly man, with great physical strength, quick, penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable tone and pronunciation.’ We gather from the same lady that it was Joseph John Gurney who recommended George Borrow to the Committee of the Bible Society. ‘So he stalked up to London, and they gave him a hymn to translate into the Manchow language, and the same to one of their people to translate also. When compared they proved to be very different. When put before their reader, he had the candour to say that Borrow’s was much the better of the two. On this they sent him to Petersburg to get it printed, and then gave him business in Portugal.’
One thing is clear – that Borrow was a lonely man, and evidently one who did not hold the resources of civilization in such esteem as Mr. Gladstone does. He loved Nature and her ways, and people like the gipsies, who are supposed to be of a similar way of thinking. He eschewed the hum of cities and the roar of the ‘madding crowd.’ He was big in body and in mind, and wanted elbow-room; and yet what would he have been if he had not lived in a city, and come under the stimulative influence of such men as Edward Taylor, of Norwich? It is idle to complain of cities, however they sully the air, and deface the land, and pollute the water, and rear the weak and vicious and the wicked – to remind us how low and depraved human nature can become when it is cut off from communion with Nature and Nature’s God. Borrow owed much to cities, and was best appreciated by the men who dwelt in them. There is often a good deal of affectation about the love of rural solitude, nor does it often last long when there is a wife to have a voice in the matter. Yet in Borrow undoubtedly the feeling was sincere, and of him Wordsworth might have written —
‘As in the eye of Nature he has lived,
So in the eye of Nature let him die.’
Lowestoft was a frequent attraction for a youthful ramble – perhaps almost too far, unless one could manage to get a lift in a little yellow-painted black-bodied vehicle called a whisky, which was grandfather’s property, and into the shafts of which could be put any spare quadruped, whether donkey, or mule, or pony, it mattered little, and which afforded a considerable relief when a trip as far as Lowestoft was determined on. At that time there was no harbour, and the town consisted simply of one High Street, gradually rising towards the north, with a fine space for boys to play in between the cliff and the sea, called the denes. I can well remember being taken to view the works of the harbour before the water was let