Borrow, George (Henry)

BORROW, GEORGE (HENRY): English adventurer and writer; b. at East Dereham (15 m. w.n.w. of Norwich), Norfolk, July 5, 1803; d. at Oulton (15 m. s.e. of Norwich), Suffolk, July 26, 1881. His boyhood was unsettled, his father, a soldier, moving about the country with his regiment. In 1819 he was articled to a solicitor at Norwich, but abandoned the work, went to London, and lived as a hack writer for the publishers. Then he took to wandering about England, and visited France, Spain, and Italy. In 1833 he was sent by the British and Foreign Bible Society to St. Petersburg to superintend the publication of a Manchu translation of the New Testament (published in eight volumes, 1835); he continued in the service of the Society, most of the time in Spain, till 1840. Then he married and adopted a more settled life in England. He had much aptitude for languages 237and acquired a knowledge, though not scientific, of many tongues, being particularly noted for his acquaintance with the Romany, the dialect of the Gipsies, with whom he associated much both on his wanderings and after his return to England. He published a Romany word-book (London, 1874), translations, and romances which tell the story of his life with more or less fiction interwoven. He edited a translation of the New Testament into Spanish (Madrid, 1837) and translated the Gospel of Luke into the dialect of tile Gitanos (Spanish Gipsies; 1837) and into Basque (1838). Complete editions of his works were published in five volumes in London and New York. The best known of them are The Zincali; or an Account of the Gipsies in Spain (2 vols., London, 1841) and The Bible in Spain (3 vols., 1843).

Bibliography: W. I. Knapp, The Life, Writings, and Correspondence of George Borrow, 2 vols., London, 1899; W. A. Dutt, George Borrow in East Anglia, ib. 1896; DNB, v, 407–408.