More on Lavengro

Lavengro (which means 'word-master' in Romani) was originally planned as an autobiographical account of Borrow’s life prior to his experiences in Spain (as described in his best-seller The Bible In Spain), but it slowly morphed over the 14 years it took him to complete the project into something far more strange and beguiling and was finally brought out in two instalments, Lavengro in 1851 followed by The Romany Rye in 1857.

The story starts as a portrait of Borrow’s highly peripatetic childhood, moving around with the army all over Britain, but is told in a series of brilliant episodes rather than a continuous narrative. It then describes his adolescence in Norwich, voraciously studying languages but also associating with Gypsies and boxers. The scene then shifts to London, where George dreams of becoming a famous translator of foreign poetry, but ends up as a poorly paid hack journalist. He then quits London in disgust and spends an idyllic summer travelling around rural England, living as a Gypsy, and having a curious romance with a proudly independent peddler girl, Isopel Berners. All this is based on incidents in Borrow’s own life.

The bare bones of this story are then fleshed out with numerous encounters with a vast range of exotic characters, most of whom have a story to tell. Many of these characters and their stories are fictional creations, acting sometimes as a means for Borrow to examine his own strange and obsessive character (for example, the tale of The Author who would compulsively touch things), while others are quite surreal, such as the snake catcher’s account of meeting the king of the snakes, while the full force of Borrow’s disdain is reserved for the Roman Catholic church, represented by the character of a gin-drinking Catholic hedge priest known only as 'the man in black' who tries to convert Borrow to his cause. The book ends abruptly and unresolved, with George and Belle the peddler girl camped up in a secluded dingle.

Upon publication Lavengro was not a great critical success, mainly because Victorian readers expected another travelogue like his best-seller The Bible In Spain but were confused by this strange creation, with its groundbreaking mixture of fact and fiction. However, it has since come to be seen as Borrow’s masterpiece. In the early 20th century Lavengro was regularly reprinted and was elevated to almost cult status.