Ten Reasons to Read George Borrow

1. Borrow is unique, a genuinely original voice. There is nobody else in English literature like Borrow, and he is like nobody else. In his books he creates from his own experiences a hyper-realistic but highly exotic universe, populated with a cast of strange and eccentric characters, not the least of which is the character of the narrator, George Borrow.

2. People will always be intrigued about how 'true' Borrow’s books are. Borrovians (as his fans call themselves) have spent vast amounts of time and energy trying to identify the places and the people that Borrow describes. Which only goes to show that we really want the world that Borrow created to be true, even though we suspect that for Borrow telling tall tales was often the best way to tell the truth.

3. Borrow is often a very amusing writer. His humour is almost always ironic, sardonic, very dry, often self-deprecating. It is said that Borrow never laughed and rarely smiled, but his eyes would often twinkle.

4. Borrow is a 'lavengro' ('word-master' in Romani), able to construct long and complex sentences, piling up the clauses one after another before bringing them all neatly to a conclusion; but he is equally adept at transcribing the colloquial language of ordinary conversation, and in using plain and straightforward language. His descriptions of people and places are often masterpieces of precision and detail.

5. His books are a fascinating description of a world that is now long past, and even at the time was rapidly disappearing. Lavengro takes place at the very end of that long period of history when the only way to travel was by foot, by horse, or by sail, before mechanised power would revolutionise transport and human society. The industrial revolution had started, but its influence was still barely felt in the rural world that Borrow describes.

6. In Lavengro /The Romany Rye Borrow is describing late Georgian and Regency England, but this is far from the middle-class and upper-class milieu of his near contemporaries such as Jane Austen or the Brontes. Borrow’s world is mainly populated with the working class and the dispossessed, people who rarely featured in the literature of that time except as light relief. In Borrow’s books it is the lower classes and the dispossessed who are taken seriously, while the pretensions of the middle and upper classes are the light relief.

7. Borrow’s description of the Gypsies and their lifestyle was groundbreaking. He gained their trust because he never patronised them. Before Borrow, Gypsies were universally despised and feared; after Borrow, they became fascinating romantic outsiders. Borrow’s pioneering work inspired generations of scholars, academics, and linguists to further explore the language, customs, and history of the Romani people.

8. In Isopel Berners we have a character who should be a proto-feminist icon. Here is a portrait of a working-class woman who is strong, independent, feisty, able to defend herself and to speak her own mind. She demands to be treated as an equal, and to be treated with respect. She is handsome rather than pretty and never resorts to feminine wiles to get her way. There is no other woman in nineteenth-century literature quite like her.

9. Borrow was physically very strong and loved boxing: it was the martial art of old England, requiring skill and discipline, and was based on the concept of fair play. But this was also a time when England, especially in the rural areas, was like the lawless Wild West, and you had to be ready to defend yourself with your fists. 

10.  Bible in Spain is one of the most interesting and entertaining books written about Spain in the early nineteenth century.