BORROW, GEORGE HENRY (1803-1881), English traveller, linguist and author, was born at East Dereham, Norfolk, on July 5, 18o3, of a middle-class Cornish family. From 1816 to 1818 Borrow attended the grammar school at Norwich. After leaving school he was articled to a firm of Norwich solicitors, where he neglected law, but studied languages. Encouraged by William Taylor, the friend of Southey, he picked up a knowledge of French, German, Danish, Welsh, Irish, Latin, Greek and, for he was already attracted by the gipsies, Romany. On the death of his father, in 1824, he went to London to seek his fortune as a literary adventurer. In 1826 he published a volume of Romantic Ballads translated from the Danish. Dissatisfied, Bor row began tramping. As he stood considerably more than 6ft. in height, was a fairly trained athlete, and had a countenance of extraordinary impressiveness, if not of commanding beauty— Greek in type, with a dash of the Hebrew—we may assume that there had never before appeared on the English high-roads so majestic-looking a tramp as Borrow. He soon found himself on Salisbury Plain. Then his extraordinary adventures began. He met the splendid road-girl, born at Long Melford workhouse, whom he has immortalized under the name of Isopel Berners. It would be a mistake to accept Lavengro and The Romany Rye as a strict autobiographical record. One of his biographers, Mr. Edward Thomas, has said of Lavengro, "a representation of a man's life in the backward dream of memory." As agent to the Bible Society, Borrow visited St. Petersburg , where he published Targum, or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and Dialects (1835). He then visited Spain, Portugal and Morocco (1835-40). From 1837 to he acted as correspondent to the Morning Herald. The result of these travels and adventures was the publication, in 1841, of Zincali, or The Gypsies in Spain. In 1843 appeared The Bible in Spain, which suddenly made Borrow famous. Every page of the book glows with freshness, picturesqueness and vivacity. In 1840 he married Mary Clarke, the widow of a naval officer. Probably Borrow would never have told the world about his vagabond life in England as a hedgesmith had not The Bible in Spain made him famous as a wanderer. Lavengro appeared in 1851 with a success which, compared with that of The Bible in Spain, was at the time only partial. In 1857 he published the sequel, The Romany Rye. In 1844 he travelled in south-eastern Europe, and in 1854 he made a tour with his step-daughter in Wales. This tour he described in Wild Wales, published in 1862. In 1874 he brought out a volume of ill-digested material upon the Romany tongue, Romano Lavo-lil, or Word-book of the Gypsy Language.
He died at Oulton, July 26, 1881. The variety of Borrow's attain ments is shown by his translation of the Church of England Homilies into Manchu, of the Gospel of St. Luke into the Git dialect of the Gitanos, of The Sleeping Bard from the Cambrian British and of Bluebird into Turkish.