No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
With a few exceptions, reviewers in 1851 found little formal unity in George Borrow's Lavengro, but rather thought it a series of slightly interrelated sketches coming to an abrupt, inconclusive end. As they read a work not yet completed, however, their estimate is understandable, for The Romany Rye, comprising about the last third of the entire story, did not appear till 1857. Later critics, even with the complete Lavengro-Romany Rye before them, have paid little or no attention to its form. Their tendency has been to characterize the work, along with Borrow's other books, as generally “episodic” and “picaresque.” Remarks such as these are typical: “[Borrow's] books are planless, as picaresque books are apt to be”; “Borrow … possessed no idea of construction”; and “Lavengro is no more than a collection of incidents and dialogues.” A recent and distinguished literary history describes Borrow's major works as “episodic, inchoate, and inconsequential” and “strange, untidy, racy.” Edd Winfield Parks is unusual among critics in that he recognizes the “creative” and “conscious artist” in Borrow, yet he says: “Here [in Borrow's works] is no structural art, no objectified form; it is not as an artist that Borrow must be judged.”
1 Quotations, respectively, from Hugh Walker, “Critical and Miscellaneous Prose”, CHEL, xrv, 161; Herbert S. Gorman, “George Borrow, Friend of Tinkers and Gypsies”, New York Times Book Review, Dec. 23, 1923, p. 15; and Bernard Groom, A Literary History of England (New York, 1929), p. 345. For similar attitudes, see, e.g., Robert M. Lovett and Helen S. Hughes, The History of the Novel in England (Boston, [1932]), pp. 285–286; George Saintsbury, “George Borrow”, Collected Essays and Papers (London and New York, 1923), ii, 61, 68; Peter Quennell, review of Borrow's Celtic Bards, Chiefs and Kings, New Statesman, xxxii (1929), 414; and Thomas Seccombe, Introduction to Lavengro (Everyman's, 1906), p. xxv.
2 Samuel C. Chew, “The Nineteenth Century and After”, Book iv of A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York and London, [1948]), p. 1334.
3 “Portrait of Lavengro: a Biographical Essay on George Borrow”, Segments of Southern Thought (Athens [Ga.], 1938), p. 317.
4 See John E. Tilford, Jr., “The Critical Approach to Lavengro-Romany Rye”, SP, XLVI (1949), 79–96.
5 Troy C. Crenshaw, the first modern critic to give Borrow credit for trying to make an integrated narrative in this work and to see some of the means he used, notes that Borrow employs many common devices to tie his story together and shows especially that some “coherence” is achieved through the “recurrence” of certain “characters” (the Petulengros, the man in black, the apple-woman, Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, the thimble-rigger) and “themes” (the doctrine of necessity, Catholicism, literary criticism, philology, the reality of existence). But Crenshaw allows the novel no more than “coherence”; it has no “unity”, he says, because after the first twenty-eight chapters it becomes episodic and digressive. (George Borrow and the Borrovian Cult [unpublished doctoral dissertation, Univ. of Texas, 1937], pp. 39–57.)
6 I shall call the stages Parts i, ii, and iii; and to emphasize continuity, I shall refer to the 147 chapters of the novel in sequential Roman numerals. As Lavengro has 100 chapters, any chapter number prefixed by “C” refers to The Romany Rye. Page references are to the John Murray Definitive Edition of the books, ed. W. I. Knapp (London, 1900).
7 Chap. xlviii, p. 275.
8 The rich author (Chaps, LXIV–LXVI), Peter Williams (Chaps, LXXV–LXXVII), the postillion (Chaps, xcvin–c), the “china-teacup” man (Chaps, cxxxiii–cxxxiv), Jack Dale (Chaps, CXLI–CXLII), and Murtagh (Chaps, CXLV–CXLVI). (Part ii has several short histories such as those of the apple-woman and the Armenian merchant.) Part in also contains a long colloquy between Lavengro and a Hungarian nobleman (Chaps, CXXXIX–CXL).
9 For example, the histories of Leonora in Joseph Andrews, of the man on the hill in Tom Jones, of Melopoyn in Roderick Random, and of Don Raphael in Gil Bias.
10 George Borrow: The Man and Bis Books (New York, 1912), p. 229.
11 R. A. J. Walling, the only critic, so far as I know, who has come close to interpreting the meaning of this chapter, says that it is a “microcosm” of Borrow—his philosophy, morals, and taste. The exordium is a “passionate statement of his efforts in search of the heart of things”; and the dialogue with Jasper, which “strikes the keynote of Borrow's life”, is “one of the most remarkable and poetical dialogues in the English tongue”—George Borrow: The Man and His Work (London, 1908), p. 4. But Walling's approach is biographical, and, uninterested in the formal implications of the chapter, he carries his analysis no further.
12 Chap, civ, p. 26.
13 Appendix, Chap. I, pp. 303, 309.
14 Appendix, Chap, ix, p. 355.
15 Chap, xi, p. 67. Cf. the similar method by which George Eliot has Lydgate become interested in medicine (Middlemarch, i, xv).
16 Chap, v, pp. 31, 37.
17 Chap, xvii, p. 107. For his proficiency in Romany, Jasper dubs the hero Lavengro—“word-master.”
18 Chap, XLVI, p. 267.
19 Chap, XLVII, p. 272.
20 Chap, cvii, p. 46.
21 Chap, cxl, p. 241.
22 Chap, xiii, p. 81.
23 Borrow knew what he was about, as his ironical remark in the Appendix indicates: “… nor does the last volume conclude in the most satisfactory and unobjectionable manner, by [Lavengro's] marrying a dowager countess, as that wise man Addison did, or by his settling down as a great country gentleman, perfectly happy and contented, like the very moral Roderick Random, or the equally estimable Peregrine Pickle …” (Chap, i, p. 308).
24 Appendix, Chap. I, p. 303. The quotations in the following summary also derive from this chapter.
25 Two of the interpolated stories, however, the postillion's and Jack Dale's, are picaresque in method and tone, though neither of the narrators is a true rogue. Murtagh's tale is a little picaresque gem, though Murtagh is a rogue on the side of Borrow's angels.
26 Chap, cxi, p. 77. The episode from The Turkish Jester prefixed to The Romany Rye epitomizes the spirit of gentility, and Borrow discourses at length on the subject in the Appendix, Chaps, iii–v. Curiously, very few in Borrow's day recognized his seriously didactic intentions. One who did was John P. Hasfeldt, who wrote Borrow that “many men would have reflected long before venturing to give the lesson to fools … But your work will live as long as the Owlglass, for it has the same philosophical thought underlying it, namely—Truth”—William I. Knapp, Life, Writings, and Correspondence of George Borrow (London, 1899), ii, 171.
27 The Craft of Fiction (New York, 1921), pp. 131–132.
28 There is little external evidence of Borrow's methods and purposes. But his letters reflect his earnestness in making the best book that he could; and his consciousness of form is witnessed by his complaint that though he had “plenty of scenes and dialogues”, his “great difficulty” was “to blend them all into a symmetrical whole”—Knapp, op. cit., ii, 12. And his friend Whitwell Elwin testified: “He told me that his composition cost him a vast amount of labour, … and that he wrote his productions several times before he had condensed and polished them to his mind”—Clement K. Shorter, The Life of George Borrow (Everyman's, 1920), p. 188.