George Borrow - Later Life

Later Life

In 1840 Borrow's career with the Bible Society came to an end, and he married Mary Clarke, a widow with a grown-up daughter called Henrietta, and a small estate at Oulton Broad in Lowestoft, Suffolk. There Borrow began to write his books. The Zincali (1841) was moderately successful, and The Bible in Spain (1843) was a huge success, making Borrow a celebrity overnight. But the eagerly awaited Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857) puzzled many readers, who were not sure how much was fact and how much fiction (a question debated to this day). Borrow made one more overseas journey, across Europe to Istanbul in 1844, but the rest of his travels were in the UK, long walking tours in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Cornwall and the Isle of Man. Of these, only the Welsh tour yielded a book, Wild Wales (1862).

Borrow's restlessness, perhaps, led to the family living in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, in the 1850s, and in London in the 1860s. Borrow visited the Romanichal Gypsy encampments in Wandsworth and Battersea, and wrote one more book, Romano Lavo-Lil, a wordbook of the Anglo-Romany dialect (1874). Mary Borrow died in 1869, and in 1874 he returned to Lowestoft, where he was later joined by his stepdaughter Henrietta and her husband, who looked after him until his death on 26 July 1881 in Lowestoft. He is buried with his wife in Brompton Cemetery, London.

Borrow was said to be a man of striking appearance and deeply original character. Although he failed to find critical acclaim in his lifetime, modern reviewers often praise his eccentric and cheerful style; "one of the most unusual people to have written in English in the last two hundred years" according to one critic.

In 1913, the Lord Mayor of Norwich bought Borrow's house in Willow Lane; it was renamed Borrow House and was presented to the City of Norwich and was for many years open as the Borrow Museum. The museum eventually closed and the house was sold in 1994; the funds were used to establish the George Borrow Trust which aims to promote Borrow's works. There are Blue plaques marking his various residences in Hereford Square, Kensington in London, Trafalgar Road, Great Yarmouth and the former museum in Willow Lane, Norwich. In December 2011, a plaque was unveiled on a house in Calle Santiago, Madrid, where he lived from 1836-40. George Borrow Road, a crescent-shaped residential street in the West of Norwich close to the University of East Anglia is named after him. There is a George Borrow Hotel in Ponterwyd near Aberystwyth.