class="smcap">George Henry Borrow was born at Dumpling Green near East Dereham, Norfolk, on the 5th of July, 1803.  It pleased him to state on many an occasion that he was born at East Dereham.

On an evening of July, in the year 18—, at East D—, a beautiful little town in a certain district of East Anglia, I first saw the light,

he writes in the opening lines of Lavengro, using almost the identical phraseology that we find in the opening lines of Goethe’s Wahrheit und Dichtung.  Here is a later memory of Dereham from Lavengro:

What it is at present I know not, for thirty years and more have elapsed since I last trod its streets.  It will scarcely have improved, for how could it be better than it was?  I love to think on thee, pretty, quiet D—, thou pattern of an English country town, with thy clean but narrow streets branching out from thy modest market-place, with their old-fashioned houses, with here and there a roof of venerable thatch, with thy one half-aristocratic mansion, where resided the Lady Bountiful—she, the generous and kind, who loved to visit the sick, leaning on her golden-headed cane, while the sleek old footman walked at a respectful distance behind.  Pretty, quiet D—, with thy venerable church, in which moulder the mortal remains of England’s sweetest and most pious bard.

Then follows an exquisite eulogy of the poet Cowper, which readers of Lavengro know full well.  Three years before Borrow was born William Cowper died in this very town, leaving behind him so rich a legacy of poetry and of prose, and moreover so fragrant a memory of a life in which humour and pathos played an equal part.  It was no small thing for a youth who aspired to any kind of renown to be born in the neighbourhood of the last resting-place of the author of The Task.

Yet Borrow was not actually born at East Dereham, but a mile and a half away, at the little hamlet of Dumpling Green, in what was then a glorious wilderness of common and furze bush, but is now a quiet landscape of fields and hedges.  You will find the home in which the author of Lavengro first saw the light without much difficulty.  It is a fair-sized farmhouse, with a long low frontage separated from the road by a considerable strip of garden.  It suggests a prosperous yeoman class, and I have known farm-houses in East Anglia not one whit larger dignified by the name of “hall.”  Nearly opposite is a pond.  The trim hedges are a delight to us to-day, but you must cast your mind back to a century ago when they were entirely absent.  The house belonged to George Borrow’s maternal grandfather, Samuel Perfrement, who farmed the adjacent land at this time.  Samuel and Mary Perfrement had eight children, the third of whom, Ann, was born in 1772.

In February, 1793, Ann Perfrement, aged twenty-one, married Thomas Borrow, aged thirty-five, in the Parish Church of East Dereham, and of the two children that were born to them George Henry Borrow was the younger.  Thomas Borrow was the son of one John Borrow of St. Cleer in Cornwall, who died before this child was born, and is described by his grandson as the scion “of an ancient but reduced Cornish family, tracing descent from the de Burghs, and entitled to carry their arms.”

When Thomas Borrow was born the family were nothing more than small farmers, and Thomas Borrow and his brothers were working on the land in the intervals of attending the parish school.  At the age of eighteen Thomas was apprenticed to a maltster at Liskeard, and about this time he joined the local Militia.  Tradition has it that his career as a maltster was cut short by his knocking his master down in a scrimmage.  The victor fled from the scene of his prowess, and enlisted as a private soldier in the Coldstream Guards.  This was in 1783, and in 1792 he was transferred to the West Norfolk Militia; hence his appearance at East Dereham, where, now a serjeant, his occupations for many a year were recruiting and drilling.  It is recorded that at a theatrical performance at East Dereham he first saw, presumably on the stage of the county-hall, his future wife—Ann Perfrement.  She was, it seems, engaged in a minor part in a travelling company, not, we may assume, altogether with the sanction of her father, who, in spite of his inheritance of French blood, doubtless shared the then very strong English prejudice against the stage.  However, Ann was one of eight children, and had, as we shall find in after years, no inconsiderable strength of character, and so may well at twenty years of age have decided upon a career for herself.  In any case we need not press too hard the Cornish and French origin of George Borrow to explain his wandering tendencies, nor need we wonder at the suggestion of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that he was “supposed to be of gypsy descent by the mother’s side.”  You have only to think of the father, whose work carried him from time to time to every corner of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of the mother with her reminiscence of life in a travelling theatrical company, to explain in no small measure the glorious vagabondage of George Borrow.

Behold then Thomas Borrow and Ann Perfrement as man and wife, he being thirty-five years of age, she twenty-one.  A roving, restless life was in front of the pair for many a day, the West Norfolk Militia being stationed in some eight or nine separate towns within the interval of ten years between Thomas Borrow’s marriage and his second son’s birth.  The first child, John Thomas Borrow, was born on the 15th April, 1801.  The second son, George Henry Borrow, the subject of this memoir, was born in his grandfather’s house at Dumpling Green, East Dereham, his mother having found a natural refuge with her father while her husband was busily recruiting in Norfolk.  The two children passed with their parents from place to place, and in 1809 we find them once again in East Dereham.  From his son’s two books, Lavengro and Wild Wales, we can trace the father’s later wanderings until his final retirement to Norwich on a pension.  In 1810 the family were at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire, when Captain Borrow had to assist in guarding the French prisoners of war; for it was the stirring epoch of the Napoleonic conflict, and within the temporary prison “six thousand French and other foreigners, followers of the Grand Corsican, were now immured.”

What a strange appearance had those mighty casernes, with their blank blind walls, without windows, or grating, and their slanting roofs, out of which, through orifices where the tiles had been removed, would be protruded dozens of grim heads, feasting their prison-sick eyes on the wide expanse of country unfolded from that airy height.  Ah! there was much misery in those casernes; and from those roofs, doubtless, many a wistful look was turned in the direction of lovely France.  Much had the poor inmates to endure, and much to complain of, to the disgrace of England be it said—of England, in general so kind and bountiful.  Rations of carrion meat, and bread from which I have seen the very hounds occasionally turn away, were unworthy entertainment even for the most ruffian enemy, when helpless and a captive; and such, alas! was the fare in those casernes.

But here we have only to do with Thomas Borrow, of whom we get many a quaint glimpse in Lavengro, our first and our last being concerned with him in the one quality that his son seems to have inherited, as the associate of a prize-fighter—Big Ben Brain.  Borrow records in his opening chapter that Ben Brain and his father met in Hyde Park probably in 1790, and that after an