Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest
1900
Lavengro is neither quite novel nor quite memoir, but something wilder: a wandering account of a man who refuses to stay put in any world offered to him. Born to a militia officer and a Huguenot mother, raised in barrack towns across England, Scotland, and Ireland, our nameless protagonist apprentices to a lawyer, descends into London Grub Street as a hack writer, then abandons respectability altogether to take to the road as a tinker. Along the way he falls in with Romany travelers, learning their language and recording their stories with an outsider's sympathy that was radical for its time. George Borrow wrote himself into the book as Lavengro, a word that means 'word master' in Romany, and the title is both boast and confession: this is a man in love with language, with movement, with life lived at the margins. The book defies conventional narrative, ending abruptly mid-thought, to be continued in The Romany Rye. It breathes the spirit of strong and eccentric characters, as G.M. Trevelyan noted, and it offers something rarer than plot: the texture of a restless mind encountering the odd, beautiful world.
X-Ray
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