The Romany Rye: A Sequel to 'Lavengro
1857
In the dying days of the open road, a scholar-turned-vagabond found what polite society could never offer him: belonging. George Borrow, the eccentric polyglot who mastered more languages than most academics encounter, spent years living among the Romani, the horse-dealers, the hedge-preachers and the wandering artisans of early nineteenth-century England. The Romany Rye - a term Borrow himself coined, meaning a 'Gypsy Gentleman' - is his firsthand account of that life.This sequel to Lavengro follows Borrow through the English countryside in the 1820s, before the railroads and the industrial age erased traveling ways that had endured for centuries. He wakes in a secluded dingle, mends a broken post-chaise, shares breakfast with a drowsy postillion, and falls into increasingly strange conversations with a mysterious man in black - about God, about truth, about the fluid border between honesty and deception. Along the road he meets circus performers and undercover Catholic missionaries, con men and horse-thieves, proud Romani families in painted wagons. Borrow records how they spoke, loved, fought and survived, a world unto themselves beyond the reach of constables. Part memoir, part ethnographic record, part philosophical dialogue, this is an irreplaceable portrait of a England that vanished within decades of its writing.
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