George Borrow, Lavengro

Andrew Radford is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. His books include The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion (co-edited with Suzanne Hobson, 2023), British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945–1975 (co-edited with Hannah Van Hove, 2021), The Occult Imagination in Britain 1875–1947 (co-edited with Christine Ferguson, 2018), Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism (2014) and Mapping the Wessex Novel (2010). He has recently published a critical edition of George Borrow’s autobiographical novel Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest with Edinburgh University Press (2023).

This well-researched and expertly edited new edition enables the reader to understand how Borrow’s familiarity with wayfaring and the gypsy community raised their profile in an era of increasing centralisation, and highlights how this work related to current debates around evolution and anthropology. Radford demonstrates the ways in which Borrow’s complex narrative voice draws upon post-Romantic ideas of subjectivity and shows how influential Borrow was to become on subsequent authors, ranging from Robert Louis Stevenson to the Dymock Poets.

• Series PrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroductionFurther ReadingLavengro. The Scholar, the Gypsy, the PriestW. I. Knapp’s Editor’s Postscript Notes List of Gypsy Words in Lavengro Appendix: Extracts from Contemporary Reviews of George Borrow’s Lavengro Index