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George (Henry) Borrow |
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George Borrow rose to international fame by writing about himself. His three-volume travelogue, The Bible in Spain, was probably the best-selling book of 1843. John Murray sold nearly 20,000 copies in a year, while 30,000 pirated copies were sold within six months of the work's appearance in America. The book had much to recommend it to a wide audience--humor, adventure, and travel (Dickens's Pickwick Papers had been another best-seller only a few years previously); a lively, though erratic, style; interpolated passages of moralizing; and a fervent sense of English nationalism. Most of all, it impressed upon the popular imagination the eccentric and extrovert personality of its author-hero, who combined the roguery of the picaro with Evangelical good works and professions of piety. To his admirers Borrow was a morally acceptable Byron: a handsome and brave, but chaste and temperate, wanderer who could revel in the company of disreputable characters, under cover of his mission to spread Protestantism to the Catholic and heathen Spaniards.
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