THE GURNEYS AND THE TAYLORS OF NORWICH
NORWICH may claim to be one of the most fascinating cities in the
kingdom. To-day it is known to the wide world by its canaries and its
mustard, although its most important industry is the boot trade, in which
it employs some eight thousand persons. To the visitor it has many
attractions. The lovely cathedral with its fine Norman arches, the
Erpingham Gate so splendidly Gothic, the noble Castle Keep so imposingly
placed with the cattle-market below—these are all as Borrow saw them
nearly a century ago. So also is the church of St. Peter Mancroft, where
Sir Thomas Browne lies buried. And to the picturesque Mousehold Heath
you may still climb and recall one of the first struggles for liberty and
progress that past ages have seen, the Norfolk rising under Robert Kett
which has only not been glorified in song and in picture, because—
Treason doth never prosper—what’s the reason?
Why if it prosper none dare call it treason.
And Kett’s so-called rebellion was destined to failure, and its leader to
cruel martyrdom. Mousehold Heath has been made the subject of paintings
by Turner and Crome, and of fine word pictures by George Borrow. When
Borrow and his parents lighted upon Norwich in 1814 and 1816 the city had
inspiring literary associations. Before the invention of railways it
seemed not uncommon for a fine intellectual life to emanate from this or
that cathedral city. Such an intellectual life was associated with
Lichfield when the Darwins and the Edgeworths gathered at the Bishop’s
Palace around Dr. Seward and his accomplished daughters. Norwich has
more than once been such a centre. The first occasion was in the period
of which we write, when the Taylors and the Gurneys flourished in a
region of ideas; the second was during the years from 1837 to 1849, when
Edward Stanley held the bishopric. This later period does not come into
our story, as by that time Borrow had all but left Norwich. But of the
earlier period, the period of Borrow’s more or less fitful residence in
Norwich—1814 to 1833—we are tempted to write at some length. There were
three separate literary and social forces in Norwich in the first decades
of the nineteenth century—the Gurneys of Earlham, the Taylor-Austin
group, and William Taylor, who was in no way related to Mrs. John Taylor
and her daughter, Sarah Austin. The Gurneys were truly a remarkable
family, destined to leave their impress upon Norwich and upon a wider
world. At the time of his marriage in 1773 to Catherine Bell, John
Gurney, wool-stapler of Norwich, took his young wife, whose face has been
preserved in a canvas by Gainsborough, to live in the old Court House in
Magdalen Street, which had been the home of two generations of the Gurney
family. In 1786 John Gurney went with his continually growing family to
live at Earlham Hall, some two or three miles out of Norwich on the
Earlham Road. Here that family of eleven children—one boy had died in
infancy—grew up. Not one but has an interesting history, which is
recorded by Mr. Augustus Hare and other writers. Elizabeth, the fourth
daughter, married Joseph Fry, and as Elizabeth Fry attained to a
world-wide fame as a prison reformer. Hannah married Sir Thomas Fowell
Buxton of Slave Trade Abolition; Richenda, the Rev. Francis Cunningham,
who sent George Borrow upon his career; while Louisa married Samuel Hoare
of Hampstead. Of her Joseph John Gurney said at her death in 1836 that
she was “superior in point of talent to any other of my father’s eleven
children.” It is with the eleventh child, however, that we have mainly
to do, for this son, Joseph John Gurney, alone appears in Borrow’s pages.
The picture of these eleven Quaker children growing up to their various
destinies under the roof of Earlham Hall is an attractive one. Men and
women of all creeds accepted the catholic Quaker’s hospitality. Mrs.
Opie and a long list of worthies of the past come before us, and when Mr.
Gurney, in 1802, took his six unmarried daughters to the Lakes Old Crome
accompanied them as drawing-master.
In 1803—the year of Borrow’s birth—John Gurney became a partner in the
great London Bank of Overend and Gurney, and his son, Joseph John, in
that same year went up to Oxford. In 1809 Joseph returned to take his
place in the bank, and to preside over the family of unmarried sisters at
Earlham, father and mother being dead, and many members of the family
distributed. Incidentally, we are told by Mr. Hare that the Gurneys of
Earlham at this time drove out with four black horses, and that when
Bishop Bathurst, Stanley’s predecessor, required horses for State
occasions to drive him to the cathedral, he borrowed these, and the more
modest episcopal horses took the Quaker family to their meeting-house.
It does not come within the scope of this book to trace the fortunes of
these eleven remarkable Gurney children, or even of Borrow’s momentary
acquaintance, Joseph John Gurney. His residence at Earlham, and his life
of philanthropy, are a romance in a way, although one wonders whether if
the name of Gurney had not been associated with so much of virtue and
goodness the crash that came long after Joseph John Gurney’s death would
have been quite so full of affliction for a vast multitude. Joseph John
Gurney died in 1847, in his fifty-ninth year; his sister, Mrs. Fry, had
died two years earlier. The younger brother and twelfth child—Joseph
John being the eleventh—Daniel Gurney, the last of the twelve children,
lived till 1880, aged eighty-nine. He had outlived by many years the
catastrophe to the great banking firm with which the name of Gurney is
associated. This great firm of Overend and Gurney, of which yet another
brother, Samuel, was the moving spirit, was organised nine years after
his death—in 1865—into a joint-stock company, which failed to the amount
of eleven millions in 1866. At the time of the failure, which affected
all England, much as did the Liberator smash a generation later, the only
Gurney in the directorate was Daniel Gurney, to whom his sister, Lady
Buxton, allowed a pension of £2000 a year. This is a long story to tell
by way of introduction to one episode in _Lavengro_. This episode had
place in the year 1817, when Borrow was but fourteen years of age and
Gurney was twenty-nine. It is doubtful if Borrow met Joseph John Gurney
more than on the one occasion. At the commencement of his engagement
with the Bible Society he writes to its secretary, Mr. Jowett (18th
March, 1833), to say that he must procure from Mr. Cunningham “a letter
of introduction from him to John Gurney,” and this second and last
interview must have taken place at Earlham before his departure for
Russia.
But if Borrow was to come very little under the influence of Joseph John
Gurney, his destiny was to be considerably moulded by the action of
Gurney’s brother-in-law, Cunningham, who first put him in touch with the
Bible Society. Joseph John Gurney and his sisters were the very life of
the Bible Society in those years.
With the famous “Taylors of Norwich” Borrow seems to have had no
acquaintance, although he went to school with a connection of that
family, James Martineau. These socially important Taylors were in no way
related to William Taylor of that city, who knew German literature, and
scandalised the more virtuous citizens by that, and perhaps more by his
fondness for wine and also for good English beer—a drink over which his
friend Borrow was to become lyrical. When people speak of the Norwich
Taylors they refer to the family of Dr. John Taylor, who in 1733 was
elected to the charge of the Presbyterian congregation in Norwich. His
eldest son, Richard, married Margaret, the daughter of a mayor of Norwich
of the name of Meadows; and Sarah, another daughter of that same
worshipful mayor, married David Martineau, grandson of Gaston Martineau,
who fled from France at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes. {39} Harriet and James Martineau were grandchildren of this
David. The second son of Richard and Margaret Taylor was John, who
married Susannah Cook. Susannah is the clever Mrs. John Taylor of this
story, and her daughter of even greater ability was Sarah Austin, the
wife of the famous jurist. Here we are only concerned with Mrs. John
Taylor, called by her friends the “Madame Roland of Norwich.” Lucy Aikin
describes how she “darned her boy’s grey worsted stockings while holding
her own with Southey, Brougham, or Mackintosh.” One of her daughters
married Henry Reeve, and, as I have said, another married John Austin.
Borrow was twenty years of age and living in Norwich when Mrs. Taylor
died. It is to be regretted that in the early impressionable years his
position as a lawyer’s clerk did not allow of his coming into a circle in
which he might have gained certain qualities of _savoir faire_ and _joie
de vivre_, which he was all his days to lack. Of the Taylor family the
Duke of Sussex said that they reversed the ordinary saying that it takes
nine tailors to make a man. The witticism has been attributed to Sydney
Smith, but Mrs. Ross gives evidence that it was the Duke’s—the youngest
son of George III. In his _Life of Sir James Mackintosh_ Basil Montagu,
referring to Mrs. John Taylor, says:
Norwich was always a haven of rest to us, from the literary society
with which that city abounded. Dr. Sayers we used to visit, and the
high-minded and intelligent William Taylor; but our chief delight was
in the society of Mrs. John Taylor, a most intelligent and excellent
woman, mild and unassuming, quiet and meek, sitting amidst her large
family, occupied with her needle and domestic occupations, but always
assisting, by her great knowledge, the advancement of kind and
dignified sentiment and conduct.
We note here the reference to “the high-minded and intelligent William
Taylor,” because William Taylor, whose influence upon Borrow’s destiny
was so pronounced, has been revealed to many by the slanders of Harriet
Martineau, that extraordinary compound of meanness and generosity, of
poverty-stricken intelligence and rich endowment. In her
_Autobiography_, published in 1877, thirty-four years after Robberds’s
_Memoir of William Taylor_, she dwells upon the drinking propensities of
William Taylor, who was a schoolfellow of her father’s. She admits,
indeed, that Taylor was an ideal son, whose “exemplary filial duty was a
fine spectacle to the whole city.”
William Taylor’s life is pleasantly interlinked with Scott and Southey.
Lucy Aikin records that she heard Sir Walter Scott declare to Mrs.
Barbauld that Taylor had laid the foundations of his literary career—had
started him upon the path of glory through romantic verse to romantic
prose, from _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ to _Waverley_. It was the
reading of Taylor’s translation of Bürger’s _Lenore_ that did all this.
“This, madam,” said Scott, “was what made me a poet. I had several times
attempted the more regular kinds of poetry without success, but here was
something that I thought I could do.” Southey assuredly loved Taylor,
and each threw at the feet of the other the abundant literary learning
that both possessed. This we find in a correspondence which, reading
more than a century after it was written, still has its charm. The son
of a wealthy manufacturer of Norwich, Taylor was born in that city in
1765. He was in early years a pupil of Mrs. Barbauld. At fourteen he
was placed in his father’s counting-house, and soon afterwards was sent
abroad, in the company of one of the partners, to acquire languages. He
learnt German thoroughly at a time when few Englishmen had acquaintance
with its literature. To Goethe’s genius he never did justice, having
been offended by that great man’s failure to acknowledge a book that
Taylor sent to him, exactly as Carlyle and Borrow alike were afterwards
offended by similar delinquencies on the part of Walter Scott. When he
settled again in Norwich he commenced to write for the magazines, among
others for Sir Richard Phillips’s _Monthly Magazine_, and to correspond
with Southey. At the time Southey was a poor man, thinking of abandoning
literature for the law, and hopeful of practising in Calcutta. The
Norwich Liberals, however, aspired to a newspaper to be called _The
Iris_. Taylor asked Southey to come to Norwich and to become its editor.
Southey declined and Taylor took up the task, The _Norwich Iris_ lasted
for two years. Southey never threw over his friendship for Taylor,
although their views ultimately came to be far apart. Writing to Taylor
in 1803 he says:
Your theology does nothing but mischief; it serves only to thin the
miserable ranks of Unitarianism. The regular troops of infidelity do
little harm; and their trumpeters, such as Voltaire and Paine, not
much more. But it is such pioneers as Middleton, and you and your
German friends, that work underground and sap the very citadel. That
_Monthly Magazine_ is read by all the Dissenters—I call it the
Dissenters’ Obituary—and here are you eternally mining, mining, under
the shallow faith of their half-learned, half-witted, half-paid,
half-starved pastors.
But the correspondence went on apace, indeed it occupies the larger part
of Robberds’s two substantial volumes. It is in the very last letter
from Taylor to Southey that we find an oft-quoted reference to Borrow.
The letter is dated 12th March, 1821:
A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller’s _Wilhelm Tell_
with the view of translating it for the Press. His name is George
Henry Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity;
indeed, he has the gift of tongues, and, though not yet eighteen,
understands twelve languages—English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; he
would like to get into the Office for Foreign Affairs, but does not
know how.
Although this was the last letter to Southey that is published in the
memoir, Taylor visited Southey at Keswick in 1826. Taylor’s three
volumes of the _Historic Survey of German Poetry_ appeared in 1828, 1829,
and 1830. Sir Walter Scott, in the last year of his life, wrote from
Abbotsford on 23rd April, 1832, to Taylor to protest against an allusion
to “William Scott of Edinburgh” being the author of a translation of
_Goetz von Berlichingen_. Scott explained that he (Walter Scott) was
that author, and also made allusion to the fact that he had borrowed with
acknowledgment two lines from Taylor’s _Lenore_ for his own—
Tramp, tramp along the land,
Splash, splash across the sea,
adding that his recollection of the obligation was infinitely stronger
than of the mistake. It would seem, however, that the name “William” was
actually on the title-page of the London edition of 1799 of _Goetz von
Berlichingen_. When Southey heard of the death of Taylor in 1836 he
wrote:
I was not aware of my old friend’s illness, or I should certainly
have written to him, to express that unabated regard which I have
felt for him eight-and-thirty years, and that hope which I shall ever
feel, that we may meet in the higher state of existence. I have
known very few who equalled him in talents—none who had a kinder
heart; and there never lived a more dutiful son, or a sincerer
friend.
Taylor’s many books are now all forgotten. His translation of Bürger’s
_Lenore_ one now only recalls by its effect upon Scott; his translation
of Lessing’s _Nathan the Wise_ has been superseded. His voluminous
_Historic Survey of German Poetry_ only lives through Carlyle’s severe
review in the _Edinburgh Review_ {42} against the many strictures in
which Taylor’s biographer attempts to defend him. Taylor had none of
Carlyle’s inspiration. Not a line of his work survives in print in our
day, but it was no small thing to have been the friend and correspondent
of Southey, whose figure in literary history looms larger now than it did
when Emerson asked contemptuously, “Who’s Southey?”; and to have been the
wise mentor of George Borrow is in itself to be no small thing in the
record of letters. There is a considerable correspondence between Taylor
and Sir Richard Phillips in Robberds’s _Memoir_, and Phillips seemed
always anxious to secure articles from Taylor for the _Monthly_, and even
books for his publishing-house. Hence the introduction from Taylor that
Borrow carried to London might have been most effective if Phillips had
had any use for poor and impracticable would-be authors.