Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest
Borrow, George, 1803-1881Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019
Rating 4.2- Word count
- 1.2M words
- Chapters
- 125
Tags
English Originals Classic Works Social ObservationLegendary LivesAdventure JourneyFate and FortuneComplex HumanityMoral DilemmaHumor ReliefExotic CultureSummary
Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest by George BorrowAuthor: Borrow, George, 1803-1881,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Dec 28, 2009Editor's review
Lavengro is a semi-autobiographical novel by George Borrow, following a young man's wanderings between the English countryside and London, interwoven with his shifting identities as a scholar, a companion of Gypsies, and a priest. Narrated in the first person, its loose, colloquial rhythm incorporates a wealth of Romany words, folk songs, and travel observations. It is at once a panorama of lower-class life in nineteenth-century England and a meditation on language learning, religious struggle, and self-fashioning. Borrow himself was a polyglot, and the book's preoccupation with language acquisition and textual scholarship has a distinctive obsessive quality; its depiction of Gypsy life was rare in the literature of its time. This is a public-domain English electronic edition, suitable as supplementary reading in English literature courses covering the transition from late Romanticism to the early Victorian period, and for readers interested in picaresque fiction and the ethnography of language. Note that its structure is loose and its plot slow-moving, so it is not suited to readers seeking strong narrative drive.Who it's for
A good fit for
- Students and teachers of nineteenth-century English literature and the picaresque novel
- Readers interested in Gypsy culture, the Romany language, and folk oral traditions
- Literature lovers who enjoy slow-paced autobiographical narrative and regional description
- Readers who need a public-domain English text for language study or textual analysis
Not a good fit for
- Readers of genre fiction expecting tight plotting and a clear resolution
- Beginners with little patience for nineteenth-century English and Romany vocabulary
- Researchers who need systematic historical sources rather than literary narrative
Reading tips
- Read the preface and author chronology first to understand Borrow's background of travel, then proceed to the main text.
- Take notes on characters and places chapter by chapter to track the narrator's shifting identity and route.
- Mark Romany words as you go, then look them up together in notes or a dictionary after finishing the chapter.
- Read alongside visual materials on nineteenth-century English rural life and Gypsy life for comparison.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
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- 8
- 9
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- 11
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- 125
FAQ
Is this book a novel or an autobiography?
Lavengro is generally regarded as semi-autobiographical: the narrator's experiences clearly echo Borrow's own, but they are literaryized, and the characters and events do not correspond strictly to his real life. It can be read as a novel with autobiographical coloring.How difficult is the English, and what background is needed?
The original is nineteenth-century English, with long sentences and scattered Romany words and dialect expressions. A university-level reading ability in English is recommended, along with a dictionary or annotated edition, and a slower, section-by-section pace.What are the features of the Project Gutenberg edition?
This edition is a free public-domain electronic text, convenient for searching and copying, but it usually contains no modern scholarly notes or introduction. Readers may pair it with background materials of their own; it serves as a basic text for reading the original.This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Borrow, George, 1803-1881 AuthorGeorge Borrow (1803–1881) was an English writer known for his essays and autobiographical works about travel, language, and marginalized people. The collection holds 44 of his works, including the two-volume The Bible in Spain and Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest, as well as Wild Wales: The People, Language, & Scenery and a Spanish translation, La Biblia en España, Tomo I. His writing draws heavily on his own journeys and blends reportage with a legendary, vivid tone, often focusing on Gypsies, wanderers, and local languages and customs, with a lively and highly personal narrative style. Public information is limited, so biographical details such as his exact dates and nationality are not elaborated here.