Wild Wales

Its People, Language and Scenery

Reading time: about 17 h
Length: 233,982 words · 492 pages
Structure: 109 chapters · 4 front-matter sections
Language: English
Era: Victorian

Wild Wales follows George Borrow on a walking tour through Wales with his wife and stepdaughter in 1854, seeking out the country's poets, its Welsh-speaking hill farmers and innkeepers, and the landscape of a language and literature Borrow had already taught himself to read — arguing throughout, sometimes combatively, for the value of Welsh culture at a moment when English opinion mostly dismissed it.

George Borrow published Wild Wales in 1862, drawing on that earlier journey; his own fluency in Welsh (one of the dozens of languages he'd taught himself) let him engage directly with people and poetry that most English travel writers of the period couldn't have reached at all.

Bibliomancer publishes the 1862 text exactly as George Borrow wrote it.

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About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

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About the author

George Borrow

1803–1881 · Victorian

George Borrow (1803–1881) was an English writer and self-taught linguist who, after early attempts at law and hack journalism, travelled through Russia and Spain from the 1830s as an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, distributing scripture translations and forming the acquaintance with Romani people that runs through his work. The Bible in Spain (1843), his account of those years, was an immediate success; two autobiographical narratives followed, Lavengro (1851) and its sequel The Romany Rye (1857). He settled at Oulton Broad in Norfolk, where he died.

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