His best-known books are The Bible in Spain and the novels Lavengro and The Romany Rye, set in his time with the English Romanichal (Gypsies).

[3] His father, a lieutenant with the West Norfolk Militia, was quartered at the prisoner-of-war camp at Norman Cross from July 1811 to April 1813, and George spent his ninth and tenth years in the barracks there.

In the autumn of 1815, he accompanied the regiment to Clonmel in Ireland, where he attended the Protestant Academy and learned to read Latin and Greek "from a nice old clergyman".

[6] Borrow's precocious linguistic skills as a youth made him a protégé of the Norwich-born scholar William Taylor, whom he depicted in his autobiographical novel Lavengro (1851) as an advocate of German Romantic literature.

With Taylor's encouragement, Borrow embarked on his first translation, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's version of the Faust legend, entitled Faustus, his Life, Death and Descent into Hell, first published in St Petersburg in 1791.

He wrote: [T]he huge population of Madrid, with the exception of a sprinkling of foreigners... is strictly Spanish, though a considerable portion are not natives of the place.

Here are no colonies of Germans, as at Saint Petersburg; no English factories, as at Lisbon; no multitudes of insolent Yankees lounging through the streets, as at the Havannah, with an air which seems to say, the land is our own whenever we choose to take it; but a population which, however strange or wild, and composed of various elements, is Spanish, and will remain so as long as the city itself shall exist.Borrow translated the Gospel of Luke into the Romani and Basque languages.

[7] In 1840 Borrow's career with the British and Foreign Bible Society came to an end, and he married Mary Clarke, a widow with a grown-up daughter called Henrietta, and a small estate at Oulton, Suffolk near Lowestoft.

Borrow made one more overseas journey, across Europe to Istanbul in 1844, but the rest of his travels were in the UK: long walking tours in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Cornwall and the Isle of Man.

Borrow visited the Romanichal encampments in Wandsworth and Battersea, and wrote one more book, Romano Lavo-Lil, a wordbook of the Anglo-Romany dialect (1874).

Although he failed to find critical acclaim in his lifetime, modern reviewers often praise his eccentric and cheerful style – "one of the most unusual people to have written in English in the last two hundred years" according to one.

[9] The museum was closed and the house sold in 1994, but the proceeds went to establish a George Borrow Trust that aims to promote his works.

[10] There are memorial blue plaques marking his residences at 22 Hereford Square, South Kensington, Fjaerland Hotel, Trafalgar Road, Great Yarmouth, and the former museum in Willow Lane, Norwich.