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...