II.2.2.iv Leon

The city of Leon, in the depth of conservative Old Castile, was one of the hotbeds of the Carlist rebellion. Led by its bishop, Don Joaquin Abarca, it had been the first city to declare for the absolutist Pretender Don Carlos when civil war broke out in September 1833. And much as the town had soon been re-conquered by the government army, and the bishop made to fly to the rebel court, the general opinion in the city was still much averse to all liberal freedoms and innovations; something which naturally included perfidious foreign missionaries selling infidel Bibles in a decent Catholic town. Borrow himself notes this hostility, when he tells of the adventures of his sales-efforts: ‘Scarcely had the advertisements appeared, when the clergy were in motion. They went from house to house, banning and cursing, and denouncing misery to whomsoever should either purchase or read “the accursed books,” which had been sent into the country by heretics for the purpose of perverting the innocent minds of the population’ [BiS ch 22].

In spite of such opposition, and the risks it entailed, Borrow found a ‘bold and determined’ bookseller willing to undertake the sale of his Testaments [L 5.7.1837]. The name of this courageous tradesman, who in order to defy the local clergy actually ‘went so far as to affix an advertisement to the gate of the very cathedral’ [BiS ch 22], has not yet been unearthed. ‘Notwithstanding the cry raised against the work’, however, some 15 copies were sold in the city during the week of Borrow’s stay in mid-June 1837, including four copies picked up by ex-friars and parish priests from the neighbourhood [L 5.7.1837; BiS ch 22].

For once, the distribution and total sales of a city can be neatly reconstructed. Borrow left 40 copies with the bookseller in Leon, which were all sold by the following November [L 20.11.1837]. Consequently, he dispatched a fresh supply of 50 copies here [L 20.11.1837], of which an additional 16 were sold, seeing that in July of 1839 Borrow computed the total sales in Leon as 56 copies [L 18.7.1839.] The fate of the remaining 34 copies is unknown.