Borrow's restlessness, perhaps, led to the family, which had lived in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, in the 1850s, moving to London in the 1860s. Borrow visited the Romanichal Gypsy encampments in Wandsworth and Battersea, and wrote one more book, "Romano Lavo-Lil, a wordbook of the Anglo-Romany dialect" (1874). Mary Borrow died in 1869, and in 1874 he returned to Lowestoft, where he was later joined by his stepdaughter Henrietta and her husband, who looked after him until his death there on 26 July 1881. He is buried with his wife in Brompton Cemetery, London.