The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World

by Dane Kennedy

Book Overview

Richard Burton was one of Victorian Britain's most protean figures. A soldier, explorer, ethnographer, and polyglot of rare power, as well as a poet, travel writer, and translator of the tales of the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, Burton exercised his abundant talents in a diverse array of endeavors. Though best remembered as an adventurer who entered Mecca in disguise and sought the source of the White Nile, Burton traveled so widely, wrote...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674025520
• ISBN13: 9780674025523
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Sir Captain Richard - a Precursor to Modernism

Nineteenth century Western colonialism and imperialism including the Industrial revolution changed Western values and social perceptions and mores, but more so, our awareness of the world as a whole, in terms of defining ourselves against difference. The Victorian influence towards modernism is far greater than historians first realized. One of the most romantic and pivotal figures of the Victorian age was Sir Captain Richard Burton. In Kennedy's critical biographical overview of the man's life and thought, unlike most of the numerous biographies to date, attempts to represent and reinterpret Burton's life and thought in the context of the Victorian era. By doing this, he proposes, we come to understand this highly complex genius in terms of the historical values of the time. Kennedy outlines Burton's numerous accomplishments as a prolific writer, linguist, (twenty-five languages and many dialects) explorer, archaeologist, spy, amateur physician, translator, artist, poet, expert swordsman and sexologist. He wrote over twenty-five travel volumes containing his many adventures, and translated the Kumar Sutra and The Arabian Nights which is the most often read an quoted in present time. Similar to many of his contemporaries, his studies of Orientalism and African cultures were done in the spirit of difference, or the `other'. Kennedy's thesis is that Burton was a product of the Victorian age but an important precursor to modernism. As the 19th century has a virtual endless list of incredible men and women, according to Kennedy, what set Burton apart, was "...restless determination to extend the reach of his experience to ever more pockets of humanity and to draw insights from those increasingly varied encounters in order to advance the larger epistemological quest to understand, explain, and classify difference." (p.270) Burton's vast written work, his copious notes and observations reveals this holy quest, his unwavering pursuit of hidden knowledge and knowledge of the `other', strange cultures and bizarre religions until his death in 1895. The author devotes most of his analysis on Burton's works as a sexologist. Burton's many erotic translations, promoting his notion that Victorian repression of sexual matters and desire is tremendously unhealthy, paved the way for future sexologists to study the subject within a scientific framework. His controversial translations and writings also revealed a sexual hypocrisy that the Victorian age is infamously known for. Rather than study sex on moral grounds, Burton proposed a relativist position, attributing different climates around the world to certain sexual behaviours. We know this to be nonsense, however, including this premise, Burton achieved distance from the moral position, giving his subject a form of objectivity. Dane Kennedy's approach to Burton is a fresh perspective of the man. He was an individual that accomplished more in one lifetime than many, but he was a man of his times, attempti

A Pioneering Effort

When I first discovered that a new Burton biography by a professor of history was soon to be published I had high expectations. Upon receipt of Professor Kennedy's Burton biography titled The Highly Civilized Man, I started digesting his work. The asserted themes of the work included 1) placing Burton and his work in context with the larger issues and challenges of Victorian times, and 2) using Burton to better understand the nature of changes beginning to percolate socially due to the interaction of Victorian England with its colonial enterprises. Indeed, as far as I know, this approach is pioneering and insightful. As I continued reading to about page 90, I thought Professor Kennedy's effort was well done, and the book would be another jewel to adorn the crown of Burton research, along with the work of Mary Lovell. I am of the opinion Professor Kennedy succeeded in achieving both this stated objectives. From this standpoint, his book is a success. The observations of Burton as a harbinger bridging the transition from the Victorian Era to the Modern Era reflect the type of insights one expects from a biographer trained in the rigors of academic scholarship. I enjoyed the in depth academic analysis of Burton from the standpoint of concepts of relativism as applied to notions of cultural difference. Professor Kennedy has also highlighted the role played by Burton in the early development of anthropology as an academic discipline. Social/Cultural Anthropology's primary research methodology is called participant/observation. Certainly, this approach was an inherent part of Burton's nature, and the scope of his anthropological observations were derived by this research approach. I was also glad to see that Professor Kennedy gave particular attention to discussing Burton's Stone Talk and his Kasidah. The earlier biographies did not devote much attention to either of these important works. As long as Kennedy stayed focused on academic based scholarship he avoided the pitfalls that plagued the earlier biographies that predated Lovell's Rage to Live. Unfortunately, the book digressed into complicated histories that are not fully recounted. Yet, Professor Kennedy felt compelled to make several definitive conclusions sorely lacking the professional level of scholarship a professor should be required to meet. The outcome of Kennedy's failures is a setback in Burton scholarship. Given the effort to place Burton in context, the irony is that the book with notable examples omits necessary context to understand and evaluate some of the Professor's conclusion. For example, the recounted history of Burton firing over the head of a crowd of Greek Orthodox Christians fails to acknowledge that Burton resorted to this solution after trying less violent alternatives, and after he and fellow members of his party were injured by rocks thrown at them. The key point is that Burton used a hierarchy of options to confront unstable situations. This point also r

Foundations of Burton's Thinking

One of the most remarkable men who ever lived was Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He was a poet, explorer, linguist, soldier, and translator, with remarkable accomplishments in each of these fields. The best biography of this astonishing and energetic man is still _The Devil Drives_ by Fawn Brodie, but in _The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World_ (Harvard), Dane Kennedy has written something else. His book covers aspects of this multi-faceted man who was busy all his life making his own legend, but who is revealed here as "very much a man of his time, a product of nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial encounter with the world." Kennedy traces the sources of the intellect behind Burton's many efforts, even his famous physical feats such as his pilgrimage in disguise to Mecca or his role in finding the source of the Nile. Among other things, Burton was, as the chapter headings here classify him, an Orientalist, a relativist, a racist, and a sexologist, and Kennedy has taken a useful look at all these roles. The different chapters with their themes cover Burton's life in a more-or-less chronological way. Burton had a genius for languages and would eventually become fluent in perhaps a couple of dozen of them. His first foreign assignment was to the British East India Company, and although Burton sought glory in battle, his contribution was really to increase the knowledge of the land, the language, and the people. He took his capacity for imitation of other cultures to its most famous exercise in making the hajj in 1853. As Kennedy points out, there was no reason for any disguise; he could have simply have asserted his belief in Islam (a freethinker, he always did value the societal strengths of Islam, and he considered Christian missionaries to be on a misconceived quest) and joined the flood of foreigners in the pilgrimage. But this would not serve his purposes. A convert to Islam (no matter of what degree of sincerity, or how loosely attached to the Church of England) would be outcast from respectable society, preventing him from becoming a national hero and limiting sales of his great _Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah_. Burton's racism was a product of his time, and of his travels in Africa; he respected African cultures, even if he felt Negroes to be inferior and incapable of improvement. Kennedy makes the case that Burton had a relativist conception of culture, but such relativism did not encompass any struggle for improvement of political rights. Burton's value of other cultures included his view of their acceptance of sexuality, an acceptance he found lacking in his own country. Kennedy explains that with publication of his translations of the _Kama Sutra_, _The Perfumed Garden_, and especially _The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night_, Burton intended to subvert his nation's "purity forces." While Burton wrote that the _Nights_ was not fit for women to re