Richard F. Burton

From Philosopedia

Burton, Richard Francis [Sir] (19 March 1821 - 20 October 1890)

Burton was born in Torquay, Devon, son of Captain Joseph Burton, a British army officer of Irish extraction. His mother, Martha Baker, was an heiress of a wealthy Hertfordshire squire.

When his father refused to testify against Queen Caroline for her allegedly scandalous behavior in Italy, he took his family abroad. Young Burton, who grew up in France and Italy and missed out on an English public-school education. He confessed to having lost his virginity in Italy at the age of thirteen. While at Trinity College Oxford for five terms, he was sent down for attending a steeplechase against school regulations, whereupon he reacted by riding a tandem-driven dogcart through his college master’s flower garden.

For much of his remaining life he was accused of being a snob, but his hauteur was more often turned on superiors, not inferiors. Joseph Epstein, commenting upon Mary S. Lovell’s A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton (The New Yorker, 23 November 1998), cited Burton’s accomplishments:

• He knew some twenty-nine foreign languages and at least a dozen dialects, and at one point tried to learn the language of monkeys. He was the first non-Muslim to make a successful pilgrimage to Mecca posing as one of the faithful, and the first to penetrate the ancient kingdom of Harar, in Somalia. He was the first Westerner to discover Lake Tanganyika, in an attempt to find the source of the Nile. He served as a spy in peacetime India and as an officer in the Crimean War. He prospected for gold in Egypt, West Africa, and Brazil. He wrote what is thought to be the best book on sword fighting of the nineteenth century. He introduced the word “safari” into the English language and is said to have introduced Turkish delight [a candy consisting of jellylike cubes] to Europe. He was one of the earliest translators of the Kama Sutra and of the Arabian Nights, and he also wrote poems in the manner of the classics of Arabic literature.

“Explorer, anthropologist, linguist, erotologist, universal genius - [he] could easily have turned up as a character in a Joseph Conrad novel,” Epstein added. While serving in India, bored with the way of life of the English in India, Burton regularly took Army examinations in Hindustani, Gujarati, and Persian, invariably finishing first among his competitors.

Some called him “a white nigger,” for he had several Indian mistresses who, likely, gave him a feeling for “the syntaxes of native Life” needed to help in translating the Kama Sutra. A master of disguise, he had himself circumcised in his early thirties in order to pass as a Muslim - during an 1853 pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, he became the first European infidel to enter Mecca as “one of the people.” His Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah became one of the best books on Arabia. Lovell speculates that in Africa Burton contracted syphilis, perhaps a cause for his and his wife’s having no children.

When Isabel Arundell, daughter of an aristocratic Catholic family, met Burton in 1851, she was sure he was to be her life companion despite her parents’ objections. A believer in magic and prophecy, she was told by a Gypsy whose named happened to be Burton that “[y]ou will be as we are, but far greater than we are. Your life is all wandering, change, and adventure. One soul in two bodies in life or death, never long apart.” She was crazily superstitious, believing that Richard could call to her from afar, felt she was both psychic and clairvoyant, and reveled in dreams and omens.

A faithful and dutiful wife, Isabel was said to be fearless and idealistic, a defender of her husband against all negative criticism, one who guided his finances. She overlooked his heretical opinions, which included the view that African missionaries “did more harm than good” and that polygamy is not immoral. She was aware that he did research into male brothels in India. She gladly showed Bedouins that English women can be experts at riding horses, and she enjoyed in Damascus keeping a pet panther cub. When Burton translated the Kama Sutra and made an unexpurgated translation of Arabian Nights (16 volumes, 1885-1888), she was aware that gossips would wonder if he used their conjugal bed to test the Eastern configurations.

The freethinking Joseph McCabe met her in his clerical days and said she was a bigoted Catholic. George W. Foote agreed, stating that according to her story, Burton had his own fits of Catholicism, outspoken agnosticism and Eastern mysticism, but consistently maintained that in religion “there were only two points, Agnosticism and Catholicism.”

Four days before he died, Mrs. Burton alleged, he “wrote a declaration that he wished to die a Catholic, but a few weeks previously upset her by ‘an unusual burst of agnostic talk at tea.’” She had the extreme unction of the Catholic Church administered to him, but everybody in the house and every member of Burton’s staff except the maid was surprised at her sending for the priest. Burton was actually dead when these “last comforts” of the Church were administered - Lady Burton afterwards fully admitted this. Nevertheless “he had three Church services performed over him, and 1,100 masses said for the repose of his soul,” according to Thomas Wright’s Life of Sir Richard Burton.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Lynn Linton referred to Burton as a “frank agnostic,” who “had systematically preached a doctrine so adverse” to Christianity. She alleged that his memory was dishonored by his wife’s demeanor at the time of his death. Lady Burton was said to have resented this charge with considerable indignation, but her own statements in The New Review (November, 1892) confirm such. Also, “Sir Richard was a very good friend of mine,” wrote Rev. H. R. Hawes, “and one whom I held in high esteem. Sir Richard once said, ‘I know nothing about my soul, I get on very well without one. It is rather hard to inflict a soul on me in the decline of my life.’ ” Burton’s niece, Georgina M. Stisted, wrote of the scene,

• The shock of so fatal a terminus to his illness would have daunted most Romanists desirous of effecting a death-bed conversion. It did not daunt Isabel. No sooner did she perceive that her husband’s life was in danger, than she sent messengers in every direction for a priest. Mercifully, even the first to arrive, a man of peasant extraction, who had been appointed to the parish, came too late to molest one then far beyond the reach of human folly and superstition.

Biographers, including his niece, Georgiana Stisted (True Life of Sir. R.F. Burton) considered Burton a rationalist, at most an agnostic or Deist.

Burton’s Selected Papers on Anthropology contains further sarcastic references to Holy Week in Rome and its theatricals, to “the horde of harpies” that prey on visitors, the contrast between the richly decorated churches, and the crowd of beggars imploring alms “in God’s name,” and to the brisk trade in “holy things - images, crucifixes and rosaries, blessed by his Holiness.” Burton’s niece Georgiana Stisted in The True Life of Sir R. F. Burton called him “a sturdy Deist” but said he believed only in “an unknowable and Impersonal God.” This, said McCabe, made Burton a Spencerian Agnostic.

Isabel designed for him a stone mausoleum in the shape of a desert tent, considered by many to be a notable monstrosity of Victorian taste, complete with camel bells to tinkle in the wind. She later arranged to be interred in the mausoleum, placed lower than her husband. At the site in Mortlake, the grave is modeled on a Bedouin tent of the type in which he doubtless spent much of his time during his travels in Arabia. Upon climbing the ladder and the back, one can peer in at a window to see his coffin, along with that of his wife, and an array of artefacts like lamps and bells.

{BDF; CE; Joseph Epstein, The New Yorker, 23 November 1998; FFRF; FO; JM; RAT; RE; TYD}