The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (review)

Like the many biographies and studies that preceded it—and, we can safely add, like the many that are sure to follow—Dane Kennedy's The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World revels in the multiple masks and disguises, self-forged identities and acts of ventriloquism, obsessions and eccentricities, that make up the career of this Victorian soldier-explorer-ethnographer-diplomat-polyglot-poet. But whereas previous writers have tended to employ these idiosyncrasies to stress Burton's exceptionality, Kennedy's masterly study aims to contextualize them, "to demythologize and rehistoricize Burton's life" (6). What makes him worthy of our attention, Kennedy argues, is not Burton's distance from Victorian mainstream respectability, but rather his involvement in and contribution to Victorian debates concerning language, religion, sex, race, and empire.

The conviction that "for all his unusual talents and contrarian character, he was very much a man of his time" (2) is beautifully encapsulated in Kennedy's somewhat cryptic title. "The highly civilised man" is the caption Burton wrote on his personal copy of a remarkable photograph taken sometime between his journey to Mecca in 1853 and his expedition to Harar in 1855: crouched on a fabric-covered floor and covered by a loose blanket—only his gaunt, tilted head visible against the plain background—nothing in Burton's manic appearance hints at his nationality, class, or profession. Nevertheless, it is precisely this stunning, self-conscious attempt to reinvent himself as a blank signifier, free from any national or cultural markers, that testifies—as the book's subtitle reminds us—to the complex relationship between Burton and the Victorian world: "we can make more sense of the man if we work harder to situate him in the multiple contexts that gave shape and direction to his life," Kennedy asserts, but, at the same time, "we can gain fuller insights into the wider Victorian world through which Burton passed by giving the proper attention to his life" (7).

On one level, Kennedy establishes his claim by demonstrating how Burton's various philological, ethnographic, and cartographic projects were in fact implicated in imperial politics, sanctioned and rewarded by the colonial apparatus and its various commercial and scholarly agents, from the East India Company to the Royal Geographical Society. Commenting on Burton's early years in India, for example, Kennedy notes that once we overcome "the misconception that Burton's behavior placed him outside the bounds of social convention, we can begin to appreciate how hard he worked to meet the expectations of his superiors" (31). Where other biographers see a social pariah, Kennedy is quick to recognize the links between Orientalist knowledge and imperial power. In this fresh reading, Burton's "eccentricities" are exposed as useful tools in the service of the state.

Even more fundamentally, Burton becomes an emblem of Victorian attitudes towards difference, and particularly of the increasingly insolvable tension between British efforts to establish taxonomies of difference that would distinguish them from others and the opposite, "civilizing" effort to erase these differences by universalizing British practices and norms. Burton is vital to the understanding of this paradox because, as Kennedy so persuasively demonstrates, shifting over time "from a philological to a physiological to a cultural conception of racial difference" (3), Burton's career and his curiosity about the world reflect the gradual shift from racism to relativism. In this respect, Kennedy's story is about Burton and the Victorian world only insomuch as this world includes, or at least anticipates, the rise of modern forms of consciousness.

When writing about a figure so prolific, scholars are always in danger of replicating their subject's graphomaniacal tendencies (a typical example is Mary S. Lovell's 1998 biography, A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton, which stretches over 944 pages). Kennedy solves this problem by producing a critical, thematic, biographical narrative. Arranged chronologically, the book is...