The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World.

 

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, 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 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 extraordinarily 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 a quoted in present time. Like 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 to 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 behaviors. 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, attempting to define the identity of western culture during a period of vast change. Despite over one hundred years since his death, even a critical appraisal of his life and work, does not in any way lessen his accomplishment nor profound influence in the Romantic age towards modernism. 

The Highly Civilized Man is a fresh and well-written account of an icon of the Romantic-Victorian age.