“Captain Burton's Oriental Muck Heap”:
The Book of the Thousand Nights
and the Uses of Orientalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2014
Extract
In the final decade of his remarkable life, the Victorian explorer and linguist Richard Francis Burton made a daring bid to provoke a confrontation with those forces in British society that he identified with moral intolerance and intellectual pedantry. Unlikely though it might seem, the instrument of this provocation was a work widely regarded as children's literature—the tales of the Arabian Nights. In 1885–86, Burton published a ten-volume translation of the tales, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, followed in 1886–88 by an additional six-volume Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. The mammoth scale of the endeavor was matched by its audacity. Burton not only offered an English reading public the first frank and unexpurgated translation of the tales themselves; he also peppered the text with footnotes about esoteric aspects of Islamic culture, especially sexual customs, and closed the tenth volume with a “Terminal Essay” that included a lengthy discourse on pederasty. This quixotic enterprise thrust Burton into the middle of an intersecting network of debates about sexuality and purity, state regulation and personal freedom, the Occident and the Orient. To examine the intentions that motivated Burton's translation of the Nights and the reception it received is to explore some of the crucial elements of the late Victorian crisis of identity.
While the crumbling of a Victorian cultural consensus has long been a matter of interest, only recently has attention turned to the role that non-Western influences played in this process.
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