Edward William Lane

The Life of the Pioneering Egyptologist and Orientalist
By Jason Thompson

Few Western scholars of the Middle East have exerted such profound influence as Edward William Lane. Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), which has never gone out of print, remains as a highly authoritative study of Middle Eastern society. His annotated translation of the Arabian Nights (1839–41) retains a devoted readership. Lane’s recently recovered and published Description of Egypt (2000) shows that he was a pioneering Egyptologist as well as Orientalist.

The capstone of Lane’s career, the definitive Arabic-English Lexicon (1863–93), is an indispensable reference tool. Yet, despite his extraordinary influence, little was known about Lane himself and virtually nothing about how he did his work. Now, in the first full-length biography, Lane’s life and accomplishments are examined in full, including his crucial years of field work in Egypt, revealing the life of a great Victorian scholar and presenting a fascinating episode in East–West encounter, interaction, and representation.

Jason Thompson is the editor of Edward William Lane’s Description of Egypt (AUC Press, 2000) and An Account of the Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians (AUC Press 2003). He is the author of Sir William Gardiner Wilkinson and His Circle and A History of Egypt, From Earliest Times to the Present (Haus, 2009).

'Here's a book we've been waiting for: Jason Thompson's biography of E. W. Lane, the great traveler, ethnographer, lexicographer, and translator, whose Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is one of the conceptual foundation-stones of ASTENE. In 2000, already acknowledged as the leading expert on his subject, Jason rescued Lane's magnificent and hitherto unpublished Description of Egypt. Three years later he produced a touchstone edition of Manners and Customs. And now he has produced this giant of a biography, the fruit of nearly 26 years of labour, a narrative that is not merely definitive, but far exceeds in scope and detail the most demanding expectations.

         To build such a work has meant locating, sifting through, and putting to use a vast amount of manuscript material, including papers still belonging to the Lane family. This biography also looks beyond Lane himself, however, and his extraordinary activities to provide a rich reconstruction of his background, both in Egypt and in England, including his contacts with associates, colleagues, and friends such as Linant de Bellefonds, Salt, Hay, Wilkinson, Bonomi, James Burton, and many others.

         The book is structured around what Lane valued most–––his work. The narrative therefore springs to life in 1825, when Lane leaves England for Egypt. The first dozen chapters (of a total of 30) rightly concentrate on Lane's first sojourn in Egypt, the 35 months during which he perfected his Arabic and sailed twice up the Nile. Throughout these trips he did most of the meticulous measuring, recording, and drawing that  would result in the Description. Jason's description of his harrowing and dangerous first voyage to Alexandria, reconstructed from primary sources, is as salty as something out of Patrick O'Brien.

          To capture Lane's impressions of Egypt during this first sojourn, Jason cunningly makes use of Lane's words, combining citations from the Description, the Manners and Customs, and various primary materials. Apart from Cairo, we thus visit every site that Lane saw and recorded on his first long voyage out of Cairo (15 March-28 October 1826). which took him to the Second Cataract and back, and the second (23 June-19 December, 1827), which went only as far as Abu Simbel.

         Lane travelled during a time when Mehmet Ali's ruthless modernisation called for massive destruction  of the physical remains of Egypt's ancient and medieval past. The observations made between 1798 and 1801 by the Napoleonic invaders thus no longer represented reality and likewise much of what Lane saw has since either decayed or disappeared. Jason's own Egyptological history of these sites, which supplements both the French Description and  Lane's Description, is therefore a welcome bonus. The result is, in effect, a compendium of observations, insights, and facts that can serve as an Egyptological reference in its own right, quite apart from its biographical value.  

         Chapters 13-15  describe Lane's activities in London during the period 1828-1833, which seem to have consisted of doing complex favours for Robert Hay while completing the Description, then listening to John Murray II's complaints about the social and political problems–––the stormy passage of the Reform Bill–––that were delaying its publication. Lane agreed that his observation of modern Cairo should be extracted from the manuscript of the Description and worked up into a separate publication, a process that would require some additional research in Cairo. He was unable to sail to Egypt again, however, until  November, 1833,

         His second Egyptian sojourn (13 December 1833-29 August 1835) had the explicit major aim of expanding the ethnographic materials he already possessed into what would eventually become Manners and Customs.  Chapters 16-19 show what new material was added and how it was acquired. But Lane also sought a higher degree of competence in Arabic. Important new friends thus included Fulgence Fresnel, Shaykh Muhammad Ayyad al-Tantawi, and Shaykh Ibrahim al-Dasuqi. He acquired manuscripts and some important new publications of the Bulaq Press, intending to return to England with them after twelve months. When the plague broke out in Cairo in January 1835, however,  Lane and Fresnel prudently sailed to Luxor. Chapter 19, which draws heavily on manuscript sources. details hitherto unpublished adventures there.

         The eight-month delay in his return caused by the plague, Jason remarks, probably cost Lane the publication of his Description, which would have changed his life completely. Chapters 20-23 detail Lane's life in London between September 1835 and mid-summer 1842 and include the story of its final abrupt rejection by John Murray III. Lane's disappointment was never wholly compensated by the runaway success of Manners and Customs, published by Charles Knight for  the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1836, with  a second edition following almost immediately. The entirety of Chapter 22 is devoted to his next project, his English translation of the Arabian Nights, carefully bowdlerised for family reading, but given value by its ethnographic annotation, which appeared in parts between 1838 and 1840. During this same period, with the support of Lord Prudhoe, he took up  in earnest the task of an Arab-English lexicon

         Lane's third  and longest Egyptian sojourn (19 July 1842-16 October 1849) occupies Chapters 24-27. This time Lane traveled as an established family man, accompanied by his Greek wife Nefeesah, who had actually been living with him since she was a child of eight, his sister Sophia, and her two sons, Stanley and Stuart. Sophia set herself to work on what became An Englishwoman in Egypt (1844). Their stay in Egypt was prolonged by financial difficulties, Cairo being a much cheaper  place to live than London.  Chapters 28 and 29 record Lane's last years and Chapter 30 is devoted to the Arabic-English Lexicon.

         An epilogue rightly criticizes Stanley Lane Poole's misguided effort to complete the Lexicon and offers a supererogatory riposte to Edward Said's ad hominem attack on Lane in Orientalism (1979).  This splendid biography itself meanwhile stands as a rebuke to that sort of  'postmodern' or 'theoretical” history that is based less on primary or even secondary sources than upon two familiar tertiary ones–––ideology and fantasy.     

         Finally, Haus Publishing should be congratulated on its production of this book, which will have involved accepting a vast and necessary amount of annotation and many spelling eccentricities. What a pleasure to see real Arabic in an English text!'

Reviewed in the TLS on 09/10/2010

'Thompson is interesting on Lane's credulous fascination with the occult. Above all, by shadowing Lane he has produced a new guide to the social, cultural and economic development of Egypt in the nineteenth century. But there is more of interest and importance in this major biography than can even be hinted at here.' - Robert Irwin, TLS

Reviewed in Egyptian Archaeology Spring 2011   See page 35-36

'Jason Thompson's latest book appears daunting at 747 pages and comprising 30 chapters. Yet the work, an exhaustive source of information on Lane, his life, and his scholarship, proves to be very readable. Thompson accomplishes this by embedding his biography within a much larger, social context, which includes the activities of Lane's family, friends, colleagues and contemporaries...   Thompson's work proves a very satisfying account of a very complicated man and life. As he states (p.1): 'Modern Egyptians is one of the most influential and widely cited works in the history of Middle East studies'. Yet the work has continually proven a source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. As such, a comprehensive study of the man who produced it was long overdue.' - Andrew Bednarski, Egyptian Archaeology