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200 years of the Bombay Education Society
by Neil White
April 22, 2015

-- Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

The Bombay Education Society (BES) celebrates the 200th anniversary of its Foundation in 1815 in Mumbai by the Venerable Archdeacon George Barnes, chaplain of the East India Company at the time. Today, it is the oldest society in the city that is dedicated to this vital cause and runs two schools, Barnes School & Junior College, Devlali, and Christ Church School, Byculla, Mumbai.

A hundred years after East India Company Chaplain Rev. Richard Cobbe founded a small free school in Mumbai (not far from the present Cathedral of St. Thomas, Fort) to house, feed, cloth and educate twelve poor boys, Archdeacon Barnes realised that the charity school could not meet the education needs of hundreds of children and so he appealed for funds. Consequently, The Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor within the Government of Bombay – now known as the Bombay Education Society (BES) – was formed in 1815 with Sir Evan Nepean, then Governor of Bombay, as its first President, to ensure a value based education and good upbringing for underprivileged children.

The first small school was taken over and student numbers grew until it became apparent that new grounds and school buildings were essential. A large, airy site at Byculla was allocated by the government and new school buildings were opened in 1925. Girls students were also provided for. One of the copper plates commemorating the opening is now on the wall of Evans Hall, Barnes School & Junior College, Devlali. The other remains with Christ Church School, Byculla, Mumbai, which along with the parish church there, stands on part of the land originally given to the BES. Much of the land was later sold to help build Barnes School.

The BES schools were primarily boarding schools for Anglo-Indian boys and girls, mainly belonging to the Anglican Church. However, day-scholars from all castes and creeds were also admitted. In the early 20th century, BES amalgamated with the Indo-British Institution, which had been founded in 1837 by Rev. George Candy.

By then, Byculla had become crowded and unhealthy and so, Sir Reginald Spence and Mr. Haig-Brown initiated plans to move the boarding part of the schools away from Bombay to the cooler and healthier Deccan Plateau. A site of more than 250 acres was purchased at Devlali and on November 17, 1923, Sir George Lloyd laid the foundation stone of Evans Hall. Less than two years later, on January 29, 1925, a special train brought the first boarders to Devlali and Barnes School was declared open by Sir Leslie Wilson, Governor of Bombay and patron of the Bombay Education Society.

The memory of Founders and Benefactors is preserved in the names of the buildings – Barnes, Candy, Spence, Haig-Brown and Lloyd. Other names are also remembered. Greaves House is named after Sir John Greaves, a prominent Bombay businessman of the firm Greaves Cotton [diesel, petrol, kerosene, gasoline engines, diesel pump sets, gensets, farm equipment, and construction equipment] who was Director of the Bombay Education Society and Chairman of its Managing Committee. Royal House commemorates Harry Royal, an old boy of the school who became an officer of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Honorary Treasurer of the BES for many years. The greatest of them all was the Rev. Thomas Evans. After being Headmaster at the old School at Byculla, he became the first Headmaster of Barnes. Without him, the school would probably not have survived its early years which is why his portrait hangs in Evans Hall, named in his memory when he retired in 1934.

In 1948, the BES faced and overcame a serious threat. The Indian Government decided to phase out the grant-in-aid to Barnes School and Christ Church School, without which the two schools would have to close. William Russell, the Chairman of BES at the time, agreed with the solution proposed by the previous Chairman, Sir John Greaves, which was to sell Barnes School to fund Christ Church School. When the Railway Board of the Central Government offered to buy Barnes School for £ 150,000, he recommended that the Society accept the offer. It was Frank Anthony, the Anglo-Indian nominated member of the Constituent Assembly who advised him to reject the offer as it would spell the doom of Anglo-Indian education in India and the Government of Maharashtra headed by Moraji Desai wanted to abolish English as a medium of instruction, except for those whose mother tongue was English. Aided by an eminent lawyer, Frank Anthony filed a case against the Government of Maharashtra and the crisis was eventually averted. Without the timely intervention of Frank Anthony, Barnes School would not be standing today.

Whilst BES has always stressed on academic excellence and the development of all-round skills through sports and extra curricular activities, it has emphasised a value based education for all students and ensures that they go through a specially created comprehensive course. That is because it is ever mindful of its responsibility to shape the citizens of tomorrow and secure the future of the nation.

Both BES schools, Barnes School & Junior College and Christ Church School, have a long and proud record of distinguished educational service as well as a reputation for imparting a sound moral, intellectual and physical education. They also have a rich heritage of promoting sports, believing that sports is critical to a child’s overall development and nurtures a competitive spirit.

Barnes School was recognised as the No.1 Day-cum-Boarding School in Maharashta and No.15 in India in the 2014 Education World Indian School Rankings. Christ Church School is one of the premier CICSE and Cambridge school in the country. It was voted among the top 10 schools in Mumbai in the Hindustan Times & Digital Magazine survey.

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Ethnological Society of London
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/9/20

The Ethnological Society of London (ESL) was a learned society founded in 1843 as an offshoot of the Aborigines' Protection Society (APS). The meaning of ethnology as a discipline was not then fixed: approaches and attitudes to it changed over its lifetime, with the rise of a more scientific approach to human diversity. Over three decades the ESL had a chequered existence, with periods of low activity and a major schism contributing to a patchy continuity of its meetings and publications. It provided a forum for discussion of what would now be classed as pioneering scientific anthropology from the changing perspectives of the period, though also with wider geographical, archaeological and linguistic interests.

In 1871 the ESL became part of what now is the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, merging back with the breakaway rival group the Anthropological Society of London.

Background

At the time of the Society's foundation, "ethnology" was a neologism. The Société Ethnologique de Paris was founded in 1839,[1] and the Ethnological Society of New York was founded in 1842.[2] An earlier Anthropological Society of London existed from 1837 to 1842; Luke Burke who was a member published an Ethnological Journal in 1848.[3]

The Paris society was set up by William Frederic Edwards, with a definite research programme in mind.[4] Edwards had been lecturing for a decade on the deficiency of considering the races as purely linguistic groups.[5] The Oxford English Dictionary records the term "ethnology" used in English by James Cowles Prichard in 1842, in his Natural History of Man, for the "history of nations". The approach to ethnology current at the time of the Society's founding relied on climate and social factors to explain human diversity; the debate was still framed by Noah's Flood, and the corresponding monogenism of human origins.[6] Prichard was a major figure in looking at human variability from a diachronic angle, and argued for ethnology as such a study, aimed at resolving the question of human origins.[7]

The early days of ethnology saw it in the position of a fringe science.[8] Prichard commented in 1848 that the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) still classed ethnology as a subdivision of natural history, as applied to man.[9] It stayed in Section D for a period, but in 1851 it was classed in a new Section E for Geology and Geography, after lobbying by supporters including Roderick Murchison.[10] The overlap of interests between the ESL and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) was reflected by common membership.[11]

Around 1860 the discovery of human antiquity and the publication of the Origin of Species caused a fundamental change of perspective, with the older historical approach looking hopeless given the emergence of prehistory, but the biological issue gaining in interest.[12]

Tensions in the Aborigines' Protection Society

Further information: Aborigines' Protection Society

The Aborigines' Protection Society (APS) was set up as a result of parliamentary committee activity, and was largely the initiative of Thomas Fowell Buxton. It produced reports, but in the wake of the Niger expedition of 1841 some of its supporters believed a case made on science was being sidelined in the activities of the APS.[13]

The Niger expedition of 1841 was mounted by British missionary and activist groups in 1841-1842, using three British iron steam vessels to travel to Lokoja, at the confluence of the Niger River and Benue River, in what is now Nigeria. The British government backed the effort to make treaties with the native peoples, introduce Christianity and promote increased trade. The crews of the boats suffered a high mortality from disease.

The expedition was put into motion by an Exeter Hall meeting of 1 June 1840. It was chaired by Prince Albert. The organisers were the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa, set up in 1839 by Thomas Fowell Buxton. Buxton was promoting a grandiose "New Africa" policy, based on a series of treaties to be made in West Africa, the introduction of Christianity, and increased commerce, as set out in his book the previous year.

-- Niger expedition of 1841, by Wikipedia

The APS was founded by Quakers in order to promote a specific social and political agenda. The Ethnological Society, though primarily a scientific organization, retained some of its predecessor's liberal outlook and activist bent.

Foundation

An ethnological questionnaire was produced by the BAAS in 1841, arising from a committee led by Thomas Hodgkin of the APS, and drawing on prior work in Paris by W. F. Edwards.[14] A prospectus for the Ethnological Society was issued in July 1842 by Richard King; King had been a student under Hodgkin at Guy's Hospital.[15] The Society first met in February 1843 at Hodgkin's house;[16] or on 31 January, when Ernst Dieffenbach read a paper On the Study of Ethnology.[17]

Among the other founders were James Cowles Prichard,[18] John Beddoe[19] and John Brown.[20] Apart from Hodgkin, King and Dieffenbach, the other significant common member with the APS was William Aldam, another Quaker.[21] The Society had Corresponding Members, who counted as Fellows;[22] they later included Hermann Welcker.[23] In the early days the Society had rooms at 27 Sackville Street, which were rented through King to the Westminster Medical Society.[24]

1840s

John Briggs became a Fellow of the ESL in 1845, and Brian Houghton Hodgson, also representing the ethnology of India, was at some point made an Honorary Fellow.[25] William Augustus Miles was a member and published a paper on the aboriginal Australian culture.[26]

After Prichard's death in 1848, the intellectual leader in the Society became Robert Gordon Latham. Links to the Aborigines' Protection Society were retained through the common membership of Hodgkin and Henry Christy, though the break was not completely amicable.[27] The Ethnological Society in its early years lacked good contacts with officialdom, certainly compared to the RGS and its good working relationship with the Colonial Office. Governor George Grey was helpful to the Society, but he was an exception: it took until the end of the decade for the Society to begin to appreciate its marginal position with respect to the flow of information from the British colonies.[28] Grey was an active member of the ESL while abroad as a colonial administrator, and his network included William Ellis, another member.[29]

1850s

In 1850 the Society was based at 17 Savile Row.[30] It saw a period of decline in the middle of the decade.[27] Among active members on the Council was William Devonshire Saull, who died in 1855.[31] George Bellas Greenough was a vice-president.[32] Richard Cull's 1852 report mentioned Singapore connections, in particular James Richardson Logan.[33]

Thomas Richard Heywood Thomson delivered a paper in 1854 to the Society on interfertility, casting doubt on comments of Paweł Edmund Strzelecki about female infertility among Aboriginal Australians after they had given birth to a child with a white father. The communication was well received, but as a contribution to the ongoing debate on race, was far from settling the significant underlying issue.[34]

James Hunt joined the ESL in 1854, and became a divisive figure because of his attacks on humanitarian attitudes of missionaries and abolitionists. He served as secretary from 1859 to 1862.[35] He found an ally in John Crawfurd, who had retired from service as colonial diplomat and administrator for the East India Company. Crawfurd came to ethnology through its section in the BAAS. His published views on race were discordant with the Quaker and APS tradition in the ESL.[36] Hunt and Crawfurd in 1858 tried to dislodge the President Sir James Clark at an ESL meeting, unsuccessfully, while Hodgkin was out of the country.[37]

1860s

The 1860s saw a revived interest in ethnology, triggered by recent work, such as that involving flint implements and the antiquity of man. The Ethnological Society became a more of meeting-place for archaeologists, as its interests kept pace with new work;[38] and during this decade the Society became a very different institution.[39] The society's original members had mainly been military officers, civil servants, and members of the clergy, but by the early 1860s younger scientists had supplanted them. The background was of continuing encounters worldwide with many peoples; John Thomson the photographer who was recording them became a member in 1866.[40] Thomas Henry Huxley, Augustus Lane Fox, Edward Tylor, Henry Christy, John Lubbock, and Augustus Wollaston Franks all figured prominently in the society's affairs after 1860.

The ESL's meetings and journal served as a forum for sharing new ideas, and as a clearing-house for ethnological data. In 1868 the Society set up a Classification Committee to try to get on top of the issues caused by haphazard reporting, and lack of systematic fieldwork.[41] This initiative was a proposal of Lane Fox.[42]

Split and merger

In the years after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, the "Ethnologicals" generally supported Charles Darwin against his critics, and rejected the more extreme forms of scientific racism. The movement towards Darwinism was not one way, however, as evidenced by the Honorary Fellowship given to Robert Knox in 1860.[43]

Robert Knox FRSE FRCSE MWS (4 September 1791 – 20 December 1862) was a Scottish anatomist, zoologist, ethologist and physician. He was a lecturer on anatomy in Edinburgh, where he introduced the theory of transcendental anatomy.

He is, however, now mainly remembered for his involvement in the Burke and Hare murders. An incautious approach to obtaining cadavers for dissection after the passage of the Anatomy Act and disagreements with professional colleagues ruined his career. A move to London did not improve matters.

His later pessimistic view of humanity contrasted sharply with his youthful attachment to the ideas of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Knox also devoted the latter part of his life to theorising on evolution and ethnology, as well as being one of the pioneers of scientific racism in Britain. His work on the latter further harmed his legacy and overshadowed his contributions to evolutionary theory...

Knox returned to Edinburgh by Christmas 1822. On 1 December 1823 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh...

Before the Anatomy Act of 1832 widened the supply, the main legal supply of corpses for anatomical purposes in the UK were those condemned to death and dissection by the courts. This led to a chronic shortage of legitimate subjects for dissection, and this shortage became more serious as the need to train medical students grew, and the number of executions fell. In his school Knox ran up against the problem from the start, since—after 1815—the Royal Colleges had increased the anatomical work in the medical curriculum. If he taught according to what was known as 'French method' the ratio would have had to approach one corpse per pupil.

As a consequence, body-snatching became so prevalent that it was not unusual for relatives and friends of someone who had just died to watch over the body until burial, and then to keep watch over the grave after burial, to stop it being violated.

In November 1827, William Hare began a new career when an indebted lodger died on him by chance. He was paid £7.10s (seven pounds & ten shillings) for delivering the body to Knox's dissecting rooms at Surgeons' Square. Now Hare and his accomplice, William Burke, set about murdering the city’s poor on a regular basis. After 16 more transactions, each netting £8-10, in what later became known as the West Port Murders, on 2 November 1828 Burke and Hare were caught, and the whole city convulsed with horror, fed by ballads, broadsides, and newspapers, at the reported deeds of the pair. Hare turned King's evidence, and Burke was hanged, dissected and his remains displayed.

Knox was not prosecuted, which outraged many in Edinburgh. His house was attacked by a mob of 'the lowest rabble of the Old Town,' and windows were broken. A committee of the Royal Society of Edinburgh exonerated him on the grounds that he had not dealt personally with Burke and Hare, but there was no forgetting his part in the case, and many remained wary of him.

Almost immediately after the Burke and Hare case, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh began to harry him, and by June 1831 they had procured his resignation as the Curator of the museum he had proposed and founded. In the same year he was obliged to resign his army commission to avoid further service in the Cape. This removed his last source of guaranteed income, but fortunately his classes were more popular than ever, with a record 504 students. His school moved to the grander premises of Old Surgeons' Hall in 1833 but his class declined after Edinburgh University made its own practical anatomy class compulsory in the mid-1830s. Knox continued to purchase cadavers for his dissection class from such shadowy figures as the 'Black Bull Man,' but the 1832 Anatomy Act made bodies more available to all anatomists, he quarrelled with HM Inspector of Anatomy over the supply of bodies, and his competitive edge was lost. In 1837 Knox applied for the chair in pathology at Edinburgh University but his candidature was blocked by eleven existing professors, who preferred to abolish the post rather than appoint him. In 1842 he was unable to make payments to the Edinburgh funeratory system, from which bodies were supplied to private schools, and he relocated to Glasgow where, still short of subjects for dissection, he closed his school in 1844. In 1847 the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh found him guilty of falsifying a student's certificate of attendance (a not uncommon practice in private schools) and refused to accept any further certificates from him, effectively banning him from teaching in Scotland. In the same year he was expelled from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and had his election retrospectively cancelled...

[U]ntil 1856 he worked on medical journalism, gave public lectures, and wrote several books, including his most ambitious work, The Races of Men in which he argued that each race was suited to its environment and "perfect in its own way."...

In his best-selling work, The Races of Men (1850), a "Zoological history" of mankind, Knox exaggerated supposed racial differences in support of his project, asserting that, anatomically and behaviourally, "race, or hereditary descent, is everything". He offered crude characterisations of each racial group: for example the Saxon (in which race he included himself) "invents nothing", "has no musical ear", lacks "genius", and is so "low and boorish" that "he does not know what you mean by fine art". No race was without its redeeming features, however; Knox described Saxons as "[t]houghtful, plodding, industrious beyond all other races, [and] a lover of labour for labour's sake". Such supposed racial characteristics meant that each race was naturally fitted for a particular environment and could not endure outside of it. While Knox maintained that all races were capable of some form civilized life, he maintained that a vast gulf stood between the limited attainments available to the 'negroid' and to most 'mongoloid' races on one hand and the much greater past achievements and future potential of white men on the other. The Black, Knox remarked, 'is no more a white man than an ass is a horse or a zebra'. Ultimately however, all races were "[d]estined ... to run, like all other animals, a certain limited course of existence", it mattering "little how their extinction is brought about". In 1862 Knox took the opportunity of a second edition of The Races of Men to defend the "much maligned races" of the Cape against accusations of cannibalism, and to rebuke the Dutch for treating them like "wild beasts".

From the perspective of a Lowland Scot Protestant, Knox's racist works espoused extreme racial hostility to Celts in general (including the Highland Scots and Welsh people, but particularly the Irish people). He considered the "Caledonian Celt" as touching "the end of his career: they are reduced to about one hundred and fifty thousand" and that the "Welsh Celts are not troublesome, but might easily become so." For Knox, "the Irish Celt is the most to be dreaded" and openy advocated their ethnic cleansing around the time that the Great Famine was happening, stating in The Races of Men: A Fragment (1850): "The source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. There is no getting over historical facts. Look at Wales, look at Caledonia; it is ever the same. [...] The race must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave. The Orange club of Ireland is a Saxon confederation for the clearing the land of all Papists and Jacobites; this means Celts. If left to themselves, they would clear them out, as Cromwell proposed, by the sword; it would not require six weeks to accomplish the work. But the Encumbered Estates Relief Bill will do it better."

-- Robert Knox, by Wikipedia

The Anthropological Society of London (ASL) was founded in 1863 as an institutional home for those who disagreed with the Ethnological Society's politics (in terms of party loyalties, Stocking makes the political complexion of the ESL 75% Liberal to 25% Conservative, with the proportions reversed in the ASL).[44] On the topic of race, the Ethnological Society retained views descending from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who had a five-race theory but was a monogenist, and from Prichard. The post-Darwin concept of human speciation was unacceptable to those forming the Anthropological Society.[45]

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (11 May 1752 – 22 January 1840) was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He was one of the first to explore the study of the human being as an aspect of natural history. His teachings in comparative anatomy were applied to his classification of human races, of which he claimed there were five, Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History.

Blumenbach's peers considered him one of the great theorists of his day, and he was a mentor or influence on many of the next generation of German biologists, including Alexander von Humboldt...

Blumenbach's work included his description of sixty human crania (skulls) published originally in fascicules as Decas craniorum (Göttingen, 1790–1828). This was a founding work for other scientists in the field of craniometry. He divided the human species into five races in 1779, later founded on crania research (description of human skulls)...

Further anatomical study led him to the conclusion that 'individual Africans differ as much, or even more, from other Africans as from Europeans'.

Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., depended on geography, diet, and mannerism.

Like other monogenists such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Blumenbach held to the "degenerative hypothesis" of racial origins. Blumenbach claimed that Adam and Eve were Caucasian inhabitants of Asia (see Asia hypothesis), and that other races came about by degeneration from environmental factors such as the sun and poor diet. Thus, he claimed, Negroid pigmentation arose because of the result of the heat of the tropical sun, while the cold wind caused the tawny colour of the Eskimos, and the Chinese were fair-skinned compared to the other Asian stocks because they kept mostly in towns protected from environmental factors. He believed that the degeneration could be reversed in a proper environmental control and that all contemporary forms of man could revert to the original Caucasian race...

He did not consider his "degenerative hypothesis" as racist and sharply criticized Christoph Meiners, an early practitioner of scientific racialism, as well as Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, who concluded from autopsies that Africans were an inferior race. Blumenbach wrote three other essays stating non-white peoples were capable of excelling in arts and sciences in reaction against racialists of his time...

His ideas were adopted by other researchers who used them to encourage scientific racism....

Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism (racial discrimination), racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Historically, scientific racism received credence throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. Dividing humankind into biologically distinct groups is sometimes called racialism or race realism by its proponents. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.

Scientific racism employs anthropology (notably physical anthropology), anthropometry, craniometry, and other disciplines or pseudo-disciplines, in proposing anthropological typologies supporting the classification of human populations into physically discrete human races, some of which might be asserted to be superior or inferior to others. Scientific racism was common during the period from the 1600s to the end of World War II. Since the second half of the 20th century, scientific racism has been criticized as obsolete and discredited, yet has persistently been used to support or validate racist world-views, based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.

After the end of World War II, scientific racism in theory and action was formally denounced, especially in UNESCO's early antiracist statement "The Race Question" (1950): "The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering." Since that time, developments in human evolutionary genetics and physical anthropology have led to a new consensus among anthropologists that human race is a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a biological one.

The term scientific racism is generally used pejoratively when applied to more modern theories, such as those in The Bell Curve (1994). Critics argue that such works postulate racist conclusions, such as a genetic connection between race and intelligence, that are unsupported by available evidence. Publications such as the Mankind Quarterly, founded explicitly as a "race-conscious" journal, are generally regarded as platforms of scientific racism because they publish fringe interpretations of human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, language, mythology, archaeology, and race.

-- Scientific racism, by Wikipedia

Blumenbach held that all living organisms "from man down to maggots, and from the cedar to common mould or mucor," possess an inherent "effort or tendency which, while life continues, is active and operative; in the first instance to attain the definite form of the species, then to preserve it entire, and, when it is infringed upon, so far as this is possible, to restore it." This power of vitality is "not referable to any qualities merely physical, chemical, or mechanical."

-- Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, by Wikipedia

Speciation is the evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct species. The biologist Orator F. Cook coined the term in 1906 for cladogenesis, the splitting of lineages, as opposed to anagenesis, phyletic evolution within lineages. Charles Darwin was the first to describe the role of natural selection in speciation in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species.[4] He also identified sexual selection as a likely mechanism, but found it problematic.

There are four geographic modes of speciation in nature, based on the extent to which speciating populations are isolated from one another: allopatric, peripatric, parapatric, and sympatric. Speciation may also be induced artificially, through animal husbandry, agriculture, or laboratory experiments. Whether genetic drift is a minor or major contributor to speciation is the subject matter of much ongoing discussion.

Rapid sympatric speciation can take place through polyploidy, such as by doubling of chromosome number; the result is progeny which are immediately reproductively isolated from the parent population. New species can also be created through hybridisation followed, if the hybrid is favoured by natural selection, by reproductive isolation.

-- Speciation, by Wikipedia

The two societies co-existed warily for several years. The X Club, with members in common, supported the Ethnological Society's side of the debate.[46]

The X Club was a dining club of nine men who supported the theories of natural selection and academic liberalism in late 19th-century England. Thomas Henry Huxley was the initiator; he called the first meeting for 3 November 1864. The club met in London once a month—except in July, August and September—from November 1864 until March 1893, and its members are believed to have wielded much influence over scientific thought. The members of the club were George Busk, Edward Frankland, Thomas Archer Hirst, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, William Spottiswoode, and John Tyndall, united by a "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas.

The nine men who would compose the X Club already knew each other well. By the 1860s, friendships had turned the group into a social network, and the men often dined and went on holidays together. After Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, the men began working together to aid the cause for naturalism and natural history. They backed the liberal Anglican movement that emerged in the early 1860s, and both privately and publicly supported the leaders of the movement.

According to its members, the club was originally started to keep friends from drifting apart, and to partake in scientific discussion free from theological influence. A key aim was to reform the Royal Society, with a view to making the practice of science professional. In the 1870s and 1880s, the members of the group became prominent in the scientific community and some accused the club of having too much power in shaping the scientific landscape of London. The club was terminated in 1893, after depletion by death, and as old age made regular meetings of the surviving members impossible....

The X Club came together during a period of turbulent conflict in both science and religion in Victorian England. The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection brought a storm of argument, with the scientific establishment of wealthy amateurs and clerical naturalists as well as the Church of England attacking this new development. Since the start of the 19th century they had seen evolutionism as an assault on the divinely ordained aristocratic social order. On the other side, Darwin's ideas on evolution were welcomed by liberal theologians and by a new generation of salaried professional scientists; the men who would later come to form the X Club supported Darwin, and saw his work as a great stride in the struggle for freedom from clerical interference in science. The members of the X social network played a significant part in nominating Darwin for the Copley Medal in 1864.

In 1860, Essays and Reviews, a collection of essays on Christianity written by a group of liberal Anglicans, was published. The collection represented a summation of a nearly century-long challenge to the history and prehistory of the Bible by higher critics as well as geologists and biologists. In short, the writers of Essays and Reviews sought to analyse the Bible like any other work of literature. At the time, Essays created more of a stir than Darwin's book. The members of the X network backed the collection, and Lubbock even sought to form an alliance between liberal Anglicans and scientists. Two liberal Anglican theologians were convicted of heresy, and when the government overturned the judgement on appeal, Samuel Wilberforce, the High Church and the evangelicals organised petitions and a mass backlash against evolution. At the Anglican convocation, the evangelicals presented a declaration reaffirming their faith in the harmony of God's word and his works and tried to make this a compulsory "Fortieth Article" of faith. They took their campaign to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, aiming to overthrow Huxley's "dangerous clique" of Darwin's allies.

In 1862, Bishop John William Colenso of Natal published The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined, an analysis of the first five books of the Old Testament. In his analysis Colenso used mathematics and concepts of population dynamics, including examinations of food supply and transportation, to show that the first five books of the Bible were faulty and unreliable. Outrage broke out within the Church of England, and the X network not only gave their support to Colenso, but at times even dined with him to discuss his ideas.

Later, in 1863, a new rift began to emerge within the scientific community over race theory. Debate was stirred up when the Anthropological Society of London, which rejected Darwinian theory, claimed that slavery was defensible based on the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin. The members of what would become the X Club sided with the Ethnological Society of London, which denounced slavery and embraced academic liberalism. The men of the X Club, especially Lubbock, Huxley, and Busk, felt that dissension and the "jealousies of theological sects" within learned societies were damaging, and they attempted to limit the contributions the Anthropological Society made to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a society of which they were all members.

Thus, by 1864, the members of the X Club were joined in a fight, both public and private, to unite the London scientific community with the objective of furthering the ideas of academic liberalism.

-- X Club, by Wikipedia

Both societies took an interest in sexual morality as a topic, but the attitude of social evolutionism was very largely restricted to the Ethnological Society, where John Ferguson McLennan was a member, with the exception of Charles Staniland Wake who made little impact at the time.[47][48] Huxley made efforts to merge the societies in 1866, but was blocked by Crawfurd; the attempt was renewed in 1868 after Crawfurd's death.[49] The Ethnological Society and Anthropological Society merged in 1871 into the Anthropological Institute. A small group of past supporters of Hunt broke away in 1873, forming a London Anthropological Society that lasted two years.[50]

Publications

Initially the Ethnological Society did not aim to publish its own learned journal. Instead it adopted a suggestion of Robert Jameson, who edited the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, to have its transactions published there.[51] The early flow of published papers was in fact sparse.[52] Volume 46 from 1848 contained papers by George Ruxton and James Henry Skene contributed via the Ethnological Society.[53]

The Journal of the Ethnological Society of London was published in the years 1848 to 1856, a period in which four volumes appeared, and the Society's scientific activities were less marginal.[52] It was edited by Thomas Wright.[51] It then was published once more, under the title Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, from 1861 to 1869; it was renamed and published, from 1869 to 1870, again as Journal of the Ethnological Society of London,[54] and was edited by George Busk.[55]

Presidents

• 1843 Charles Malcolm[56]
• 1848 James Cowles Prichard
• 1850 Charles Malcolm.[30]
• 1853–4 Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet[57][58][59]
• 1855–6 John Conolly[57][60]
• Sir James Clark
• 1861–? John Crawfurd
• 1863–5 John Lubbock[61]
• 1865-8 John Crawfurd[62]
• 1868-9 Thomas Huxley[63]
• Before merger: George Busk[64]

References

• Efram Sera-Shriar, The Making of British Anthropology, 1813–1871, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013, pp. 53–79.
• Brent Henze, Scientific Definition in Rhetorical Formations: Race as "Permanent Variety" in James Cowles Prichard's Ethnology, Rhetoric Review Vol. 23, No. 4 (2004), pp. 311–331. Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. JSTOR 20176631
• Ronald Rainger, Philanthropy and Science in the 1830s: The British and Foreign Aborigines' Protection Society, Man, New Series, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 702–717. Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. JSTOR 2801541
• Damon Ieremia Salesa (2011), Racial Crossings: Race, intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire; Google Books.
• George W. Stocking, Jr. (1987), Victorian Anthropology

Notes

1. Waterloo Chronology of Scholarly Societies, 1830s
2. Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (2011), p. 162 note 32; Google Books.
3. Richard Handler, Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions: essays toward a more inclusive history of anthropology (2000), pp. 24–25 with note 7; Google Books.
4. Henrika Kuklick, New History of Anthropology (2009), p. 98; Google Books.
5. Stocking, p. 27.
6. Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, Emma C. Spary, Cultures of Natural History (1996), p. 339; Google Books.
7. Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2011), p. 327 note 60; Google Books.
8. Salesa, p. 145; Google Books.
9. J. C. Prichard, On the Relations of Ethnology to Other Branches of Knowledge, Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1848–1856) , Vol. 1, (1848), pp. 301–329. Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. doi:10.2307/3014091. JSTOR 3014091.
10. Paul Sillitoe, The Role Of Section H at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the History Of Anthropology Archived 2012-10-19 at the Wayback Machine, Durham Anthropology Journal.
11. Notably Richard Francis Burton, John Crawfurd, Francis Galton, Frederick Hindmarsh, Thomas Hodgkin, William Spottiswoode, and Alfred Russel Wallace. David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: episodes in the history of a contested enterprise (1993), p. 163; Google Books.
12. Stocking, p. 76.
13. Stocking, pp. 241–5.
14. Philip D. Curtin (1973). Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850. Univ of Wisconsin Press. p. 332. ISBN 978-0-299-83026-7. Retrieved 2 December 2012.
15. Stocking, p. 244.
16. ESL archives.
17. Robert Grant, New Zealand ‘Naturally’: Ernst Dieffenbach, Environmental Determinism and the Mid Nineteenth-Century British Colonization of New Zealand, New Zealand Journal of History, 37, 1 (2003) at p. 25; PDF.
18. RAI page: Prichard centenary.
19. Richardson, Angelique. "Beddoe, John". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/30666. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
20. Baigent, Elizabeth. "Brown, John". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/3629. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
21. Rainger, p. 711.
22. RAI page: Local Correspondents.
23. Hermann Welcker and J. B. D., On the Skull of Dante, Anthropological Review , Vol. 5, No. 16 (Jan., 1867), pp. 56–71. Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. doi:10.2307/3024871. JSTOR 3024871.
24. D. Zuck, The Westminster Medical Society 1809–1850, The History of Anaesthesia Society Proceedings vol. 42 (2010), pp. 9–25; ISSN 1360-6891; PDF, at p. 16.
25. Jan van Bremen, Akitoshi Shimizu, Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania (1999), p. 87 note 33; Google Books.
26. Henze, p. 327.
27. George W. Stocking, Jr., What's in a Name: The Origins of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1837–71), at pp. 372–3, Man, New Series volume 6 issue 3, (Sep. 1971), 369–390; PDF.
28. Salesa, p. 146; Google Books.
29. Salesa, p. 155; Google Books.
30. Regulations of the Ethnological Society of London (1850); JSTOR 3014129.
31. Desmond, Adrian. "Saull, William Devonshire". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/24683. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
32. RAI page: Archive Contents 44 Archived 2012-04-20 at the Wayback Machine.
33. Journal of the Ethnological Society of London vol. III (1854), p. 171;archive.org.
34. Salesa, pp. 134–5; Google Books.
35. Brock, W. H. "Hunt, James". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/14194. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
36. Terry Jay Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (2001), p. 265; Google Books.
37. Ellingson, p. 275; Google Books.
38. Stocking, pp. 246–7.
39. Andrew L. Christenson, Tracing Archaeology's Past: the historiography of archaeology (1989), p. 155; Google Books.
40. Reed Institute, biography of Thomson.
41. Mark Bowden, Pitt Rivers: the life and archaeological work of Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, DCL, FRS, FSA (1991), p. 45; Google Books.
42. Rethinking Pitt-Rivers: A year in the life: 1869.
43. Adrian J. Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: morphology, medicine, and reform in radical London (1992), p. 425; Google Books.
44. Stocking, p. 251.
45. Bronwen Douglas, Chris Ballard, Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the science of race 1750–1940 (2008), p. 206; Google Books.
46. Ruth Barton, X Club (act. 1864–1892), ODNB theme.
47. Larry T. Reynolds, Leonard Lieberman (editors), Race and other Misadventures: essays in honor of Ashley Montagu in his ninetieth year (1996), p. 350; Google Books.
48. Lester Richard Hiatt, Arguments about Aborigines: Australia and the evolution of social anthropology (1996), p. 40; Google Books.
49. Stocking, p. 255.
50. Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians (1978), pp. 158–9.
51. RAI page: Ethnological Society of London. Publications.
52. Stocking, p. 245.
53. Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal (1848 – 1849 (Oct. – Apr.)) Volume 46; archive.org and later page.
54. https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/anthro/antelect.html
55. Foote, Yolanda. "Busk, George". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/4168. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
56. Richard Cull, Obituary Notice of the Late Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Malcolm, President of the Ethnological Society, Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1848–1856) , Vol. 3, (1854), pp. 112–114. Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. JSTOR 3014137.
57. Obituary of Conolly in the Transactions of 1867; archive.org.
58. http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/rpr/images/stor ... nology.pdf[permanent dead link]
59. Presidential Address 1853.
60. R. J. Cooter, Phrenology and British Alienists, c. 1825–1845: Part I: Converts to a Doctrine p. 16 note 62; PDF.
61. Steven Mithen, After the Ice: a global human history, 20,000–5000 BC (2006), p. 514; Google Books.
62. Transactions, list of officers; archive.org.
63. Adrian Desmond, Huxley: The Devil's Disciple (1994), p. 371.
64. BMA obituary, p. 346; PDF.

External links

• WorldCat page

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Anthropological Society of London
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/9/20

Debate was stirred up when the Anthropological Society of London, which rejected Darwinian theory, claimed that slavery was defensible based on the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin. The members of what would become the X Club sided with the Ethnological Society of London, which denounced slavery and embraced academic liberalism. The men of the X Club, especially Lubbock, Huxley, and Busk, felt that dissension and the "jealousies of theological sects" within learned societies were damaging, and they attempted to limit the contributions the Anthropological Society made to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a society of which they were all members.

-- X Club, by Wikipedia

The Anthropological Society of London was founded in 1863 by Richard Francis Burton and Dr. James Hunt. It broke away from the existing Ethnological Society of London, founded in 1843, and defined itself in opposition to the older society. The Anthropological Society, Hunt proclaimed, would concern itself with the collection of facts and the identification of natural laws that explained the diversity of humankind. It would also cast its intellectual nets more broadly, dealing with the physical as well as the cultural aspects of humans.

Polygenism versus monogenism

The real differences between the two societies ran much deeper. The members of the Ethnological Society were, on the whole, inclined to believe that humans were shaped by their environment; when Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution by natural selection, they supported it. They also believed in monogenism and tended to be politically liberal, especially on matters related to race.

Hunt and his closest followers tended to be supporters of polygenism and sceptical of Darwin (though they made him an honorary fellow).[1] They found the Ethnological Society's politics distasteful, and (for example) supported the Confederacy in the American Civil War. The issue that most sharply divided the two groups was the "Negro question." In his opening speech to the society he enunciated a strong racist view:

Whatever may be the conclusion to which our scientific inquiries may lead us, we should always remember, that by whatever means the Negro, for instance, acquired his present physical, mental and moral character, whether he has risen from an ape or descended from a perfect man, we still know that the Races of Europe have now much in their mental and moral nature which the races of Africa have not got.[2]

However he was careful to distance himself from the slave trade:

A serious charge has been made against the American School of Anthropology, when it is affirmed that their interest in keeping up slavery induced the scientific men of that country to advocate a distinct origin for the African race...I would therefore express a hope that the objects of this Society will never be prostituted to such an object as the support of the slave trade, with all its abuses.[3]

He did this by redefining slavery such [that] it did not occur in America:

Our Bristol and Liverpool merchants, perhaps, helped to benefit the race when they transplanted some of them to America; and our mistaken legislature has done the Negro race much injury by their absurd and unwarrantable attempts to prevent Africa from exporting her worthless or surplus population...I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that slavery as understood by the ancients does not exist out of Africa and that the highest type of the Negro race is at present to be found in the Confederate States of America.[4]

According to noted Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore, however, founder James Hunt was a paid agent of the Confederate States of America, as was his friend Henry Hotze and two other council members. Their purpose in founding the society was "to swing London opinion during the [American Civil] war." Hunt and Hotze put pro-slavery pseudoscience into the Anthropological Society library, "bought journalists, printed and distributed thousands of pamphlets,... ran a propaganda weekly in Fleet Street, The Index..." and in general promoted the pro-slavery dogma that black people were a separate species and inherently capable of no higher development than that of enslavement.[5]

Merger

In 1864, Hunt attempted to persuade the British Association to rename Section E (Geography and Ethnology) to include Anthropology and in 1865 his attempt create a new Anthropology sub-section devoted to the study of man was strongly resisted by others. However with the support of T. H. Huxley it was created under Biology section D in 1866, and in 1869, Section E dropped the "Ethnology" part of its title.[6]

At the same time, Hunt's position was weakened by an allegation made by one of the members, Hyde Clarke, about the finances of the organisation. Although he managed to satisfy the other members and expel Clarke, the stress seriously affected his health.

A merger of the two organisations was already under way before Hunt died early at a young age in 1869, and in 1871 they formed the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

Other organisations

In 1863, Richard Burton and others founded a breakaway London Anthropological Society which for several years published a journal "Anthropologia". Burton said "My motive was to supply travellers with an organ that would rescue their observations from the outer darkness of manuscripts and print their curious information on social and sexual matters out of place in the popular book".[7]

There was also an Anthropological Society of London founded in 1836 by John Isaac Hawkins which had more to do with phrenology.[8]

Publications

• Memoirs read before the Anthropological Society of London Vol 1:1863-4, 2:1865-6, 3:1867-9
• Journal of the Anthropological Society of London Vol 7:1868
• Anthropological Review. Vol 1, 2:1864, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8:1870
• Journal of Anthropology. No. I-III:1870-1.
• 'The Popular Magazine of Anthropology. Vol 1
• Anthropologia. Vol. 1. London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox. [1873-1875]

References

1. Memoirs of the Anthropological Society of London, 2
2. James Hunt, President (February 24, 1863), Introductory address on the study of Anthropology, The Anthropological Review, 1, p. 3
3. Hunt 1863, p. 4
4. James Hunt, President (1865), On the Negro's place in Nature, The Anthropological Review, 3, pp. 53–4
5. Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a hatred of slavery shaped Darwin's views on human evolution, A Desmond and J Moore, 2009 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston/NYC; quotes from p. 332-3
6. Sillitoe, Paul, "The Role Of Section H At The British Association For The Advancement Of Science In The History Of Anthropology", Durham Anthropology Journal, 13 (2), ISSN 1742-2930, archived from the original on 2012-10-19, retrieved 2011-06-05
7. Thomas Wright, The Life of Richard Burton, p. 65
8. Jorian, P., "The first anthropological society", Man, New, 1: 142, JSTOR 2801983

Further reading

Efram Sera-Shriar, ‘Observing Human Difference: James Hunt, Thomas Huxley, and Competing Disciplinary Strategies in the 1860s’, Annals of Science, 70 (2013), 461-491

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Richard Francis Burton [Mirza Abdullah the Bushri] [Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî] [Frank Baker]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/9/20


Sir Richard Francis Burton, KCMG FRGS
Burton in 1864
Born: 19 March 1821, Torquay, Devon, England
Died: 20 October 1890 (aged 69), Trieste, Austria-Hungary
Burial place: St Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic Church, Mortlake, London, England
Nationality: British
Other names: Mirza Abdullah the Bushri; Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî; Frank Baker
Alma mater: Trinity College, Oxford
Occupation: Soldier, diplomat, explorer, translator, arabist, author
Notable work: Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah; The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night; The Kasidah
Spouse(s): Isabel Arundell ​(m. 1861)
Military career
Nickname(s): Ruffian Dick
Allegiance: British Empire
Service/branch: Bombay Army
Years of service: 1842–1861
Rank: Captain
Battles/wars: Crimea War
Awards: Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George; Crimea Medal

Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS (/ˈbɜːrtən/; 19 March 1821 – 20 October 1890) was a British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy,[1] linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat. He was famed for his travels and explorations in Asia, Africa and the Americas, as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures. According to one count, he spoke 29 European, Asian and African languages.[2]

Burton's best-known achievements include: a well-documented journey to Mecca in disguise, at a time when Europeans were forbidden access on pain of death; an unexpurgated translation of One Thousand and One Nights (commonly called The Arabian Nights in English after early translations of Antoine Galland's French version); the publication of the Kama Sutra in English; a translation of The Perfumed Garden, the Arab Kama Sutra; and a journey with John Hanning Speke as the first Europeans to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile.

His works and letters extensively criticised colonial policies of the British Empire, even to the detriment of his career. Although he aborted his university studies, he became a prolific and erudite author and wrote numerous books and scholarly articles about subjects including human behaviour, travel, falconry, fencing, sexual practices, and ethnography. A characteristic feature of his books is the copious footnotes and appendices containing remarkable observations and information. William Henry Wilkins wrote: "So far as I can gather from all I have learned, the chief value of Burton’s version of The Scented Garden lay not so much in his translation of the text, though that of course was admirably done, as in the copious notes and explanations which he had gathered together for the purpose of annotating the book. He had made this subject a study of years. For the notes of the book alone he had been collecting material for thirty years, though his actual translation of it only took him eighteen months."[3]

Burton was a captain in the army of the East India Company, serving in India, and later briefly in the Crimean War. Following this, he was engaged by the Royal Geographical Society to explore the east coast of Africa, where he led an expedition guided by locals and was the first European known to have seen Lake Tanganyika. In later life, he served as British consul in Fernando Pó (now Bioko, Equatorial Guinea), Santos in Brazil, Damascus (Ottoman Syria), and finally in Trieste. He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and was awarded a knighthood in 1886.[4]

Biography

Early life and education (1821–1841)

Burton was born in Torquay, Devon, at 21:30 on 19 March 1821; in his autobiography, he incorrectly claimed to have been born in the family home at Barham House in Elstree in Hertfordshire.[5][6] He was baptized on 2 September 1821 at Elstree Church in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire.[7] His father, Lt.-Colonel Joseph Netterville Burton, of the 36th Regiment, was an Irish-born British army officer of Anglo-Irish extraction who through his mother's family—the Campbells of Tuam—was a first cousin of Lt.-Colonel Henry Peard Driscoll and Mrs Richard Graves. Richard's mother, Martha Baker, was the daughter and co-heiress of a wealthy English squire, Richard Baker (1762–1824), of Barham House, Hertfordshire, for whom he was named. Burton had two siblings, Maria Katherine Elizabeth Burton (who married Lt.-General Sir Henry William Stisted) and Edward Joseph Netterville Burton, born in 1823 and 1824, respectively.[8]

Burton's family travelled extensively during his childhood and employed various tutors to educate him. In 1825, they moved to Tours in France. In 1829, Burton began a formal education at a preparatory school in Richmond Green in Richmond, Surrey, run by Reverend Charles Delafosse.[9] Over the next few years, his family travelled between England, France, and Italy. Burton showed a talent to learn languages and quickly learned French, Italian, Neapolitan and Latin, as well as several dialects. During his youth, he allegedly had an affair with a Roma girl and learned the rudiments of the Romani language. The peregrinations of his youth may have encouraged Burton to regard himself as an outsider for much of his life. As he put it, "Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause".[10]

Burton matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford, on 19 November 1840. Before getting a room at the college, he lived for a short time in the house of William Alexander Greenhill, then doctor at the Radcliffe Infirmary. Here, he met John Henry Newman, whose churchwarden was Greenhill. Despite his intelligence and ability, Burton was antagonised by his teachers and peers. During his first term, he is said to have challenged another student to a duel after the latter mocked Burton's moustache. Burton continued to gratify his love of languages by studying Arabic; he also spent his time learning falconry and fencing. In April 1842, he attended a steeplechase in deliberate violation of college rules and subsequently dared to tell the college authorities that students should be allowed to attend such events. Hoping to be merely "rusticated"—that is, suspended with the possibility of reinstatement, the punishment received by some less provocative students who had also visited the steeplechase—he was instead permanently expelled from Trinity College.[11]

According to Ed Rice, speaking on Burton's university days, "He stirred the bile of the dons by speaking real - that is, Roman-Latin instead of the artificial type peculiar to England, and he spoke Greek Romaically, with the accent of Athens, as he had learned it from a greek merchant at Marseilles, as well as the classical forms. Such a linguistic feat was a tribute to Burton's remarkable ear and memory, for he was only a teenager when he was in Italy and southern France.[12]

Army career (1842–1853)


Burton in Persian disguise as "Mirza Abdullah the Bushri" (c. 1849–50)

In his own words, "fit for nothing but to be shot at for six pence a day",[13] Burton enlisted in the army of the East India Company at the behest of his ex-college classmates who were already members. He hoped to fight in the first Afghan war, but the conflict was over before he arrived in India. He was posted to the 18th Bombay Native Infantry based in Gujarat and under the command of General Charles James Napier.[14] While in India, he became a proficient speaker of Hindustani, Gujarati, Punjabi, Sindhi, Saraiki and Marathi as well as Persian and Arabic. His studies of Hindu culture had progressed to such an extent that "my Hindu teacher officially allowed me to wear the janeo (Brahmanical Thread)".[15] Him Chand, his gotra teacher, a Nagar Brahmin, could have been an apostate.[16] Burton's interest (and active participation) in the cultures and religions of India was considered peculiar by some of his fellow soldiers, who accused him of "going native" and called him "the White Nigger".[17] Burton did have many peculiar habits that set him apart from other soldiers. While in the army, he kept a large menagerie of tame monkeys in the hopes of learning their language, accumulating sixty "words".[18][12]:56–65 He also earned the name "Ruffian Dick"[12]:218 for his "demonic ferocity as a fighter and because he had fought in single combat more enemies than perhaps any other man of his time".[19]

According to Ed Rice, "Burton now regarded the seven years in India as time wasted." Yet, "He had already passed the official examinations in six languages and was studying two more and was eminently qualified." His religious experiences were varied, including attending Catholic services, becoming a Nāgar Brāhmins, adopting Sikhism, conversion to Islam, and undergoing chillá for Qadiri Sufism. Regarding Burton's Muslim beliefs, Ed Rice states, "Thus, he was circumcised, and made a Muslim, and lived like a Muslim and prayed and practiced like one." Furthermore, Burton, "...was entitled to call himself a hāfiz, one who can recite the Qur'ān from memory."[12]:58,67–68,104–108,150–155,161,164

First explorations and journey to Mecca (1851–53)


"The Pilgrim", illustration from Burton's Personal Narrative (Burton disguised as "Haji Abdullah", 1853)

Burton's pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca in 1853, was his realization of "the plans and hopes of many and many a year...to study thoroughly the inner life of the Moslem." Traveling through Alexandria in April, then Cairo in May, where he stayed in June during Ramadan, Burton first donned the guise of a Persian mirza, then a Sunnī "Shaykh, doctor, magician and dervish. Accompanied by an Indian boy slave called Nūr, Burton further equipped himself with a case for carrying the Qur'ān, but instead had three compartments for his watch and compass, money, and penknife, pencils, and numbered pieces of paper for taking notes. His diary he kept in a break pocket, unseen. Burton traveled onwards with a group of nomads to Suez, sailed to Yambu, and joined a caravan to Medina, where he arrived on 27 July, earning the title Zair. Departing Medina with the Damascus caravan on 31 August, Burton entered Mecca on 11 September. There, he participated in the Tawaf, traveled to Mount Arafat, and participated in the Stoning of the Devil, all the while taking notes on the Kaaba, its Black Stone, and the Zamzam Well. Departing Mecca, he journeyed to Jeddah, back to Cairo, returning to duty in Bombay. In India, Burton wrote his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah. Of his journey, Burton wrote, "at Mecca there is nothing theatrical, nothing that suggests the opera, but all is simple and impressive...tending, I believe, after its fashion, to good."[12]:179–225

Motivated by his love of adventure, Burton got the approval of the Royal Geographical Society for an exploration of the area, and he gained permission from the board of directors of the East India Company to take leave from the army. His seven years in India gave Burton a familiarity with the customs and behaviour of Muslims and prepared him to attempt a Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca and, in this case, Medina). It was this journey, undertaken in 1853, which first made Burton famous. He had planned it whilst travelling disguised among the Muslims of Sindh, and had laboriously prepared for the adventure by study and practice (including undergoing the Muslim tradition of circumcision to further lower the risk of being discovered).[20]

Although Burton was certainly not the first non-Muslim European to make the Hajj (Ludovico di Varthema did this in 1503 and Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1815),[21] his pilgrimage is the most famous and the best documented of the time. He adopted various disguises including that of a Pashtun to account for any oddities in speech, but he still had to demonstrate an understanding of intricate Islamic traditions, and a familiarity with the minutiae of Eastern manners and etiquette. Burton's trek to Mecca was dangerous, and his caravan was attacked by bandits (a common experience at the time). As he put it, though "... neither Koran or Sultan enjoin the death of Jew or Christian intruding within the columns that note the sanctuary limits, nothing could save a European detected by the populace, or one who after pilgrimage declared himself an unbeliever".[22] The pilgrimage entitled him to the title of Hajji and to wear the green head wrap. Burton's own account of his journey is given in A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah.[23][12]:179–225

Burton sat for the examination as an Arab linguist. The examiner was Robert Lambert Playfair, who disliked Burton. As Professor George Percy Badger knew Arabic well, Playfair asked Badger to oversee the exam. Having been told that Burton could be vindictive, and wishing to avoid any animosity should Burton fail, Badger declined. Playfair conducted the tests; despite Burton's success living as an Arab, Playfair had recommended to the committee that Burton be failed. Badger later told Burton that "After looking [Burton's test] over, I [had] sent them back to [Playfair] with a note eulogising your attainments and ... remarking on the absurdity of the Bombay Committee being made to judge your proficiency inasmuch as I did not believe that any of them possessed a tithe of the knowledge of Arabic you did."[24]

Early explorations (1854–55)


Isabel Burton

In May 1854, Burton traveled to Aden in preparation for his Somaliland Expedition, supported by the Royal Geographical Society. Other members included G.E. Herne, William Stroyan, and John Hanning Speke. Burton undertook the expedition to Harar, Speke investigated the Wady Nogal, while Herne and Stroyan stayed on at Berbera. According to Burton, "A tradition exists that with the entrance of the first [white] Christian Harar will fall." With Burton's entry, the "Guardian Spell" was broken.[12]:219–220,227–264

This Somaliland Expedition lasted from 29 October 1854 to 9 February 1855, with much of the time spent in the port of Zeila, where Burton was a guest of the town's Governor al-Haji Sharmakay bin Ali Salih. Burton, "assuming the disguise of an Arab merchant" called Haji Mirza Abdullah, awaited word that the road to Harar was safe. On 29 December, Burton met with Gerard Adan in the village of Sagharrah, when Burton openly proclaimed himself an English officer with a letter for the Amīr of Harar. On 3 January 1855, Burton made it to Harar, and was graciously met by the Amir. Burton stayed in the city for ten days, officially a guest of the Amir but in reality his prisoner. The journey back was plagued by lack of supplies, and Burton wrote that he would have died of thirst had he not seen desert birds and realized they would be near water. Burton made it back to Berbera on 31 January 1855.[25][12]:238–256

Following this adventure, Burton prepared to set out in search of the source of the Nile, accompanied by Lieutenant Speke, Lieutenant G. E. Herne and Lieutenant William Stroyan and a number of Africans employed as bearers. However, while the expedition was camped near Berbera, his party was attacked by a group of Somali waranle ("warriors") belonging to Isaaq clan. The officers estimated the number of attackers at 200. In the ensuing fight, Stroyan was killed and Speke was captured and wounded in eleven places before he managed to escape. Burton was impaled with a javelin, the point entering one cheek and exiting the other. This wound left a notable scar that can be easily seen on portraits and photographs. He was forced to make his escape with the weapon still transfixing his head. It was no surprise then that he found the Somalis to be a "fierce and turbulent race".[26] However, the failure of this expedition was viewed harshly by the authorities, and a two-year investigation was set up to determine to what extent Burton was culpable for this disaster. While he was largely cleared of any blame, this did not help his career. He describes the harrowing attack in First Footsteps in East Africa (1856).[27][12]:257–264

After recovering from his wounds in London, Burton traveled to Constantinople during the Crimean War, seeking a commission. He received one from General W.F. Beatson, as the Chief of Staff for "Beatson's Horse", popularly called the Bashi-bazouks, and based in Gallipoli. Burton returned after an incident which disgraced Beatson, and implicated Burton as the instigator of a "mutiny", damaging his reputation.[12]:265–271

Exploring the African Great Lakes (1856–1860)

In 1856, the Royal Geographical Society funded another expedition for Burton and Speke, "and exploration of the then utterly unknown Lake regions of Central Africa." They would travel from Zanzibar to Ujiji along a caravan route established in 1825 by an Arab slave and ivory merchant. The Great Journey commenced on 5 June 1857 with their departure from Zanzibar, their caravan consisting of Baluchi mercenaries led by Ramji, 36 porters, eventually a total of 132 persons, all led by the caravan leader Said bin Salim. From the beginning, Burton and Speke were hindered by disease, malaria, fevers, and other maladies, at times both having to be carried in a hammock. Pack animals died, and natives deserted, taking supplies with them. Yet, on 7 November 1857, they made it to Kazeh, and departed for Ujij on 14 Dec. Speke wanted to head north, sure they would find the source of the Nile at what he later named Victoria Nyanza, but Burton persisted in heading west.[12]:273–297


Monument commemorating Burton and Speke's arrival in Ujiji

The expedition arrived at Lake Tanganyika on 13 February 1858. Burton was awestruck by the sight of the magnificent lake, but Speke, who had been temporarily blinded, was unable to see the body of water. By this point much of their surveying equipment was lost, ruined, or stolen, and they were unable to complete surveys of the area as well as they wished. Burton was again taken ill on the return journey; Speke continued exploring without him, making a journey to the north and eventually locating the great Lake Victoria, or Victoria Nyanza, on 3 August. Lacking supplies and proper instruments, Speke was unable to survey the area properly but was privately convinced that it was the long-sought source of the Nile. Burton's description of the journey is given in Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa (1860). Speke gave his own account in The Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863).[28][12]:298–312,491–492,500

Burton and Speke made it back to Zanzibar on 4 March 1859, and left on 22 March for Aden. Speke immediately boarded HMS Furious for London, where he gave lectures, and was awarded a second expedition by the Society. Burton arrived London on 21 May, discovering "My companion now stood forth in his new colours, and angry rival." Speke additionally published What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863), while Burton's Zanzibar; City, Island, and Coast was eventually published in 1872.[12]:307,311–315,491–492,500

Burton then departed on a trip to the United States in April 1860, eventually making it to Salt Lake City on 25 August. There he studied Mormonism and met Brigham Young. Burton departed San Francisco on 15 November, for the voyage back to England, where he published The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California.[12]:332–339,492

Burton and Speke

"Burton and Speke" redirects here. For the novel by William Harrison, see Burton and Speke (novel).


Burton was the first European to see Lake Tanganyika

A prolonged public quarrel followed, damaging the reputations of both Burton and Speke. Some biographers have suggested that friends of Speke (particularly Laurence Oliphant) had initially stirred up trouble between the two.[29] Burton's sympathizers contend that Speke resented Burton's leadership role. Tim Jeal, who has accessed Speke's personal papers, suggests that it was more likely the other way around, Burton being jealous and resentful of Speke's determination and success. "As the years went by, [Burton] would neglect no opportunity to deride and undermine Speke's geographical theories and achievements".[30]

Speke had earlier proven his mettle by trekking through the mountains of Tibet, but Burton regarded him as inferior as he did not speak any Arabic or African languages. Despite his fascination with non-European cultures, some have portrayed Burton as an unabashed imperialist convinced of the historical and intellectual superiority of the white race, citing his involvement in the Anthropological Society, an organization that established a doctrine of scientific racism.[31][32] Speke appears to have been kinder and less intrusive to the Africans they encountered, and reportedly fell in love with an African woman on a future expedition.[33]

The two men travelled home separately. Speke returned to London first and presented a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society, claiming Lake Victoria as the source of the Nile. According to Burton, Speke broke an agreement they had made to give their first public speech together. Apart from Burton's word, there is no proof that such an agreement existed, and most modern researchers doubt that it did. Tim Jeal, evaluating the written evidence, says the odds are "heavily against Speke having made a pledge to his former leader".[34]

Speke undertook a second expedition, along with Captain James Grant and Sidi Mubarak Bombay, to prove that Lake Victoria was the true source of the Nile. Speke, in light of the issues he was having with Burton, had Grant sign a statement saying, among other things, "I renounce all my rights to publishing ... my own account [of the expedition] until approved of by Captain Speke or [the Royal Geographical Society]".[35]

On 16 September 1864, Burton and Speke were scheduled to debate the source of the Nile at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. On the day before the debate, Burton and Speke sat near each other in the lecture hall. According to Burton's wife, Speke stood up, said "I can't stand this any longer," and abruptly left the hall. That afternoon Speke went hunting on the nearby estate of a relative. He was discovered lying near a stone wall, felled by a fatal gunshot wound from his hunting shotgun. Burton learned of Speke's death the following day while waiting for their debate to begin. A jury ruled Speke's death an accident. An obituary surmised that Speke, while climbing over the wall, had carelessly pulled the gun after himself with the muzzle pointing at his chest and shot himself. Alexander Maitland, Speke's only biographer, concurs.[36]

Diplomatic service and scholarship (1861–1890)


Burton in 1876

On 22 January 1861, Burton and Isabel married in a quiet Catholic ceremony although he did not adopt the Catholic faith at this time. Shortly after this, the couple were forced to spend some time apart when he formally entered the Diplomatic Service as consul on the island of Fernando Po, now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea. This was not a prestigious appointment; because the climate was considered extremely unhealthy for Europeans, Isabel could not accompany him. Burton spent much of this time exploring the coast of West Africa, documenting his findings in Abeokuta and The Cameroons Mountains: An Exploration (1863), and A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome (1864). He described some of his experiences, including a trip up the Congo River to the Yellala Falls and beyond, in his 1876 book Two trips to gorilla land and the cataracts of the Congo.[37][12]:349–381,492–493

The couple were reunited in 1865 when Burton was transferred to Santos in Brazil. Once there, Burton travelled through Brazil's central highlands, canoeing down the São Francisco River from its source to the falls of Paulo Afonso.[38] He documented his experiences in The Highlands of Brazil (1869).[12]:

In 1868 and 1869 he made two visits to the war zone of the Paraguayan War, which he described in his Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (1870).[39]

In 1868 he was appointed as the British consul in Damascus, an ideal post for someone with Burton's knowledge of the region and customs.[40] According to Ed Rice, "England wanted to know what was going on in the Levant," another chapter in The Great Game. Yet, the Turkish governor Mohammed Rashid 'Ali Pasha, feared anti-Turkish activities, and was opposed to Burton's assignment.[12]:395–399,402,409

In Damascus, Burton made friends with Abdelkader al-Jazairi, while Isabel befriended Jane Digby, calling her "my most intimate friend." Burton also met with Charles Francis Tyrwhitt-Drake and Edward Henry Palmer, collaborating with Drake in writing Unexplored Syria (1872).[12]:402–410,492

However, the area was in some turmoil at the time with considerable tensions between the Christian, Jewish and Muslim populations. Burton did his best to keep the peace and resolve the situation, but this sometimes led him into trouble. On one occasion, he claims to have escaped an attack by hundreds of armed horsemen and camel riders sent by Mohammed Rashid Pasha, the Governor of Syria. He wrote, "I have never been so flattered in my life than to think it would take three hundred men to kill me."[41] Burton eventually suffered the enmity of the Greek Christian and Jewish communities. Then, his involvement with the Sházlis, a group of Muslims Burton called "Secret Christians longing for baptism," which Isabel called "his ruin." He was recalled in August 1871, prompting him to telegram Isabel "I am recalled. Pay, pack, and follow at convenience."[12]:412–415

Burton was reassigned in 1872 to the sleepy port city of Trieste in Austria-Hungary.[42][dead link] A "broken man", Burton was never particularly content with this post, but it required little work, was far less dangerous than Damascus (as well as less exciting), and allowed him the freedom to write and travel.[43]

In 1863 Burton co-founded the Anthropological Society of London with Dr. James Hunt. In Burton's own words, the main aim of the society (through the publication of the periodical Anthropologia) was "to supply travellers with an organ that would rescue their observations from the outer darkness of manuscript and print their curious information on social and sexual matters". On 13 February 1886, Burton was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) by Queen Victoria.[44]

He wrote a number of travel books in this period that were not particularly well received. His best-known contributions to literature were those considered risqué or even pornographic at the time, which were published under the auspices of the Kama Shastra society. These books include The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883) (popularly known as the Kama Sutra), The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885) (popularly known as The Arabian Nights), The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi (1886) and The Supplemental Nights to the Thousand Nights and a Night (seventeen volumes 1886–98).

Published in this period but composed on his return journey from Mecca, The Kasidah[10] has been cited as evidence of Burton's status as a Bektashi Sufi. Deliberately presented by Burton as a translation, the poem and his notes and commentary on it contain layers of Sufic meaning that seem to have been designed to project Sufi teaching in the West.[45] "Do what thy manhood bids thee do/ from none but self expect applause;/ He noblest lives and noblest dies/ who makes and keeps his self-made laws" is The Kasidah's most-quoted passage. As well as references to many themes from Classical Western myths, the poem contains many laments that are accented with fleeting imagery such as repeated comparisons to "the tinkling of the Camel bell" that becomes inaudible as the animal vanishes in the darkness of the desert.[46]

Other works of note include a collection of Hindu tales, Vikram and the Vampire (1870); and his uncompleted history of swordsmanship, The Book of the Sword (1884). He also translated The Lusiads, the Portuguese national epic by Luís de Camões, in 1880 and, the next year, wrote a sympathetic biography of the poet and adventurer. The book The Jew, the Gipsy and el Islam was published posthumously in 1898 and was controversial for its criticism of Jews and for its assertion of the existence of Jewish human sacrifices. (Burton's investigations into this had provoked hostility from the Jewish population in Damascus (see the Damascus affair). The manuscript of the book included an appendix discussing the topic in more detail, but by the decision of his widow, it was not included in the book when published).[citation needed]

Death


Richard Burton's Tomb at Mortlake, south west London, June 2011.


Close up of inscription on the tomb.

Burton died in Trieste early on the morning of 20 October 1890 of a heart attack. His wife Isabel persuaded a priest to perform the last rites, although Burton was not a Catholic and this action later caused a rift between Isabel and some of Burton's friends. It has been suggested that the death occurred very late on 19 October and that Burton was already dead by the time the last rites were administered. On his religious views, Burton called himself an atheist, stating he was raised in the Church of England which he said was "officially (his) church".[47]

Isabel never recovered from the loss. After his death she burned many of her husband's papers, including journals and a planned new translation of The Perfumed Garden to be called The Scented Garden, for which she had been offered six thousand guineas and which she regarded as his "magnum opus". She believed she was acting to protect her husband's reputation, and that she had been instructed to burn the manuscript of The Scented Garden by his spirit, but her actions have been widely condemned.[48]

Isabel wrote a biography in praise of her husband.[49]

The couple are buried in a remarkable tomb in the shape of a Bedouin tent, designed by Isabel,[50] in the cemetery of St Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic Church Mortlake in southwest London. The coffins of Sir Richard and Lady Burton can be seen through a window at the rear of the tent, which can be accessed via a short fixed ladder. Next to the lady chapel in the church there is a memorial stained-glass window to Burton, also erected by Isabel; it depicts Burton as a medieval knight.[51] Burton's personal effects and a collection of paintings, photographs and objects relating to him are in the Burton Collection at Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham.[52]

Kama Shastra Society

Burton had long had an interest in sexuality and some erotic literature. However, the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 had resulted in many jail sentences for publishers, with prosecutions being brought by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Burton referred to the society and those who shared its views as Mrs Grundy. A way around this was the private circulation of books amongst the members of a society. For this reason Burton, together with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, created the Kama Shastra Society to print and circulate books that would be illegal to publish in public.[53]

One of the most celebrated of all his books is his translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (commonly called The Arabian Nights in English after early translations of Antoine Galland's French version) in ten volumes (1885), with seven further volumes being added later. The volumes were printed by the Kama Shastra Society in a subscribers-only edition of one thousand with a guarantee that there would never be a larger printing of the books in this form. The stories collected were often sexual in content and were considered pornography at the time of publication. In particular, the Terminal Essay in volume 10 of the Nights contained a 14,000-word essay entitled "Pederasty" (Volume 10, section IV, D), at the time a synonym for homosexuality (as it still is, in modern French). This was and remained for many years the longest and most explicit discussion of homosexuality in any language. Burton speculated that male homosexuality was prevalent in an area of the southern latitudes named by him the "Sotadic zone".[54]

Perhaps Burton's best-known book is his translation of The Kama Sutra. It is untrue that he was the translator since the original manuscript was in ancient Sanskrit, which he could not read. However, he collaborated with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot on the work and provided translations from other manuscripts of later translations. The Kama Shastra Society first printed the book in 1883 and numerous editions of the Burton translation are in print to this day.[53]

His English translation from a French edition of the Arabic erotic guide The Perfumed Garden was printed as The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui: A Manual of Arabian Erotology (1886). After Burton's death, Isabel burnt many of his papers, including a manuscript of a subsequent translation, The Scented Garden, containing the final chapter of the work, on pederasty. Burton all along intended for this translation to be published after his death, to provide an income for his widow.[55]

Burton's languages

By the end of his life, Burton had mastered at least 26 languages – or 40, if distinct dialects are counted.[56]

1. English
2. French
3. Occitan (Gascon/Béarnese dialect)
4. Italian
a. Neapolitan Italian
5. Romani
6. Latin
7. Greek
8. Saraiki
9. Hindustani
a. Urdu
b. Sindhi
10. Marathi
11. Arabic
12. Persian (Farsi)
13. Pushtu
14. Sanskrit
15. Portuguese
16. Spanish
17. German
18. Icelandic
19. Swahili
20. Amharic
21. Fan
22. Egba
23. Asante
24. Hebrew
25. Aramaic
26. Many other West African & Indian dialects

Scandals


Burton in later life

Burton's writings are unusually open and frank about his interest in sex and sexuality. His travel writing is often full of details about the sexual lives of the inhabitants of areas he travelled through. Burton's interest in sexuality led him to make measurements of the lengths of the penises of male inhabitants of various regions, which he includes in his travel books. He also describes sexual techniques common in the regions he visited, often hinting that he had participated, hence breaking both sexual and racial taboos of his day. Many people at the time considered the Kama Shastra Society and the books it published scandalous.[57]

Biographers disagree on whether or not Burton ever experienced homosexual sex (he never directly acknowledges it in his writing). Allegations began in his army days when Charles James Napier requested that Burton go undercover to investigate a male brothel reputed to be frequented by British soldiers. It has been suggested that Burton's detailed report on the workings of the brothel led some to believe he had been a customer.[58] There is no documentary evidence that such a report was written or submitted, nor that Napier ordered such research by Burton, and it has been argued that this is one of Burton's embellishments.[59]

A story that haunted Burton up to his death (recounted in some of his obituaries) was that he came close to being discovered one night when he lifted his robe to urinate rather than squatting as an Arab would. It was said that he was seen by an Arab and, in order to avoid exposure, killed him. Burton denied this, pointing out that killing the boy would almost certainly have led to his being discovered as an impostor. Burton became so tired of denying this accusation that he took to baiting his accusers, although he was said to enjoy the notoriety and even once laughingly claimed to have done it.[60][61] A doctor once asked him: "How do you feel when you have killed a man?", Burton retorted: "Quite jolly, what about you?". When asked by a priest about the same incident Burton is said to have replied: "Sir, I'm proud to say I have committed every sin in the Decalogue."[62] Stanley Lane-Poole, a Burton detractor, reported that Burton "confessed rather shamefacedly that he had never killed anybody at any time."[61]

These allegations coupled with Burton's often irascible nature were said to have harmed his career and may explain why he was not promoted further, either in army life or in the diplomatic service. As an obituary described: "...he was ill fitted to run in official harness, and he had a Byronic love of shocking people, of telling tales against himself that had no foundation in fact."[63] Ouida reported: "Men at the FO [Foreign Office] ... used to hint dark horrors about Burton, and certainly justly or unjustly he was disliked, feared and suspected ... not for what he had done, but for what he was believed capable of doing."[64]

Sotadic Zone


Burton's Sotadic Zone encompassed only small areas of Europe and North Africa, larger areas of Asia, and all of North and South America.

The existence of a Sotadic Zone was a hypothesis of Burton. He asserted that there exists a geographic zone in which pederasty (romantic-sexual intimacy between a boy and a man) is prevalent and celebrated among the indigenous inhabitants.[65] The name derives from Sotades, a 3rd-century BC Greek poet who was the chief representative of a group of writers of obscene, and sometimes pederastic, satirical poetry; these homoerotic verses are preserved in the Greek Anthology, a collection of poems spanning the Classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature.

Burton first advanced his Sotadic Zone concept in the "Terminal Essay"[66] contained in Volume 10 of his translation of The Arabian Nights, which he called The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, in 1886.[67]

Extent

According to Burton's description,

1. the Sotadic Zone is bounded westward by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N. Lat. 43 °) and by the southern (N. Lat. 30°). Thus the depth would be 780 to 800 miles including meridional France, the Iberian peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from Morocco to Egypt;
2. Running eastward the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldaea, Afghanistan, Sindh, the Punjab and Kashmir.
3. In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China, Japan and Turkistan.
4. It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World where, at the time of its discovery, Sotadic love was, with some exceptions, an established racial institution.
5. "Within the Sotadic Zone the Vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practise it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest disgust."

In popular culture

Fiction

• In the short story "The Aleph" (1945) by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, a manuscript by Burton is discovered in a library. The manuscript contains a description of a mirror in which the whole universe is reflected.
• The Riverworld series of science fiction novels (1971–83) by Philip José Farmer has a fictional and resurrected Burton as a primary character.
• William Harrison's Burton and Speke is a 1984 novel about the two friends/rivals.[68]
• The World Is Made of Glass: A Novel by Morris West[69] tells the story of Magda Liliane Kardoss von Gamsfeld in consultation with Carl Gustav Jung; Burton is mentioned on pp. 254–7 and again on p. 392.
• Der Weltensammler[70] by Iliya Troyanov is a fictional reconstruction of three periods of Burton's life, focusing on his time in India, his pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, and his explorations with Speke.
• Burton is the main character in the "Burton and Swinburne" steampunk series by Mark Hodder (2010–2015): The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack; The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man; Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon; The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi; The Return of the Discontinued Man; and The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats. These novels depict an alternate world where Queen Victoria was killed early in her reign due to the inadvertent actions of a time-traveler acting as Spring-Heeled Jack, with a complex constitutional revision making Albert King in her place.
• Though not one of the primary characters in the series, Burton plays an important historical role in the Area 51 series of books by Bob Mayer (written under the pen name Robert Doherty).
• Burton and his partner Speke are recurrently mentioned in one of Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires, the 1863 novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, as the voyages of Kennedy and Ferguson are attempting to link their expeditions with those of Heinrich Barth in west Africa.
• In the novel The Bookman's Promise (2004) by John Dunning, the protagonist buys a signed copy of a rare Burton book, and from there Burton and his work are major elements of the story. A section of the novel also fictionalizes a portion of Burton's life in the form of recollections of one of the characters.

Drama

• In the BBC production of The Search for the Nile series (1972), Burton is portrayed by actor Kenneth Haigh.
• The film Mountains of the Moon (1990) (starring Patrick Bergin as Burton) relates the story of the Burton-Speke exploration and subsequent controversy over the source of the Nile. The script was based on Harrison's novel.
• In the Canadian film Zero Patience (1993), Burton is portrayed by John Robinson as having had "an unfortunate encounter" with the Fountain of Youth and is living in present-day Toronto. Upon discovering the ghost of the famous Patient Zero, Burton attempts to exhibit the finding at his Hall of Contagion at the Museum of Natural History.

Chronology


Timeline of Richard Francis Burton's life (1821–1890)

Works and correspondence

Main article: Richard Francis Burton bibliography

Burton published over 40 books and countless articles, monographs and letters. A great number of his journal and magazine pieces have never been catalogued. Over 200 of these have been collected in PDF facsimile format at burtoniana.org.[71]

An extensive selection of Burton's correspondence can be found in the four-volume Book of Burtoniana edited by Gavan Tredoux (burtoniana.org, 2016), which is freely downloadable in HTML, PDF, Kindle/MOBI and ePub formats.[72]

Brief selections from a variety of Burton's writings are available in Frank McLynn's Of No Country: An Anthology of Richard Burton (1990; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).

See also

• Selim Aga
• Mausoleum of Sir Richard and Lady Burton
• List of polyglots

References

1. Lovell, p. xvii.
2. Young, S. (2006). "India". Richard Francis Burton: Explorer, Scholar, Spy. New York: Marshall Cavendish. pp. 16–26. ISBN 9780761422228.
3. Burton, I.; Wilkins, W. H. (1897). The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton. The Story of Her Life. New York: Dodd Mead & Company. Archived from the original on 29 January 2018. Retrieved 28 January 2018.
4. "Historic Figures: Sir Richard Burton". BBC. Retrieved 7 April 2017
5. Lovell, p. 1.
6. Wright (1906), vol. 1, p. 37 Archived 8 September 2014 at the Wayback Machine.
7. Page, William (1908). A History of the County of Hertford. Constable. vol. 2, pp. 349–351. ISBN 978-0-7129-0475-9.
8. Wright (1906), vol. 1, p. 38 Archived 8 September 2014 at the Wayback Machine.
9. Wright (1906), vol. 1, p. 52 Archived 8 September 2014 at the Wayback Machine.
10. Burton, R. F. (1911). "Chapter VIII". The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (Eight ed.). Portland: Thomas B. Mosher. pp. 44–51.
11. Wright (1906), vol. 1, p. 81 Archived 8 September 2014 at the Wayback Machine.
12. Rice, Ed (1990). Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: the secret agent who made the pilgrimage to Mecca, discovered the Kama Sutra, and brought the Arabian nights to the West. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. p. 22. ISBN 978-0684191379.
13. Falconry in the Valley of the Indus, Richard F. Burton (John Van Voorst 1852) page 93.
14. Ghose, Indira (January 2006). "Imperial Player: Richard Burton in Sindh". In Youngs, Tim (ed.). Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century. Anthem Press. pp. 71–86. doi:10.7135/upo9781843317692.005. ISBN 9781843317692. Retrieved 25 August 2018.
15. Burton (1893), Vol. 1, p. 123.
16. Rice, Edward. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1991). p. 83.
17. In 1852, a letter from Burton was published in The Zoist: "Remarks upon a form of Sub-mesmerism, popularly called Electro-Biology, now practised in Scinde and other Eastern Countries", The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology & Mesmerism, and Their Applications to Human Welfare, Vol.10, No.38, (July 1852), pp.177–181.
18. Lovell, p. 58.
19. Wright (1906), vol. 1, pp. 119–120 Archived 8 September 2014 at the Wayback Machine.
20. Seigel, Jerrold (1 December 2015). Between Cultures: Europe and Its Others in Five Exemplary Lives. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 9780812247619 – via Google Books.
21. Leigh Rayment. "Ludovico di Varthema". Discoverers Web. Discoverers Web. Archived from the original on 17 June 2012. Retrieved 16 June 2012.
22. Selected Papers on Anthropology, Travel, and Exploration by Richard Burton, edited by Norman M. Penzer (London, A. M. Philpot 1924) p. 30.
23. Burton, R. F. (1855). A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah. London: Tylston and Edwards.
24. Lovell, pp. 156–157.
25. Burton, R., Speke, J. H., Barker, W. C. (1856). First footsteps in East Africa or, An Exploration of Harar. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.
26. In last of a series of dispatches from Mogadishu, Daniel Howden reports on the artists fighting to keep a tradition alive, The Independent, dated Thursday, 2 December 2010.
27. Burton, Richard (1856). First Footsteps in East Africa (1st ed.). Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. pp. 449–458.
28. Speke, John Hanning. "The Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile". http://www.wollamshram.ca. Retrieved 19 July2020.
29. Carnochan, pp. 77–78 cites Isabel Burton and Alexander Maitland
30. Jeal, p. 121.
31. Jeal, p. 322.
32. Kennedy, p. 135.
33. Jeal, pp. 129, 156–166.
34. Jeal, p. 111.
35. Lovell, p. 341.
36. Kennedy, p. 123.
37. Richard Francis Burton, Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, 2 vols. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low & Searle, 1876).
38. Wright (1906), vol. 1, p. 200 Archived 8 September 2014 at the Wayback Machine.
39. Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay, the Preface.
40. "No. 23447". The London Gazette. 4 December 1868. p. 6460.
41. Burton (1893), Vol. 1, p. 517.
42. "No. 23889". The London Gazette. 20 September 1872. p. 4075.
43. Wright, Thomas (1 January 1906). The Life of Sir Richard Burton. Library of Alexandria. ISBN 9781465550132 – via Google Books.
44. "No. 25559". The London Gazette. 16 February 1886. p. 743.
45. The Sufis by Idries Shah (1964) p. 249ff
46. The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi. 1880.
47. Wright (1906) "Some three months before Sir Richard's death," writes Mr. P. P. Cautley, the Vice-Consul at Trieste, to me, "I was seated at Sir Richard's tea table with our clergy man, and the talk turning on religion, Sir Richard declared, 'I am an atheist, but I was brought up in the Church of England, and that is officially my church.'"
48. Wright (1906), vol. 2, pp. 252–254 Archived 29 June 2008 at the Wayback Machine.
49. Burton (1893)
50. Cherry, B.; Pevsner, N. (1983). The Buildings of England – London 2: South. London: Penguin Books. p. 513. ISBN 978-0140710472.
51. Boyes, Valerie & Wintersinger, Natascha (2014). Encountering the Uncharted and Back – Three Explorers: Ball, Vancouver and Burton. Museum of Richmond. pp. 9–10.
52. De Novellis, Mark. "More about Richmond upon Thames Borough Art Collection". Art UK. Retrieved 15 December 2012.
53. Ben Grant, "Translating/'The' “Kama Sutra”", Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3, Connecting Cultures (2005), 509–516
54. Pagan Press (1982–2012). "Sir Richard Francis Burton Explorer of the Sotadic Zone". Pagan Press. Pagan Press. Retrieved 16 June 2012.
55. The Romance of Lady Isabel Burton (chapter 38) Archived 10 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine by Isabel Burton (1897) (URL accessed 12 June 2006)
56. McLynn, Frank (1990), Of No Country: An Anthology of the Works of Sir Richard Burton, Scribner's, pp. 5–6.
57. Kennedy, D. (2009). The highly civilized man: Richard Burton and the Victorian world. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674025523. OCLC 647823711.
58. Burton, Sir Richard (1991) Kama Sutra, Park Street Press, ISBN 0-89281-441-1, p. 14.
59. Godsall, pp. 47–48.
60. Lovell, pp. 185–186.
61. Rice, Edward (2001) [1990]. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography. Da Capo Press. pp. 136–137. ISBN 978-0306810282.
62. Brodie, Fawn M. (1967). The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton, W.W. Norton & Company Inc.: New York 1967, p. 3.
63. Obituary in Athenaeum No. 3287, 25 October 1890, p. 547.
64. Richard Burton by Ouida, article appearing in the Fortnightly Review June (1906) quoted by Lovell
65. Waitt, Gordon; Kevin Markwell (2008). "The Lure of the "Sotadic Zone"'". Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. 15 (2).
66. (§1., D)
67. The Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night. s.l.: Burton Society (Private printing). 1886.
68. William Harrison, Burton and Speke (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), ISBN 978-0-312-10873-1.
69. (Coronet Books, 1984), ISBN 0-340-34710-4.
70. 2006, translated as The Collector of Worlds [2008].
71. "Shorter Works by Richard Francis Burton".
72. "The Book of Burtoniana, in Four Volumes, edited by Gavan Tredoux".

Sources

Books and articles

• Cust, R.N. (1895). "Sir Richard Burton". Linguistic and oriental essays: written from the year 1861 to 1895. London: Trübner & Co. pp. 80–82.
• Brodie, Fawn M. (1967). The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-907871-23-1.
• Burton, Isabel (1893). The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton KCMG, FRGS. Vols. 1 and 2. London: Chapman and Hall.
• Carnochan, W.B. (2006). The Sad Story of Burton, Speke, and the Nile; or, Was John Hanning Speke a Cad: Looking at the Evidence. Stanford: Stanford University Press. p. 160. ISBN 978-0-8047-5325-8.
• Kennedy, Dane (2005). The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01862-4.
• Edwardes, Allen (1963). Death Rides a Camel. New York: The Julian Press.
• Farwell, Byron (1963). Burton: A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-012068-4.
• Godsall, Jon R (2008). The Tangled Web – A life of Sir Richard Burton. London: Matador Books. ISBN 978-1906510-428.
• Hitchman, Francis (1887), Richard F. Burton, K.C.M.G.: His Early, Private and Public Life with an Account of his Travels and Explorations, Two volumes; London: Sampson and Low.
• Jeal, Tim (2011). Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-300-14935-7.
• Lovell, Mary S. (1998). A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard & Isabel Burton. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-04672-4.
• McDow, Thomas F. 'Trafficking in Persianness: Richard Burton between mimicry and similitude in the Indian Ocean and Persianate worlds'. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30.3 (2010): 491–511. ISSN 1089-201X
• McLynn, Frank (1991). From the Sierras to the Pampas: Richard Burton's Travels in the Americas, 1860–69. London: Century. ISBN 978-0-7126-3789-3.
• McLynn, Frank (1993). Burton: Snow on the Desert. London: John Murray Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7195-4818-5.
• Newman, James L. (2009), Paths without Glory: Richard Francis Burton in Africa, Potomac Books, Dulles, Virginia; ISBN 978-1-59797-287-1.
• Moorehead, Alan (1960). The White Nile. New York: Harper & Row. p. 448. ISBN 978-0-06-095639-4.
• Ondaatje, Christopher (1998). Journey to the Source of the Nile. Toronto: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-00-200019-2.
• Ondaatje, Christopher (1996). Sindh Revisited: A Journey in the Footsteps of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. Toronto: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-1-59048-221-6.
• Rice, Edward (1990). Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Makkah, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
• Seigel, Jerrold (2016). Between Cultures: Europe and Its Others in Five Exemplary Lives. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-4761-9.
• Sparrow-Niang, Jane (2014). Bath and the Nile Explorers: In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Burton and Speke's encounter in Bath, September 1864, and their 'Nile Duel' which never happened. Bath: Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution. ISBN 978-0-9544941-6-2
• Wisnicki, Adrian S. (2008). "Cartographical Quandaries: The Limits of Knowledge Production in Burton's and Speke's Search for the Source of the Nile". History in Africa. 35: 455–79. doi:10.1353/hia.0.0001.
• Wisnicki, Adrian S. (2009). "Charting the Frontier: Indigenous Geography, Arab-Nyamwezi Caravans, and the East African Expedition of 1856–59". Victorian Studies 51.1 (Aut.): 103–37.
• Wright, Thomas (1906). The Life of Sir Richard Burton. Vols. 1 and 2. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. ISBN 978-1-4264-1455-8. Archived from the original on 22 February 2008. Retrieved 1 March 2008.

Film documentaries

• Search for the Nile, 1971 BBC mini-series featuring Kenneth Haigh as Burton
• In The Victorian Sex Explorer, Rupert Everett documents Burton's travels. Part of the Channel Four (UK) 'Victorian Passions' season. First Broadcast on 9 June 2008.

External links

• Complete Works of Richard Burton at burtoniana.org. Includes over 200 of Burton's journal and magazine pieces.
• Works by Sir Richard Francis Burton at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Richard Francis Burton at Internet Archive
• Works by Richard Francis Burton at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• "Archival material relating to Richard Francis Burton". UK National Archives. – index to world holdings of Burton archival materials
• The Penetration of Arabia by David George Hogarth (1904) – discusses Burton in the second section, "The Successors"
• Capt Sir Richard Burton Museum (sirrichardburtonmuseum.co.uk), "located in a private residence in central St Ives, Cornwall UK"
• Sir Richard Francis Burton at Library of Congress Authorities, with 172 catalogue records

[admin]

X Club
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/9/20


Thomas Henry Huxley, the initiator of the X Club, c. 1880.

The X Club was a dining club of nine men who supported the theories of natural selection and academic liberalism in late 19th-century England. Thomas Henry Huxley was the initiator; he called the first meeting for 3 November 1864.[1] The club met in London once a month—except in July, August and September—from November 1864 until March 1893, and its members are believed to have wielded much influence over scientific thought. The members of the club were George Busk, Edward Frankland, Thomas Archer Hirst, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Lubbock, Herbert Spencer, William Spottiswoode, and John Tyndall, united by a "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas."[2]

The nine men who would compose the X Club already knew each other well. By the 1860s, friendships had turned the group into a social network, and the men often dined and went on holidays together. After Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, the men began working together to aid the cause for naturalism and natural history. They backed the liberal Anglican movement that emerged in the early 1860s, and both privately and publicly supported the leaders of the movement.

According to its members, the club was originally started to keep friends from drifting apart, and to partake in scientific discussion free from theological influence. A key aim was to reform the Royal Society, with a view to making the practice of science professional. In the 1870s and 1880s, the members of the group became prominent in the scientific community and some accused the club of having too much power in shaping the scientific landscape of London. The club was terminated in 1893, after depletion by death, and as old age made regular meetings of the surviving members impossible.

Background

Social connections


English botanist and explorer Joseph Dalton Hooker

When the first dinner meeting commenced on 3 November 1864 at St. George's Hotel on Albemarle Street in central London, the eight members of what was to be known as the X Club—William Spottiswoode was added at the second meeting in December 1864—already had extensive social ties with one another. In the mid-1850s, the men who would come to make up the X Club formed two distinct sets of friends. John Tyndall, Edward Frankland and Thomas Hirst, men who became friends in the late 1840s, were artisans who became physical scientists. Thomas Huxley, Joseph Dalton Hooker, and George Busk, friends since the early 1850s, had worked as surgeons and had become professional naturalists. Beginning in the mid-1850s, the network began to form around Huxley and Hooker, and these six men began helping one another, both as friends and professionals. In 1863, for example, Tyndall aided Frankland in getting a position at the Royal Institution. Spottiswoode, Herbert Spencer, and John Lubbock joined the circle of friends during the debates over evolution and naturalism in the early 1860s.[3]

The original members of the club had much in common. They shared a middle-class background and similar theological beliefs. All of the men were middle-aged, except Lubbock, who was 30, and Busk, who was 57, and all of the men, except Lubbock, lived in London.[4] More importantly, the men of the club all shared an interest in natural history, naturalism, and a more general pursuit of intellectual thought free from religious influence, commonly referred to as academic liberalism.[5]

Scientific climate


English chemist Edward Frankland

The X Club came together during a period of turbulent conflict in both science and religion in Victorian England. The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection brought a storm of argument, with the scientific establishment of wealthy amateurs and clerical naturalists as well as the Church of England attacking this new development. Since the start of the 19th century they had seen evolutionism as an assault on the divinely ordained aristocratic social order. On the other side, Darwin's ideas on evolution were welcomed by liberal theologians and by a new generation of salaried professional scientists; the men who would later come to form the X Club supported Darwin, and saw his work as a great stride in the struggle for freedom from clerical interference in science. The members of the X social network played a significant part in nominating Darwin for the Copley Medal in 1864.[6][7]

In 1860, Essays and Reviews, a collection of essays on Christianity written by a group of liberal Anglicans, was published. The collection represented a summation of a nearly century-long challenge to the history and prehistory of the Bible by higher critics as well as geologists and biologists.[8] In short, the writers of Essays and Reviews sought to analyse the Bible like any other work of literature. At the time, Essays created more of a stir than Darwin's book. The members of the X network backed the collection, and Lubbock even sought to form an alliance between liberal Anglicans and scientists. Two liberal Anglican theologians were convicted of heresy, and when the government overturned the judgement on appeal, Samuel Wilberforce, the High Church and the evangelicals organised petitions and a mass backlash against evolution. At the Anglican convocation, the evangelicals presented a declaration reaffirming their faith in the harmony of God's word and his works and tried to make this a compulsory "Fortieth Article" of faith. They took their campaign to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, aiming to overthrow Huxley's "dangerous clique" of Darwin's allies.[9]

In 1862, Bishop John William Colenso of Natal published The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined, an analysis of the first five books of the Old Testament. In his analysis Colenso used mathematics and concepts of population dynamics, including examinations of food supply and transportation, to show that the first five books of the Bible were faulty and unreliable. Outrage broke out within the Church of England, and the X network not only gave their support to Colenso, but at times even dined with him to discuss his ideas.[10]


Irish physicist John Tyndall, c. 1885

Later, in 1863, a new rift began to emerge within the scientific community over race theory. Debate was stirred up when the Anthropological Society of London, which rejected Darwinian theory, claimed that slavery was defensible based on the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin. The members of what would become the X Club sided with the Ethnological Society of London, which denounced slavery and embraced academic liberalism. The men of the X Club, especially Lubbock, Huxley, and Busk, felt that dissension and the "jealousies of theological sects" within learned societies were damaging, and they attempted to limit the contributions the Anthropological Society made to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a society of which they were all members.[11]

Thus, by 1864, the members of the X Club were joined in a fight, both public and private, to unite the London scientific community with the objective of furthering the ideas of academic liberalism.[12]

Dining clubs

Dining clubs, common in late-Victorian England, were characterised by informal gatherings where men with similar interests could share new ideas and information among friends. Many formal societies and institutions that existed in England during the 19th century started as informal dining clubs. The problem with most formal societies at the time, especially to those men that would come together to form the X Club, was the manner in which meetings were conducted; most were too large and unsuitable for the discussion of private scientific matters. In addition, due to the outbreak of debates over evolution and religion within the scientific societies of London during the 1860s, the pursuit of discussion with likeminded men was often difficult.[13]

Several scientific clubs, such as the Philosophical Club and the Red Lion Club, were formed in the late 19th century, but these organisations lacked the scientific professionalism that serious scientists, including those members of the X Club such as Hooker and Huxley, sought. Other more serious clubs, such as the 'B-Club', were not sufficiently intimate for the men who would comprise the X Club.[14]

Formation

In 1864, Huxley wrote to Hooker and explained that he feared he and his group of friends, the other men of the social network, would drift apart and lose contact. He proposed the creation of a club that would serve to maintain social ties among the members of the network, and Hooker readily agreed. Huxley always insisted that sociability was the only purpose of the club, but others in the club, most notably Hirst, claimed that the founding members had other intentions. In his description of the first meeting, Hirst wrote that what brought the men together was actually a "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas," and he predicted that situations would arise when their concerted efforts would be of great use.[15][16]

On the night of the first meeting, Huxley jokingly proposed that the club be named "Blastodermic Club", in reference to blastoderm, a layer of cells in the ovum of birds that acts as the center of development for the entire bird. Some historians, such as Ruth Barton, feel that Huxley wanted the newly formed club to act as a guide to the development of science. The name "Thorough Club", which referred to the movements that existed at the time for the "freedom to express unorthodox opinion", was also rejected as a possible name.[17] As Spencer would later explain, "X Club" was chosen in May 1865 because "it committed [the group] to nothing."[18] The name itself, according to Hirst, was proposed by Mrs. Busk.[19]

It was also decided on the first night that each ensuing meeting would take place on the first Thursday of each month, except during the holiday months of July, August, and September.[20] During the existence of the club, dinners took place at St. George’s Hotel on Albemarle Street, Almond’s Hotel on Clifford Street, and finally at the Athenaeum Club after 1886. Meetings always started at six in the evening so that dinner would be over in time for the Royal Society meetings at 8:00 or 8:30 pm in the Burlington House.[15][21]


English mathematician Thomas Archer Hirst

Eight men attended the first meeting, and in addition Spottiswoode came to the next meeting in December 1864, making the membership of nine. William Benjamin Carpenter, an English physiologist, and William Fergusson, the Queen's surgeon, were also invited to join the club, but they declined.[16] After some discussion, it was decided, according to Spencer, that no more members would be added because no other men outside their network were friendly or intelligent enough to be part of the X Club.[19] In contrast, Huxley would later write that no others were admitted to the group because it was agreed that the name of any new member would have to contain "all the consonants absent from the names of the old ones."[22] As the members of the club had no Slavonic friends, the matter was supposedly dropped.

According to Spencer, the only rule the club had was to have no rules. When a resolution was proposed in November 1885 to keep formal notes of the meetings, the motion was defeated because it violated the rule. Nevertheless, the club kept both a secretary and a treasurer, and both positions were held in turn by each member of the club. These offices were in charge of account collecting and sending notices of upcoming meetings. Members, including Hirst, Huxley, Hooker, and Tyndall, also took informal notes of the meetings.[19]

Influence


Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher and political theorist

Between the time of its inception in 1864 and its termination in 1893, the X club and its members gained much prominence within the scientific community, carrying much influence over scientific thought, similar to the Scientific Lazzaroni in the United States and the Society of Arcueil in France.[23] Between 1870 and 1878, Hooker, Spottiswoode, and Huxley held office in the Royal Society simultaneously, and between 1873 and 1885, they consecutively held the presidency of the Royal Society. Spottiswoode was treasurer of the Society between 1870 and 1878 and Huxley was elected Senior Secretary in 1872. Frankland and Hirst were also of importance to the Society, as the previous held the position of Foreign Secretary between 1895 and 1899, and the latter served on the Council three times between 1864 and 1882.[22][24]

Outside the Royal Society, the men of the X Club continued to gain influential positions. Five members of the Club held the presidency of the British Association for the Advancement of Science between 1868 and 1881. Hirst was elected president of the London Mathematical Society between 1872 and 1874 while Busk served as Examiner and eventually President of the Royal College of Surgeons. Frankland also served as President of the Chemical Society between 1871 and 1873.[22][24]

During this time, the members of the X-Club began to gain renown and win awards within the scientific community in London. Among the nine, three received the Copley Medal, five received the Royal Medal, two received Darwin Medals, one received the Rumford Medal, one received the Lyell Medal, and one received the Wollaston Medal. Eighteen honorary degrees were handed out among the nine members, as well as one Prussian 'Pour le Mérite' and one Order of Merit. Two of the members were knighted, one served as Privy Councillor, one as Justice of the Peace, three as Corresponding Members, and one was a Foreign Associate of the French Academy of Sciences.[24]

As the members of the club continued to gain prominence within the scientific community, the private club became well known. Many people at the time viewed the club as a scientific caucus, and some, such as Richard Owen, accused the group of having too much influence in shaping the scientific landscape of late-Victorian England.[25] Huxley recounted that he once overheard a conversation about the club between two men of the Athenaeum Club, and when one asked what the X-Club did, the other explained "Well they govern scientific affairs, and really, on the whole, they don't do it badly."[26][27] Informal notes of early meetings seem to confirm some of the concerns. Discussion often surrounded the nomination of members to offices of major societies, as well as the negotiation of pension and medal claims. In 1876, the club even voted to collectively support Lubbock’s candidacy for the Parliament of the United Kingdom.[28]

Huxley, however, always stated that the simple purpose of the club was to bring friends together who may have drifted apart otherwise. According to Huxley, the fact that all the members of the club gained distinction within science was merely coincidental.[29]

Decline


English mathematician and physicist William Spottiswoode

By 1880, the members of the X Club had prominent positions within the scientific community, and the club was highly regarded, but it was beginning to fall apart. In 1883, Spottiswoode died of typhoid and at the same time, according to Spencer, only two of the remaining eight members of the X club were in good health. Attendance at meetings began to dwindle and by 1885, Frankland and Lubbock urged for the election of new members. There was a difference of opinion on the matter and it was eventually dropped. In 1889, a rift emerged in the group when Huxley and Spencer had an argument over land nationalisation policies and refused to talk with one another.[30]

The members of the club were growing old and during the late 1880s and early 1890s, a few of the members moved out of London. When attendance began to severely dwindle, talks of ending the club emerged. The last meeting was held unceremoniously in March 1893, and only Frankland and Hooker attended.[31]

See also

• Victorian era
• Naturalism (philosophy)
• Liberalism
• Natural history
• Liberal Christianity
• Natural Selection

References

• Barton, Ruth (September 1998), ""Huxley, Lubbock, and Half a Dozen Others": Professionals and Gentlemen in the Formation of the X Club, 1851–1864", Isis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 89 (3): 410–444, doi:10.1086/384072, JSTOR 237141, OCLC 83940246
• Barton, Ruth (March 1990), "'An Influential Set of Chaps': The X-Club and Royal Society Politics 1864–85", The British Journal for the History of Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University, 23 (1): 53–81, doi:10.1017/S0007087400044459, JSTOR 4026802.
• Desmond, Adrian; Moore, James (1994), Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, London: W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 978-0-393-31150-1, OCLC 30748962.
• Desmond, James D. (2001), "Redefining the X Axis: "Professionals," "Amateurs" and the Making of Mid-Victorian Biology – A Progress Report", Journal of the History of Biology, Springer Netherlands, 34 (1): 3–50, doi:10.1023/A:1010346828270, OCLC 207888686, PMID 14513845.
• Hall, Marie Boas (March 1984), "The Royal Society in Thomas Henry Huxley's Time", Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, London: Royal Society, 38 (2): 153–158, doi:10.1098/rsnr.1984.0010, JSTOR 531815, OCLC 115985513, PMID 11615965.
• Jensen, J. Vernon (June 1970), "The X Club: Fraternity of Victorian Scientists", The British Journal for the History of Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 5 (1): 63–72, doi:10.1017/S0007087400010621, JSTOR 4025353, OCLC 104253815, PMID 11609564.
• MacLeod, Roy M. (April 1970), "The X-Club a Social Network of Science in Late-Victorian England", Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, London: Royal Society, 24 (2): 305–322, doi:10.1098/rsnr.1970.0022, JSTOR 531297, OCLC 104254595, PMID 11609784.
• Teller, James D. (February 1943), "Huxley's "Evil" Influence", Scientific Monthly, Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 56 (2): 173–178, Bibcode:1943SciMo..56..173T, JSTOR 17790.

Notes

1. Desmond A. 1994. Huxley: the Devil's disciple. Joseph, London. p327 et seq.
2. "Darwin Correspondence Project – Letter 4807 – Hooker, J. D. to Darwin, C. R., (7–8 Apr 1865)". Retrieved 1 December2008.
3. Barton 1998, p. 417.
4. MacLeod 1970, pp. 308–309, 311.
5. Barton 1998, p. 433.
6. Barton 1998, pp. 411, 434.
7. Desmond & Moore 1994, p. 526.
8. Glenn Everett, Essays and Reviews, http://www.victorianweb.org – Retrieved 1 December 2006.
9. Barton 1998, pp. 411, 433, 437, 447
10. Barton 1998, pp. 411, 434–435.
11. Barton 1998, p. 439.
12. Barton 1998, pp. 437–438.
13. MacLeod 1970, pp. 305–306.
14. Barton 1998, p. 412.
15. MacLeod 1970, p. 307.
16. Barton 1998, p. 411.
17. Barton 1998, p. 443.
18. Barton 1998, pp. 443–444.
19. MacLeod 1970, p. 309.
20. Jensen 1970, p. 63.
21. Jensen 1970, p. 65.
22. Teller 1943, p. 177.
23. Jensen 1970, p. 64.
24. MacLeod 1970, p. 310.
25. Hall 1894, p. 156.
26. MacLeod 1970, p. 312.
27. Browne, E. Janet (2002), Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, 2, London: Jonathan Cape, p. 249, ISBN 978-0-7126-6837-8, OCLC 186329110
28. MacLeod 1970, p. 311.
29. Barton 1998, p. 413.
30. MacLeod 1970, pp. 313–315.
31. MacLeod 1970, pp. 315–317.

Further reading

• Gondermann, Thomas (2007), Evolution und Rasse. Theoretischer und institutioneller Wandel in der viktorianischen Anthropologie, Bielefeld: transkript.
• Patton, Mark (2007), Science, Politics and Business in the Work of Sir John Lubbock: A Man of Universal Mind, London: Ashgate Publishing, ISBN 978-0-7546-5321-9, OCLC 72868508.

External links

• Encyclopædia Britannica: X Club
• Encyclopædia Britannica: X Club – Further Reading
• Timeline of Darwin after Origin of Species

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James Hunt (speech therapist)
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/9/20

-- The Negro's Place in Nature: A Paper Read Before the London Anthropological Society, by Dr. James Hunt, F.R.S.

According to noted Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore, however, founder James Hunt was a paid agent of the Confederate States of America, as was his friend Henry Hotze and two other council members. Their purpose in founding the society was "to swing London opinion during the [American Civil] war." Hunt and Hotze put pro-slavery pseudoscience into the Anthropological Society library, "bought journalists, printed and distributed thousands of pamphlets,... ran a propaganda weekly in Fleet Street, The Index..." and in general promoted the pro-slavery dogma that black people were a separate species and inherently capable of no higher development than that of enslavement.

-- Anthropological Society of London, by Wikipedia

James Hunt (1833 – 29 August 1869) was a speech therapist in London, England who had among his clients Charles Kingsley, Leo Tennyson (son of the poet laureate Alfred Tennyson) and Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Lewis Carroll was a children’s author, mathematician, and clergyman. He had a stammer that was said to have affected his job. The 1861 census shows that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was staying at Ore House in 1861 and being treated by Dr Hunt a psellismolligist. Since his book was published in 1865 it is quite possible that some of it was written during his stay.[original research?]

His other main interest was in anthropology and in 1863 he established the Anthropological Society of London, which after his death merged with the more established Ethnological Society of London to become the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Career

James Hunt was born in Swanage, Dorset, the son of the speech therapist Thomas Hunt (1802–1851) and his wife Mary. He was trained by his father in the art of curing stuttering by means of breath exercises, muscle control and building the patient's confidence. He bought a doctorate from the University of Giessen in Germany and set up a practice in 1856 in Regent Street, London.[1] He dedicated his first Manual on the subject to Charles Kingsley who spent three weeks with him in 1859. He moved to Hastings where ran residential courses during the summer season with his sister Elizabeth's husband, Rev. Henry F. Rivers.

Anthropology

In 1854 he joined the Ethnological Society of London because of his interest in racial differences and from 1859 to 1862 was the honorary secretary. However many members of this society disliked his attacks on humanitarian and missionary societies and the anti-slavery movement. [2] So in 1863 with the help of the explorer Richard Burton he set up the Anthropological Society of London, becoming its first president. His paper The Negro's place in nature was greeted with boos and hisses when given at the British Association meeting in 1863 because of its defence of slavery in the Confederate States of America and belief in the plurality of the human species.[3]

He established the Anthropological Review as the organ of the society and by 1867 the membership of the Society had reached 500. However, by 1867 allegations by one of the members Hyde Clarke of financial irregularities in his running of the society caused his temporary resignation as president, though he returned in 1868 when Clarke was expelled. This took a toll on his health and in 1869 he died of an inflammation of the brain. The society shortly afterwards started discussions to merge with the Ethnological Society.

He left a widow, Henrietta, and five children and left his books to his nephew W.H.R. Rivers who refused them, though, through unconnected means, he later became an anthropologist himself.

Publications

• Manual of the Philosophy of Voice and Speech, 1859
• Stammering and Stuttering, their nature and treatment, London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1861.
• "The Negro's Place in Nature" (1863), Memoirs read before the Anthropological Society of London, 1865.

Further reading

Efram Sera-Shriar, ‘Observing Human Difference: James Hunt, Thomas Huxley, and Competing Disciplinary Strategies in the 1860s’, Annals of Science, 70 (2013), 461-491

References

1. Brock, W. H. "Hunt, James". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/14194. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
2. George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology, New York, The Free Press, 1991 (1987), p. 247.
3. James Hunt, President (1865), On the Negro's place in Nature, The Anthropological Review, 3, pp. 53–4

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Henry Hotze
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/9/20

According to noted Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore, however, founder James Hunt was a paid agent of the Confederate States of America, as was his friend Henry Hotze and two other council members. Their purpose in founding the society was "to swing London opinion during the [American Civil] war." Hunt and Hotze put pro-slavery pseudoscience into the Anthropological Society library, "bought journalists, printed and distributed thousands of pamphlets,... ran a propaganda weekly in Fleet Street, The Index..." and in general promoted the pro-slavery dogma that black people were a separate species and inherently capable of no higher development than that of enslavement.

-- Anthropological Society of London, by Wikipedia

Henry Hotze
Born: September 2, 1833, Zug, Switzerland
Died: April 19, 1887 (aged 53), Zug, Switzerland
Nationality: Swiss-American
Known for: Unofficial Diplomatic Agent of the Confederate States of America
Spouse(s): Ruby Senac
Parents: Rudolf Hotze (father); Sophie Essinger (mother)

Henry Hotze (September 2, 1833 – April 19, 1887) was a Swiss American propagandist for the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. He acted as a Confederate agent in Great Britain, attempting to build support for the Southern cause there. Hotze attempted to use liberal arguments of self-determination in favor of national independence, echoing the failed European revolutions of 1848. He also promised that the Confederacy would be a low-tariff nation in contrast to the high-tariff United States, and he emphasized the consequences of cotton shortages for the industrial workers in Britain, as caused by the Union blockade of Southern ports.[1]

Early life and career

He was the son of Rudolph Hotze, a captain in the French Royal Service, and Sophie Esslinger. He was educated in a Jesuit setting and emigrated to the United States in his youth. He became a naturalized citizen in 1855, and lived in Mobile, Alabama, where he made important connections through his social skills and intelligence. He had strong racial opinions. In 1856 Hotze was hired by Josiah C. Nott to translate Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races entitled The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races.

In 1858, he went to the southern commercial convention as a delegate for Mobile. He was a secretary for the U.S. legation in Brussels in 1858 and 1859, and when he returned, worked as an associate editor of the Mobile Register, owned by John Forsyth.

He joined the Mobile Cadets when the Civil War began. On May 30, 1861, he became a clerk in Richmond to the adjutant general. Secretary of War L. P. Walker ordered Hotze to go to London to assist in providing funds for Confederate agents in Europe, and help with the acquisition of munitions and supplies for the conflict. He went through the North and Canada before his departure, and collected some intelligence on the Union's mobilization efforts.

Agent in Europe


The Index Newspaper

He arrived in London on October 5 and came to the determination that the Confederacy needed a strong diplomatic and propaganda effort in Europe. He returned to Richmond and made his argument to the Confederate leadership. On November 14, he was created an agent with the core task of influencing British public opinion toward supporting the Confederacy. Hotze was given $750 by the Confederate government to influence the British press with pro-Confederate propaganda.[2] Until the end of the war, he made substantial and vigorous activities to this end.

Hotze realized that propaganda effort had to be about more than cotton alone. He appealed to prejudice against the United States, British naval rights, and the rights of smaller nations. He paid English journalists to support the cause and wrote his own pieces in the Morning Post, the London Standard, the Herald, and the financial weekly paper Money and Market Review.

His first piece in the British press was published on 23 February 1862 in the influential Morning Post, the newspaper loyal to then British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston.[3]

In May 1862, he created a weekly journal, The Index, which was perhaps the best Confederate propaganda activity in Europe. It had a circulation of around 2,000 and was distributed primarily in Britain but was also read in France, Ireland, and even sent back to the Union itself. Hotze's realism and subtlety in his propaganda differed with other Confederate agents in Europe like Edwin De Leon, James Williams, Felix senac, John Slidell, and Paul Pecquet du Bellet. With a total of sixteen pages, The Index appeared every week on Thursdays. The newspaper cost six pence and thirty shillings for an annual subscription. By the month of July 1864, though sales had been increasing very slowly since 1862, sales revenue of The Index finally became sufficient to amortize the total running costs of the paper.[4] The offices of The Index were located on London's Fleet Street, two doors down from The London American, the official pro-Union propaganda journal.[5]

Contributors to The Index included British authors, as well as Americans living in London such as Albert Taylor Bledsoe and John Reuben Thompson.

According to Serge Noirsain of the Confederate Historical Association of Belgium, "Hotze called upon the assistance of professional journalists on the European continent. Manetta was a long-standing Italian friend of a member of the Confederate diplomatic mission in London, who had lived for a while in Virginia. Using the same methods as Hotze in England, Manetta managed to successfully infiltrate the Italian media, in particular the Turin press. This complicity produced a profitable exchange of information between The Index and the best newspapers on the European market. When sources were available, Hotze developed topics that influenced or helped the Confederate envoys in their official missions. As a result, his columns in The Index and their echoes in other well-known newspapers helped consolidate the logic behind the policies of the South".[6]

Hotze participated in a number of other important activities to support the south. He assisted in writing Lord Campbell's speech against the Union blockade given in the House of Lords on March 10, 1862. He also had an important dinner with William Ewart Gladstone (according to Gladstone's papers, July 31, 1862), where he stressed that the Union and Confederacy could negotiate their boundaries in a mediation effort. As 1862 moved on and after the battle of Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation, Hotze became more frustrated over the course of public opinion in Great Britain.[7]

In London, Hotze took under his wing the famous Confederate spy Belle Boyd who had fled to England.[8] Boyd had landed in Liverpool and made her way to London to meet Hotze, upon the recommendation of the Confederacy's Secretary of State.[9] Boyd soon after married Union naval officer Samuel Wylde Hardinge in London on August 24, 1864. Though a shock to many, in light of the Civil War raging back home, the ceremony was nonetheless attended by influential Confederates such Hotze, Caleb Huse, John Walker Fearn, John L. O'Sullivan (who had coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny") and James Williams. Both O'Sullivan and Williams had previously been US Ambassadors; O'Sullivan to Portugal and Williams to the Ottoman Empire.

Last efforts and post-war activities

After the death of Stonewall Jackson prompted some sympathy for the south, Hotze attempted to organize pro-Confederacy meetings in Manchester, Sheffield, Preston and elsewhere to support a House of Commons resolution, initiated by J. A. Roebuck, for recognition of the Confederacy. Its failure and withdrawal on July 13, 1863, seemed like the end of hope for diplomatic solutions to Hotze. When James M. Mason was withdrawn, Hotze was the only remaining agent for the Confederacy in Britain.

He continued to draw on negative sentiments related to Union actions against Confederate attempts to build ironclad ships in Britain and concerns over occasional Union actions against British shipping. He also worked to obtain signatures for petitions for peace and was able to influence French newspapers by affecting Havas Agency telegraphs.

According to Serge Noirsain, Hotze "took time to analyze the routing of information in France. He learned that it was the Havas Agency that spread the world news to the French press. By way of intrigues, he managed to make friends with Auguste Havas and convince him to exploit his exclusive information coming supposedly directly from the New World. Of course he took care not to reveal his true sources...In addition to France and Great Britain, Hotze was soon put in charge of Confederate propaganda in Ireland and in the German kingdoms. However, those nations had gradually passed under the control of Union agents who were provided with considerable funds. In spite of some local successes, Richmond advised Hotze not to focus on those areas because of the enormous amount of energy that this operation would require."[10]

In the long run Hotze's strong feelings about slavery made him averse to work with Jefferson Davis, whose final offer to accept emancipation in exchange for European recognition he flatly rejected.

After the war, he refused to return to the United States and remained in Europe working as a journalist, mostly Paris. He returned to London during the Franco-Prussian War and is known to have visited Istanbul for a newspaper assignment.[11]

Shortly after the war, Hotze joined the rifle manufacturing company Martini, Tanner & Co. as senior partner. The company was later renamed Martini, Hotze, & Co.[12] The company operated from the rue de Lisbonne in Paris.

Hotze died of a stomach cancer in Zug, Switzerland on April 19, 1887 at the age of 53.[13]

Marriage to Ruby Angela Senac

Henry Hotze married Ruby Senac in 1867 at the American Legation in Paris. A religious ceremony was held on December 7, 1867 at the Church of Saint Augustine in Paris by Rev. Crabod, 1st Vicar.


Henry Hotze's wife Ruby Senac Hotze photographed in 1867 in Paris, France


Funeral service for Ruby Senac Hotze

Ruby Senac, born in Mobile on 4 January 1844, was the daughter of Felix senac and Marie Louise Hollinger. She had come to England with her parents in 1863 and had appeared at Court, being presented to Queen Victoria.[14] Ruby had been educated in the United States and had attended Georgetown Visitation Academy in Washington until 1858. Her father Felix senac, born in Pensacola on 28 July 1815 to Pierre Senac and Agnes Senac, had been the Confederacy's purchasing agent and paymaster in New Orleans and then Europe. Felix senac, who had married Marie Louise Hollinger on 16 April 1843, began his military career in Florida in June 1834 before being dismissed as purser on August 15, 1856.[15] Senac had been stationed on Key West's Fort Taylor as Chief Clerk in the 1850s, responsible for the construction and budget of the newly built Fort Taylor.[16][17]

Felix senac enlisted in the Confederate navy on 22 July 1861 and died on 27 January 1866 in Wiesbaden, Germany.[18] His widow and daughter returned to Paris and it was there that Ruby first met Hotze. The Senacs were related to Angela Sylvania Moreno, the wife of Stephen Mallory, Secretary of the Navy of the Confederacy. The Senac family and Moreno family were related through Fernando Moreno (1771-1830), who had married Florentina Senac in 1788 in New Orleans, Louisiana.[19] Felix Senac was also the maternal uncle of Confederate Second Lieutenant John Lawrence Rapier.

The Hotze couple and Ruby's mother lived in the St Mary Abbotts area of Kensington in 1871, and were still living in Kensington as late as 1881. Following Hotze's death in 1887, Ruby survived her husband by several decades. She continued to live in England and then moved to Washington, D.C. with her mother Marie Louise who died on 2 October 1898. Ruby was employed in the Census Office on July 1, 1890 and then became a clerk in the Signal Corps. She was transferred to the Weather Bureau in 1891. She died on January 3, 1929 in Washington, D.C. at the age of 84. She is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery.[20]

See also

• Diplomacy of the American Civil War

Further reading

• Bennett, John D. The London Confederates: The Officials, Clergy, Businessmen and Journalists who Backed the American South During the Civil War (McFarland, 2008).
• Bonner, Robert E. "Slavery, Confederate Diplomacy, and the Racialist Mission of Henry Hotze," Civil War History 51, no. 3 (2005): 288–316.
• Burnett, Lonnie. Henry Hotze, Confederate Propagandist: Selected on Revolution, Recognition, and Race, University of Alabama Press, 2008. ISBN 0-8173-1620-5
• Crook, D.P. "Hotze, Henry"; [1]; American National Biography Online February 2000.
• Cullop, Charles P. Confederate Propaganda in Europe, 1861–1865 (1969)
• Fleche, Andre. Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (2012)
• Oates, Stephen B. "Henry Hotze: Confederate Agent Abroad." Historian 27.2 (1965): 131-154. in JSTOR

References

1. Andre Fleche, Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (2012) p 84.
2. "CONFEDERATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION OF BELGIUM" (PDF).
3. "CONFEDERATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION OF BELGIUM" (PDF).
4. "CONFEDERATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION OF BELGIUM" (PDF).
5. "Historynet.com : Battlefields Beyond (London UK)".
6. "CONFEDERATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION OF BELGIUM" (PDF).
7. "Early American History".
8. "Belle Boyd: Siren of the South p. 159".
9. "Belle Boyd: Siren of the South p.157".
10. "CONFEDERATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION OF BELGIUM" (PDF).
11. "The London Confederates: The Officials, Clergy, Businessmen and Journalists".
12. "Persuading John Bull: Union and Confederate Propaganda in Britain, 1860–65".
13. "The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College".
14. "In the Shadow of the Alabama: The British Foreign Office and the American Civil War".
15. "Southern Anthology".
16. "US Congress: House Documents, 13th Congress, p.288".
17. "US Congress: Senate Documents p. 181".
18. "In the Shadow of the Alabama: The British Foreign Office and the American Civil War".
19. "Our family: the Moreno and related families".
20. "Southern Anthology".

External links

• "The South's Man in London,' Andre M. Fleche, The New York Times, 20 November 2012 [2]

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The British Rule in India
by Karl Marx
New-York Daily Tribune
June 25, 1853

Karl Marx identified the notion of an Asiatic economic system in his 1853 analyses of British rule in India, and then put beside that immediately the human depredation introduced into this system by English colonial interference, rapacity, and outright cruelty. In article after article he returned with increasing conviction to the idea that even in destroying Asia, Britain was making possible there a real social revolution. Marx's style pushes us right up against the difficulty of reconciling our natural repugnance as fellow creatures to the sufferings of Orientals while their society is being violently transformed with the historical necessity of these transformations.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies ....

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:

Sollte these Qual uns qualen
Da she unsere Lust vermehrt
Hat nicht Myriaden Seelen
Timurs Herrschaft aufgeziehrt?69
(Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?)
[From Goethe’s “An Suleika”, Westöstlicher Diwan]

The quotation, which supports Marx's argument about torment producing pleasure, comes from the Westőstlicher Diwan and identifies the sources of Marx's conceptions about the Orient. These are Romantic and even messianic: as human material the Orient is less important than as an element in a Romantic redemptive project. Marx's economic analyses are perfectly fitted thus to a standard Orientalist undertaking, even though Marx's humanity, his sympathy for the misery of people, are clearly engaged. Yet in the end it is the Romantic Orientalist vision that wins out, as Marx's theoretical socio-economic views become submerged in this classically standard image:

England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating -- the annihilation of the Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.70

The idea of regenerating a fundamentally lifeless Asia is a piece of pure Romantic Orientalism, of course, but coming from the same writer who could not easily forget the human suffering involved, the statement is puzzling. It requires us first to ask how Marx's moral equation of Asiatic loss with the British colonial rule he condemned gets skewed back towards the old inequality between East and West we have so far remarked. Second, it requires us to ask where the human sympathy has gone, into what realm of thought it has disappeared while the Orientalist vision takes its place.

We are immediately brought back to the realization that Orientalists, like many other early-nineteenth-century thinkers, conceive of humanity either in large collective terms or in abstract generalities. Orientalists are neither interested in nor capable of discussing individuals; instead artificial entities, perhaps with their roots in Herderian populism, predominate. There are Orientals, Asiatics, Semites, Muslims, Arabs, Jews, races, mentalities, nations, and the like, some of them the product of learned operations of the type found in Renan's work. Similarly, the age-old distinction between "Europe" and "Asia" or "Occident" and "Orient" hides beneath very wide labels every possible variety of human plurality, reducing it in the process to one or two terminal, collective abstractions. Marx is no exception. The collective Orient was easier for him to use in illustration of a theory than existential human identities. For between Orient and Occident, as if in a self-fulfilling proclamation, only the vast anonymous collectivity mattered, or existed. No other type of exchange, severely constrained though it may have been, was at hand.

That Marx was still able to sense some fellow feeling, to identify even a little with poor Asia, suggests that something happened before the labels took over, before he was dispatched to Goethe as a source of wisdom on the Orient. It is as if the individual mind (Marx's, in this case) could find a precollective, pre-official individuality in Asia -- find and give in to its pressures upon his emotions, feelings, senses -- only to give it up when he confronted a more formidable censor in the very vocabulary he found himself forced to employ. What that censor did was to stop and then chase away the sympathy, and this was accompanied by a lapidary definition: Those people, it said, don't suffer -- they are Orientals and hence have to be treated in other ways than the ones you've just been using. A wash of sentiment therefore disappeared as it encountered the unshakable definitions built up by Orientalist science, supported by "Oriental" lore (e.g., the Diwan) supposed to be appropriate for it. The vocabulary of emotion dissipated as it submitted to the lexicographical police action of Orientalist science and even Orientalist art. An experience was dislodged by a dictionary definition: one can almost see that happen in Marx's Indian essays, where what finally occurs is that something forces him to scurry back to Goethe, there to stand in his protective Orientalized Orient.

In part, of course, Marx was concerned with vindicating his own theses on socio-economic revolution; but in part also he seems to have had easy resource to a massed body of writing, both internally consolidated by Orientalism and put forward by it beyond the field, that controlled any statement made about the Orient. In Chapter One I tried to show how this control had had a general cultural history in Europe since antiquity; in this chapter my concern has been to show how in the nineteenth century a modern professional terminology and practice were created whose existence dominated discourse about the Orient, whether by Orientalists or non- Orientalists. Sacy and Renan were instances of the way Orientalism fashioned, respectively, a body of texts and a philologically rooted process by which the Orient took on a discursive identity that made it unequal with the West. In using Marx as the case by which a non-Orientalist's human engagements were first dissolved, then usurped by Orientalist generalizations, we find ourselves having to consider the process of lexicographical and institutional consolidation peculiar to Orientalism.

-- Orientalism, by Edward W. Said

London, Friday, June 10, 1853

Telegraphic dispatches from Vienna announce that the pacific solution of the Turkish, Sardinian and Swiss questions, is regarded there as a certainty.

Last night the debate on India was continued in the House of Commons, in the usual dull manner. Mr. Blackett charged the statements of Sir Charles Wood and Sir J. Hogg with bearing the stamp of optimist falsehood. A lot of Ministerial and Directorial advocates rebuked the charge as well as they could, and the inevitable Mr. Hume summed up by calling on Ministers to withdraw their bill. Debate adjourned.

Hindostan is an Italy of Asiatic dimensions, the Himalayas for the Alps, the Plains of Bengal for the Plains of Lombardy, the Deccan for the Apennines, and the Isle of Ceylon for the Island of Sicily. The same rich variety in the products of the soil, and the same dismemberment in the political configuration. Just as Italy has, from time to time, been compressed by the conqueror’s sword into different national masses, so do we find Hindostan, when not under the pressure of the Mohammedan, or the Mogul[4], or the Briton, dissolved into as many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns, or even villages. Yet, in a social point of view, Hindostan is not the Italy, but the Ireland of the East. And this strange combination of Italy and of Ireland, of a world of voluptuousness and of a world of woes, is anticipated in the ancient traditions of the religion of Hindostan. That religion is at once a religion of sensualist exuberance, and a religion of self-torturing asceticism; a religion of the Lingam and of the juggernaut; the religion of the Monk, and of the Bayadere.[5]

I share not the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindostan, without recurring, however, like Sir Charles Wood, for the confirmation of my view, to the authority of Khuli-Khan. But take, for example, the times of Aurangzeb; or the epoch, when the Mogul appeared in the North, and the Portuguese in the South; or the age of Mohammedan invasion, and of the Heptarchy in Southern India[6]; or, if you will, go still more back to antiquity, take the mythological chronology of the Brahman himself, who places the commencement of Indian misery in an epoch even more remote than the Christian creation of the world.

There cannot, however, remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindostan had to suffer before. I do not allude to European despotism, planted upon Asiatic despotism, by the British East India Company, forming a more monstrous combination than any of the divine monsters startling us in the Temple of Salsette[7]. This is no distinctive feature of British Colonial rule, but only an imitation of the Dutch, and so much so that in order to characterise the working of the British East India Company, it is sufficient to literally repeat what Sir Stamford Raffles, the English Governor of Java, said of the old Dutch East India Company:

“The Dutch Company, actuated solely by the spirit of gain, and viewing their [Javan] subjects, with less regard or consideration than a West India planter formerly viewed a gang upon his estate, because the latter had paid the purchase money of human property, which the other had not, employed all the existing machinery of despotism to squeeze from the people their utmost mite of contribution, the last dregs of their labor, and thus aggravated the evils of a capricious and semi-barbarous Government, by working it with all the practised ingenuity of politicians, and all the monopolizing selfishness of traders.”

All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid, and destructive as the successive action in Hindostan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo, and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history.

There have been in Asia, generally, from immemorial times, but three departments of Government; that of Finance, or the plunder of the interior; that of War, or the plunder of the exterior; and, finally, the department of Public Works. Climate and territorial conditions, especially the vast tracts of desert, extending from the Sahara, through Arabia, Persia, India, and Tartary, to the most elevated Asiatic highlands, constituted artificial irrigation by canals and water-works the basis of Oriental agriculture. As in Egypt and India, inundations are used for fertilizing the soil in Mesopotamia, Persia, &c.; advantage is taken of a high level for feeding irrigative canals. This prime necessity of an economical and common use of water, which, in the Occident, drove private enterprise to voluntary association, as in Flanders and Italy, necessitated, in the Orient where civilization was too low and the territorial extent too vast to call into life voluntary association, the interference of the centralizing power of Government. Hence an economical function devolved upon all Asiatic Governments, the function of providing public works. This artificial fertilization of the soil, dependent on a Central Government, and immediately decaying with the neglect of irrigation and drainage, explains the otherwise strange fact that we now find whole territories barren and desert that were once brilliantly cultivated, as Palmyra, Petra, the ruins in Yemen, and large provinces of Egypt, Persia, and Hindostan; it also explains how a single war of devastation has been able to depopulate a country for centuries, and to strip it of all its civilization.

Now, the British in East India accepted from their predecessors the department of finance and of war, but they have neglected entirely that of public works. Hence the deterioration of an agriculture which is not capable of being conducted on the British principle of free competition, of laissez-faire and laissez-aller. But in Asiatic empires we are quite accustomed to see agriculture deteriorating under one government and reviving again under some other government. There the harvests correspond to good or bad government, as they change in Europe with good or bad seasons. Thus the oppression and neglect of agriculture, bad as it is, could not be looked upon as the final blow dealt to Indian society by the British intruder, had it not been attended by a circumstance of quite different importance, a novelty in the annals of the whole Asiatic world. However changing the political aspect of India’s past must appear, its social condition has remained unaltered since its remotest antiquity, until the first decennium of the 19th century. The hand-loom and the spinning-wheel, producing their regular myriads of spinners and weavers, were the pivots of the structure of that society. From immemorial times, Europe received the admirable textures of Indian labor, sending in return for them her precious metals, and furnishing thereby his material to the goldsmith, that indispensable member of Indian society, whose love of finery is so great that even the lowest class, those who go about nearly naked, have commonly a pair of golden ear-rings and a gold ornament of some kind hung round their necks. Rings on the fingers and toes have also been common. Women as well as children frequently wore massive bracelets and anklets of gold or silver, and statuettes of divinities in gold and silver were met with in the households. It was the British intruder who broke up the Indian hand-loom and destroyed the spinning-wheel. England began with driving the Indian cottons from the European market; it then introduced twist into Hindostan, and in the end inundated the very mother country of cotton with cottons. From 1818 to 1836 the export of twist from Great Britain to India rose in the proportion of 1 to 5,200. In 1824 the export of British muslins to India hardly amounted to 1,000,000 yards, while in 1837 it surpassed 64,000,000 of yards. But at the same time the population of Dacca decreased from 150,000 inhabitants to 20,000. This decline of Indian towns celebrated for their fabrics was by no means the worst consequence. British steam and science uprooted, over the whole surface of Hindostan, the union between agriculture and manufacturing industry.

These two circumstances – the Hindoo, on the one hand, leaving, like all Oriental peoples, to the Central Government the care of the great public works, the prime condition of his agriculture and commerce, dispersed, on the other hand, over the surface of the country, and agglomerated in small centers by the domestic union of agricultural and manufacturing pursuits – these two circumstances had brought about, since the remotest times, a social system of particular features – the so-called village system, which gave to each of these small unions their independent organization and distinct life. The peculiar character of this system may be judged from the following description, contained in an old official report of the British House of Commons on Indian affairs:

“A village, geographically considered, is a tract of country comprising some hundred or thousand acres of arable and waste lands; politically viewed it resembles a corporation or township. Its proper establishment of officers and servants consists of the following descriptions: The potail, or head inhabitant, who has generally the superintendence of the affairs of the village, settles the disputes of the inhabitants attends to the police, and performs the duty of collecting the revenue within his village, a duty which his personal influence and minute acquaintance with the situation and concerns of the people render him the best qualified for this charge. The kurnum keeps the accounts of cultivation, and registers everything connected with it. The tallier and the totie, the duty of the former of which consists [...] in gaining information of crimes and offenses, and in escorting and protecting persons travelling from one village to another; the province of the latter appearing to be more immediately confined to the village, consisting, among other duties, in guarding the crops and assisting in measuring them. The boundary-man, who preserves the limits of the village, or gives evidence respecting them in cases of dispute. The Superintendent of Tanks and Watercourses distributes the water [...] for the purposes of agriculture. The Brahmin, who performs the village worship. The schoolmaster, who is seen teaching the children in a village to read and write in the sand. The calendar-brahmin, or astrologer, etc. These officers and servants generally constitute the establishment of a village; but in some parts of the country it is of less extent, some of the duties and functions above described being united in the same person; in others it exceeds the above-named number of individuals. [...] Under this simple form of municipal government, the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries of the villages have been but seldom altered; and though the villages themselves have been sometimes injured, and even desolated by war, famine or disease, the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families have continued for ages. The inhabitants gave themselves no trouble about the breaking up and divisions of kingdoms; while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves; its internal economy remains unchanged. The potail is still the head inhabitant, and still acts as the petty judge or magistrate, and collector or renter of the village.”

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:

“Sollte these Qual uns quälen
Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt,
Hat nicht myriaden Seelen
Timur’s Herrschaft aufgezehrt?”

[“Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?”]

-- From Goethe’s “An Suleika”, Westöstlicher Diwan

Karl Marx

_______________

Footnotes

4 A reference to the rule in India, mainly in the north, of the Mohammedan invaders who came from Central Asia, Afghanistan and Persia. Early in the thirteenth century the Delhi Sultanate became the bulwark of Moslem domination but at the end of the fourteenth century it declined and was subsequently conquered by the Moguls, new invaders of Turkish descent, who came to India from the east of Central Asia in the early sixteenth century and in 1526 founded the Empire of the Great Moguls (named after the ruling dynasty of the Empire) in Northern India. Contemporaries regarded them as the direct descendants of the Mongol warriors of Genghis Khan’s time, hence the name “Moguls”. In the mid-seventeenth century the Mogul Empire included the greater part of India and part of Afghanistan. Later on, however, the Empire began to decline due to peasant rebellions, the growing resistance of the Indian people to the Mohammedan conquerors and increasing separatist tendencies. In the early half of the eighteenth century the Empire of the Great Moguls practically ceased to exist.

5 Religion of the Lingam – the cult of the God Shiva, particularly widespread among the southern Indian sect of the Lingayat (from the word “linga” - the emblem of Shiva), a Hindu sect which does not recognise distinctions of caste and rejects fasts, sacrifices and pilgrimages.

Juggernaut (jagannath) – a title of Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu. The cult of juggernaut was marked by sumptuous ritual and extreme religious fanaticism which manifested itself in the self-torture and suicide of believers. On feast days some believers threw themselves under the wheels of the chariot bearing the idol of Vishnu-juggernaut.

6 Heptarchy (government by seven rulers) – a term used by English historiographers to describe the political system in England from the sixth to eighth centuries, when the country was divided into seven highly unstable Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which, in their turn, frequently split up and reunited. Marx uses this term by analogy to describe the disunity of the Deccan (Central and South India) before its conquest by the Mohammedans at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

7 The island of Salsette, north of Bombay, was famous for its 109 Buddhist cave temples.

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Ernest Renan
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/9/20


Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan by Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon, circa 1870s
Born: Joseph Ernest Renan, 28 February 1823, Tréguier, Kingdom of France
Died: 2 October 1892 (aged 69), Paris, French Third Republic
Notable work: Life of Jesus (1863); What Is a Nation? (1882)
Era: 19th-century philosophy
Region: Western philosophy
School: Continental philosophy
Main interests: History of religion, philosophy of religion, political philosophy
Notable ideas: Civic nationalism[1]
Influences: Thomas Reid, Nicolas Malebranche, G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, J. G. Herder, David Strauss

Joseph Ernest Renan (French: [ʁənɑ̃]; 27 February 1823 – 2 October 1892)[2] was a French Orientalist and Semitic scholar, expert of Semitic languages and civilizations, historian of religion, philologist, philosopher, biblical scholar and critic.[3] He is best known for his influential and pioneering historical works on the origins of early Christianity,[3] and his political theories, especially concerning nationalism and national identity. Renan is credited as being among the first scholars to advance the now-discredited[4] Khazar theory, which held that Ashkenazi Jews were descendants of the Khazars,[5] Turkic peoples who had adopted Jewish religion and migrated to Western Europe following the collapse of their khanate.[5]

Life

Birth and family


Ernest Renan birthplace museum in Tréguier

He was born at Tréguier in Brittany to a family of fishermen.[6] His grandfather, having made a small fortune with his fishing smack, bought a house at Tréguier and settled there, and his father, captain of a small cutter and an ardent republican, married the daughter of a Royalist tradesman from the neighbouring town of Lannion. All his life, Renan was aware of the conflict between his father's and his mother's political beliefs. He was five years old when his father died, and his sister, Henriette, twelve years his senior, became the moral head of the household. Having in vain attempted to keep a school for girls at Tréguier, she departed and went to Paris as a teacher in a young ladies' boarding-school.[7]

Education

Ernest, meanwhile, was educated in the ecclesiastical seminary of his native town.[8][7] His school reports describe him as "docile, patient, diligent, painstaking, thorough". While the priests taught him mathematics and Latin, his mother completed his education. Renan's mother was half Breton. Her paternal ancestors came from Bordeaux, and Renan used to say that in his own nature the Gascon and the Breton were constantly at odds.[9][7]

During the summer of 1838, Renan won all the prizes at the college of Tréguier. His sister told the doctor of the school in Paris where she taught about her brother, and he informed F. A. P. Dupanloup, who was involved in organizing the ecclesiastical college of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, a school in which the young Catholic nobility and the most talented pupils of the Catholic seminaries were to be educated together, with the idea of creating friendships between the aristocracy and the priesthood. Dupanloup sent for Renan, who was then fifteen years old and had never been outside Brittany. "I learned with stupor that knowledge was not a privilege of the church ... I awoke to the meaning of the words talent, fame, celebrity." Religion seemed to him wholly different in Tréguier and in Paris.[7] He came to view Abbé Dupanloup as a father figure.[10]

Study at Issy-les Moulineaux

In 1840, Renan left St Nicholas to study philosophy at the seminary of Issy-les-Moulineaux. He entered with a passion for Catholic scholasticism. Among the philosophers, Thomas Reid and Nicolas Malebranche first attracted him, and, then he turned to G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant and J. G. Herder.[10] Renan began to see a contradiction between the metaphysics which he studied and the faith he professed, but an appetite for verifiable truths restrained his scepticism. "Philosophy excites and only half satisfies the appetite for truth; I am eager for mathematics", he wrote to Henriette. Henriette had accepted in the family of Count Zamoyski an engagement more lucrative than her former job. She exercised the strongest influence over her brother.[7]

Study at college of St Sulpice

It was not mathematics but philology which was to settle Renan's gathering doubts. His course completed at Issy, in 1844 he entered the college of St Sulpice in order to take his degree in philology prior to entering the church, and, here, he began the study of Hebrew. He realized that the second part of the Book of Isaiah differs from the first not only in style but in date, that the grammar and the history of the Pentateuch are later than the time of Moses, and that the Book of Daniel is clearly written centuries after the time in which it is set. At night he read the new novels of Victor Hugo; by day, he studied Hebrew and Syriac under Arthur-Marie Le Hir.[10] In October 1845, Renan left St Sulpice for Stanislas, a lay college of the Oratorians. Still feeling too much under the domination of the church, he reluctantly ended the last of his associations with religious life and entered M. Crouzet's school for boys as a teacher.[7]

Scholarly career


Portrait of Joseph Ernest Renan, by F. Mulnier

Renan, educated by priests, was to accept the scientific ideal with an extraordinary expansion of all his faculties. He became ravished by the splendor of the cosmos. At the end of his life, he wrote of Amiel, "The man who has time to keep a private diary has never understood the immensity of the universe." The certitudes of physical and natural science were revealed to Renan in 1846 by the chemist Marcellin Berthelot, then a boy of eighteen, his pupil at M. Crouzet's school. To the day of Renan's death, their friendship continued. Renan was occupied as usher only during evenings. During the daytime, he continued his researches in Semitic philology. In 1847, he obtained the Volney prize, one of the principal distinctions awarded by the Academy of Inscriptions, for the manuscript of his "General History of Semitic Languages." In 1847, he took his degree as Agrégé de Philosophie – that is to say, fellow of the university – and was offered a job as master in the lycée Vendôme.[7]

In 1856, Renan married in Paris Cornélie Scheffer, daughter of Hendrik Scheffer and niece of Ary Scheffer, both French painters of Dutch descent. They had two children, Ary Renan, born in 1858, who became a painter, and Noémi, born in 1862, who eventually married Yannis Psycharis.

Life of Jesus

Within his lifetime, Renan was best known as the author of the enormously popular Life of Jesus (Vie de Jésus, 1863).[11][12] Renan attributed the idea of the book to his sister, Henriette, with whom he was traveling in Ottoman Syria and Palestine when, struck with a fever, she died suddenly. With only a New Testament and copy of Josephus as references, he began writing.[13] The book was first translated into English in the year of its publication by Charles E. Wilbour and has remained in print for the past 145 years.[14] Renan's Life of Jesus was lavished with ironic praise and criticism by Albert Schweitzer in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus.[15]

Renan argued Jesus was able to purify himself of "Jewish traits" and that he became an Aryan. His Life of Jesus promoted racial ideas and infused race into theology and the person of Jesus; he depicted Jesus as a Galilean who was transformed from a Jew into a Christian, and that Christianity emerged purified of any Jewish influences.[16] The book was based largely on the Gospel of John, and was a scholarly work.[16] It depicted Jesus as a man but not God, and rejected the miracles of the Gospel.[16] Renan believed by humanizing Jesus he was restoring to him a greater dignity.[17] The book's controversial assertions that the life of Jesus should be written like the life of any historic person, and that the Bible could and should be subject to the same critical scrutiny as other historical documents caused controversy[18] and enraged many Christians,[19][20][21][22] and Jews were enraged because of its depiction of Judaism as foolish and absurdly illogical and for its insistence that Jesus and Christianity were superior.[16]

Continuation of scholarly career: social views

Renan was not only a scholar. In his book on St. Paul, as in the Apostles, he shows his concern with the larger social life, his sense of fraternity, and a revival of the democratic sentiment which had inspired L'Avenir de la Science. In 1869, he presented himself as the candidate of the liberal opposition at the parliamentary election for Meaux. While his temper had become less aristocratic, his liberalism had grown more tolerant. On the eve of its dissolution, Renan was half prepared to accept the Empire, and, had he been elected to the Chamber of Deputies, he would have joined the group of l'Empire liberal, but he was not elected. A year later, war was declared with Germany; the Empire was abolished, and Napoleon III became an exile. The Franco-Prussian War was a turning-point in Renan's history. Germany had always been to him the asylum of thought and disinterested science. Now, he saw the land of his ideal destroy and ruin the land of his birth; he beheld the German no longer as a priest, but as an invader.[7]


Ernest Renan in his study by Anders Zorn

In La Réforme Intellectuelle et Morale (1871), Renan tried to safeguard France's future. Yet, he was still influenced by Germany. The ideal and the discipline which he proposed to his defeated country were those of her conqueror—a feudal society, a monarchical government, an elite which the rest of the nation exists merely to support and nourish; an ideal of honor and duty imposed by a chosen few on the recalcitrant and subject multitude. The errors attributed to the Commune confirmed Renan in this reaction. At the same time, the irony always perceptible in his work grows more bitter. His Dialogues Philosophiques, written in 1871, his Ecclesiastes (1882) and his Antichrist (1876) (the fourth volume of the Origins of Christianity, dealing with the reign of Nero) are incomparable in their literary genius, but they are examples of a disenchanted and sceptical temper. He had vainly tried to make his country obey his precepts. The progress of events showed him, on the contrary, a France which, every day, left a little stronger, and he roused himself from his disbelieving, disillusioned mood and observed with interest the struggle for justice and liberty of a democratic society. The fifth and sixth volumes of the Origins of Christianity (the Christian Church and Marcus Aurelius) show him reconciled with democracy, confident in the gradual ascent of man, aware that the greatest catastrophes do not really interrupt the sure if imperceptible progress of the world and reconciled, also, if not with the truths, at least with the moral beauties of Catholicism and with the remembrance of his pious youth.[7]

Definition of nationhood

Renan's definition of a nation has been extremely influential. This was given in his 1882 discourse Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? ("What is a Nation?"). Whereas German writers like Fichte had defined the nation by objective criteria such as a race or an ethnic group "sharing common characteristics" (language, etc.), Renan defined it by the desire of a people to live together, which he summarized by a famous phrase, "avoir fait de grandes choses ensemble, vouloir en faire encore" (having done great things together and wishing to do more). Writing in the midst of the dispute concerning the Alsace-Lorraine region, he declared that the existence of a nation was based on a "daily plebiscite." Some authors criticize that definition, based on a "daily plebiscite", because of the ambiguity of the concept. They argue that this definition is an idealization and it should be interpreted within the German tradition and not in opposition to it. They say that the arguments used by Renan at the conference What is a Nation? are not consistent with his thinking.[23]

Karl Deutsch (in "Nationalism and its alternatives") suggested that a nation is "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors." This phrase is frequently, but mistakenly, attributed to Renan himself. He did indeed write that if "the essential element of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common", they "must also have forgotten many things. Every French citizen must have forgotten the night of St. Bartholomew and the massacres in the 13th century in the South."

Renan believed "Nations are not eternal. They had a beginning and they will have an end. And they will probably be replaced by a European confederation".[24]

Renan's work has especially influenced 20th century theorist of nationalism, Benedict Anderson.

Late scholarly career


Renan in his study in the College of France


Renan caricatured by GUTH in Vanity Fair, 1910

Shifting away from his pessimism regarding liberalism's prospects during the 1870s while still believing in the necessity of an intellectual elite to influence democratic society for the good, Renan rallied to support the French Third Republic, humorously describing himself as a légitimiste, that is, a person who needs "about ten years to accustom myself to regarding any government as legitimate," and adding "I, who am not a republican a priori, who am a simple Liberal quite willing to adjust myself to a constitutional monarchy, would be more loyal to the Republic than newly converted republicans."[25] The progress of the sciences under the Republic and the latitude given to the freedom of thought that Renan cherished above all had allayed many of his previous fears, and he opposed the deterministic and fatalist theories of philosophers like Hippolyte Taine.[26][27]

As he got older, he contemplated his childhood. He was nearly sixty when, in 1883, he published the autobiographical Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse which, after the Life of Jesus, is the work by which he is chiefly known.[7]

They showed the blasé modern reader that a world no less poetic, no less primitive than that of the Origins of Christianity still existed within living memory on the northwestern coast of France. It has the Celtic magic of ancient romance and the simplicity, the naturalness, and the veracity which the 19th century prized so highly. But his Ecclesiastes, published a few months earlier, his Drames Philosophiques, collected in 1888, give a more adequate image of his fastidious critical, disenchanted, yet optimistic spirit. They show the attitude towards uncultured Socialism of a philosopher liberal by conviction, by temperament an aristocrat. We learn in them how Caliban (democracy), the mindless brute, educated to his own responsibility, makes after all an adequate ruler; how Prospero (the aristocratic principle, or, if we will, the mind) accepts his dethronement for the sake of greater liberty in the intellectual world, since Caliban proves an effective policeman and leaves his superiors a free hand in the laboratory; how Ariel (the religious principle) acquires a firmer hold on life and no longer gives up the ghost at the faintest hint of change. Indeed, Ariel flourishes in the service of Prospero under the external government of the many-headed brute. Religion and knowledge are as imperishable as the world they dignify. Thus, out of the depths rises unvanquished the essential idealism of Renan.[7]

Renan was a great worker. At sixty years of age, having finished the Origins of Christianity, he began his History of Israel, based on a lifelong study of the Old Testament and on the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, published by the Académie des Inscriptions under Renan's direction from the year 1881 till the end of his life. The first volume of the History of Israel appeared in 1887; the third, in 1891; the last two posthumously. As a history of facts and theories, the book has many faults; as an essay on the evolution of the religious idea, it is (despite some passages of frivolity, irony, or incoherence) of extraordinary importance; as a reflection of the mind of Renan, it is the most lifelike of images. In a volume of collected essays, Feuilles Détachées, published also in 1891, we find the same mental attitude, an affirmation of the necessity of piety independent of dogma. During his last years, he received many honors, and was made an administrator of the Collège de France and grand officer of the Legion of Honor. Two volumes of the History of Israel, his correspondence with his sister Henriette, his Letters to M. Berthelot, and the History of the Religious Policy of Philippe-le-Bel, which he wrote in the years immediately before his marriage, all appeared during the last eight years of the 19th century.[7]

Renan died after a few days' illness in 1892 in Paris,[7] and was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre in the Montmartre Quarter.

Reputation and controversies

Hugely influential in his lifetime, Renan was eulogised after his death as the embodiment of the progressive spirit in western culture. Anatole France wrote that Renan was the incarnation of modernity. Renan's works were read and appreciated by many of the leading literary figures of the time, including James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Matthew Arnold, Edith Wharton, and Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve.[28][29] One of his greatest admirers was Manuel González Prada in Peru who took the Life of Jesus as a basis for his anticlericalism. In his 1932 document "The Doctrine of Fascism", Italian dictator Benito Mussolini also applauded perceived "prefascist intuitions" in a section of Renan's "Meditations" that argued against democracy and individual rights as "chimerical" and intrinsically opposed to "nature's plans".[30]

Statue


Statue of Ernest Renan in Tréguier town square

In 1903 a major controversy accompanied the installation of a monument in Tréguier designed by Jean Boucher. Placed in the local cathedral square, it was interpreted as a challenge to Catholicism, and led to widespread protests, especially because the site was normally used for the temporary pulpit erected at the traditional Catholic festival of the Pardon of St Yves. It also included the Greek goddess Athena raising her arm to crown Renan gesturing in apparent challenge towards the cathedral.[31][32] The local clergy organised a protest calvary sculpture designed by Yves Hernot as "a symbol of the triumphant ultramontaine church."

Views on race

Renan believed that racial characteristics were instinctual and deterministic.[33][34] He has been criticised for his claims that the Semitic race is inferior to the Aryan race.[35] Renan claimed that the Semitic mind was limited by dogmatism and lacked a cosmopolitan conception of civilisation.[36] For Renan, Semites were "an incomplete race."[37] Some authors argue that Renan developed his antisemitism from Voltaire's anti-Judaism.[38]

He did not regard the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe as being a Semitic people; Renan is credited with launching the so-called Khazar theory. This theory states that Ashkenazim had their origin in Turkic refugees that had converted to Judaism and later migrated from the collapsed Khazar Khanate westward into the Rhineland, and exchanged their native Khazar language for the Yiddish language while continuing to practice the Jewish religion. In his 1883 lecture "Le Judaïsme comme race et comme Religion" he disputed the concept that Jewish people constitute a unified racial entity in a biological sense,[39] which made his views unpalatable within racial antisemitism. Renan was also known for being a strong critic of German ethnic nationalism, with its antisemitic undertones.[40] His notions of race and ethnicity were completely at odds with the European antisemitism of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Renan wrote the following about the long history of persecution of Jews:

When all nations and all ages have persecuted you, there must be some motive behind it all. The Jew, up to our own time, insinuated himself everywhere, claiming the protection of the common law; but, in reality, remaining outside the common law. He retained his own status; he wished to have the same guarantees as everyone else, and, over and above that, his own exceptions and special laws. He desired the advantages of the nations without being a nation, without helping to bear the burdens of the nations. No people has ever been able to tolerate this. The nations are military creations founded and maintained by the sword; they are the work of peasants and soldiers; towards establishing them the Jews have contributed nothing. Herein is the great fallacy inspired in Israelite pretensions. The tolerated alien can be useful to a country, but only on condition that the country does not allow itself to be invaded by him. It is not fair to claim family rights in a house which one has not built, like those birds which come and take up their quarters in a nest which does not belong to them, or like the crustaceans which steal the shell of another species.[41]

However, during the 1880s, Renan shifted away from these views. In a lecture on "Judaism as a Race and as a Religion", he stated:

When, in 1791, the National Assembly decreed the emancipation of the Jews, it concerned itself very little with race. It considered that men ought to be judged, not by the blood that runs in their veins, but by their moral and intellectual value. It is the glory of France to take these questions by their human side. The work of the nineteenth century is to tear down every ghetto, and I have no praise for those who seek to rebuild them. The Israelite race has in the past rendered the greatest services to the world. Blended with the different nations, in harmony with the diverse national unities of Europe, it will continue to do in the future what it has done in the past. By its collaboration with all the liberal forces of Europe, it will contribute eminently to the social progress of humanity.[42][43]

And in 1883, in a lecture called "The Original Identity and Gradual Separation of Judaism and Christianity":

Judaism, which has served so well in the past, will still serve in the future. It will serve the true cause of liberalism, of the modern spirit. Every Jew is a liberal ... The enemies of Judaism, however, if you only look at them more closely, you will see that they are the enemies of the modern spirit in general.[44][45]

Other comments on race, have also proven controversial, especially his belief that political policy should take into account supposed racial differences:

Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor... A race of tillers of the soil, the Negro; treat him with kindness and humanity, and all will be as it should; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race. Reduce this noble race to working in the ergastulum like Negroes and Chinese, and they rebel... But the life at which our workers rebel would make a Chinese or a fellah happy, as they are not military creatures in the least. Let each one do what he is made for, and all will be well.[46]

This passage, among others, was cited by Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism, as evidence of the alleged hypocrisy of Western humanism and its "sordidly racist" conception of the rights of man.[47]

Republican racism

During the arising of racism theories around Europe and specifically in France—French Republic (1870–1940)—Renan had an important influence on the matter. He was a defender of people's self-determination concept,[48] but on the other hand was in fact convinced of a "racial hierarchy of peoples" that he said was "established".[49] Discursively, he subordinated the principle of self-determination of peoples to a racial hierarchy,[50] i.e. he supported the colonialist expansion and the racist view of the Third Republic because he believed the French to be hierarchically superior (in a racial matter) to the African nations.[51] This subtle racism, called by Gilles Manceron "Republican racism"[52] was common in France during the Third Republic, and was also a well-known defensing discourse in politics. Supporters of colonialism used the concept of cultural superiority, and described themselves as "protectors of civilization" to justify their colonial actions and territorial expansion.

Honours

• The armoured cruiser Ernest Renan was named in his honour.
• The community of Renan, Virginia was named after him.

Archives and memorabilia

• Musée de la Vie romantique, Hôtel Scheffer-Renan, Paris

Works

• (1848). De l'Origine du Langage.
• (1852). Averroës et l'Averroïsme.
• (1852). De Philosophia Peripatetica, apud Syros.
• (1854). L'Âme Bretonne.
• (1855). Histoire Générale et Systèmes Comparés des Langues Sémitiques.
• (1857). Études d'Histoire Religieuse.
• (1858). Le Livre de Job.
• (1859). Essais de Morale et de Critique.
• (1860). Le Cantique des Cantiques.
• (1862). Henriette Renan, Souvenir pour ceux qui l'ont Connue.
• (1863–1881). Histoire des Origines du Christianisme:
o (1863). Vie de Jésus.
o (1866). Les Apôtres.
o (1869). Saint Paul.
o (1873). L'Antéchrist.
o (1877). Les Évangiles et la Seconde Génération Chrétienne.
o (1879). L'Église Chrétienne.
o (1882). Marc-Aurèle et la Fin du Monde Antique.
o (1883). Index.
• (1864). Mission de Phénicie (1865–1874)
• (1865). Prière sur l'Acropole.
• (1865). Histoire Littéraire de la France au XIVe Siècle [with Victor Le Clerc].
• (1868). Questions Contemporaines.
• (1871). La Réforme Intellectuelle et Morale de la France.
• (1876). Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques.
• (1878). Mélanges d'Histoire et de Voyages.
• (1878–1886). Drames Philosophiques:
o (1878). Caliban.
o (1881). L'Eau de Jouvence.
o (1885). Le Prêtre de Némi.[53]
o (1886). L'Abbesse de Jouarre.
• (1880). Conférences d'Angleterre.
• (1881). L'Ecclésiaste.
• (1882). Qu'est-ce qu'une Nation?
• (1883). L'Islamisme et La Science: conférence faite à la Sorbonne, le 29 mars 1883.
• (1883). Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse.
• (1884). Nouvelles Études d'Histoire Religieuse.
• (1884). Le Bouddhisme.
• (1887). Discours et Conférences.
• (1887–1893). Histoire du Peuple d'Israël [5 volumes].
• (1889). Examen de Conscience Philosophique.
• (1890). L'Avenir de la Science, Pensées de 1848.
• (1892). Feuilles Détachées.
• (1899). Études sur la Politique Religieuse du Règne de Philippe le Bel.
• (1904). Mélanges Religieux et Historiques.
• (1908). Patrice.
• (1914). Fragments Intimes et Romanesques.
• (1921). Essai Psychologique sur Jésus-Christ.
• (1928). Voyages: Italie, Norvège.
• (1928). Sur Corneille, Racine et Bossuet.
• (1945). Ernest Renan et l'Allemagne.

Works in English translation

• (1862). An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture. London: Trübner & Co.
• (1864). Studies of Religious History and Criticism. New York: Carleton Publisher.
• (1864). The Life of Jesus. London: Trübner & Co.
• (1866). The Apostles. New York: Carleton Publisher.
• (1868). Saint Paul. London: The Temple Company.
• (1871). Constitutional Monarchy in France. Boston: Robert Brothers.
• (1883). Islam and Science: A lecture presented at La Sorbonne, 29 March 1883. ; translated by S.P. Ragep. Montréal, Canada: McGill University. 2nd ed. 2011.
• (1885). Lectures on the Influence of the Institutions, Thought and Culture of Rome, on Christianity and the Development of the Catholic Church. London: Williams & Norgate (The Hibbert Lectures).
o (1888). English Conferences of Ernest Renan. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company.
• (1888–1895). History of the People of Israel. London: Chapman & Hall [5 vols.]
• (1888). Marcus-Aurelius. London: Mathieson & Company.
• (1888). The Abbess of Jouarre. New York: G.W. Dillingham.
• (1889). The Gospels. London: Mathieson & Company.
• (1890). The Antichrist. London: Mathieson & Company.
• (1890). Cohelet; or, the Preacher. London: Mathieson & Company.
• (1891). The Future of Science. London: Chapman & Hall.
• (1891). The Song of Songs. London: W.M. Thomson.
• (1892). Recollections and Letters of Ernest Renan. New York: Cassell Publishing Company.
• (1893). The Book of Job. London: W.M. Thomson.
• (1895). My Sister Henrietta. Boston: Robert Brothers.
• (1896). Brother and Sister: A Memoir and the Letters of Ernest & Henriette Renan. London: William Heinemann.
• (1896). Caliban: A Philosophical Drama. London: The Shakespeare Press.
• (1896). The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Essays. London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co.
• (1904). Renan's Letters from the Holy Land. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company.
• (1935). The Memoirs of Ernest Renan. London: G. Bles.

References

1. Ernest Renan. "What is a Nation?", 1882; cf. Chaim Gans, The Limits of Nationalism, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 11.
2. "Notes & Obituary Notes" . Popular Science Monthly. Vol. 42. December 1892. ISSN 0161-7370 – via Wikisource.
3. Römer, Thomas (11 October 2012). Homage to Ernest Renan: Renan’s historical and critical exegesis of the Bible(Speech). Symposium. Amphithéâtre Marguerite de Navarre-Marcelin Berthelot: Collège de France. Retrieved 31 August 2020.
4. "Did the Khazars Convert to Judaism? New Research Says 'No'". en.huji.ac.il. Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 26 June 2014. Retrieved 31 August 2020.
5. Stampfer, Shaul (Summer 2013). "Did the Khazars Convert to Judaism?". Jewish Social Studies. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. 19 (3): 1–72. doi:10.2979/jewisocistud.19.3.1. S2CID 161320785.
6. Kaufmann, Alfred (1924). "Renan: The Man," The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 388-398.
7. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Duclaux, Agnes Mary Frances (1911). "Renan, Ernest". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 23 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 93–95.
8. Loth, Joseph (1892). "Renan au Collège de Tréguier," Annales de Bretagne 8 (1), pp. 124-9.
9. Galand, René (1959). L'Âme Celtique de Renan. Presses Universitaires de France.
10. Theiss, Will. "The Pale Galilean: Ernest Renan, Jesus, and Modern History", Marginalia, Los Angeles Review of Books, March 16, 2018
11. Wright, Terence R. (1994). "The Letter and the Spirit: Deconstructing Renan's "Life of Jesus" and the Assumptions of Modernity," Religion & Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 55–71.
12. Pitt, Alan (2000). "The Cultural Impact of Science in France: Ernest Renan and the Vie de Jésus," The Historical Journal, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 79–101.
13. Hammerton, J. A. (1937). Outline of Great Books, New York: Wise & Co., p. 998.
14. As of this writing, WorldCat reports 115 different editions of the book in 1426 different libraries.
15. Baird, William (1992). History of New Testament Research: From Deism to Tubingen. Augsburg: Fortress Press, p. 382.
16. Susannah Heschel (2008). The Aryan Jesus: christian theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press. p. 34–. ISBN 978-0-691-12531-2. Retrieved 31 May 2013.
17. Chadbourne, Richard M. (1968). Ernest Renan. New York: Twayne Publishers, p. 68.
18. "Renan's 'Vie de Jesus'," The Dublin Review 2, January/April 1864, pp. 386–419.
19. Jules Théodose Loyson Une prétendue Vie de Jésus, ou M. Ernest Renan, historien, philosophe et poëte (Paris, Douniol, 1863)
20. Cochin, Augustin (1863). Quelques mots sur la Vie de Jésus de M. Ernest Renan. Paris: Douniol.
21. Instruction pastorale de Monseigneur l'évêque de Nîmes au clergé de son diocèse contre un ouvrage intitulé "Vie de Jésus" par Ernest Renan (1863)
22. Several of the books of Henri-Joseph Crelier have polemical titles naming Renan.
23. Azurmendi, Joxe . Historia, arraza, nazioa . Donostia: Elkar, 2014. ISBN 978-84-9027-297-8
24. "Inventing national identity". June 1999.
25. Lee, David C. J. (1996). Ernest Renan. Ardent Media. pp. 97–99.
26. Lee, David C. J. (1996). Ernest Renan. Ardent Media. p. 96.
27. Noronha-DiVanna, Isabel (2010). Writing History in the Third Republic. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 70.
28. Singley, Carol J. (2003). "Race, culture, nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan". Twentieth Century Literature. 49 (1): 32. doi:10.1215/0041462X-2003-2003.
29. Brown, Richard (1988). James Joyce and Sexuality. Cambridge University Press. p. 130.
30. The Doctrine of Fascism by Benito Mussolini Complete text of the essay "Dottrina" (Doctrines).
31. Ernest Renan à Tréguier
32. Catalogue, Ernest Renan (1823–1892) un Celte en Orient, Musée d'Art et d'histoire, Musée de Bretagne, 1992, Ville de Saint-Brieuc, Ville de Rennes.
33. Olender, Maurice (1992). The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century. Harvard University Press.
34. Susannah Heschel (2008). The Aryan Jesus: christian theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press. p. 30–. ISBN 978-0-691-12531-2. Retrieved 31 May 2013.
35. "I am therefore the first to recognize that the Semitic race, compared to the Indo-European race, truly represents an inferior combination of human nature."—Arvidsson, Stefan (2006). Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science. University of Chicago Press, p. 107.
36. "The Racial Motif in Renan's Attitude to Jews and Judaism", in: S. Almog (ed.), Antisemitism Through the Ages, Oxford, 1988, pp. 255–278.
37. Anti-Semitism, by Gotthard Deutsch, Jewish Encyclopedia
38. Azurmendi, Joxe (2014). Historia, arraza, nazioa. Donostia: Elkar. pp.177-86. ISBN 978-84-9027-297-8
39. Le Judaïsme comme Race et comme Religion: Conférence faite au Cercle Saint-Simon. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1883.
40. Mian, Aristide (1945-46). "Renan on War and Peace," The American Scholar, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 90-96.
41. Antichrist. London: Walter Scott, Ltd., 1900, pp. 126-127.
42. Rose, Paul Lawrence (2013). "Renan versus Gobineau: Semitism and Antisemitism, Ancient Races and Modern Liberal Nations". History of European Ideas. 39 (4): 528–540. doi:10.1080/01916599.2012.724549. S2CID 145204339.
43. Gidley, Ben (2011). "On the Nation and the 'Jewish People'". Ethnic and Racial Studies. 35 (4): 782–783. doi:10.1080/01419870.2011.643817. S2CID 145721356.
44. Trawny, Peter (2015). "Heidegger, "World Judaism," and Modernity". Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual. 5: 1–20. doi:10.5840/gatherings201551.
45. Graetz, Michael (1996). The Jews in Nineteenth-century France: From the French Revolution to the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Stanford University Press. p. 212.
46. From Ernest Renan, "La Reforme Intellectuelle et Morale". Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1929.
47. Césaire, Aimé (2000). Discourse on Colonialism, Joan Pinkham, trans. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 37–8.
48. "What is a Nation?" In: The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Essays. London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1896, pp. 61-83.
49. Preface to The Future of Science. London: Chapman & Hall, 1891.
50. The Future of Science. London: Chapman & Hall, 1891.
51. Manceron, Gilles (2005). Marianne et les Colonies: Une Introduction à l'Histoire Coloniale de la France. Editions La Découverte.
52. Manceron (2005).
53. Renan considers the problem of a rational transformation by High Priest Antistius of the practice of human sacrifice into "a more humane, spiritual, and scientific form." See Brieux and Contemporary French Society, by William H. Scheifley, 408. https://books.google.com/books?id=_dIaA ... &lpg=PA408 Accessed 27 February 2014

Further reading

• Alaya, Flavia M. (1967). "Arnold and Renan on the Popular Uses of History," Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 551–574.
• Azurmendi, Joxe (2003): Humboldt eta Renanen nazio kontzeptua, RIEV, Vol. 48, No. 1, 91–124.
• Azurmendi, Joxe (2014): Historia, arraza, nazioa. Renan eta nazionalismoaren inguruko topiko batzuk, Donostia: Elkar. ISBN 978-84-9027-297-8
• Babbitt, Irving (1912). "Renan." In: The Masters of Modern French Criticism. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
• Bancquart, Marie-Claire (1994). "Renan, Maître de la Violence Sceptique," Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 94e Année, No. 1, pp. 48–58.
• Barry, William (1897). "Newman and Renan," The National Review, Vol. XXIX, pp. 557–576.
• Barry, William Francis (1905). Ernest Renan. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
• Bazouge, Francis (1889). "Ernest Renan," Revue du Monde Catholique, Vol. C, pp. 5–26.
• Bierer, Dora (1953). "Renan and His Interpreters: A Study in French Intellectual Warfare," The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 375–389.
• Brandes, Georg (1886). "Ernest Renan." In: Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
• Chadbourne, Richard M. (1949). "Renan, or the Contemptuous Approach to Literature," Yale French Studies, No. 3, Criticism and Creation, pp. 96–104.
• Chadbourne, Richard M. (1951). "Renan's Revision of His Liberté de Penser Articles," PMLA, Vol. 66, No. 6, pp. 927–950.
• DiVanna, Isabel (2010). Writing History in the Third Republic. Cambridge Scholars Publishing excerpt and text search
• Espinasse, Francis (1895). Life and Writings of Ernest Renan. London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co.
• Grant Duff, Mountstuart E. (1893). Ernest Renan, in Memoriam. London: Macmillan & Co.
• Guérard, Albert Léon (1913). "Ernest Renan." In: French Prophets of Yesterday. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
• Ingersoll, Robert G. (1892). "Ernest Renan," The North American Review, Vol. CLV, No. 432, pp. 608–622.
• Lemaître, Jules (1921). "Ernest Renan." In: Literary Impressions. London: Daniel O'Connor, pp. 80–107.
• Lenoir, Raymond (1925). "Renan and the Study of Humanity," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 289–317.
• Mott, Lewis F. (1918). "Renan and Matthew Arnold," Modern Language Notes, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 65–73.
• Mott, Lewis F. (1921). Ernest Renan. New York: D. Appleton and Company.
• Myers, F.W.H. (1897). "Ernest Renan." In: Essays. London: Macmillan & Co.
• Neubauer, A. (1893). "M. Ernest Renan," The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 200–211.
• Priest, Robert D. (2015). The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Richard, Edouard (1996). Ernest Renan Penseur Traditionaliste? Presses Universitaires d'Aix-Marseille.
• Robinson, Agnes Mary Frances (1897). The Life of Ernest Renan. London: Methuen & Co.
• Rolland, Romain (1925). "A Conversation with Ernest Renan," The Century Magazine, Vol. CIX, No. 4, pp. 435–439.
• Saintsbury, George (1892). "Ernest Renan." In: Miscellaneous Essays. London: Percival & Co.
• Shapiro, Gary (1982). "Nietzsche Contra Renan," History and Theory, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 193–222.

External links

Sources

• Works by Ernest Renan at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Ernest Renan at Internet Archive
• Works by Ernest Renan at JSTOR
• Works by Ernest Renan at Unz.org
• What is a Nation? – Renan's most famous lecture in English translation
• The history of the origins of Christianity Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection. {Reprinted by} Cornell University Library Digital Collections
• Société des Études renaniennes (Ernest Renan's Society website)
• Newspaper clippings about Ernest Renan in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

WMF project links

• Media related to Ernest Renan at Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations related to Ernest Renan at Wikiquote
• Works written by or about Ernest Renan at Wikisource
• French Wikisource has original text related to this article: Ernest Renan

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Alexander Cunningham
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 9/9/20

-- An Essay on the Arian Order of Architecture, as exhibited in the Temples of Kashmir, by Captain A. Cunningham, Engineers. (Communicated by H.M. Elliot, Esq., Secretary to the Government of India -- PDF)

-- The Buddha and Dr. Fuhrer: An Archaeological Scandal, by Charles Allen

Major-General Sir Alexander Cunningham, KCIE CSI ADC
Born: 23 January 1814, London
Died: 28 November 1893 (aged 79), London
Nationality: British
Occupation: Engineer; Archaeologist
Spouse(s): Alice Cunningham (married 1840)[1]
Children: Allan J. C. Cunningham;Sir Alexander F. D. Cunningham[1]
Parent(s): Allan Cunningham[1] (father)
Relatives: Francis Cunningham (brother); Joseph Davey Cunningham (brother); Peter Cunningham (brother)[1]

Major General Sir Alexander Cunningham KCIE CSI (23 January 1814 – 28 November 1893) was a British army engineer with the Bengal Engineer Group who later took an interest in the history and archaeology of India. In 1861, he was appointed to the newly created position of archaeological surveyor to the government of India; and he founded and organised what later became the Archaeological Survey of India.

The Bengal Engineer Group (BEG) (informally the Bengal Sappers or Bengal Engineers) is a military engineering regiment in the Corps of Engineers of the Indian Army. The unit was originally part of the Bengal Army of the East India Company's Bengal Presidency, and subsequently part of the British Indian Army during the British Raj. The Bengal Sappers are stationed at Roorkee Cantonment in Roorkee, Uttarakhand.

The Bengal Sappers are one of the few remaining regiments of the erstwhile Bengal Presidency Army and survived the Rebellion of 1857 due to their "sterling work" in the recapture by the East India Company of Delhi and other operations in 1857–58. The troops of the Bengal Sappers have been a familiar sight for over 200 years in the battlefields of British India with their never-say-die attitude of Chak De and brandishing their favourite tool the hamber.

-- Bengal Engineer Group, by Wikipedia

He wrote numerous books and monographs and made extensive collections of artefacts. Some of his collections were lost, but most of the gold and silver coins and a fine group of Buddhist sculptures and jewellery were bought by the British Museum in 1894.[2]

He was also the father of mathematician Allan Cunningham.

Early life and career


Cunningham (fourth from the right) at an unknown date

Cunningham was born in London in 1814 to the Scottish poet Allan Cunningham (1784–1842) and his wife Jean née Walker (1791–1864). Along with his older brother, Joseph, he received his early education at Christ's Hospital, London.[3] Through the influence of Sir Walter Scott, both Joseph and Alexander obtained cadetships at the East India Company's Addiscombe Seminary (1829–31), followed by technical training at the Royal Engineers Estate at Chatham. Alexander joined the Bengal Engineers at the age of 19 as a Second Lieutenant and spent the next 28 years in the service of British Government of India. Soon after arriving in India on 9 June 1833, he met James Prinsep. He was in daily communication with Prinsep during 1837 and 1838 and became his intimate friend, confidant and pupil.[4] Prinsep passed on to him his lifelong interest in Indian archaeology and antiquity.

James Prinsep FRS (20 August 1799 – 22 April 1840) was an English scholar, orientalist and antiquary. He was the founding editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and is best remembered for deciphering the Kharosthi and Brahmi scripts of ancient India. He studied, documented and illustrated many aspects of numismatics, metallurgy, meteorology apart from pursuing his career in India as an assay master at the mint in Benares.

-- James Prinsep, by Wikipedia

From 1836 to 1840 he was ADC [aide-de-camp (a personal assistant or secretary to a person of high rank)] to Lord Auckland, the Governor-General of India.

The Governor-General of India (from 1858 to 1947 the Viceroy and Governor-General of India, commonly shortened to Viceroy of India) was the representative of the monarch of the United Kingdom and after Indian independence in 1947, the representative of the Indian head of state. The office was created in 1773, with the title of ‘Governor-general of the Presidency of Fort William’. The officer had direct control only over Fort William, but supervised other East India Company officials in India. Complete authority over all of British India was granted in 1833, and the official came to be known as the "governor-general of India".

-- Governor-General of India, by Wikipedia

During this period he visited Kashmir, which was then not well explored. He finds mention by initials in Up the Country by Emily Eden.[1][5]

Military life


Leh Palace, Ladakh. Illustration from Ladak: Physical, Statistical, and Historical

In 1841 Cunningham was made executive engineer to the king of Oudh. In 1842 he was called to serve the army in thwarting an uprising in Bundelkhand by the ruler of Jaipur. He was then posted at Nowgong in central India before he saw action at the Battle of Punniar in December 1843. He became engineer at Gwalior and was responsible for constructing an arched stone bridge over the Morar River in 1844–45. In 1845–46 he was called to serve in Punjab and helped construct two bridges of boats across the Beas river prior to the Battle of Sobraon.

In 1846, he was made commissioner along with P. A. Vans Agnew to demarcate boundaries. Letters were written to the Chinese and Tibetan officials by Lord Hardinge, but no officials joined. A second commission was set up in 1847 which was led by Cunningham to establish the Ladakh-Tibet boundary, which also included Henry Strachey and Thomas Thomson. Henry and his brother Richard Strachey had trespassed into Lake Mansarovar and Rakas Tal in 1846 and his brother Richard revisited in 1848 with botanist J. E. Winterbottom.[6][7] The commission was set up to delimit the northern boundaries of the Empire after the First Anglo-Sikh War concluded with the Treaty of Amritsar, which ceded Kashmir as war indemnity expenses to the British.[8] His early work Essay on the Aryan Order of Architecture (1848) [Joan Leopold, ‘British Applications of the Aryan Theory of Race to India, 1850–1870’, English Historical Review, 89: 352, 1974, 578–603, here 579 and 580; cf. Alexander Cunningham, ‘An Essay on the Arian Order of Architecture, as exhibited in the Temples of Kashmir’, Journal of the Asiatic Society, XVII: II, 1848, 241–242] arose from his visits to the temples in Kashmir and his travels in Ladakh during his tenure with the commission. He was also present at the battles of Chillianwala and Gujrat in 1848–49. In 1851, he explored the Buddhist monuments of Central India along with Lieutenant Maisey and wrote an account of these.[9]

In 1856 he was appointed chief engineer of Burma, which had just been annexed by Britain, for two years; and from 1858 served for three years in the same post in the North-Western Provinces. In both regions, he established public works departments. He was therefore absent from India during the Rebellion of 1857. He was appointed Colonel of the Royal Engineers in 1860. He retired on 30 June 1861, having attained the rank of Major General.[1]

Archaeology

Cunningham had taken a keen interest in antiquities early in his career. Following Jean-Baptiste Ventura, general of Ranjit Singh, who inspired by the French explorers in Egypt had excavated the bases of pillars to discover large stashes of Bactrian and Roman coins, excavations became a regular activity among British antiquarians.[10]

In 1834 he submitted to the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal an appendix to James Prinsep's article on the relics in the Mankiala stupa. He had conducted excavations at Sarnath in 1837 along with Colonel F. C. Maisey and made careful drawings of the sculptures. In 1842 he excavated at Sankassa and at Sanchi in 1851. In 1854 he published The Bhilsa Topes, an attempt to establish the history of Buddhism based on architectural evidence.

By 1851, he also began to communicate with William Henry Sykes and the East India Company on the value of an archaeological survey. He provided a rationale for providing the necessary funding, arguing that the venture[10]

... would be an undertaking of vast importance to the Indian Government politically, and to the British public religiously. To the first body it would show that India had generally been divided into numerous petty chiefships, which had invariably been the case upon every successful invasion; while, whenever she had been under one ruler, she had always repelled foreign conquest with determined resolution. To the other body it would show that Brahmanism, instead of being an unchanged and unchangeable religion which had subsisted for ages, was of comparatively modern origin, and had been constantly receiving additions and alterations; facts which prove that the establishment of the Christian religion in India must ultimately succeed.[11]

Letter dated 31 January 1862, appointing Cunningham as Surveyor General

Following his retirement from the Royal Engineers in 1861, Lord Canning, then Viceroy of India, appointed Cunningham archaeological surveyor to the Government of India.[12] He held this appointment from 1861 to 1865, but it was then terminated through lack of funds.[1]

Most antiquarians of the 19th century who took interest in identifying the major cities mentioned in ancient Indian texts did so by putting together clues found in classical Graeco-Roman chronicles and the travelogues of travellers to India such as Xuanzang and Faxian. Cunningham was able to identify some of the places mentioned by Xuanzang[13] and counted among his major achievements the identification of Aornos, Taxila, Sangala, Srughna, Ahichchhatra, Bairat, Sankisa, Shravasti, Kaushambi, Padmavati, Vaishali, and Nalanda. Unlike his contemporaries, Cunningham would also routinely confirm his identifications through field surveys. The identification of Taxila, in particular, was made difficult partly due to errors in the distances recorded by Pliny in his Naturalis Historia which pointed to a location somewhere on the Haro River, two days march from the Indus. Cunningham noticed that this position did not tally with the itineraries of Chinese pilgrims and in particular, the descriptions provided by Xuanzang. Unlike Pliny, these sources noted that the journey to Taxila from the Indus took three days and not two and therefore, suggested a different location for the city. Cunningham's subsequent explorations in 1863–64 of a site at Shah-dheri convinced him that his hypothesis was correct.[14]

Now as Hwen Thsang, on his return to China, was accompanied by laden elephants, his three days' journey from Takhshasila [sic] to the Indus at Utakhanda, or Ohind, must necessarily have been of the same length as those of modern days, and, consequently, the site of the city must be looked for somewhere in the neighbourhood of Kâla-ka-sarâi. This site is found near Shah-dheri, just one mile to the north-east of Kâla-ka-sarâi, in the extensive ruins of a fortified city, around which I was able to trace no less than 55 stupas, of which two are as large as the great Manikyala tope, twenty-eight monasteries, and nine temples.

— Alexander Cunningham, [15]

After his department was abolished in 1865, Cunningham returned to England and wrote the first part of his Ancient Geography of India (1871), covering the Buddhist period; but failed to complete the second part, covering the Muslim period.[16] During this period in London he worked as director of the Delhi and London Bank.[17] In 1870, Lord Mayo re-established the Archaeological Survey of India, with Cunningham as its director-general from 1 January 1871. Cunningham returned to India and made field explorations each winter, conducting excavations and surveys from Taxila to Gaur. He produced twenty-four reports, thirteen as author and the rest under his supervision by others such as J. D. Beglar. Other major works included the first volume of Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum (1877) which included copies of the edicts of Ashoka, The Stupa of Bharhut (1879) and the Book of Indian Eras (1883) which allowed the dating of Indian antiquities. He retired from the Archaeological Survey on 30 September 1885 and returned to London to continue his research and writing.[1]

Numismatic interests

Cunningham assembled a large numismatic collection, but much of this was lost when the steamship he was travelling in, the Indus, was wrecked off the coast of Ceylon in November 1884. The British Museum, however, obtained most of the gold and silver coins. He had suggested to the Museum that they should use the arch from the Sanchi Stupa to mark the entrance of a new section on Indian history. He also published numerous papers in the Journal of the Asiatic Society and the Numismatic Chronicle.[18]

Family and personal life

Two of Cunningham's brothers, Francis and Joseph, became well known for their work in British India; while another, Peter, became famous for his Handbook of London (1849).[19]

Cunningham married Alicia Maria Whish, daughter of Martin Whish, B.C.S., on 30 March 1840. The couple had two sons, Lieutenant-Colonel Allan J. C. Cunningham (1842–1928) of the Bengal and Royal Engineers, and Sir Alexander F. D. Cunningham (1852–1935) of the Indian Civil Service.[1]

Cunningham died on 28 November 1893 at his home in South Kensington and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, London. His wife had predeceased him. He was survived by his two sons.[1]

Awards and memorials

Cunningham was awarded the CSI on 20 May 1870 and CIE in 1878. In 1887, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire.[16]

Publications

Books written by Cunningham include:

• LADĀK: Physical, Statistical, and Historical with Notices of the Surrounding Countries (1854).
• Bhilsa Topes (1854), a history of Buddhism
• The Ancient Geography of India (1871)
• Archaeological Survey Of India Vol. 1 (1871) Four Reports Made During the Years, 1862-63-64-65, Volume 1 (1871)
• Archaeological Survey Of India Vol. 2
• Archaeological Survey Of India Vol. 3 (1873)
• Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum. Volume 1. (1877)
• The Stupa of Bharhut: A Buddhist Monument Ornamented with Numerous Sculptures Illustrative of Buddhist Legend and History in the Third Century B.C. (1879)
• The Book of Indian Eras (1883)
• Coins of Ancient India (1891)
• Mahâbodhi, or the great Buddhist temple under the Bodhi tree at Buddha-Gaya (1892)
• Coins of Medieval India (1894)
• Report Of Tour In Eastern Rajputana

Notes

1. Cotton, J. S. & James Lunt (reviser) (2004). "Cunningham, Sir Alexander (1814–1893)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/6916.
2. British Museum Collection
3. Buckland, Charles Edward (1906). Dictionary of Indian Biography. Swan Sonne schein. p. 102.
4. Kejariwal, O. P. (1999). The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India's Past 1784–1838 (1988 ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 200. ISBN 0-19565089-1.
5. Vibart, H. M. (1894). Addiscombe: its heroes and men of note. Westminster: Archibald Constable. pp. 455–459.
6. Waller, Derek J. (2004). The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia. University Press of Kentucky. p. 13.
7. Strachey, Henry (1854). Physical Geography of Western Tibet. London: William Clowes and sons. pp. iii.
8. Cunningham, Alexander (1854). Ladak, physical, statistical and historical. London: W. H. Allen.
9. Cunningham, A. (1854) The Bhilsa Topes, or Buddhist Monuments of Central India. London
10. "Sir Alexander Cunningham (1814–1893): the first phase of Indian archaeology". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (3–4): 194–207. 1963.
11. Cunningham, A (1843). "An Account of the discovery of the Ruins of the Buddhist City of Samkassa". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society: 241–247. doi:10.1017/S0035869X0015590X.
12. Cunningham, Alexander (1871). Archaeological Survey of India: four reports made during the years 1862–63–64–65. Simla: Government Central Press. pp. i–iii.
13. Cunningham, Alexander (1848). "Verification of the Itinerary of the Chinese Pilgrim, Hwan Thsang, through Afghanistan and India during the First Half of the Seventh Century of the Christian Era". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal. 17 (2): 13–60.
14. Singh 2008, p. 265.
15. Cunningham 1871, p. 105.
16. Cunningham, Alexander (1871). The Ancient Geography of India. 1. India: Trübner and Co.
17. Iman, Abu (1966). Sir Alexander Cunningham and the beginnings of Indian archaeology. Dacca: Asiatic Society of Pakistan. p. 191.
18. Mathur, Saloni (2007). India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display. University of California Press. p. 146.
19. Cunningham, Joseph Davey (1849). Cunningham's History of the Sikhs. John Murray. pp. xii–xiv.

References

• Singh, Upinder (2008). A history of ancient and early medieval India : from the Stone Age to the 12th century. New Delhi: Pearson Education. ISBN 9788131711200.
• Cunningham, Alexander (1871). The Ancient Geography of India: The Buddhist Period, Including the Campaigns of Alexander, and the Travels of Hwen-Thsang. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Pres. ISBN 9781108056458.