“Consolatory” Writing: Literary and Other Works of Consul Richard Burton
On Tuesday 17 February, at the Antico Caffè San Marco in Trieste, a new event in the lecture series promoted by the "Manlio Cecovini Study Society" took place. The meeting, introduced by the scientific director Luca G. Manenti, featured Riccardo Cepach, a Trieste-based scholar who retraced the biography and literary output of Richard Francis Burton, British consul in Trieste from 1872 to 1890, explorer, orientalist, and author of an exceptionally vast body of essays.
Opening the evening, Manenti introduced the speaker, recalling his long-standing commitment to the study of Burton, culminating in the documentary Il leone e la leonessa (2010), dedicated to the life of Burton and his wife Isabel. Cepach structured the lecture as a survey of Burton’s “immense bibliography”, choosing to follow the thread of his turbulent existence through his writings.
The talk repositioned the Englishman within his geographical and historical context, moving beyond superficial or purely romanticised interpretations. Born in Devon in 1821 and raised between France and Italy in a restless, cosmopolitan family, Burton developed from an early age an extraordinary talent for languages – he is credited with knowledge of forty languages and dialects – and a precocious interest in exotic cultures. After being sent down from Oxford, he enlisted in the East India Company and began moving from place to place, shaping himself in the field both as a man and as a scholar of other peoples’ customs and practices.
Cepach emphasised a central point: Burton was a man of empire, but not an uncritical official. He might be described as an “intelligent imperialist”, convinced of the righteousness of the British mission yet severe in judging the linguistic and cultural ignorance of his superiors towards the peoples they governed. Direct knowledge of the populations under administration, he argued, was an indispensable condition for any effective political action. Already at this stage emerged the anthropologist and the polymath who would leave us dozens of volumes on geography, religions, fencing techniques, and falconry.
Considerable attention was devoted to the famous pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, undertaken under the name Mirza Abdullah. From this journey he produced an account that enjoyed great editorial success, describing with unprecedented precision the sacred places of Islam. Cepach stressed that Burton’s interest in the Islamic world was not merely adventurous: over the years he developed a profound engagement with Sufism and with the spiritual dimensions of the East, themes that resurfaced in his later poetic works.
A central chapter concerned the African expeditions. Burton led the mission that resulted in the discovery of Lake Tanganyika; his companion John Hanning Speke identified Lake Victoria, claiming to have located the source of the Nile. The rivalry between the two explorers erupted into a public controversy never resolved, cut short by Speke’s sudden death. Here too, Cepach observed, Burton’s character emerged: polemical, proud, incapable of compromise, yet driven by a genuine scientific passion.
The lecture then followed Burton through his consular appointments – from Fernando Poo to Brazil, from Damascus to Trieste – highlighting the continuity of his writing. He studied the Mormon communities in Salt Lake City, described populations in the Amazon and Central Africa, and addressed delicate subjects such as infibulation and homosexuality, which he interpreted not as pathology but as a variant of human behaviour, in a perspective remarkably advanced for the time.
During his years in Trieste, Burton intensified his research activities. He investigated the Istrian hill-forts, intuiting their prehistoric origins, studied the thermal baths of Monfalcone and Etruscan civilisation, collaborating with Carlo Marchesetti. At the same time he completed celebrated translations: the unexpurgated edition of The Thousand and One Nights and of the Kama Sutra, published under fictitious imprints in order to evade Victorian censorship.
No less significant was the figure of Isabel Burton, a loyal and determined companion. After her husband’s death in Trieste in 1890, she oversaw the repatriation of his body to London, commissioned the unusual tent-shaped tomb inspired by Berber design, and, in a gesture as dramatic as it was controversial, destroyed over forty years of diaries along with the translation of The Perfumed Garden. She later published a monumental biography of her husband, contributing decisively to the construction of his public memory.
In the concluding discussion with the audience, further themes emerged: Burton’s family origins, his links with Theosophical circles in Trieste, hypotheses of Masonic affiliation, and possible literary influences that may have inspired authors such as Kipling or Stoker. Questions that confirm how complex and elusive Burton’s figure remains.
The evening conveyed the image of an exuberant intellectual, marked by profound contradictions and animated by an inexhaustible “fury of living”, to quote a celebrated biography devoted to him. Through his work – scientific, narrative, translational – Burton sought to understand the world in its manifold expressions, making of the written page both an instrument of knowledge and a means of engaging with the limits and anxieties of his time.
WATCH THE GALLERY
Opening the evening, Manenti introduced the speaker, recalling his long-standing commitment to the study of Burton, culminating in the documentary Il leone e la leonessa (2010), dedicated to the life of Burton and his wife Isabel. Cepach structured the lecture as a survey of Burton’s “immense bibliography”, choosing to follow the thread of his turbulent existence through his writings.
The talk repositioned the Englishman within his geographical and historical context, moving beyond superficial or purely romanticised interpretations. Born in Devon in 1821 and raised between France and Italy in a restless, cosmopolitan family, Burton developed from an early age an extraordinary talent for languages – he is credited with knowledge of forty languages and dialects – and a precocious interest in exotic cultures. After being sent down from Oxford, he enlisted in the East India Company and began moving from place to place, shaping himself in the field both as a man and as a scholar of other peoples’ customs and practices.
Cepach emphasised a central point: Burton was a man of empire, but not an uncritical official. He might be described as an “intelligent imperialist”, convinced of the righteousness of the British mission yet severe in judging the linguistic and cultural ignorance of his superiors towards the peoples they governed. Direct knowledge of the populations under administration, he argued, was an indispensable condition for any effective political action. Already at this stage emerged the anthropologist and the polymath who would leave us dozens of volumes on geography, religions, fencing techniques, and falconry.
Considerable attention was devoted to the famous pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, undertaken under the name Mirza Abdullah. From this journey he produced an account that enjoyed great editorial success, describing with unprecedented precision the sacred places of Islam. Cepach stressed that Burton’s interest in the Islamic world was not merely adventurous: over the years he developed a profound engagement with Sufism and with the spiritual dimensions of the East, themes that resurfaced in his later poetic works.
A central chapter concerned the African expeditions. Burton led the mission that resulted in the discovery of Lake Tanganyika; his companion John Hanning Speke identified Lake Victoria, claiming to have located the source of the Nile. The rivalry between the two explorers erupted into a public controversy never resolved, cut short by Speke’s sudden death. Here too, Cepach observed, Burton’s character emerged: polemical, proud, incapable of compromise, yet driven by a genuine scientific passion.
The lecture then followed Burton through his consular appointments – from Fernando Poo to Brazil, from Damascus to Trieste – highlighting the continuity of his writing. He studied the Mormon communities in Salt Lake City, described populations in the Amazon and Central Africa, and addressed delicate subjects such as infibulation and homosexuality, which he interpreted not as pathology but as a variant of human behaviour, in a perspective remarkably advanced for the time.
During his years in Trieste, Burton intensified his research activities. He investigated the Istrian hill-forts, intuiting their prehistoric origins, studied the thermal baths of Monfalcone and Etruscan civilisation, collaborating with Carlo Marchesetti. At the same time he completed celebrated translations: the unexpurgated edition of The Thousand and One Nights and of the Kama Sutra, published under fictitious imprints in order to evade Victorian censorship.
No less significant was the figure of Isabel Burton, a loyal and determined companion. After her husband’s death in Trieste in 1890, she oversaw the repatriation of his body to London, commissioned the unusual tent-shaped tomb inspired by Berber design, and, in a gesture as dramatic as it was controversial, destroyed over forty years of diaries along with the translation of The Perfumed Garden. She later published a monumental biography of her husband, contributing decisively to the construction of his public memory.
In the concluding discussion with the audience, further themes emerged: Burton’s family origins, his links with Theosophical circles in Trieste, hypotheses of Masonic affiliation, and possible literary influences that may have inspired authors such as Kipling or Stoker. Questions that confirm how complex and elusive Burton’s figure remains.
The evening conveyed the image of an exuberant intellectual, marked by profound contradictions and animated by an inexhaustible “fury of living”, to quote a celebrated biography devoted to him. Through his work – scientific, narrative, translational – Burton sought to understand the world in its manifold expressions, making of the written page both an instrument of knowledge and a means of engaging with the limits and anxieties of his time.
WATCH THE GALLERY
