culture. One state of mind called the other forth; like two poles in a magnetic field, they defined the push and pull of Burton’s relations to Arab life. A similar dialectic can be discerned in his relations to other cultural milieus that occupied an important place in his career, and to which we now turn: first the ones he encountered in his early life, where his mix of identification with and distance from every given way of life had some of its roots, and in his dealings with two groups toward whom he sometimes expressed feelings and judgments most people today would regard as deplorable: Jews and black Africans.
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Burton’s family was British (with roots in Ireland and possibly France), but his childhood was almost entirely spent in France and Italy, his soldier father having taken the family to live on the continent after he lost his military commission and a large part of his income, as a consequence of his refusal to testify against George IV’s consort Queen Caroline when the king was seeking to divorce her in 1820. (Although probably guilty of the adultery with which she was charged, Caroline had enormous popular support in England, and the controversy that swirled around her became a cause célèbre; the elder Burton’s loyalty to her stemmed from the kindness she earlier bestowed on British officers in Genoa while he was stationed there.) The family settled in Tours in 1821, the year of Richard’s birth; they returned to England briefly following the revolutionary upheaval of July 1830, in Paris, but soon departed for another Loire Valley town, Blois. Burton’s parents found themselves ill there, however, leading them to seek the milder climate of Italy; over the next years parents and children spent periods in various Italian cities, including Pisa, Florence, Rome, and Naples.
Burton attributed many things about his later personality and career to his youthful experiences on the continent. The family was by no means wholly isolated from English life, since British colonies existed in the places where they settled (as in numerous European towns), providing a setting for the social life of their members. Dane Kennedy sees a certain similarity between these outposts and those in colonial locales outside Europe, but whereas Burton described British societies in India as spaces where John Bullish narrow-mindedness found more developed expression, it was the opposite with the continental communities. The “Anglo-Saxondom” they established was devoid of “snobs,” as well as of the “bitter discord” often found in ménages bourgeoises. The prudery then spreading in English life was absent, too: “The difference of the foreign colonies was that the weight of English respectability appeared to be taken off them, though their lives were respectable and respected. The expatriates were not exactly cosmopolitans, since living abroad made them “intensely patriotic” (although not much concerned about English politics); they “stuck to their own Church because it was their Church, and they knew as much about the Catholics at their very door, as the average Englishman does of the Hindu.” Many looked on their French neighbors with suspicion and especially condemned romantic relationships between young people of the two countries.39
But continental life all the same gave Burton and his siblings a taste for a broader and more open kind of social existence than England afforded, a preference that he discovered both when the family returned briefly to England in 1830 and still more later on, when he became a student at Oxford. On the first trip the children were put off by the small and commonplace nature of English buildings, by the inferior food, and by “the national temper, fierce and surly …a curious contrast to the light-hearted French of middle France.” Later, in Oxford,
the old dislike to our surroundings returned with redoubled violence. Everything appeared to us so small, so mean, so ugly. The faces of the women were the only exception. … The houses were so unlike houses, and more like the Nuremberg toys magnified. … The little bits of garden were mere slices. … The interiors were cut up into such wretched rooms. … And there was a desperate neatness and cleanness about everything that made us remember the old story of the Stoic who spat in the face of the master of the house because it was the most untidy place in the dwelling.
To contrast England and France in such terms was not unique to Burton in these years: the young John Stuart Mill reported a similar impression from a visit across the Channel, later recalling that being “able to breathe for a whole year the free and genial atmosphere of continental life” made him aware of “the low moral tone” of British social intercourse.40 But no one ever saw Mill as un-English, whereas people in Oxford viewed Burton in just this way, disapproving of his manners, his accent in Latin (the continental pronunciation was closer to Italian), and his dislike of the teaching and food in his college. The disapproval was mutual; when one student laughed at his mustache Burton tried to challenge him to a duel: “I felt as if I had fallen among épiciers.” None of the learning or experience he had absorbed was appreciated: “It was found out that I, who spoke French and Italian and their dialects like a native, who had a considerable smattering of Bearnais, Spanish, and Provençale, barely knew the Lord’s Prayer, broke down in the Apostles’ Creed, and had never heard of the Thirty-nine Articles—a terrible revelation.” That Burton’s animus was directed at least as much against British smugness as against religious education as such seems clear in the positive impression he retained of John Henry Newman, the don who later became a Catholic and a cardinal; although his person and speech struck Burton as somewhat colorless, he showed qualities of “complete candour and honesty; he said only what he believed, and he induced others to believe with him.”41
Neither the preference for continental life nor the strong sense for the power of cultural difference these experiences bred in Burton kept him from seeing many things about France and Italy in negative terms, too, the pettiness of life in small French towns, the squalor and dirtiness of pre-Risorgimento Rome. But toward his own country Burton’s childhood cast him as an outsider in another way: it deprived him of the formative experiences and personal connections that making a career in nineteenth-century England required. “The conditions of society in England are so complicated, and so artificial, that those who would make their way in the world, especially in public careers, must be broken to it from their earliest day. The future soldiers and statesmen must be prepared by Eton and Cambridge. The more English they are, even to the cut of their hair, the better. In consequence of being brought up abroad, we never thoroughly understood English society, nor did society understand us.” In particular, Burton lacked a kind of tie that formed an important part of every national identity in the nineteenth century (and in many ways still does), namely to a particular locality (he used the word “parish”). “It is a great thing, when you have won a battle, or explored Central Africa, to be welcomed home by some little corner of the Great World, which takes a pride in your exploits, because they reflect honour upon itself. In the contrary condition you are a waif, a stray; you are a blaze of light, without a focus. Nobody outside your own fireside cares.” Burton already felt much of this distance during his time at Oxford (it contributed to his leaving without taking a degree), but through all these comments there beams a clear sense that his impaired and conflicted British identity was one he could never cast off, however much it came to be mixed with other ones.42
As other writers have noted, his description of himself as “a waif, a stray … a blaze of light without a focus” fits with some persisting features of his personality already visible in his childhood. His mother seems to have had a complex fascination with both self-command and indiscipline (she was passionately attached to a half-brother she described as “wild”), two contradictory qualities that Burton would display and value in later life. Their roots seem readily visible in such incidents as the one in which she called her two sons’ attention to tempting apple tarts in a French pastry-shop window, only to call the boys away, praising the virtues of self-denial. Burton and his younger brother Edward broke the glass with their fists and ran off with the tarts in their bloody fingers.43 A persisting desire to challenge and outrage their parents seems evident in a later moment that involved disguise as part of their strategy. An epidemic of cholera broke out while the family was living in Naples; mortality was especially high among the poor, many of whose bodies were cast into mass graves outside the city in the dead of night. Fascinated by the macabre events, Burton and his brother put on clothes in which they could pass as mute undertaker’s
