Letters & Memoirs of Sir Richard Francis Burton Volume 3

Although there are many biographies of Burton, none is completely satisfactory, and primary sources are badly needed. To date there have only been two brief collections of correspondence: an unpublished M.A. thesis by Donald Young, written in 1979, and a selection of documents about the Nile controversy from the collection of Quentin Keynes, edited by Donald Young and Quentin Keynes, published in a limited edition in 1999. This is not because of a lack of material.
While Isabel Burton burned in stages-partly in Trieste, partly in London-almost all of her husband's correspondence, along with his diaries and a number of his manuscripts, she could not burn the letters he had sent to other people. Therefore the letters we now have contain hardly any received by Burton himself, apart from scattered instances where he pasted letters he received into copies of books in his library, or collated them for use in ongoing projects, like the Book of the Sword, which survived Isabel's moral scrutiny. From references in the letters which do survive, it is obvious that Isabel burnt a vast correspondence, of which the extant portion is just a small sample. Even so, there are still enough letters from Burton to fill multiple volumes.

The mania for collecting Burtoniana has meant that a lot of the known correspondence is now secreted away in private collections-the auction catalogues are full of examples at ransom-like prices. Occasionally this material finds its way into archives where it can be accessed, such as the Huntington Library, where the Edwards Metcalfe collection was deposited; the British Library, where the Quentin Keynes Collection of manuscripts is now available for use; the National Library of Scotland, where the Grant papers, which contain several letters to and from John Hanning Speke and C. P. Rigby, are held; Durham University, where the Wylde family papers, which contain a trove of letters from Burton to William Henry Wylde, have been deposited; and the Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office, where the Arundell papers, which contain the residue of the items that Isabel had custody of and did not burn or have burnt, reside.

The scope here is considerably broader than traditional collections of letters, as it includes other documents, and relevant mentions of Burton and his concerns in correspondence between third parties. In this spirit, there is an extensive selection of correspondence between John Hanning Speke, C. P. Rigby, J. A. Grant and others, as well as a large tranche of correspondence by Isabel.

Most of the material here has never been published before, or has appeared in fragmented form only, often garbled by transcription errors. Commentary is supplied where necessary to explain obscurities and identify references. A Register is also provided in Volume 3 with more details on the principal figures referred to.