BURTON

In Burton’s tiny somewhat illegible hand though largely deciphered. ‘Richard used always to say that a wee writing, as if done with a pin, betokened a big, strong man’ (Lady Burton, ‘Life’, ii. 268, with a good story of how she pacified the printers’ foreman). In February of 1886 Burton had been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George by Queen Victoria. 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 and 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. French publisher Isidore Liseux and Sir Richard Burton collaborated in the 1880s to publish these controversial, erotological, and untranslated Eastern and classical texts. Liseux printed the original French texts in Paris, which Burton then translated into English for clandestine publication. Most notably, Liseux published the French version of the Arabic sexological manual The Perfumed Garden in 1886. Burton used Liseux’s edition for his own infamous 1886 English translation, which he released under the imprint of his own Kama Shastra Society. If by any chance, the letter was written in 1890 it would have been written only a month or so before he died in which case the letter might pertain to a new translation he was doing, with new material, which he intended to call, this time, not The Perfumed Garden but The Scented Garden. He died before completing it, and his wife burned the manuscript.