Richard Burton continues to fascinate literary critics, historians, and biographers because of his long and productive career as a writer, his wide and well-documented travels, and the many facets of his personality. The past two decades, for instance, have witnessed biographies by Edward Rice (1990), Frank McLynn (1990, 1991), Mary Lovell (1998), Dane Kennedy (2005), and Jon R. Godsall (2008). Kennedy’s biography ranks foremost among these because of his willingness to “demythologize and rehistoricize Burton’s life” by demonstrating “how Burton’s natural talents were nurtured, his career options determined, and his provocative views on race, religion, and other issues informed by the broader forces—social, political, cultural, intellectual, and more—that shaped the Victorian world” (6). James Newman’s engaging, if somewhat problematic biography of Burton follows in the footsteps of Kennedy’s work, but with a twist: “[Kennedy’s] choice is the Victorian world surrounding Burton; mine the various African worlds he entered” (5–6).

Newman’s project is to locate this and many other facets of Burton’s African career in the relevant African contexts, a project rarely attempted by other scholars. Of course, Newman acknowledges that there are limits to this approach and to the “historical, ethnographic, and environmental” information that his study can provide (5), but his successful integration of wide-ranging historical and cultural research on Africa—especially given that the primary subject is a nineteenth-century British explorer—is nonetheless groundbreaking. Individual chapters cover each of the key African-related episodes in Burton’s life, from the failed Somali expedition of 1854–55, to the ill-fated East African expedition of 1856–59, to his later wanderings in West Africa, the final turns of the quarrel with Speke, and the influence of Africa and African development schemes on Burton’s final years. Intervening chapters connect the dots. As a result, although the Newman’s study places enough emphasis on Burton’s time in Africa to interest specialists, the book’s focus on biography is also “useful for nonspecialists, as they can better see how Burton’s life and thoughts evolved” (6).

Scholars will especially welcome the nuanced analysis of Burton’s racism, which, Newman indicates, was both tied to specific African contexts—for instance, Burton’s encounters with the populations of East or West Africa (70–72, 132–33, 244–46)—and influenced by Victorian ideologies such as social Darwinism (203–4). However, Newman also complicates the discussion by marshaling evidence that shows Burton could display “an appreciation of African culture that goes against the grain of the derogatory views expressed in other sources” (204). Equally valuable will be the reproductions of original draft maps of the interior of Africa by the German missionary Jakob Erhardt (62), Speke (79), and Burton (229), none of which, to this reviewer’s knowledge, has previously been published.

Finally, as mentioned, Newman’s adroit integration into his biographical narrative of research on multiple African social and political contexts represents the most noteworthy element of this study. Because nineteenth-century explorers of Africa often passed through a range of distinct societies, scholars of exploration have often refrained from engaging and understanding these local and regional contexts, thereby ignoring several decades of recent scholarship on Africa and, moreover, rarely straying beyond the limited cultural perspectives of the nineteenth-century explorers themselves. Newman’s willingness to probe and make accessible numerous such contexts in, for instance, the interior of East Africa (chaps. 2 and 4) or along the West African coast (chap. 6) marks a refreshing departure from critical practice and, in effect, sets a new standard for analysis of the lives and literary works of Victorian travelers like Burton.

Yet, despite its many merits, Newman’s study suffers from an overarching lack of cohesion. The problem lies in Newman’s failure to define his audience adequately. Is Newman’s goal to engage a nonspecialist audience through a well-researched overview of Burton’s relationship with Africa and Africans? Or, is Newman attempting to advance critical discussion of Burton, his career, and his writings as influenced by his time in and thoughts on Africa? If the former, then Newman takes too much for granted about his audience—from a thorough knowledge of Burton’s career as a writer to familiarity with the key settlements in the interior of nineteenth-century Africa. Rarely are Burton’s travelogues and other writings mentioned by name let alone linked to specific moments in Burton’s career, while the maps reproduced are frequently too small and, hence, not legible enough to be of use to those wishing to trace Burton’s routes on the continent. If this work represents an attempt to advance critical thought, then Newman fails to reach the requisite level of analytical and methodological rigor. For example, Newman’s book begins better than it ends, in part because of his marked preference for researching Burton’s earlier travels in East Africa rather than the later years in West Africa—an imbalance that prevents the full sweep of Burton’s relationship with Africa from coming into focus and that results in certain portions of Burton’s African career being analyzed largely through published sources (see the notes for chapter 6, for example). Likewise, although Newman’s attempt to grapple with numerous African contexts deserves praise, his discussion of these contexts can be somewhat clumsy, especially when he tries to link nineteenth-century African political circumstances to modern developments (see the discussions of Sierra Leone [153] and Liberia [154] for two such awkward transitions). There is also a frustrating absence of reference to the sources used by Newman to elucidate these contexts, as in the case of the histories of Mombasa (74), the Canary Islands (144–45), and Sierra Leone (150–51).

Finally, in drawing on Burton’s published and unpublished works, Newman fails to acknowledge the relevance of a long-running critical discussion involving Dorothy Helly, I. S. MacLaren, Roy Bridges, Tim Youngs, David Finkelstein, and Leila Koivunen, among others, on the role that the Victorian publishing industry played in shaping the final texts of Victorian explorers (for the only quasi-exception, see the discussion of Burton’s text on Zanzibar [68]). Such critical work has shown that the statements made by explorers in their published works were often the result of a complex, collaborative process and so do not necessarily represent what the explorers themselves thought or experienced in the field. Yet, these issues aside, Newman has produced an ambitious and wide-ranging study, one that will be read with interest by scholars and nonspecialists alike and that promises to expand the research agenda to non-Western contexts for future studies of Burton and other Victorian travelers and explorers.