It is difficult to find something new to say about Sir Richard Burton, the Victorian “bad boy” of empire whose peripatetic career as soldier, explorer, diplomat, and man of letters revealed his many talents and substantial shortcomings. Since his death in 1890, there have been dozens of thoughtful and carefully researched biographies about him. Fawn M. Brodie's The Devil Drives: The Life of Sir Richard Burton (New York, 1967) and Mary Lovell's more recent A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton (New York, 1998) are among the best. In keeping with shifting popular and academic interests, biographers have highlighted different aspects of Burton's infamous career—his imperial adventures and conflicts, his sexual proclivities, his cultural and racial cross-dressings in India, Arabia, and East Africa, and his relations with his wife and amanuensis.

Dane Kennedy's new cultural biography of Richard Burton, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World, contributes to this “ongoing process of representing and reinterpreting Burton” (268) but, significantly, contextualizes the man's oft-cited exceptionalism. Kennedy not only shows how Burton cultivated this image of himself as deeply unorthodox and anathema to Victorian values but also argues that his persona as enfant terrible participated within larger Victorian thinking about difference. Kennedy takes the measure of the man within a consciously global Britain highly attuned to cultural, sexual, and religious difference, offering engaging chapters on Burton's kaleidoscopic personae as “gypsy,” “Orientalist,” “impersonator,” “explorer,” “racist,” “relativist,” and “sexologist.” This biography demythologizes Burton by rehistoricizing him; even more important, however, it demythologizes Victorianism as universally repressive, racist, and imperialist by exploring the dynamic and shifting notions of difference that galvanized and contained such a man as Burton.

Kennedy's biography contributes to our understanding of Burton in the Victorian context through nuanced reinterpretations of many of the received truths about this controversial historical figure. The author carefully reexamines Burton's publications and manuscripts, as well as the Burton archives at the Huntington Library, Wiltshire Records Office, and elsewhere, to moderate many of the prurient questions and sensational rumors that persist in biographical accounts of his life. First, was Burton homosexual? His writings on pederastic practices in India and Arabia have raised the question among biographers. Kennedy wisely suggests that “efforts to determine whether Burton's inclinations were heterosexual or homosexual are framed around a false dichotomy” (214). Second, was Burton the poster boy for sadistic pornography? This question has been advanced because of his correspondence with other members of the Cannibal Club (a refractory branch of the Anthropological Society). Burton exchanged letters on the subject of human sacrifice in West Africa and the acquisition of the “peau de femme” meant to cover one of the works of the Marquis de Sade—the enfant terrible of the previous century (210). Kennedy convincingly argues that there is no evidence that Burton shared the sadistic proclivities of his fraternity and shows that he repeatedly exposed the sensationalism behind popular Victorian accounts of human sacrifice in West Africa. Finally, was Burton a racist? Yes, absolutely. However, Kennedy demonstrates that Burton's racism reveals surprising inconsistencies. While he believed that Africans were innately inferior, he also defended their “fetish” worship and traditional customs against British missionary zeal. Also, paradoxically, his fundamental belief in racial difference led him in the direction of cultural relativism, and thus to a more permissive way of thinking about other societies in their own terms. Throughout, Kennedy offers tempered and intelligent analysis of some of the more sensational calumnies against Burton.

Kennedy's biography also offers insightful commentary on Burton's theories about women's innate (and active) sexuality and Britain's cultural shortcomings. He sheds new light on Burton's infamous and much-fabled falling-out with John Hanning Speke, fellow explorer of the source of the Nile. Kennedy's discussion of the perceptual differences that determined the two men's pursuit of knowledge—Speke's reliance on the eye challenged Burton's faith in the word—is the most fascinating in the biography. His discussion of what motivated Isabel Burton to destroy some of Burton's writings and papers is also far more evenhanded than many previous accounts. Kennedy's biography is more engaged with the complexities of Burton's thinking in his time than with classifying him in relation to modern paradigms of Victorian imperial and sexual hegemony.

While Kennedy's biography offers an important reinterpretation of the main findings of Burton's previous biographers, it does not offer very many new discoveries. Burton's publications, manuscripts, and letters have already been thoroughly sifted through by scholars. Yet Kennedy does uncover certain details about Burton's life that have not been thoroughly examined elsewhere. For instance, to support his argument that Burton's imperial relations with the people of the West African kingdom of Dahomey were more complex than was often asserted, Kennedy discusses a gift Burton gave to the king: “three very degagé coloured prints of white women in a state of eve-ical toilette.” This gift, as Kennedy argues, “reversed the regular cross-racial pornography and subverted the standard conviction that imperial authority rested on the symbolic importance of the white woman's sexual inaccessibility to black men” (211). Kennedy is also one of the few scholars to examine Burton's 121-page satirical poem, Stone Talk. As he demonstrates, the poem offers insight into Burton's disaffection with British society and determination to challenge its conventions and platitudes. In a work that so assiduously positions Burton's life and work within the larger framework of difference, I would have hoped for a more rigorous historical and theoretical examination of notions of difference in the Victorian period, particularly in the book's introduction. However, this is my only reservation about this lively and judicious study.

Burton's various and sundry fulminations on race, sexuality, and religion, though now over a century old, always have the potential to become scandalous. Most recently, his anti-Semitic rants in a manuscript entitled “Human Sacrifice among the Sephardine or Eastern Jews” generated controversy when briefly put up for auction. Kennedy's biography offers important context for this incendiary agent provocateur, reexamining Burton's life and theories without ever being his apologist.