Edward William Lane

Edward William Lane (17 September 1801 – 10 August 1876) was a British Orientalist, translator and lexicographer. He is known for his translation of One Thousand and One Nights, which he censored, with the usual 19th-century view on "Victorian morality".

Lane was born at Hereford, England, the third son of the Rev. Dr Theopilus Lane, and grandnephew of Gainsborough on his mother's side. After his father's death in 1814, Lane was sent to grammar school at Bath and then Hereford, where he showed a talent for mathematics. He visited Cambridge, but did not enroll in any of its colleges.

Instead, Lane joined his brother Richard in London, studying engraving with him. At the same time Lane began his study of Arabic on his own. However, his health soon deteriorated. For the sake of his health and of a new career, he set sail to Egypt.

Lane arrived in Alexandria in September 1825, and soon left for Cairo. He remained in Egypt for two and a half years, mingling with the locals, dressed as a Turk (the ethnicity of the then-dominant Ottoman Empire) and taking notes of everything he saw and heard. In Old Cairo, he lived near Bab al-Hadid, and studied Arabic, among others, with Sheikh Muhammad 'Ayyad al-Tantawi (1810–1861), who was later invited to teach at Saint Petersburg, Russia. He returned to England with his voluminous notes in the autumn of 1828.

Lane's interest in ancient Egypt may have been first aroused by seeing a presentation by Giovanni Battista Belzoni. His original ambition was to publish an account of what had remained of Ancient Egypt. The London publisher John Murray showed early interest in publishing the mighty project (known as Description of Egypt), but then retracted. At the suggestion of Murray, Lane expanded a chapter of the original project into a whole book. The result was his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The work was partly modeled on Alexander Russell's The Natural History of Aleppo (1756). Lane visited Egypt again, in order to collect materials to expand and revise the work, after the society accepted the publication. The book became a bestseller (still in print), and won Lane a reputation.

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