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Burton's father was an Irishman, an inactive lieutenant colonel in the British army, who drifted about Europe hunting boar and let his sons educate themselves. It was a break for Richard, leaving him free to form his own character. Oxford sent him down without a degree, after he misbehaved at a steeplechase, despite his erudition in Greek, Latin and three or four modern languages. His friends called him "Ruffian Dick," and admired him as a brawler, toper and wit. He shipped out to Bombay as an officer in the East India Company. Before long, he had mastered Hindustani, Sindhi and half a dozen dialects. To get to know the natives, he impersonated Moslem merchants on the North-West Frontier or prowled the bazaars as a Hindu holy man. This did not help his career. Even more damaging to his reputation as sound senior officer material was the fact that he wrote a scrupulously detached report on male brothels in Karachi. He won the grudging admiration of generals and the envious malice of Anglo-Indian officials. Both groups were glad to see Burton go on to Zanzibar, Timbuctoo, or the devil. There is fine comedy in the way in which the Victorian Establishment tried in vain to as similate the flamboyance and scandal of Burton and to make of his exploits an edifying story like that of the pious Livingstone.
Catnip in Tails. In London after a brisk tour of the Crimean War, Burton cut a theatrically romantic figure. Glowering in evening dress, yellow from fever, scarred on the cheek by a Somali javelin, carrying a dark nimbus of unspeakable sins learned in the evil Orient, Burton was pure catnip to the ladies in the drawing room. That he should have been catnip to Lady Burton is comedy at its highest. Isabel Arundell was pious, snobbish as only a daughter of the O.E.C. (Old English Catholic) aristocracy can be, and both romantic and puritanical.
Such women romantics can do only one of two things with such a man as Burton: aspire to reform him or pretend that he is just as he should be. Isabel Burton, in defiance of what she may well have suspected to be strong homosexual leanings in her husband, played the English game of Let's-Pre-tend-and-Be-Happy-Families. She did it so well for nearly 30 years that the man Burton almost disappeared under the respectable shawl she knitted for him. Of course, she reasoned, Richard did have odd friends, but that was because he was so generous. The friends were odd indeed: one was Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), owner of the finest collection of erotica in Europe; another was Poet Algernon Swinburne, who had a taste for flagellation. Through all this, in Damascus, Trieste and Santos, where Burton served as British consul, his wife clung to the female theory that all men are little boys at heart; they only like to show off. Her iron, doting conviction was that nothing bad ever really happened, and besides, in the end, dear Richard would accept the Faith.