Edward William Lane Author:Jason Thompson Edward William Lane (1801-1876) was Britain's most renowned scholar of the modern Middle East. Possessed of artistic, scholarly, and literary talent, Lane travelled to Egypt in the early nineteenth century, when it was first opened to Western travellers, where he participated both in the development of orientalist studies and in the nascent disc... more »ipline of Egyptology. Returning to Britain, he published enormously influential works such as Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) and the monumental Arabic-English Lexicon (1863) - both continuously in print since their original publications - and a major translation of the Arabian Nights (1839). Lane's life was one of high ideals, goals, struggles against adversity, and great accomplishments intermixed with personal tragedy. Its story reveals many previously unknown aspects of Victorian and Egyptian life, and of the encounter between the two. Jason Thompson has uncovered an enormous amount of previously unconsidered primary source material for this new biography, which exhaustively and entertainingly covers his life and work.« less