Hello, my name's Ben Grant. I'm a lecturer in English literature at the Department for Continuing Education here at the University of Oxford.
So is your job? I started in 2018, actually.
This was a return at Oxford for me as I studied here in the early 1990s.
I started a degree in biochemistry and in college I studied and was Trinity College, which is where we are now, sir, on the ground college.
And one of the oldest ones, we are here in front of the imposing front gates of the college and Broad Street, which is right in the heart of Oxford.
And we're not far from the old Lane library. We're here because the person I'd like to talk about also studied at Trinity College.
And I actually wrote a book about him that I started that work before I realised we'd been to the same college.
His name is Richard Francis Burton, and he was one of those larger than life Victorians.
He worked as a spy in British India and he became famous as an explorer and a translator.
He was also one of the foremost, if not the foremost linguists of his day.
He is reported to know in 27 languages.
Before all that, he'd spent his childhood on the continent, particularly in France and Italy, an expatriate British communities.
So when he arrived in Oxford in 1840 at the age of 19, he'd actually spent very little of his life in Britain.
Picture the scene in Britain, walks up to Trinity College gates on his first day, sporting Matt, sporting a magnificent moustache,
which is all the rage in Europe, which would have been considered outlandish in Britain as he steps through the college entrance.
He bumps into a group of fellow students and one of them laughs in his face, taken aback by his outlandish appearance.
Burton promptly challenges this person, whom he describes as tall to a duel.
And this is met with astonishment by the other students for whom duels were then only something to be found in history books and novels.
They were still in Vogue in Europe. Well, think of the time to describe the scene,
because I think the Capulets a great deal about Britain's experience of Oxford and indeed of the English society more broadly.
Despite working for the British government and British institutions, stranger's life, Britain always remains something of an outsider in Britain.
And he spent very little of his life there in the status of being different or something which Burton himself actively cultivated.
And I suppose the most obvious expression of this is his famous journey to the weaselling holy sites of Mecca and Medina,
disguised as a Muslim and his frequent praise for aspects of Islamic culture.
But it should be said, though, that Britain combined this this obvious interest in other cultures.
And he was very curious about other places and people with really very extreme form of racism, particularly towards Africans.
Well, going back to Britain's time in Oxford, although, as I said,
he was already at that time a consulate linguist and he's for numerous European languages.
He wasn't able to develop those skills in Oxford.
Like his moustache, he found his European pronunciation of Greek and Latin was laughed at by his tutors.
I mean, he's tried to learn Arabic. He couldn't find anyone to teach him. Although Oxford prides itself on having had an Arabic professor since 16 36.
The older of this post in 1840 wasn't really much of an Arabic scholar, and he refused to give birth and individual tuition.
So Britain really struggled to to learn Arabic on his own.
Well, after his first year at Oxford,
Burton decided he'd had enough and he declared his family that he wanted to leave and join the army or to emigrate to Canada, Australia.
However, his father was having none of this. So Burton contrived instead to have himself expelled.
And he managed to do this eventually when he went to a horse race, which Trinity students had been prohibited from attending.
And in typical Burton style, his leaving Trinity and Oxford was as theatrical as his arrival there.
A friend from another college who'd been expelled at the same time came to pick Burton up from the college doors.
And I quote Burton himself on what happened next with a cantering leader and a high trotting shaft horse,
which unfortunately, unfortunately went over the beds of the best flowers.
We started from the High Street by the Queen's Highway to London.
I artistically performing upon a yard of tin trumpet, waving due to my friends and kissing my hand to the pretty shopgirl.
Well, after leaving Oxford, Burton ended up taking off a commission in the East India Company Army in British India.
And the rest, as they say, is history. I should say just to finish that I like Burton and also left Trinity without completing my degree.
There will not, unfortunately, in his spectacular style as him.