Adventures in Egypt and Nubia: the Travels of William John Bankes - 1786-1855 - Book Review

Patricia Usick The British Museum Press, 2002, ISBN 0 7141 1803 6, 25 [pounds sterling]

For any man who was young, rich, talented, ambitious, independent and politically or sexually dissident, Regency England must have been an odd place to live. The surface glitter of a world so brilliantly caught by the portraits of Sir Thomas Lawrence certainly represents one truth about the period, but as England sank into a mini ice-age of political repression under Liverpool and Castlereagh, the exile of Byron and the literary butchery of Bowdler sent out unmistakable signals of duller times a'coming.

With such ageing courtesans as Lady Melbourne and Lady Oxford--the 'grande horizontale' of Whig politics--holding sway, the moral license of Regency London has a cosy and almost institutionalised feel about it. For any young blade ready to play 'lion' to the great hostesses for a season, there were opportunities enough, but--as Byron discovered in the wake of a bitter separation from Annabella Milbanke--the tolerance of aristocratic England for anything like the genuine outsider was strictly limited.

When one thinks of English exiles, one thinks inevitably of Byron, but what is true of him is even more so of his contemporary and Cambridge friend, William John Bankes. The brilliantly gifted heir to landed estates and a fortune, Bankes would seem to have had everything needed for success, but even an income of 8000 [pounds sterling] a year and an entree to the heart of the political and social establishment was not enough to reconcile his complicated, combative and restless nature to the constraints of this 'tight little island'. 'I find the world very much as I left it', he wrote of England on returning from the travels that made his name in 1820, 'not indeed perhaps the same people but the same sort of people; very dull, very meddling, very silly, & very false. The Sothebys flourish, the Wordsworths write, the Hob-houses speak, the Agar Elisses marry ... For my own part, with almost all perhaps that this country can give me, I am pining for the sunshine & intense blue skies of the East, for those enticements to curiosity & interest which abound there, & for the free and vagrant life which I led.'

With anyone other than Bankes, it would be tempting to diagnose an overdose of 'The Giaour' or 'Bride of Abydos', but talent, energy, imagination, discipline and courage all set him apart from the run-of-the-mill traveller who responded to the Byronic call. After the fall of Napoleon in 1814, the Europe of the old Grand Tour was once again accessible to the English, but Europe was not exotic enough for Bankes, any more than it had been for Byron. No wonder, then, that after two years travelling and collecting in Spain, Portugal and Italy, he arrived at Alexandria in August 1815 to begin the series of journeys and excavations that made his name as 'the Nubian explorer'.

With Burckhardt in Egypt and generous with his advice, and Young and Champollion both at work, it was a good time to be in the Near East, and it is lucky for us that it was Bankes who was there to seize the opportunity. There were any number of adventurers of the kind who would later turn up as pseudo-philhellenes in the Greek War of Independence washing through the area at the same time, but Bankes brought to the task of exploration and recording a rigour and method that transformed the dilettante 'methodist' of Charles Matthews and Byron's Cambridge circle into one of the key figures in early nineteenth-century archaeology.

He was recording sites, too, that would soon be endangered by indifference, vandalism, despoliation and inundation, and in many cases his detailed accounts are the only evidence we now have for lost Egyptian and Nubian monuments. If Bankes has never recieved the credit he deserves for this, it was at least in part his fault, but in this scholarly and meticulous study Patricia Usick has done her best to rescue his reputation from the opprobrium and silence that obscured his last years after a charge of homosexuality added one more Englishman of talent to a long line of exiles.

This is not a biography--and Patricia Usick is no natural biographer--but although it is impossible not to want more of Bankes the man, Adventures in Egypt and Nubia places the emphasis exactly where it should be. There are clearly problems anyway in the path of anyone attempting a full life, but even if there were not, it would still be a relief to find the stress fall on the work--as it does here--and not on the personality. As a raconteur, wit and conversational bully Bankes inspired admiration, affection, irritation and boredom in just about equal measures. As a collector, epigrapher, archaeologist, traveller and builder, however, he has left a legacy with which there is no arguing. He deserves more than to be remembered for an obelisk at Kingston Lacy or as a footnote to Romantic literary history.

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