Browne, Edward Granville:
life and academic career

by Michael Wickens

published in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Volume 4
New York: Columbia University, 1990

E. G. Browne came of a wealthy family engaged in shipbuilding. He was at first strongly dominated by his father, Sir Benjamin Browne, who sent him to the preparatory school at Glenalmond, to Eton College, and finally to Cambridge University, where he was to study engineering or, as an ultimate compromise, science and medicine. The boy followed his father’s wishes and eventually qualified, and for a short time practiced, as a doctor. But at the age of only fifteen, in 1877, his interest in the Middle East had been aroused by the Russo-Turkish War, in which characteristically his sympathy lay with the side that was unpopular in Britain, the Turks. At this point his “Oriental” studies began, with Turkish, to which Persian and Arabic were soon added. He had (and continued to have) little or no interest in philology as such, and his methods seem to have been entirely pragmatic: the autodidactic use of any manuals and texts he could find, consultation with real and pretended experts, and the genial exploitation of various native speakers, who could nearly always be found in England in the great days of empire. The results, to judge by the reports of his contemporaries and his own published work, were stupendously successful.

Upon his graduation in the Cambridge Natural Sciences Tripos in 1882, he was “bribed” by his father to persevere in his medical studies with the gift of a summer trip to Istanbul (or, as it was still known in Europe, Constantinople). In 1884, on his own initiative, he also took the so-called “Indian” Languages (in fact, languages of the Islamic world) Tripos at Cambridge. There followed three years of further medical study, internship, and practice, interrupted, whenever the occasion allowed, for pursuit of his private, “Oriental” interests. In 1887 be achieved both his final medical qualifications and a fellowship from his Cambridge college (Pembroke), which enabled him to spend his celebrated year in Iran—for it was by then unquestionably Persian studies that were claiming his main atten­tion. It was this visit that generated the remarkable book, A Year Amongst the Persians, which, despite its romantic and archaic title, approach, and style, remains a classic source. It was first published in 1893, after being more than once turned down, and has since been reprinted several times under various auspices (chiefly A. C. Black and Cambridge University Press).

After his return to Britain in 1888, Browne’s life was spent almost wholly in Cambridge, remaining outwardly quite unspectacular. He was first University Lecturer in Persian and then, from 1902 until his death, Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic; the latter post was one of two prestigious but ill-paid chairs nominally in the field of Arabic studies then maintained in the university. Until 1906 he lived a vigorous, if somewhat self-centered, social life as a bachelor in his college; in that year he married Alice Blackburne-Daniell, a well­-to-do and influential Roman Catholic, who enlisted his vague but generous sympathies both for Roman Ca­tholicism and for the cause of an independent Ireland. They had two sons, neither of whom followed his father’s interests, though later both lent them moral and financial support. Browne suffered a massive heart attack in November, 1924; his wife died in June, 1925, six months before his own death. The last year or so of his life was little more than a gallant holding action.

To appreciate Browne’s remarkable academic achievements (as well as some of his peculiar shortcom­ings) at their proper evaluation, it is necessary to understand something of his personal position and the world in which he lived and worked. He was bred to wealth and status and was (particularly in his mature years) a very rich man in his own right. This meant that his time was largely his own (his statutory duties were minimal) and that he could please himself in virtually everything he did and said. He could choose his own projects, pay for them and their publication if necessary (as it often was), and personally employ such colleagues and helpers (several Iranians among them) as the university would not hire. But this situation carried its disadvantage as well. If he was generous and clever and often charming, he was also egotistical (several tributes bear witness to his fascinating but nearly always one-­sided discourse); and, as frequently happens in such cases, his judgment could be willful and erratic and the self-discipline necessary for the finest academic work very difficult to achieve. His almost continuous antagonism to his own government and the establish­ment (related to general Middle Eastern diplomacy and the Persian “Question,” Ireland, South Africa­—liberals in those days were pro-Boer—anti-Germanism and concomitant pro-Russian and pro-French policy, inadequate educational measures, and so on) largely does him credit, no doubt; it certainly cost him deserved public recognition and influence. It also, however, sometimes contained elements of the arbitrary and the cranky, and anyone less privileged might well have had cause to be more circumspect. As with most of his contemporaries, all his ways seem to have been firmly set before he reached the age of thirty. He had, too, something in him of upper-class Victorian-Edwardian philistinism: Early in life he engaged in tennis, squash, and rowing, and later he took up fishing, but he had no time for art, music, religion, or indeed for languages or cultures outside his chosen field. His early enthusiasm for Turkish studies soon waned, while for “Indian” culture he seemed to cherish a marked antipathy most of his life, considering it to represent a debased version of all that he loved in Iran. He was no sybarite: Given endless cigarettes and tea, he could apparently easily dispense (for himself and his guests) with good food or wine.

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