“THESE IDLE DESERTS”
Never before have Eastern studies made such progress. In the time of Louis XIV everyone was a Hellenist; now they are all Orientalists …
—VICTOR HUGO, LES ORIENTALES
If timing isn’t actually everything, it is at least half the battle. With Enlightenment interest in the eastern world reaching full steam in the early eighteenth century, Les mille et une nuits arrived at exactly the right moment to become the Harry Potter of its day—a tremendously successful imaginative work enjoyed by all ages and classes. The Nights seemed to focus all the exotic promise of the East in a single book. Europeans taking holidays from their everyday reality by reading the work could detect a more glamorous, sensuous self in its tales, an oriental dopplegänger unburdened by cultural constraints. Through Antoine Galland’s free adaption of Alf Laila wa Laila, The Thousand and One Nights came to the West through two worlds—the historical East, where the stories derived, and an Enlightenment Europe opening itself to the possibilities of other cultures.
So popular was Les mille et une nuits that it quickly attracted literary pirates. At a time when European copyright laws were in their infancy, even a halfway-successful book was guaranteed to be pirated, especially abroad, soon after its publication. Besides unlicensed extracts of Galland’s work circulating widely in France, volumes of the Nights were bought and sped off to other parts of the Continent soon after their release in Paris, where they were translated with almost indecent haste by anonymous, bilingual hacks. These versions were then issued in cheap editions that were nonetheless the first translations of the work to appear outside France. Even as volumes of Les mille et une nuits continued to be published during the first two decades of the new century, unauthorized translations began appearing in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Poland and Russia.
Given the growing English presence abroad and the increasing importance of English as a language, the first and most important of these pirated editions appeared in London early in 1706. The subtitle of Galland’s work was modified from Arabian Tales, Translated into French to the full English title Arabian Winter-Evenings’ Entertainments or Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, thereby sealing the book’s common name in the English-speaking world. This is known as the “Grub Street” edition, a nod toward the London thoroughfare where writers, poets, pamphleteers and publishers plied their uncertain trade. Translators making no more than a shilling a page merely “pitchforked into Gallic English the French paraphrase of Galland,” receiving no royalties or acknowledgment for their work, and ensuring that the first English translator or translators of the Arabian Nights from Galland’s French version will remain forever unknown.
Released by the bookseller Andrew Bell, the English Nights quickly followed the French original by creating a sensation, with the title page containing the following brief, if inaccurate, introduction:
Arabian Nights Entertainments: consisting of one thousand and one stories, told by the Sultaness of the Indies, to divert the Sultan from the execution of a bloody vow he had made to marry a lady every day, and have her head cut off next morning…. Containing a better account of the customs, manners, and religion of the Eastern nations … than is to be met with in any author hitherto published. Translated into French from the Arabian Mss. By M. Galland, of the Royal Academy, and now done in English.
Here Bell seems to have taken Galland’s titular statement that the tales are essentially “Arabian” at face value, compressing the English title even as his introduction acknowledges that the book’s characters traverse national and ethnic lines. Perhaps there was also, as in France, an element of marketing involved, a sense that placing the name of a fabled region front and centre might increase sales. Whatever the reason, the French and English title changes would create a permanent association of the Nights with Arabia more than any other land.
Even this first pirated English translation was then pirated in turn. Soon after its London debut, the Arabian Nights appeared in similarly unauthorized editions in Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. “Read Sindbad and you will be sick of Aeneas,” the Gothic novelist Horace Walpole assured a friend, praising the Nights for possessing “a wildness … that captivates.”
The book’s popularity was no flash in the pan. Over the course of the next century Galland’s Nights continued to be pirated, running to more than thirty editions in French and English alone. Frequent newspaper and journal serializations, as well as cheap “chapbook” editions of individual stories like “Sindbad” and “Aladdin,” contributed to a continuous dissemination of Arabian Nights’ tales and characters throughout Europe and eventually the greater world. By the end of the century, the Nights had leapfrogged the seas to reach North America and Australia. Little wonder, then, that during the Napoleonic Era an anthologist could note that much of Europe believed the Nights’
store house of ingenious fiction … imagery … [and] supernatural agency skillfully introduced” had “contributed more to the … delight of every succeeding generation … than all the works which the industry and … imagination of Europeans have provided for the instruction and entertainment of youth.
Just as important, the Arabian Nights’ popularity was not restricted to the West, for the Galland edition was likewise pirated in Asia by being re translated into eastern languages in the decades following its appearance. Since it is now clear that all Arabic editions containing Galland’s orphan stories appeared only after the publication of his Nights, at least some of this more recent Arabic material must have come from Les mille et une nuits. Nor was Arabic the only eastern language to see translations of Galland’s work. A century and a half later, Sir Richard Burton claimed to have found three separate Hindi editions of Galland while in India, making the first European adaption of The Thousand and One Nights not only a western but also an eastern success story as well.
Then, the deluge. What no one involved with the book—not Galland, nor the Nights’ hack translators, nor its thousands of readers—could foretell was an altogether remarkable set of circumstances that would see the work spawn a hydra-headed influence on western art and thought for many decades to come. At its publication, the Arabian Nights was a hugely popular storybook in many languages, but little else. Yet by appearing at a critical juncture in East–West relations, the work not only provided enjoyment but also became a focal point for those oriental fantasies that had fascinated westerners for generations. Very quickly, it came to represent the common impression of the Muslim Orient like nothing else—an early indicator of the Enlightenment tendency to observe Asian societies through an approving glass. Eighteenth-century philosophers, disillusioned with the current state of European civilization, became inclined to praise Asian cultures as models for the West. The chinoiserie craze that began in the mid-seventeenth century saw European artistic styles influenced by Chinese themes and forms, and was an outgrowth of the near-reverence that the Enlightenment West accorded China. Likewise, the Nights made the world of Islam an enticing world of alien enchantment, different enough to be intriguingly strange, but sufficiently close for westerners to understand.
Admired as the Nights was, no one should believe that the western passion for oriental romance was due solely to its publication. Besides the cultural impact of the Bible, allusions to the East appear frequently in Elizabethan and Jacobean arts—think of Othello or the Moroccan prince in The Merchant of Venice—as part of a general European curiosity about the Orient. It is beyond doubt, however, that the glowing popular reception of the Nights served as a prime stimulus toward establishing the idea of an exotic eastern world as an enduring vision. Soon catchphrases like “genie in a bottle,” “magic carpet ride” and “Aladdin’s lamp” entered common usage. There appeared Arabian Nights–themed balls and masques, and a clutch of western artists and composers began using “oriental” themes in their work. The developing English pantomime tradition frequently employed Sindbad, Ali Baba and especially Aladdin as stock characters—even today, “Aladdin” ranks second only to “Cinderella” as a “panto” show. Since there is no limit to the number of wishes Aladdin’s lamp may grant in the original tale, it was probably one of these early stage adaptions that introduced the “three wishes only” device to add suspense to Aladdin’s drama.
Literary buccaneers were not the only ones looking to make some profit from the Nights’ popular success. With the work setting a kind of bookish seal on Europe’s burgeoning fascination with the East, it was inevitable that imitations and collections of competing eastern tales would arrive in the wake of Les mille et une nuits. Within a short time, other compendiums began appearing, chief among them François Pétis de la Croix’s collection of translated Turkish Tales in 1707, followed three years later by a series of Persian stories pointedly entitled Mille et une jours—“A Thousand and One Days.”
The efforts of scholars like Galland and Pétis de la Croix were legitimate adaptations of genuine eastern folklore, but in sheer numbers they were no match for the series of endless knock-offs that appeared for more than a century after the Nights’ first appearance. The exact number of such fictions is difficult to determine, but it is probable that Britain and France alone saw the publication of more than a thousand essays, short tales, novels and long poems. These were soon numerous enough to constitute a new genre of literature: the European “oriental tale” of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Like knock-offs in general, many were forgettable dreck, written for no reason other than to cash in on the prevailing taste for opulent eastern melodrama. But better writers saw in the mock-oriental story scope for satire or allegory, using exotic locales and characters to poke fun at their own societies or addressing philosophical issues by employing fashionable eastern settings. A few of these fictions, like Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia and James Justinian Morier’s perennial favourite about a rascally Persian barber, The Adventures of Haji Baba of Isfahan, have become bona fide classics. But most are little more than poor men’s versions of the Nights—sensationalist literature emphasizing the coarseness and licentiousness, as well as the mystery and the magic, present even in Galland’s expurgated version.
Enough of these imitations appeared that a reaction against the Nights and its kin set in among the educated classes. This did nothing to dampen general enthusiasm for the work, but it did indicate that not everyone welcomed the Arabian Nights with high acclaim. A number of establishment figures saw the popular enthusiasm for the Nights, eastern tales and the oriental craze in general as nothing but a regrettable fad—quickly begun, quickly forgotten and of no particular value.
Voltaire, although he claimed to have read the Nights ten times and used oriental themes in many of his philosophe romances, still professed scorn for those mock-eastern tales enjoying such a vogue, calling them “senseless stories that mean nothing.” Within a few years, Britain’s Earl of Shaftesbury was making sneering references to the prevailing “Moorish fancy” in literature. “Monsters and monsterland were never more in request,” Shaftesbury wrote, “and we may often see a philosopher, or wit, run a tale-gathering in these idle deserts as familiarly as the silliest woman or merest boy.”
This last phrase is suggestive of a belief among some Brits that there was something childish or even unmanly about reading the Arabian Nights and similar works, an early expression of the attitude of innate cultural superiority that would come to be criticized as “orientalism.” The fashion for eastern romance was thought to have something unbecomingly feminine in its nature—literature appropriate for a lady’s fancy, perhaps, but hardly proper for more rational Enlightenment gentlemen.
Curiously, this was essentially the same attitude, centuries removed, as that of classical Islam, when upper-class court ladies in Baghdad or Cairo might read such works as the Nights for enjoyment, but educated men thought them nonsense fit only for the hoi polloi. When Alexander Pope sent copies of the Arabian Nights to Bishop Francis Atterbury, Atterbury responded by sniffing that the work was likely “the product of some Woman’s imagination,” containing no moral that he could see, and dismissing the tales as things “so extravagant, monstrous, and disproportioned” that they were likely to give “a judicious eye pain.” Some who read too much into Galland’s adaption even questioned the Nights’ authenticity. Just before the French Revolution, the English critic James Beattie puzzled over
whether the tales be really Arabick [sic], or invented by Mons. Galland, I have never been able to learn with certainty. If they be Oriental, they are translated with unwarranted latitude; for the whole tenor of the style is in the French mode: and the Caliph … and the Emperor of China, are addressed in … terms … usual at the court of France.
Whether in France, Britain or elsewhere, the public didn’t care a button about establishment opinions. For the century and a half following the appearance of Galland’s volumes, the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments bedazzled much of the West with its blend of the fantastic and the extraordinary. Even the most sober-minded of individuals were not immune to the book’s charm. A telling anecdote concerns a distinguished lord advocate for Scotland, Sir James Stewart, who found his daughters reading the Nights one Saturday evening. Good Presbyterian that he was, the outraged father snatched the book from their hands with a stern Calvinist lecture against reading such frivolity on the eve of the Holy Sabbath. That was Sir James’s mistake: actually putting his hands on the work. The next morning his family came downstairs, dressed for divine services, only to find their patriarch engrossed in reading the Arabian Nights, which he confessed sheepishly he had been doing all night long.
The success of the mock-oriental tale was directly caused by the general admiration for the Arabian Nights, but imitations were only part of the book’s impact. The appearance of eastern stories from both East and West did much more than create a fashion for fictional material dealing with a mysterious Orient. In important ways, the pseudo-oriental story inspired by the Nights helped the development of fiction itself as a legitimate literary category. By providing the popularity needed for an acceptance of fictional works designed for entertainment (and not simply as vehicles for religious allegory or moral instruction), fiction lost much of its bad reputation for flighty falsehood and became recognized as a worthy literary genre. What is not so apparent, however, is that as a series of short fictions linked by a narrator enmeshed in her own story, the Arabian Nights also helped develop the genres of the western short story and the novel, as well as fantasy and picaresque tales. A taste was being created for imaginative fiction with narratives such as those found in fairy tales and works like the Nights, and the latter’s frame-tale structure, allowing for stories to appear within stories, likewise permitted the appearance of variety and changes of mood within a single text. Such frame-tale works as the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron had appeared in Europe before, but the publication of Galland’s work caused such a collective stir that a vogue for similar works centring on the marvellous was created in western literature.
Great Britain was the main beneficiary of this trend. It may be no accident that when the first English novels began appearing in the early decades of the eighteenth century, the Arabian Nights was already established as a standard English-language book, sparking the first imitations even as its stories were still being translated across the Channel. At the same time as proto-novels like The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers arrived around 1712 (one of its authors, Joseph Addison, also dabbled in oriental stories), the Arabian Nights was making its mark, providing multiple examples of narrative fiction’s essential elements of character, setting and incident for writers to create novels along the lines of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
Both works appeared in the decades following the Grub Street edition of the Nights, and both bear strong similarities to the older work. Each can be read as a takeoff of Sindbad’s fabulous voyages into imaginary worlds, even marvel worlds, of continuously linked dramatic incidents recounted by a single narrator. Like Scheherazade’s stories, the adventures of Crusoe and Lemuel Gulliver are fictional, yet describe events accepted as real within the context of the story, melding actual times, places and sympathetic figures with the unusual and sometimes fantastic. Jonathan Swift, as well as enjoying French fairy tales, was certainly among the Nights’ first English readers, receiving the dedication to a 1709 book with the wittily inverted words, “The Arabian and Turkish Tales were owing to your Tale of a Tub.”
The two literary genres inspired by the Arabian Nights—the European oriental tale and the English-language novel—are offspring of the same parent, linked by the extravagant allure given the West by the Nights and creating a demand for more such romances. In England, where the oriental tale genre flourished for more than a century, this linkage is so strong that the early twentieth-century literary scholar Martha Pike Conant states emphatically—and in a highly appropriate analogy—“the Arabian Tales was the fairy godmother of the English novel.”
And not only of the English novel, but also of one of literature’s most enduring and universal genres. While some tales smack of proto–science fiction or horror fiction, literary scholars are almost unanimous in proclaiming that one of the work’s core stories—“The Tale of the Three Apples”—is the earliest surviving example of a murder mystery. Although “The Three Apples” becomes more of a “Who is responsible” story than a simple “Whodunnit,” it does contain elements of traditional detective fiction, with an investigator (Haroun al-Rashid’s companion Jafar) working against the clock to reveal the murderer of a young woman, but finding that the case is more complex than he first thought. Eventually, he discovers that the denouement touches him personally. After more than a thousand years, “The Three Apples” remains a thrilling tale of suspense equal to any contemporary mystery story.
The general European concern with eastern styles, expressed through words, music, theatre, art and even architecture, had more lasting influences than simple homages. The success of the Nights also breathed life into new genres by providing impetus to developing trends. As antitheses of the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality, the oriental tale, celebrating an emotionalism believed to be a typical feature of Asian life, went hand-in-hand with the parallel development of the Gothic story to fire the opening salvoes in a revolt against the predominant attitudes of the age.
Once the vogue for the mock-oriental story settled down somewhat in the second half of the eighteenth century, original works using the Nights only as part-inspiration began making their mark on western literature, creating some of the earliest European fantasy works. Two period novels, neither strict oriental knock-offs, can be linked to their respective authors’ passion for The Thousand and One Nights, but both went further than the standard eastern pastiche by blending elements of the oriental and Gothic genres in a fresh literary concoction.
Little read today outside of university classrooms, William Beckford’s Vathek and Jan Potocki’s Saragossa Manuscript are nonetheless considered major precursors to the modern fantasy novel. Both were original works exploring new thematic venues, but scratch below their surfaces and it becomes clear both are tied to the Nights in various ways, chief among them the interest the two über-eccentric authors (Beckford was obsessed with towers and Potocki shot himself with a bullet made from the strawberry-shaped knob of a sugar-bowl) showed in the older work. William Beckford—fabulously wealthy from Jamaican sugar and multitalented (Mozart is suppose to have been his private piano tutor as a boy)—was so besotted by the Nights and the idea of the Orient that his guardians tried to stem his youthful interest by burning his collection of eastern books and paintings.
A terrible waste of art and literature, since Beckford’s interest was sincere and lifelong. Preferring French to English, he went on to study Arabic and Persian, then later indulged himself by living behind four-metre walls on his estate as a kind of quasi-oriental potentate. At one point, Beckford even spent time translating into French sundry Arabian Nights stories that appeared in manuscripts different from Galland’s, but only found true satisfaction when he decided to construct his own “Arabian” tale as an expression of his innermost desires.
At twenty-two, Beckford sat down and in a three-day burst of creative energy wrote The History of the Caliph Vathek (1786), a grim tale of decadence and damnation that was among the most widely read novels of its day. Although written originally in French (it only appeared in English after Beckford’s agent had it translated and published without his knowledge), Vathek ranks with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein among the foremost English Gothic novels. It also stands as a kind of culmination of the period oriental story, taking the genre further in its depiction of excess and misdeeds than previous works by ending in a memorable underground hell where the damned wander forever with their hearts encased in flames. Although it is set in a fictional Muslim East, Vathek merges European Gothic and pseudo-oriental conventions in a polished, original book—an orientalized horror story that stands as one of the earliest examples of European Romantic orientalism.
Further separating it from the bulk of eastern imitations is the fact that parts are distinctly autobiographical, with the caliph Vathek the fictional counterpart of Beckford himself, his Calvinist mother the sorceress Carathis, Vathek’s illicit paramour Nouronihar a stand-in for Beckford’s cousin Louisa and Nouronihar’s effeminate fiancé modelled on another cousin, the young William Courtenay. Venturing beyond standard oriental fare, Vathek stands as a kind of literary confessional, since the hedonistic Beckford (forced to flee England for a decade over a homosexual scandal) created his amoral protagonist as a vision of himself: a man sated by pleasure who longs for the esoteric knowledge that will allow him to achieve a union with the absolute. Disdaining conventional morality in the pursuit of a higher understanding, Beckford/Vathek reaches for the sublimity of heaven, only to pay for his crimes by eternal damnation.
Vathek is book-ended by another work derived from the impact of the Nights on western literature, but which forgoes traditional oriental trappings to evoke the mysterious East within Europe itself. Count Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (a.k.a. The Saragossa Manuscript), published in its whole only after his death, is the traceable by-product of this Polish nobleman’s love of the Arabian Nights and remains a cult novel even today (Jerry Garcia was among its ardent admirers). But, like Vathek, it goes beyond the eastern knock-off to create a new vision of the Nights’ alternative reality.
In his youth, the extensively travelled Potocki wrote a number of mock-oriental stories before searching Morocco for the mythical full Arabic text of the Nights, not to find even a partial manuscript. This failure, however, may have induced Potocki to write his own frame-tale masterpiece as a distraction for his first wife—a kind of Thousand and One Nights for the West. As background, Potocki used a journey he once made through Spain’s eerie Sierra Morena mountains—to Potocki’s mind, a quasi-oriental world steeped in the country’s Moorish past. In the late eighteenth century he began writing episodes for The Saragossa Manuscript, using as its framing device the experiences of a young army officer travelling through the Sierra Morenas on his way to Madrid. In the mountains, the officer undergoes a series of nightmarish encounters over sixty-six days, during which he hears about a hundred stories peopled by an incredible array of brigands, gypsies, Moorish seductresses, cabalists, living corpses and (for good measure) Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.
Like Vathek, The Saragossa Manuscript is an extravagant, over-the-top fantasy. It, too, was first written in French—the universal language of the European upper classes—and was only later translated into Potocki’s native Polish, as well as German and English. Whatever its language, the novel goes beyond its Arabic inspiration by evoking a sustained sense of dread and uncertainty in a haunted mountain world. Potocki’s officer spends more than two months wandering the Sierra Morenas but is never sure whether his experiences are real, or only part of some fantastic dream. Although in the end everything is explained rationally, Potocki takes his cue from the Nights by creating an impossible reality, leaving the reader often as unsure about the certainty of things as Potocki’s protagonist.
With Jonathan Swift and William Beckford, Jan Potocki is often hailed as one of the pioneers of the modern fantasy novel, but both he and Beckford are also among the first generation of authors to take inspiration from the Arabian Nights in order to expand on themes both within and without the work, rather than simply mimicking it. In its own day, The Saragossa Manuscript was popular enough to be plagiarized—there was a sensational court case in Paris in 1842—but even in our time its fascination is undimmed and its reputation as one of European literature’s most curious literary creations remains secure. As Count Potocki may have intended, The Saragossa Manuscript is as near a western counterpart to The Thousand and One Nights as it is likely possible for one writer to construct. But neither it nor Vathek would exist at all if not for the original template of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.
Given the universal popularity of Les mille et une nuits, it is no surprise that along with piracy, imitations and inspirations, the “incomplete” nature of Galland’s book invited attempts to capitalize on its success by offering extensions of the work. Shortly before the French Revolution, a Syrian priest named Dom Denis Chavis collaborated with the French fairy-tale writer Jacques Cazotte to foist a fraudulent continuation of the Nights on an unsuspecting public. Cazotte fashioned from Chavis’s cribbing (the Syrian was responsible for one of the fake Arabic “Aladdin” manuscripts) and his own imagination a work published in 1788–89 as Suite des mille et une nuits, part of a massive fairy-tale anthology called Cabinet des fées.
Translated separately into English a few years later as Arabian Tales, or a Continuation of the Arabian Nights, it proved highly successful in its intention to provide more “legitimate” Nights stories to hungry readers, even if for years it remained a suspect text, with some aficionados accepting the Arabian Tales as a true sequel to Galland, others deeming it a base forgery and still others considering it at worst an adapted collection of actual eastern stories such as might be found within the Nights or the volumes of Pétis de la Croix.
The truth often lies between extremes. It now seems certain that Dom Chavis’s Swiss publisher was duped into believing Chavis had discovered the remainder of the “incomplete” Galland Manuscript in Paris, miraculously preserved in the king’s library, where Chavis worked as a teacher of Arabic. In truth, his desperate poverty compelled Chavis to copy stories from the Galland Manuscript housed in the library, make some masking changes, then add material from an independent Arabic collection he seems to have brought with him from Syria.
Chavis’s poor draft translation—part French, part Italian and all bad—was then given over to the professional fairy-tale writer Jacques Cazotte for revision and polishing into better French. Cazotte not only corrected it but, in the tradition of Galland and others, added new material to “improve” already existing tales, even inserting additional stories based on abstracts provided by Chavis. This “completion” of Les mille et une nuits, then, is a compendium of rehashed Galland, some original Arabic material contained in Chavis’s manuscript, stories retold by Chavis and Cazotte and other tales that are overwhelmingly Cazotte’s invention.
Even so, using the word “fraud” is problematic since it implies a manufactured, unauthorized imitation of a recognized original. In the case of the Nights, and especially the Galland adaption which itself contains so much that is probably invented, this “continuation” can be seen as no more fraudulent than the tradition of including inserted material begun in the time of the rawi and continued by Galland. Along with outright forgeries like the Arabic “Aladdin,” Chavis did provide translations of actual eastern stories supplemented by Cazotte’s contributions and tales reworked from Antoine Galland.
This raises a difficult point. Can a work like the Nights, acknowledged as not having specific origins, be considered authentic enough to even have fraudulent sequels? If Galland, as is now accepted, is the true author of “Aladdin,” and made such frequent additions to other stories that he can practically claim joint authorship with the rawi, can Chavis and Cazotte be denied their contribution to the corpus of the Arabian Nights even as countless generations of storytellers and scribes added to it by their own alterations?
To some extent, yes. Even given the twisty, deceptive history of the Nights in the West, aside from material copied by Chavis from Les mille et une nuits, none of the stories appearing in the Suite are to be found in any manuscript collection of Alf Laila wa Laila. The general consensus today is that, taken as a whole, these “additions” to the Nights are greatly inferior to those tales translated and adapted by the genuine scholar and storyteller Antoine Galland. The Suite des mille et une nuits is no “continuation”—at absolute best, it can be considered a pseudo-translation; at worst, just another attempt to steal some of the original work’s epic thunder.
All the same, even the publication of this bogus book served a purpose. Its favourable reception (like the Nights, it ran to multiple editions) did much to keep the original tales’ mythos alive in the minds of Europeans, acting as a concrete reminder of the wonders found within the eastern storytelling tradition. The 1792 English translation of the Suite, which appeared in every major English city in the year of its publication, was included with a new edition of the Nights printed in Liverpool a generation later, sealing its legitimacy in the minds of many readers. This gave Chavis and Cazotte’s work a prestige and longevity far beyond its deserts, while reminding many in late-Enlightenment Europe of the pleasure of reading the Arabian Nights and helping maintain the original book’s reputation. The Suite stands as a counterfeit bridge between the original vogue for the Nights and the next phase in the Nights’ history, when the West turned from simply reading it and began investigating the work’s origins and background.
But fiction writers were not the only period figures stimulated by their exposure to the Nights. Scholars, archaeologists and historians also found themselves inspired by its romance. As a student at University College, Oxford, the celebrated jurist and philologist Sir William Jones—“Oriental Jones”—learned Arabic by persuading a native speaker from Syria to accompany him to university and translate tales from Les mille et une nuits into their original language while Jones wrote out his dictation. Noting the affinity between Arabic and modern Persian, Jones began the process whereby he eventually mastered nearly thirty languages, founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta and in time discovered the close relationship between Sanskrit and Ancient Greek and Latin, thus uncovering the Indo-European language group.
“Oriental Jones” wasn’t the only one whose life was influenced by the Nights. During the 1840s, the young traveller and diplomat Austen Henry Layard, fascinated by childhood tales of ancient Baghdad in his favourite book, spent years excavating the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon in Mesopotamia (Iraq), exhuming the lost records of those ancient empires that once formed the cradle of civilization. A serious and sober man, Layard’s description of the Nineveh site still evokes the Arabian Nights of his youth:
Visions of palaces underground, of gigantic monsters, of sculpted figures, and endless inscriptions, floated before me…. I fancied myself wandering in a maze of chambers from which I could find no outlet.
Fifty years earlier, the English historian Edward Gibbon described the Nights, with Pope’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, as three books that “will always please by the moving picture of human manners and specious miracles,” believing the work, like the Aeneid, to be a politically instructive book. Gibbon’s magisterial The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is notoriously critical of medieval Christian Europe while remaining generally sympathetic to the Islamic civilization of the Middle East, especially the Abbasid caliphate. This viewpoint may have been an outgrowth of the delight the sickly and unattractive Gibbon derived from early readings of the Nights. In the words of his biographer, G.M. Young, Gibbon’s considerations of the Muslim East move “most freely … and the work of his manhood is shot [through] with a child’s vision of grave and bearded Sultans who only smiled on the day of battle, the sword of Alp Arslan, the mace of Mahmoud … and the Golden Mountains, and the Girdle of the Earth.”
Could some of Gibbon’s regard for medieval Islam come from his youthful exposure to an imaginary depiction of that world? Like others of his generation, and later figures such as Layard, Gibbon was first exposed to an alternative historical culture through the Arabian Nights, which became a significant aspect of his historical education. It’s a strange thought: that the man often considered the greatest historical writer of the modern age, creator of one of the most stately and soberly conceived histories ever written, could have been so shaped by a fantastical work read in childhood.
Or perhaps, as literary works, the Arabian Nights and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall are not as far apart as we might suppose. If scholars can view the secular nature of the Nights as a legitimate window onto the social dynamics of classical Islam, then this work, fusing the visionary with recognizable socio-historical times, is perhaps a dim, distant cousin to the professional historian’s attempt to define the structure of a bygone past through researched recreation.