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A life-size statue would usually make visitors of the National Portrait Gallery in London admire and strike a pose with it. As part of the curiosity of the subject visitors' eyes, they go to those Scholars of Middle East and Egyptologists to recognize the names and learn something about them. On the other hand, Edward William Lane is different from those people who were inspired by those life-size statues life histories; his mother Sophia Gardiner who has a very interesting story as a sister and daughter to her siblings and parents had the greatest impact on Lane. Additionally, Lane's education, which was initiated by his father before going to grammar schools, wherein he learned almost everything he knew in his researches and gave him the ability to learn continuously, is enumerated and discussed.

The first volume of Edward William Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon was published in spring 1863, twenty-two years after the project began. It displays all the photographic accuracy for which he is so well known, combined with scholarship of a kind — acquired as it was in the East — which is hard to attain. The nomination of “M. Edouard Guillaume Lane” described him as a distinguished orientalist who had made “little noise in the world” but had become well known to the learned; it confidently predicted that the Arabic-English Lexicon would become “a mine of research for the centuries.” Turning the pages of beautifully chromolithographed plates, Lane remembered the original drawings that Lepsius had shown him twenty years before in Cairo. As he occasionally confided, a secret part of him was still fascinated with ancient Egypt.

An aura of achievement surrounded Edward William Lane. He became known as “Egyptian Lane”, Britain's foremost authority on the modern Near East. His personal charm was what people noticed. Everyone liked him. It is too easy to infer from his lifestyle in later years that Lane was a natural recluse, devoid of social skills; in fact, he was the opposite. Few could know Lane without seeking to be his friend and his worth was not that of an uncut diamond. The courtesy and grace of his manners were conspicuous. Lane would have become quite a figure on the Victorian intellectual scene, but self-promotion was never part of his personality, and he had little interest in personal glory. Lane supervised the finances, receiving funds from Hay and doling out payments to Bonomi as they were due, but his involvement in the actual business was small and required no close supervision.

Despite sore eyes and generally miserable health, Edward William Lane still wrote the first draft of his book in London during 1829. He stuck to his writing while almost entirely housebound by strict physician's orders. His book's title was Description of Egypt, but exactly when it became so is unclear. The first two manuscript drafts have no title; only the third has one — not the one under which it was eventually published — and it is unlikely to have been his first or final choice. Although the text of the first draft of Description of Egypt, now in the Bodleian Library, is only about one-quarter as long as the third and final draft, a note in it shows how Lane initially envisioned the book's shape. It was to extend to four volumes, with nearly one hundred plates; the chapter about Thebes alone would require at least eighteen illustrations.

This chapter discusses Edward William Lane's expedition of the Nile river on March 1826 with Osman Effendi's unfailing assistance. For this trip, Lane hired a boat to reach Second Cataract in Nubia from Nile. Lane tended to travel light but made sure of the safety of the basics like plentiful water jugs and supplies of bread and meat. There were different itineraries which made Lane see and examine differences among places. The stop every night on the Nile voyage helped them to have the relished supper beside the river. Furthermore, Lane's mode of operation for the voyage downriver was also altered and sharpened his focus.

Edward William Lane's artistic training made him access the most of the opportunity, wherein he could easily assess the various media and techniques of the ancient artists. While the different plateaus, which were not really visible to Lane, were the ones he chose for his habitat, he saw most clearly what he called New Kingdom because of its recent abundance. Different conflicts about Lane's stay in Egypt have been one of the issues here. Moreover, Lane had critical good sense to ignore the Hermetic texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Also, his reputation as a pioneering Egyptologist had been established and made him marked as an orientalist due to his inevitable assessment of Egypt's modern inhabitants. In addition, Lane examined the two most important French works to appear about Egypt during the eighteenth century.

Observing “the life of a great scholar that should not be suffered to pass away into forgetfulness” is the main rationale of this brief journal written by Stanley Lane-Poole about his uncle, Edward William Lane. Edward William Lane is a British orientalist, translator and lexicographer. Most of his influential and widely cited works involve the history of Middle East studies. However, Lane-Poole did not write this for his uncle's scholarly reputation; instead, he wanted to keep the memory of Lane. Moreover, this book's structure is presented in a narrative biography form that is supported by other outlines of inquiry and prosopography.

Cairo was the next step for Edward William Lane's growing experience in Egypt. His exploration here served as an exploration of intense curiosity for widening horizons that seemed maybe rarely impossible. Just like his previous works wherein comparisons can be put through his series of dated notebooks and journals about each place, he went through for easy identification of his current place. Lane this time, in his trip to Cairo, was a bit different as his most formative experiences, his most crucial insights were obtained, and few sources have come to light. Aside from the curiosity of Lane in Cairo, its magnificent Islamic monuments made him more fascinated about Cairo, wherein the public buildings such as mosques gave him most interest.

Edward William Lane has his own inspiration as a reason for coming into Egypt. The zealous attachment to the study of oriental literature and particular desire to render familiarity with the Arabs' language, manners, and their customs were the main reasons for Lane's visit to Egypt. Due to this visit, his language study advanced faster than expected. For him, studying Arabic and learning about Egyptian society were closely entwined processes. Part of Lane's stay in Egypt and having his Egyptian friends created a lot of differences in him as he shrouded another Eastern name, Mansur, generally known as Mansur Effendi. Included as well here are the other sacrifices of Lane for his Egyptian identity, his acquaintances, and Muhammad Ali's regime in Egypt, where he had his views about it.

Part of Edward William Lane's expedition in Egypt was his stay in Cairo where he spent his first days. Most of the impressions that came on Lane amounted to a never-ending visual feast. Moreover, a remarkable man named Osman Effendi played a symbolic role for Lane as part of his experiences. Osman Effendi was a native of Scotland whose name was William Thomson, but on his conversion to Islam it was changed to Osman Effendi. Issues of the true nature of Osman have been raised, which led to Lane's immediate change from European clothing to Turkish attire, giving additional benefit for an unsolvable disguise.

During the seventy-three days spent at Thebes during Edward William Lane's visit, he made a scrupulous immersion in Egyptology. The Valley of the Kings is a large wadi which today is clearly defined as a natural stone portal. During those two and a half months, Lane worked at most of the major Theban sites, and devoted most of his time to three places. Although he spent most of his week at Thebes, he still researched and visited all the different places at the Valley of the Kings.

In 1825, Edward William Lane went to Egypt where he had experienced one of the most memorable events of his life. During his first few days of stay there, all things went well as he enjoyed watching the English coast and other shows. In this trip, Lane found himself enjoying every detail of it. This chapter discusses everything that Lane had experienced in one of his trips. Apart from the wonderful experiences that Lane had, he also met some people, and one of them was Salt who had provided them letters to be introduced to Cairo.

During the years that Jason Thompson was engaged in the overall Edward William Lane project, of which this edition of Lane's Description of Egypt is a part, Jason incurred scholarly debts to so many individuals that it long ago became impractical to list them all. A zealous attachment to the study of oriental literature, and a particular desire to render himself familiar with the language of the Arabs, and with their manners and customs, induced Jason to visit Egypt. But these were not his only motives. He had long entertained a wish to examine the antiquities of that most interesting country: and as he felt, even before he commenced his travels, that there was a probability of his publishing the observations that he might make.

There is no record of how Dr. Robert Darwin diagnosed Charles' illness. Some doctors were “puzzled” by the illness. Others viewed it as a form of dyspepsia: Dr. James Gully diagnosed it as “nervous dyspepsia”. Dr. Edward Wickstead Lane described it as “dyspepsia of an aggravated character”. George Busk thought it was “waterbrash”, whereas the British Medical Journal reported that Darwin had suffered from “catarrhal dyspepsia”. Dr. Henry Holland concluded that Darwin was suffering from a form of gout without joint inflammation, “nearer to suppressed gout”. Drs. William Brinton and William Jenner also suspected “suppressed gout”, and Dr. Andrew Clark found manifestations of a “gouty” state. For several doctors, these two diagnoses were related. Darwin came to believe that two causes for his illness were the ill effects of the Beagle cruise and heredity.

The impressive Egyptological momentum of the 1820s and 1830s was not fully maintained in the years that immediately followed. When Champollion died in his early 40s there was no one to replace him. His brother Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac saw Champollion's remaining publications through press, but without correcting or improving them, while refusing to cooperate with others who might have helped. The scholars who succeeded Champollion in his academic post at the Collège de France and at the Louvre were unable to advance his work. In Britain, the promising work of the Rev. Edward Hincks, a pioneer in hieratic studies, languished for lack of support. Robert Hay, having accomplished so much in Egypt, lost interest and left his large portfolio unpublished. It was the same with William John Bankes. John Gardner Wilkinson, now Sir Gardner Wilkinson, having made a great impression with his Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, could not find significant ways to move ahead, although he was convinced that much of value remained in his papers. Edward William Lane was unable to find a publisher for his major work about ancient Egypt.

Charles Darwin began to write what he hoped would become a comprehensive and very big book entitled Natural Selection. Despite anxieties over work and children, he did not experience a serious increase in illness, and his main complaints about his health were of working “too hard” on Natural Selection and of sometimes being “overdone” because of his work. By “overdone”, he meant mental fatigue and increases in flatulence. He tried hydropathy at Moor Park, in Surrey, due to his poor health. At Moor Park—after a week of daily shallow baths, douches, and sitz baths—he felt benefits to his health. The physician based at Moor Park, Dr. Edward Wickstead Lane, lacked the national prominence of Dr. Gully. After a sojourn at Moor Park, Darwin returned to Down and, feeling better, resumed work on his species book, only to fall ill yet again. During his sojourn in Moor Park, while he relaxed from writing Natural Selection, he was able to advance his work.

This chapter discusses the Robinson v. Robinson and Lane divorce case of 1858. When Isabella Robinson became ill, her husband read her diary that revealed her adulterous affair with her physician, Dr. Edward Lane. Mr. Robinson initiated, in December 1857, a suit for divorce with the diary as sole evidence on which the Court would base its decision. Dr. Lane was dismissed from the suit and Mrs. Robinson's diary was discredited. The Court ruled that the passages were written by a delusional woman who is suffering from a uterine disease. The chapter critically examines the contents of the diary as evidence of a woman's bodily passions and desires and then explores the arguments about the effects of uterine disturbances on mental health.