page_title: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night
section_title: Lady Burton's edition
hierarchical_section_title: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night / Editions / Lady Burton's edition
caption_attribution_description: English: Lady Burton's Edition of Her Husband's Arabian Nights Translated Literally from the Arabic (1886-1888); Prepared for Household Reading by Justin Huntly McCarthy, M.P.; 6 vols.; London: Waterlow &amp; Sons, Limited, London Wall.
context_page_description: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is an English language translation of One Thousand and One Nights – a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age – by the British explorer and Arabist Richard Francis Burton. It stood as the only complete translation of the Macnaghten or Calcutta II edition of the "Arabian Nights" until the Malcolm C. and Ursula Lyons translation in 2008.
  Burton's translation was one of two unabridged and unexpurgated English translations done in the 1880s; the first was by John Payne, under the title The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. Burton's ten volume version was published almost immediately afterward with a slightly different title. This, along with the fact that Burton closely advised Payne and partially based his books on Payne's, led later to charges of plagiarism.
context_section_description: Lady Burton's Edition of Her Husband's Arabian Nights Translated Literally from the Arabic (1886-1887); Prepared for Household Reading by Justin Huntly McCarthy, M.P.; 6 vols.; London: Waterlow & Sons, Limited, London Wall.
  This edition is ostensibly the “family” version of Burton's translation. (In her "Preface", Lady Burton guarantees that "no mother shall regret her girl's reading this Arabian Nights".) It is a much bowdlerized version of the original edition and was not a commercial success. It excises 215 of the original 3,215 pages, including Burton's defense of turpiquilum in his "Foreword", all sexually explicit commentary, and the two final essays on "Pornography" and "Pederasty." Lady Burton merely lent her name to this expurgated edition. As she stated before his death, "I have never read, nor do I intend to read, at his own request, and to be true to my promise to him, my husband's 'Arabian Nights' ".
caption: Title page of Volume I of Lady Burton's Edition of Her Husband's Arabian Nights.
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