Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Baronet
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Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, 2nd Baronet (20 October 1873 – 8 January 1944) was a British would-be-oriental scholar and "black sheep" of the Backhouse family who is currently famous mostly for his fraudulent diary.
Backhouse was born into a Quaker family in Darlington; his relatives included many churchmen and scholars and he probably tried to rise to their stature. He ended up as a professor of law and literature in the University of Peking. In 1918 he inherited the family baronetcy from his father, Sir Jonathan Backhouse, 1st Baronet. He attended Winchester College and Merton College, Oxford.
Backhouse formed connections to the Chinese imperial court and used them to negotiate favourable business deals to western companies. In 1910 he published a book China Under the Empress Dowager and in 1914 Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking, both with British journalist J.O.P. Bland. With these books he established his reputation as an oriental scholar. Both are probably based on Backhouse's own forgeries.
In 1913 Backhouse began to donate a great many Chinese manuscripts to the Bodleian Library, probably hoping to receive a status of professor in return. He delivered total of eight tons of manuscripts to the Bodleian between 1913 and 1923. The provenance of the manuscripts is in serious doubt.
In 1916 he presented himself as a representative of the Imperial Court and negotiated two fraudulent deals with American Bank Note Company and John Brown & Company, a British shipbuilder. Neither company received any confirmation from the court. When they tried to contact Backhouse, he had left the country. After he returned to Peking in 1922, he refused to speak about the deals. He spent the last 18 years of his life alone in China, and died in Peking towards the end of the Second World War.
In 1973 British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper received a manuscript of Backhouse's memoirs. In those, Backhouse boasted of having had affairs with prominent people including Lord Rosebery, Verlaine, an Ottoman princess, Oscar Wilde and even the Empress Dowager Cixi of China. He also claimed to have visited Leo Tolstoy and played opposite to Sarah Bernhardt.
Trevor-Roper described the diary as "pornographic" and investigated its claims. Eventually he declared that the supposed exploits were just a figment of Backhouse's own imagination.
He told The Literary Digest: "My name is pronounced back'us" (Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)
[edit] Books
- Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper: A Hidden Life - The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse (Published in the USA as The Hermit of Peking) (1976)
| Preceded by: Jonathan Edmund Backhouse |
Baronet (of Uplands, Somerset) 1918–1944 |
Succeeded by: John Backhouse |
This page incorporates information from Leigh Rayment's Peerage Page.
