Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875) in Turkish Dress, at Thebes: The Self-Fashioning of an Antiquarian Egyptologist

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural practice of Britons wearing indigenous dress, as well as debate as to what motivated people to re-fashion their identity in such radical ways. Typically, these practices have been viewed either as acts of cultural appropriation, or occasionally as acts of solidarity with other cultures. This article focuses on one individual, the antiquarian Egyptologist Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875), who wore Turkish dress whilst in Egypt, and was depicted wearing the same dress by the portrait artist Henry Wyndham Phillips, in 1843/44. Despite being reproduced in countless histories of Egyptology, archaeology and beyond, there currently exists no sustained critical analysis of Wilkinson’s relationship with this costume. I contend that Wilkinson’s choice of Turkish dress and his engagement with such clothing was both sustained and complicated. It reflected simple practicalities, but also an awareness of socio-political conditions in Egypt which were inadequately understood at an official level, due to high-handed expectations about how Britons should and should not behave, to bolster Britain’s national image abroad. At the same time, the same clothing could be interpreted differently by other audiences, and Phillips’s painting of Wilkinson – the components of which are identified for the first time – emerges as an attempt at self-fashioning on Wilkinson’s part, to cement his recently acquired status as a recognized authority about ancient Egypt. These concerns are applicable to other western scholars and travellers active in the Near East in the early nineteenth century.