Edward Lane was a British Orientalist and great-uncle of Stanley Lane-Poole.
He was part of a group of young British artists and architects who had begun to look at Islamic architecture in a deliberately analytical way. They not only tried to find new explanatory categories that might explain the architecture, but also searched for principles that might guide their own work. Crinson (1996, p. 26) refers to this movement as ‘new Orientalism’. When Lane arrived in Alexandria in 1825, Joseph Bonomi, James Haliburton, and J. G. Wilkinson were already there. Lane lived in Cairo for the next three years until 1828, and during this time he made two expeditions down the Nile recording ancient Egyptian monuments in obsessively accurate drawings, using a camera lucida. When Lane returned to England in 1828, he intended to publish a selection of his drawings as a ‘Description of Egypt’, but this never happened. Lane returned to Egypt for a further period of study from 1833 to 1835 and in 1836 he published his very influential book Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (Crinson, 1996, p. 28).
Edward Lane’s archive is preserved in the Griffith Institute, Oxford.

Crinson, M. (1996). Empire building : Orientalism and Victorian architecture. Routledge.

Lane, E. W. (1836). Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. London: Charles Knight and Co.

Thompson, J. (2010). Edward William Lane. The Life of the Pioneering Egyptologist and Orientalist. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.