I might almost have spared myself the labour of the present undertaking. Dictionary and other works From 1842 onwards, Lane devoted himself to the monumental Arabic-English Lexicon, although he found time to contribute several articles to the journal of Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft. He went to Egypt in 1842 with his wife, two children, and his sister Sophia Lane Poole who was working on her book The Englishwoman in Egypt. On this occasion Lane stayed in Egypt for 7 years, working six days a week on his Lexicon. A local scholar, Ibrahim al-Disqui, helped him with this work. Al-Disqui assisted in locating manuscripts and proofreading these manuscripts for Lane. The two became close during this period and continued to stay friends after they finished the Lexicon. Lane's Selections from the Kur-án appeared in 1843. It was neither a critical nor a commercial success. Moreover, it was misprint-ridden as Lane was for the third time in Egypt with his family collecting materials for the Arabic-English Lexicon when it was being printed. Lane was unable to complete his dictionary. He had arrived at the letter Qāf, the 21st letter of the Arabic alphabet, but in 1876 he died at Worthing, Sussex. Lane's great-nephew Stanley Lane-Poole finished the work based on his incomplete notes and published it in the twenty years following his death. In 1854, an anonymous work entitled The Genesis of the Earth and of Man was published, edited by Lane's nephew Reginald Stuart Poole. The work is attributed by some to Lane. The part concerning Cairo's early history and topography in Description of Egypt, based on Al-Maqrizi's work and Lane's own observations, was revised by Reginald Stuart Poole in 1847 and published in 1896 as Cairo Fifty Years Ago. Criticism Lane has been criticized for his particularly unsympathetic description of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority, drawn in part from the words of an Egyptian man who presented himself to Lane as a Copt, although other scholars have reported that the interlocutor was, in fact, a Muslim. In his writings, he describes Copts as "of a sullen temper, extremely avaricious, and abominable dissemblers; cringing or domineering according to circumstances. Scholars such as S.H. Leeder have described "a great deal of the morbid prejudice against the Copts" as being inspired by the writings of Lane. Personal life Lane was from a notable Orientalist family. His sister, Sophia Lane Poole, was an Oriental scholar, as