Edward FitzGerald

English · 1809 to 1883

Born on March 31, 1809, at Bredfield House near Woodbridge in Suffolk, Edward FitzGerald was the seventh of eight children in a family of great wealth, his mother an heiress whose fortune dwarfed his father's. He grew up partly in France and was schooled at Bury St Edmunds, then went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he formed lifelong friendships with William Makepeace Thackeray and, later, Alfred Tennyson. After Cambridge he retreated to a quiet rural life in Suffolk, reading, gardening, and sailing on the River Deben aboard his small yacht the Scandal, content to be what he called an idle fellow. In middle age he taught himself Persian under the orientalist Edward Cowell, who introduced him to the verses attributed to the eleventh-century astronomer-poet Omar Khayyam. From these quatrains FitzGerald fashioned the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), a free rendering rather than a literal translation, published anonymously and at first ignored. The first edition sold for a penny in a London bookstall before Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne discovered it; FitzGerald revised it across four further editions. He also published Euphranor (1851), a Platonic dialogue, and translations of Calderon and the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. His brief and unhappy marriage in 1856 to Lucy Barton ended in swift separation. Solitary and eccentric, he signed his letters Old Fitz and kept up a vast correspondence later prized as much as his verse. He died in his sleep on June 14, 1883, while visiting a friend at Merton in Norfolk, aged seventy-four, and was buried at Boulge, where a rose grown from seed taken from Omar Khayyam's grave was later planted above him.