The Man Behind the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The Life and Letters of Edward Fitzgerald

William H. Martin, Sandra Mason

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784536596
• eBook ISBN: 9781786720146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Its lines and verses have become part of the western literary canon and his translation of this most famous of poems has been continuously in print in for almost a century and a half. But just who was Edward FitzGerald? Was he the eccentric recluse that most scholars would have us believe? Is there more to the man than just his famous translation? In The Man Behind the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam William Martin and Sandra Martin go beyond the standard view. Drawing on their unique analysis of the more than 2, 000 surviving letters of FitzGerald, together with evidence from his scrapbooks, commonplace books and materials from his personal library, they reveal a more convivial yet complex personality than we have been led to suppose."

Part I

FitzGerald from his own words: the relationships and events that shaped his life

1 Edward FitzGerald: a man of letters

Much more than the Rubáiyát

Edward FitzGerald is best known as the ‘translator’ of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.¹ Beyond this, he has a reputation as an eccentric recluse. But there is much more to FitzGerald than either of these attributes suggests. In particular, he was also a convivial and supportive friend, a cultured man of letters and the arts, a fine poet and writer of more than the Rubáiyát, and a passionate lover of East Anglia.

The support for these assertions lies primarily in FitzGerald’s own correspondence. FitzGerald’s letters have been studied previously by many researchers, especially for information about his work on the Rubáiyát, and for insights into his personal life and friendships.² These earlier analyses notwithstanding, there is still much more to be learnt about FitzGerald from his letters, both as an interesting and generous person, and as a Victorian intellectual and communicator.

In this part of the study, we aim to put the Rubáiyát in perspective in terms of FitzGerald’s life, as we examine what the available material tells us about FitzGerald’s principal relationships and the key events that shaped his life. In Part II, we explore his interests in and thoughts on many specific subjects, highlighting insights from the analysis into the nature and conventions of Victorian intellectual life, the changes in society and technology from the early 1800s, and the crucial role played by letters in the networking and personal contacts of the period.

Illustration 3. An example of FitzGerald’s multi-topic letters.

Basic features of the letters

The letters available to us cover virtually the whole of FitzGerald’s adult life. The first one found by the Terhunes was sent to his university friend John Allen in January 1830, when FitzGerald was aged only 20. The final letter was sent on 12 June 1883 from Woodbridge to Samuel Laurence the painter; this was just two days before FitzGerald’s death, aged 74, at the home of his friend George Crabbe at Merton in Norfolk.

The number of surviving letters sent by FitzGerald built up fairly steadily from the 1840s. The main interruption to this progression was in the late 1850s when, as we shall see in Chapter 5, FitzGerald was preoccupied with troubles in his private life. His most active letter writing period was in the 1870s and the early 1880s. This probably reflects the fact that FitzGerald was no longer travelling round and visiting his friends as much as in earlier years. Writing became a substitute for direct personal contact in many cases.

Throughout his life FitzGerald’s letters were very wide-ranging in their subject matter, and a single letter often contained references to a great variety of different topics, covering news about the author and his friends as well as enlightening comments on books or religion, and queries about abstruse issues of translation or East Anglian dialect. An example of a relatively short letter is given in illustration 3.

Three-quarters of all FitzGerald’s letters contain some news of, or comments on, his friends, family or acquaintances, and more than two-thirds include references to what he himself was writing or reading. Other topics, such as the arts (theatre, music and pictures) and religion and current affairs, vary much more in importance depending on what was happening in FitzGerald’s life, and to whom he was writing, and they are much less significant overall.

FitzGerald had over 100 direct correspondents for whom letters remain. Brief descriptions of them are given in Appendix 1. FitzGerald’s correspondents represent most aspects of his life. Very few letters to his family have survived, but there are representatives of his school and university friends, neighbours, artistic and literary contacts, and many others including local residents and tradespeople.

The charts on page 10 provide a broad summary of the nature of FitzGerald’s surviving correspondence in statistical terms. Account must also be taken of the letters that are probably missing from the many that do survive. Our detailed analysis of the possible gaps in the correspondence is in Appendix 4. It is clear that the surviving letters of Edward FitzGerald do not form an unbiased sample of his total correspondence. As far as possible we have allowed for this in presenting our analysis of FitzGerald’s life and reaching our conclusions.

Figure 1. FitzGerald’s letters – a summary.

Source: see Appendix 4.

2 FitzGerald’s early years: 1809–29

A wealthy Victorian family

Edward FitzGerald was born on 31 March 1809, the sixth child of a very wealthy Anglo-Irish family.¹ He had two older brothers, John and Peter, and five sisters. Mary Francis, the eldest sister, died aged 18 years, while Eleanor and Jane were both older than Edward, and Isabella and Andalusia younger. Edward was actually born Edward Purcell, but his father, John Purcell, and the rest of the family changed their surnames to FitzGerald in 1818, when Edward’s mother, Mary Frances FitzGerald, inherited a substantial fortune in property in England and Ireland from her father. She was then reputed to be the wealthiest commoner in England.²

The FitzGerald letters contain relatively few comments about Edward’s childhood and upbringing. Earlier biographies suggest that the family life mirrored the typical image of landowners of the Victorian era, with distant and disciplinarian parents. John FitzGerald, Edward’s father, was a country squire, who was also a Member of Parliament (for Sussex) and High Sheriff both of Suffolk and in County Cork in Ireland. Portraits from the time, including one by Thomas Lawrence, show that Edward’s mother was a beautiful woman; she was also clearly a strong and domineering character.

The one substantial comment about Mrs FitzGerald in the letters is very double-edged. Writing in 1872 when he was aged 63 to his friend Fanny Kemble, who had known his mother, FitzGerald commented: ‘My Mother used to come up sometimes [to the children’s nursery], and we Children were not much comforted. She was a remarkable woman, as you said in a former letter: and as I constantly believe in outward Beauty as an Index of a beautiful Soul within, I used sometimes to wonder what feature in her fine face betrayed what was not so good in her Character.’³

Illustration 4. Portrait of FitzGerald’s mother.
Mrs Mary Frances FitzGerald.

Despite his rather austere family upbringing, FitzGerald developed quite a strong sense of responsibility for his large family. This is highlighted in the many mentions of family members in the letters, more of which are quoted in the FitzGerald family section in Chapter 12. He does not show any particular love for either of his parents, nor for his eldest brother John. But he seems to have got on quite well with his brother Peter and with all his sisters. He was especially fond of his elder sister Eleanor, with whose family he stayed often and whose children were his frequent companions in his later years. FitzGerald left his residual estate to be divided between these Kerrich nieces and nephews, excluding only the oldest son, who inherited his father’s estate.

Early experiences of East Anglia and France

FitzGerald’s birthplace was a small village called Bredfield, close to Woodbridge in Suffolk. His family had rented the White House in Bredfield, and they remained there for the next six years. The estuary of the Deben at Woodbridge was nearby, and some summer holidays were spent on the Suffolk coast at Aldeburgh, as FitzGerald recalled when revisiting the resort in 1882, the year before he died.⁴

This early experience of East Anglia was reinforced when the family returned to the area in 1818 after a two-year stay in France. FitzGerald was then sent with his brothers ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the quotations from the letters
• A chronology of the life of Edward FitzGerald
• Introduction: the man behind the Rubáiyát
• Part I FitzGerald from his own words: the relationships and events that shaped his life
• Part II Insights into Victorianlife and opinions from FitzGerald’s letters
• Part III Background information and additional analyses
• Notes
• Bibliography