Edward FitzGerald

Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883) was born near Woodbridge, Suffolk, into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, and lived one of the quietest lives in English literary history — yet produced one of its most famous poems. His free translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), a sequence of quatrains attributed to the eleventh-century Persian mathematician and poet, became one of the most widely quoted poems in the English language. Its philosophy of carpe diem — “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou” — spoke to an age losing its religious certainties and discovering that pleasure and mortality might be all there is.

Life and Career

FitzGerald was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he formed friendships with Thackeray, Tennyson, and Thomas Carlyle that would last a lifetime. He had independent means and no ambition for public life, settling into a life of quiet reading, gardening, sailing, and letter-writing in his beloved Suffolk.

He married Lucy Barton, the daughter of a friend, in 1856, but the marriage was a disaster — they separated within months and were temperamentally incompatible in every way. FitzGerald’s deepest emotional attachments were to male friends, particularly the fisherman Joseph “Posh” Fletcher, with whom he sailed and whose company he preferred to any literary society.

He learned Persian from his friend Edward Cowell and began translating the quatrains of Omar Khayyám, an eleventh-century Persian polymath. The result — 75 quatrains in the first edition, expanded to 101 in later editions — is less a translation than a free adaptation, restructuring the scattered quatrains into a coherent meditation on the transience of life, the futility of philosophy, and the imperative to seize pleasure while one can.

The first edition (1859, Bernard Quaritch) was published anonymously in an edition of 250 copies and was a complete commercial failure. Copies were eventually remaindered at a penny each. Then Dante Gabriel Rossetti discovered it in a penny box, showed it to Swinburne and others, and the poem became a cult sensation that grew into one of the great publishing phenomena of the Victorian era.

FitzGerald revised the poem through four editions (1859, 1868, 1872, 1879), each slightly different. He died in his sleep in 1883 at Merton Rectory, near Woodbridge.

Major Works and Themes

The Rubáiyát is a poem about mortality, pleasure, and the vanity of human ambition — themes that resonated powerfully with Victorian readers struggling with Darwinism and the Higher Criticism. FitzGerald’s Omar is a philosophical hedonist who rejects both religious consolation and philosophical system-building in favour of wine, love, and the rose-garden.

Critical Reception and Legacy

The Rubáiyát was enormously popular from the 1860s through the early twentieth century — Rubáiyát clubs were formed, illustrated editions proliferated, and the poem was quoted everywhere. Its reputation declined with modernism, but it remains one of the most recognizable poems in English.

Key Works

• Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859; revised 1868, 1872, 1879)

Collecting FitzGerald

The first edition of the Rubáiyát (1859, Bernard Quaritch, 250 copies) is one of the most legendary items in book collecting. Copies that were once sold for a penny now bring $50,000–$200,000 at auction. It is among the most dramatic appreciation stories in bibliographic history.

The second edition (1868): $2,000–$8,000. Third (1872) and fourth (1879) editions: $500–$3,000 each.

The Rubáiyát inspired hundreds of illustrated editions — by Edmund Dulac, Willy Pogany, Elihu Vedder, and others. The Vedder illustrations (1884, Houghton Mifflin) are particularly collected: $200–$1,000.

FitzGerald’s letters are also collected — they are among the finest in the English language, praised by everyone from Tennyson to Virginia Woolf.