Edward FitzGerald

Edward FitzGerald or Fitzgerald (31 March 1809 - 14 June 1883) was an English poet and writer best known as a poet for the first and most famous English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. This has remained famous since the 1860s. Edward FitzGerald was born Edward Purcell at Bredfield House in Bredfield, some 2 miles north of Woodbridge, Suffolk, England, in 1809. In 1818, his father, John Purcell, assumed the name and arms of his wife's family, the FitzGeralds. His elder brother John used the surname Purcell-Fitzgerald from 1858. The family name change occurred shortly after FitzGerald's mother inherited her second fortune. She had previously inherited over half a million pounds from an aunt, but in 1818, her father died and left her considerably more than that. The FitzGeralds were one of the wealthiest families in England. Edward FitzGerald later commented that all of his relatives were mad; further, that he was insane as well, but was at least aware of the fact. In 1816, the family moved to France, and lived in St Germain as well as Paris, but in 1818, after the aforementioned death of his maternal grandfather, the family had to return to England. In 1821, Edward was sent to King Edward VI School, Bury St Edmunds. In 1826, he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge. He became acquainted with William Makepeace Thackeray and William Hepworth Thompson. Though he had many friends who were members of the Cambridge Apostles, most notably Alfred Tennyson, FitzGerald himself was never offered an invitation to this famous group.^{[citation needed]} In 1830, FitzGerald left for Paris, but in 1831 was living in a farmhouse on the battlefield of Naseby. In 1853, FitzGerald issued Six Dramas of Calderon, freely translated. He then turned to Oriental studies, and in 1856 published anonymously a version of the Sálamán and Absál of Jami in Miltonic verse. In March 1857, Cowell discovered a set of Persian quatrains by Omar Khayyám in the Asiatic Society library, Calcutta, and sent them to FitzGerald. At the time, the name with which FitzGerald has been so closely identified first occurs in his correspondence: "Hafiz and Omar Khayyam ring like true metal." On 15 January 1859, an anonymous pamphlet appeared as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In the world at large and the circle of FitzGerald's close friends, the poem seems at first to have attracted no attention. The publisher allowed it to gravitate to a fourpenny or even (as he afterwards boasted) to a penny box on the bookstalls. Posh died at Mutford Union workhouse, near Lowestoft, on 7 September 1915, at the age of 76.