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The work is a curated collection of Edward FitzGerald’s correspondence, assembled after his death to give readers a portrait of the poet‑translator through his own words rather than a conventional biography. The editor, William Aldis Wright, explains that the letters have been selected to illustrate FitzGerald’s character and pursuits, and that additional material, particularly letters to his lifelong friend Mrs. Kemble, has recently become available from the firm of Richard Bentley and Son. The volume opens with a detailed preface that outlines the editorial philosophy, notes recent corrections to dates, and includes a poignant posthumous note from FitzGerald to Wright in which the poet entrusts his corrected manuscripts and personal papers to his friend. This introductory material sets the tone for a series of letters that begin with FitzGerald’s departure from college and continue almost to the day before his death, interspersed with occasional explanatory notes.
The letters retain FitzGerald’s unmistakable 19th‑century voice: quietly humorous, deeply affectionate, and suffused with a love of music and literature. Their style is conversational yet polished, reflecting the genteel yet modest milieu of his Cambridge circle and the wider literary network that included figures such as Carlyle, Thackeray, and the Poet‑Laureate. Readers who enjoy intimate glimpses into Victorian intellectual life, who appreciate the subtle wit of a man better known for his translation of The Rubáiyát, or who seek a nuanced portrait of a modest, musically inclined scholar will find this volume rewarding.
The opening · free to read
I do not suppose it likely that any of my works should be reprinted after my Death. Possibly the three Plays from the Greek, and Calderon's Magico: which have a certain merit in the Form they are cast into, and also in the Versification.
However this may be, I venture to commit to you this Box containing Copies of all that I have corrected in the way that I would have them appear, if any of them ever should be resuscitated.
The C. Lamb papers are only materials for you, or any one else, to use at pleasure.
The Crabbe volume would, I think, serve for an almost sufficient Selection from him; and some such Selection will have to be made, I believe, if he is to be resuscitated. Two of the Poems--'The Happy Day' and 'The Family of Love'--seem to me to have needed some such abridgement as the 'Tales of the Hall,' for which I have done little more than hastily to sketch the Plan. For all the other Poems, simple Extracts from them will suffice: with a short notice concerning their Dates of Composition, etc., at the Beginning.
My poor old Lowestoft Sea-slang may amuse yourself to look over perhaps.
And so, asking your pardon for inflicting this Box upon you I am ever sincerely yours
E. F. G.
In endeavouring to carry out these last wishes of my friend I thought that of the many who know him only as a translator some would be glad to have a picture of him as he appeared to the small circle of his intimate acquaintances. The mere narrative of the life of a man of leisure and literary tastes would have contained too few incidents to be of general interest, and it appeared to me best to let him be his own biographer, telling his own story and revealing his own character in his letters. Fortunately there are many of these, and I have endeavoured to give such a selection from them as would serve this purpose, adding a few words here and there to connect them and explain what was not sufficiently evident. As the letters begin from the time that he left College and continue with shorter or longer intervals till the day before his death, it was only necessary to introduce them by a short sketch of his early life in order to make the narrative complete.
FitzGerald's letters, like his conversation, were perfectly unaffected and full of quiet humour. In his lonely life they were the chief means he had of talking with his friends, and they were always welcome. In reply to one of them Carlyle wrote: 'Thanks for your friendly human letter; which gave us much entertainment in the reading (at breakfast time the other day), and is still pleasant to think of. One gets so many _in_human letters, ovine, bovine, porcine, etc., etc.: I wish you would write a little oftener; when the beneficent Daimon suggests, fail not to lend ear to him.' Another, who has since followed him 'from sunshine to the sunless land,' and to whom he wrote of domestic affairs, said, 'The striking feature in his correspondence with me is the exquisite tenderness of feeling which it exhibits in regard to all family matters; the letters might have been written by a mother or a sister.' He said of himself that his friendships were more like loves, and as he was constant in affectionate loyalty to others, he might also say with Brutus,
In all my life I found no man but he was true to me.
The Poet-Laureate, on hearing of his death, wrote to the late Sir Frederic Pollock: 'I had no truer friend: he was one of the kindliest of men, and I have never known one of so fine and delicate a wit. I had written a poem to him the last week, a dedication, which he will never see.'
When Thackeray, not long before he died, was asked by his daughter which of his old friends he had loved most, he replied, 'Why, dear old Fitz, to be sure; and Brookfield.'
And Carlyle, quick of eye to discern the faults and weaknesses of others, had nothing but kindliness, with perhaps a touch of condescension, 'for the peaceable, affectionate, and ultra-modest man, and his innocent far niente life.'
It was something to have been intimate with three such friends, and one can only regret that more of his letters addressed to them have not been preserved. Of those written to the earliest and dearest friend of all, James Spedding, not one is left.
One of his few surviving contemporaries, speaking from a lifelong experience, described him with perfect truth as an eccentric man of genius, who took more pains to avoid fame than others do to seek it.
His love of music was one of his earliest passions, and remained with him to the last. I cannot refrain from quoting some recollections of the late Archdeacon Groome, a friend of his College days, and so near a neighbour in later life that few letters passed between them. 'He was a true musician; not that he was a great performer on any instrument, but that he so truly appreciated all that was good and beautiful in music. He was a good performer on the piano, and could get such full harmonies out of the organ that stood in one corner of his entrance room at Little Grange as did good to the listener. Sometimes it would be a bit from one of Mozart's Masses, or from one of the finales of some one of his or Beethoven's Operas. And then at times he would fill up the harmonies with his voice, true and resonant almost to the last. I have heard him say, "Did you never observe how an Italian organ-grinder will sometimes put in a few notes of his own in such perfect keeping with the air which he was grinding?" He was not a great, but he was a good composer. Some of his songs have been printed, and many still remain in manuscript. Then what pleasant talk I have had with him about the singers of our early years; never forgetting to speak of Mrs. Frere of Downing, as the most perfect private singer we had ever heard. And so indeed she was. Who that had ever heard her sing Handel's songs can ever forget the purity of her phrasing and the pathos of her voice? She had no particle of vanity in her, and yet she would say, "Of course, I can sing Handel. I was a pupil of John Sale, and he was a pupil of Handel." To her old age she still retained the charm of musical expression, though her voice was but a thread. And so we spoke of her; two old men with all the enthusiastic admiration of fifty years ago. Pleasant was it also to hear him speak of the public singers of those early days. Braham, so great, spite of his vulgarity; Miss Stephens, so sweet to listen to, though she had no voice of power; and poor Vaughan, who had so feeble a voice, and yet was always called "such a chaste singer." How he would roar with laughter, when I would imitate Vaughan singing
His hiddeus (sic) love provokes my rage, Weak as I am, I must engage,
from Acis and Galatea. Then too his reminiscences of the said Acis and Galatea as given at the Concerts for Ancient Music. "I can see them now, the dear old creeters with the gold eye-glasses and their turbans, noddling their heads as they sang
O the pleasures of the plains!"
'These old creeters being, as he said, the sopranos who had sung first as girls, when George the Third was king.
'He was a great lover of our old English composers, specially of Shield. Handel, he said, has a scroll in his marble hand in the Abbey on which are written the first bars of
'He was fond of telling a story of Handel, which I, at least, have never seen in print. When Handel was blind he composed his "Samson," in which there is that most touching of all songs, specially to any one whose powers of sight are waning--"Total Eclipse." Mr. Beard was the great tenor singer of the day, who was to sing this song. Handel sent for him, "Mr. Beard," he said, "I cannot sing it as it should be sung, but I can tell you how it ought to be sung." And then he sang it, with what strange pathos need not be told. Beard stood listening, and when it was finished said, with tears in his eyes, "But Mr. Handel, I can never sing it like that." And so he would tell the story with tears in his voice, such as those best remember, who ever heard him read some piece of his dear old Crabbe, and break down in the reading.'
With this I will conclude, and I have only now to express my sincere thanks to all who have entrusted me with letters addressed to themselves or to those whom they represent. It has been my endeavour to justify their confidence by discretion. To Messrs. Richard Bentley and Son I am indebted for permission to reprint Virgil's Garden from the Temple Bar Magazine. {0a}
The portrait is from a photograph by Cade and White of Ipswich taken in 1873.
WILLIAM ALDIS WRIGHT.
TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 20 May, 1889.
Edward FitzGerald was born at Bredfield House in Suffolk, an old Jacobean mansion about two miles from Woodbridge, on the 31st of March, 1809. He was the third son of John Purcell, who married his cousin Mary Frances FitzGerald, and upon the death of her father in 1818 took the name and arms of FitzGerald. In 1816 Mr. Purcell went to France, and for a time settled with his family at St. Germains. FitzGerald in later life would often speak of the royal hunting parties which he remembered seeing in the forest. They afterwards removed to Paris, occupying the house in which Robespierre had once lived, and here FitzGerald had for his drillmaster one of Napoleon's Old Guard. Even at this early period the vivacious humour which afterwards characterized him appears to have shewn itself, for his father writing to some friends in England speaks of little Edward keeping the whole family in good spirits by his unfailing fun and droll speeches. The dramatic circumstances of the assassination of M. Fualdes, a magistrate at Rodez, in 1817, and the remarkable trial which followed, fastened themselves on FitzGerald's memory, and he was familiar with all the details which he had heard spoken of when quite a child in Paris. In 1821 he was sent to King Edward the Sixth's School at Bury St. Edmunds, where his two elder brothers were already under the charge of Dr. Malkin, who, like himself in after life, was a great admirer of Crabbe. Among his schoolfellows were James Spedding and his elder brother, W. B. Donne, J. M. Kemble, and William Airy the brother of Sir George Airy, formerly Astronomer-Royal. I have often heard him say that the best piece of declamation he had ever listened to was Kemble's recitation of Hotspur's speech, beginning 'My liege, I did deny no prisoners,' on a prize day at Bury. When he left for Cambridge in 1826 the Speddings were at the head of the School. He was entered at Trinity on 6th February 1826 under Mr. (afterwards Dean) Peacock and went into residence in due course in the following October, living in lodgings at Mrs. Perry's (now Oakley's), No. 19 King's Parade. James Spedding did not come up till the year following, and his greatest friends in later life, John Allen, afterwards Archdeacon of Salop, W. M. Thackeray, and W. H. Thompson, afterwards Master of Trinity, were his juniors at the University by two years. The three Tennysons were also his contemporaries, but it does not appear that he knew them till after he had left Cambridge. Indeed, in a letter to Mrs. Richmond Ritchie (Miss Thackeray), written in 1882, he says of the Laureate, 'I can tell you nothing of his College days; for I did not know him till they were over, though I had seen him two or three times before. I remember him well--a sort of Hyperion.'
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