Edward Marlborough (Purcell) FitzGerald (1809 - 1883)

Born 31 Mar 1809 in Woodbridge, Suffolk, England, United Kingdom

Husband of Lucy Barton — married 4 Nov 1856 (to 1857) in Chichester, West Sussex, England, United Kingdom

Died 14 Jun 1883 at age 74 in Merton, Norfolk, England, United Kingdom

Problems/Questions Profile managers: Mark Carroll [send private message] and Stephen Cox [send private message]

Biography

Edward (Purcell) FitzGerald was born in Suffolk, England.

Overview

Edward FitzGerald or Fitzgerald (31 March 1809 – 14 June 1883), born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, was an English poet and writer. ^[1] (See Research notes.) His most famous poem is the first and best known English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which has kept its reputation and popularity since the 1860s. ^[2] His marriage in 1856 ended in failure after only a few months, and he died childless in Suffolk, the county of his birth and burial and where he lived for much of his life. An English Heritage blue plaque pays fitting tribute to his outstanding contribution to world literature.

Blue plaque near Woodbridge, Suffolk

Early life

Edward FitzGerald was born, as Edward Purcell, into a Suffolk-based family with strong Irish roots and considerable wealth. His father, John (Purcell) FitzGerald MP (1775-1852), was a Member of Parliament and rich in his own right, having inherited substantial sums of money and land. ^[3] He had married on 16 May 1801 his first cousin, Mary Frances FitzGerald (abt.1779-1855), daughter and heir of John Fitzgerald of Little Island, Waterford, Ireland, and of Pendleton, Lancashire and of Gayton, Staffordshire. She bore him in the space of nine years three sons and 5 daughters, one of whom died young. ^[3] Her husband, as John Purcell, succeeded his father in 1806, and on the death of his father-in-law in 1818, took the family surname and coat of arms of Fitzgerald by Royal Licence on 3 October 1818. ^[4] The couple made their home in 1801 at Bredfield House - since demolished - two miles (3km) north of Woodbridge and eight miles (13km) north-east of Ipswich, the county town of Suffolk.

Bredfield House

1790 map of east Suffolk

Edward's older brother was John (Purcell) Purcell-Fitzgerald (abt.1803-1879). On the death of their mother in 1855 the family estates passed to John, said to be a highly eccentric and grossly fat lay preacher, who took the additional name of Purcell in 1858 and lived much at Castle Irwell on the Pendleton estate. ^[3] The second son, Peter Slingsby (Purcell) FitzGerald (abt.1807-1875), became a Catholic. One of Edward's four surviving sisters was Andalusia (Purcell) FitzGerald (abt.1813-abt.1879), who was baptised on 14 May 1813 at Bredfield. ^[5] The other sisters were Mary Frances, Eleanor Mary, Jane and Isabella.^[1] In 1816 the Purcell family moved to France, where they took a house in St Germain near Paris. When John and his children returned to Bredfield for the Summer, their mother Mary went on a grand European tour. The family reassembled in 1817 in Paris, where they lived in the Rue d'Angouleme until the death on 6 September 1818 of Mary's father, John Fitzgerald. From him she inherited a large fortune to add to her already considerable wealth.^[3] Until 1835 the FitzGerald family lived in Wherstead, Suffolk, but they stayed from then to 1853 at Boulge Hall nearby, not far from the tidal River Deben, with Edward living in a cottage in the grounds. From 1860 to 1873 the FitzGeralds resided at Farlingaye Hall, before finally moving to Woodbridge itself, where Edward stayed in his own house nearby called Little Grange.^[2]

Boulge Hall

Education and literary career

In 1821 Edward was sent to the King Edward VI School in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. In 1826 he enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge. He lived at 29 Kings Parade, Cambridge, and graduated in 1830 with the degree of Bachelor of Arts. ^[6] Whilst a university student he became acquainted with the subsequently noted author William Makepeace Thackeray. He also had several friends who were members of the Cambridge Apostles, an intellectual society that included the poet Alfred Tennyson; however, Edward was not invited to join the group. In 1830 he left for Paris but returned in 1831 to live in a farmhouse on the family estate at Naseby, Northamptonshire.
Edward's literary output never matched that of his more illustrious peers; it was hardly prodigious, often obscure, and went unrecognised for several years. In 1851 he published his first book, Euphranor, a Platonic dialogue inspired by memories of happy days in Cambridge. This was followed in 1852 by the publication of Polonius, a collection of 'saws and modern instances' - some of them his own, the rest borrowed from the less familiar English classics. He began his study of Spanish poetry in 1850 at Elmsett, Suffolk, followed in 1853 by Persian literature at the University of Oxford under Edward Byles Cowell, later the first professor of Sanskrit literature at Cambridge University. In March 1857 Cowell discovered a set of quatrains by the Persian poet and polymath, Omar Khayyám, in the library of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, India, and sent them to his former pupil. Edward eventually set to work to translate the set of four-line stanzas, and on 15 January 1859 an anonymous pamphlet appeared as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The publication achieved little early recognition, even amongst his close friends. It was not until 1861 that the work was discovered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the poet, painter and noted member of the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Rubaiyat slowly became famous, but it was not until 1868 that FitzGerald was encouraged to print a second, greatly revised edition of it. ^[2] He continued to produce other literary pieces, mainly translations and invariably obscure, but none achieved the same success as the Rubaiyat.

Front cover of the Rubaiyat, 1878

Personal and later life

On 4 November 1856 at All Saints' Church in Chichester, Sussex, Edward married Lucy, daughter of the Quaker poet Bernard Barton, a bank clerk who lived in Woodbridge. He had made a death-bed promise to Bernard in 1849 to look after her. The marriage was unhappy and the couple separated after only a few months, despite having known each other for many years and collaborated on a book about her father's works. ^[2] One factor contributing to the marriage breakdown might have been Edward's 'homoerotic tendencies', as claimed by some modern literary critics, at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England. Certainly he formed strong emotional bonds with several men during his lifetime. As a teenager he became very close to William Browne, whose tragic early death from a riding accident had a serious negative impact on him. Later Edward bought a fishing boat with Joseph Fletcher, known as "Posh", with whom he spent many happy hours sailing in the Suffolk area. His many letters reveal him to be a witty, picturesque and sympathetic correspondent and friend, though his fellow villagers tended to describe him as eccentric. He died in 1883 in the Old Rectory of the village of Merton, Norfolk, while visiting his friend and the vicar of Bredfield, George Crabbe, whose works he had been editing. Towards the end of his life Edward had renounced his Christian faith, but he was nevertheless buried on 19 June 1883 in the churchyard of St Michael and All Angels Church, Boulge, next to the family mausoleum. The words on his tomb read: "It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves." - a curious epitaph for an agnostic. ^{[7] [8]}

Grave of Edward FitzGerald

In his will, proved at Ipswich on 24 July 1883, he left about £36,000 - equivalent to over £3 million in present-day money. ^[9] The will names many family members: Margaret, Honoraria and Mary Frances, three of the daughters of his uncle Peter Purcell of Halverstown, County Kildare, Ireland; and the ten children of his sister Eleanor Mary and her husband, the late John Kerrich of Geldeston Hall, Norfolk - Eleanor Frances, Elizabeth, Amelia Jane, Mary, Andalusia, Anna, Maria Theresa, Adeline Walker, Edmund and john. He also left a bequest of £500 to Anne, the wife of Mr Richmond Ritchie and eldest daughter of his friend from university days, William Makepeace Thackeray.

Legacy

A Suffolk man born and bred, Edward FitzGerald was fortunate in that, through his wealthy but somewhat unconventional family, he never had to work to earn a living.^[1] He was able to devote considerable time to learning foreign languages proficiently enough that he could translate works in Persian, Spanish and Greek to a high standard. Most of his literary output now goes unrecognised, with the notable exception of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Undoubtedly Edward's legacy rests on his bringing to the attention of a wider Western audience one of the jewels of Oriental literature.

Sources

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} Wright, Thomas. The Life of Edward Fitzgerald. London, England, United Kingdom: Grant Richards, 1904. Available at: https://archive.org/stream/lifeofedwardfitz01wriguoft/lifeofedwardfitz01wriguoft_djvu.txt [accessed 19 September 2022]
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3} Edward FitzGerald (poet). Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Edward_FitzGerald_(poet)&oldid=1109725258 [accessed 19 September 2022]
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3} Fitzgerald, John (1775-1852), of Wherstead Lodge, nr. Ipswich, Suff. and Millburgh, Seaford, Suss. Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1820-1832, ed. D.R. Fisher, 2009. Available at: HOPO [accessed 15 Sep 2022]
4. ↑ The London Gazette, issue 17404, page 1768, 3 October 1818. Available at: https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/17404/page/1768 [accessed 23 September 2022].
5. ↑ "England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:J77T-45C : 18 September 2020), Andalusia Purcell, 1813. [accessed 19 September 2022]
6. ↑ A Cambridge Alumni Database. Available at: ACAD [accessed 23 September 2022].
7. ↑ Victorian Web. Available at: https://victorianweb.org/authors/fitzgerald/bio.html [accessed 16 September 2022].
8. ↑ Memorial: Find a Grave (has image)
   Find A Grave: Memorial #6826127 (accessed 3 October 2022)
   Memorial page for Edward FitzGerald Famous memorial (31 Mar 1809-14 Jun 1883), citing St Michael Churchyard, Boulge, Suffolk Coastal District, Suffolk, England; Maintained by Find a Grave.
   "It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves".
9. ↑ Inflation calculator. Available at: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator [accessed 29 September 2022].

Research notes

• Edward invariably signed his surname as FitzGerald (see image below), but the form more often seen in the modern literature concerning him is Fitzgerald. Given his personal preference for FitzGerald, this is the form used in this profile. He was in fact born Edward Purcell. As explained later in the Biography, his father changed the family surname from Purcell to FitzGerald when Edward was still a boy.

Signature of Edward FitzGerald

• Edward attended Trinity College from 1826 and Steve Cox wrote to Chris Jephson some time ago: "Just as Fitzgerald entered Cambridge, there left it, in ill odour, an Edward Marlborough Fitzgerald, a fact which, combined with other reasons not given, caused Fitzgerald to dislike heartily his own name, and led him on occasions to use as a signature merely the initials EFG."

• Following up on another lead, Chris Jephson contacted Syracuse University in the US as the late Professor Alfred Terhune was one of the leading experts on Edward and published 'The Life of Edward Fitzgerald, 1830-1883' in four volumes. The University holds a major collection of his letters and after investigating, the University librarian confirmed that his full name was Edward Marlborough Fitzgerald although he did not use that name.

Acknowledgements

I thank Stephen Cox for providing the initial biographical information in this profile before I developed it further. Carroll-12825 09:02, 23 September 2022 (UTC).