To Edmund Gosse there was something exasperating and pitiable in the spectacle of Edward FitzGerald’s ‘career’. ‘He was a man of taste in easy circumstances,’ Gosse remarked, ‘and until he was forty years of age he was nothing else whatever.’ Biographers have done what they can to disperse the atmosphere of drift and dilettantism that suffuses his life, but Gosse’s judgement, that of a man who had worked for his living and was subject to the discipline of a professional writer and ‘man of letters’, is more clear-sighted. FitzGerald was born in 1809 to a wealthy Anglo-Irish family — so wealthy that what remained, after multiple financial reverses (the most serious being his father’s disastrous speculation in coal-mining in the grounds of one of his own estates), was more than enough to support him throughout his life.
His father was a squirearchical cipher; his mother was a Thackerayan grotesque of social pretension and emotional nullity. Recalling his small child’s view of the world from the nursery at Bredfield Hall, he wrote many years later: ‘My Mother used to come up sometimes, and we Children were not much comforted.’ For years FitzGerald’s only ‘occupation’, after his parents separated, was to accompany his mother, as nominal male companion, to society dinners and the theatre in London and Brighton. He writhed, but until her death in 1855 could not escape. His education, at the King Edward VI Grammar School in Bury St Edmunds and Trinity College, Cambridge, was benign and productive of close friendships and wide, unsystematic learning (mostly outside the formal curriculum); but it led to no profession, indeed to no activity. He had no fixed idea of what to do; there was no need for him to make what Samuel Johnson, in Rasselas, calls ‘the choice of life’. It may be said that not to choose itself constitutes a choice, but it is hardly a vocation.
FitzGerald’s way of life became an odd blend of transience and tenacity, and a paradoxical emblem of his social origins and standing. He did not have a house of his own until he bought Little Grange on the outskirts of Woodbridge in 1864 — and he did not actually move in until he was evicted from his lodgings in 1873. (He then took to signing himself ‘Littlegrange’ or ‘The Laird of Little Grange’.) Yet he was rooted in Suffolk; his Sea Words and Phrases along the Suffolk Coast (1869) is evidence of intense attachment, and of his hostility to the landowners who bought up the coastline, blocked up footpaths, and persecuted poachers. No one but a gentleman completely assured of his own breeding could have excoriated one of his neighbours as a ‘bull-dog-named Potentate, on whose large slice of Suffolk birds do accumulate and men decay; cottages left to ruin lest they should harbour a dog, or a gun, or a poor man’. No one but a gentleman could have got away with dressing as FitzGerald dressed, or behaving as he behaved in public, while reserving the privileges of his rank.
His slovenliness was not an affectation, and neither was his occasional and startling rudeness.15 He was not disreputable, but he was not respectable either; he was not ‘alienated’, not a poète maudit like Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du mal was published in 1857, two years before the Rubáiyát); he was not urban enough for that. Yet he was unassimilated, except to the grand tradition of English eccentricity. Nowhere is this more evident than in his life as a writer, which may be described as a kind of anti-career, devoid of professional or financial ambition, haphazard, miscellaneous, and undeveloped: for although the Rubáiyát belongs to a group of translations, the group itself has no intellectual or stylistic coherence, and nothing but chronological sequence links FitzGerald’s first composition to his
Human Condition and the Universal Message of Khayyam
