FitzGerald, EDWARD, was born March 31, 1809, at Bredfield House, near Woodbridge, in Suffolk. His father, John Purcell, took his wife's family name on her father's death in 1818. In 1816 the family went to France, and lived for a time at St Germain, and afterwards at Paris. In 1821 he was sent to King Edward VI.'s School at Bury St Edmunds, where James Spedding, W. B. Donne, and J. M. Kemble were among his schoolfellows. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1826, where Spedding joined him the next year, and where he formed fast friendships with Thackeray, W. H. Thompson, afterwards Master of Trinity, and John Allen, afterwards Archdeacon of Salop. He took his degree in January 1830.
His father's family resided at Wherstead Lodge, near Ipswich, from 1825 to 1835, and subsequently at Boulge Hall, near Woodbridge; there he lived with them until 1838, when he took up his separate residence in a cottage near the gate of Boulge Hall. His life at this time was a quiet round of reading and gardening, occasionally broken by visits from or to friends; his chief friends in the neighbourhood were the Rev. G. Crabbe, the son of the poet, and vicar of Bredfield, Archdeacon Groom, and Bernard Barton, the Quaker-poet of Woodbridge, whose daughter he afterwards married. Every spring he used to make a long visit to London to see his friends. There he constantly met Donne, Spedding, and Thackeray, and was a frequent visitor at Carlyle's house. Lord Tennyson and his brother Frederic had been his contemporaries at college; but it was in London that they became intimate; how fast the friendship was is best shown by Lord Tennyson's dedication of Tiresias. In 1853 he left the cottage and settled near Woodbridge, and afterwards in the town itself; but in 1874 he removed to Little Grange, a house which he had built for himself in the neighbourhood. His great outdoor amusement in these years was yachting; and every summer was spent cruising about the Suffolk coast, especially near Lowestoft and Aldborough, the latter locality being of great interest to him as associated with the poems of his favourite, Crabbe. He thoroughly enjoyed the life on his yacht, carrying his books with him, and delighting to take his friends for short trips, when they might read and talk over well-known passages together. He also enjoyed the rough, honest ways of the sailors and fishermen; and he liked to collect their peculiar words and phrases. But he could not escape 'the browner shade' which Gibbon ascribes to the evening of life, and the sea gradually lost its charm; one old sailor died, and another grievously disappointed him; and he at last gave up the yacht for his garden, where his favourite walk was called the 'Quarter-deck.' He died suddenly, June 14, 1883, while paying his annual visit to his friend the Rev. G. Crabbe, the poet's grandson, at Merton Rectory, Norfolk. One of his great characteristics was steadfastness in friendship; he was slow to form intimacies, but, once riveted, the link lasted till death. His outward manner was reserved, and he might sometimes seem a little wayward or petulant; but under all this cold exterior there lay a tenderness like Johnson's, and a fine stroke of imagination or a noble deed would make his voice falter and his eyes fill with tears.
The first forty-two years of his life passed in quiet reading and thinking, and it was not till 1851 that he published anonymously his dialogue on youth, Euphranor, which was followed by Polonius in 1852. In the meantime a friend had persuaded him to begin Spanish, and this not only opened a new world of interest, but revealed to him his own powers. He at once took to Calderon's plays, and afterwards to Don Quixote, and in 1853 he published a translation of six dramas of the former with his name attached; but he soon withdrew it from circulation, and two more were afterwards printed privately. About 1853 the same friend interested him in Persian. Sa'di's Gulistan early attracted him by its quaint stories, and in 1856 he published an anonymous version of Jami's Salāmān and Absāl; and he also wrote, but never printed, an abridgment in verse of 'Attār's Mantik ut tair. But the Persian poet who most interested him, from the time of his first seeing his works in 1856 in a MS. in the Bodleian Library, was 'Omar Khayyām, the astronomer-poet of the 11th century. These poems were then known only by a few current quotations, as they were first printed at
Paris in 1857 by M. Nicolas; but Fitzgerald at once recognised their beauty, and his name and the poet's will probably remain indissolubly linked together. Here his genius as a translator appears at its height. He possessed to an extraordinary degree the power of reproducing on his reader the effect of the original; and, though the original ideas are often altered, condensed, and transposed in an apparently reckless way, these lawless alterations are like those in Dryden, and they all tell; the translator becomes the 'alter' and not the 'dimidiatus Menander.' His letters and collected works and his Letters to Fanny Kemble were edited by Mr W. Aldis Wright (3 vols. 1889-95).