Life
1809-1883; b. Suffolk; his mother Mary Fitzgerald, of Anglo-Norman stock, owned
estates in England and Ireland and m. John Percell [Purcell] of Kilkenny, who surrendered his name and subsequently went through bankruptcies on his own account; ed. King Edward Grammar School
and Cambridge; lived privately on a cottage on his father’s estate
at Boulge, and later at Woodbridge, and spent much time sailing with Suffolk
fisherman, always in frock coat and top hat, and sometimes with a boa; issued Euphranor, a Dialogue on Youth (1851), and plays
by Calderon, Aeschylus, and Sophocles; kept scrapbook dictionaries of nautical terms and commonplaces; translated The Rubáibyát
of Omar Khayyam (1859); suffered death of his long-time friend William Browne, following a hunting accident, 1886; also Attar’s Bird Parliament
and Jami’s Salaman and Absal; lived latterly at Woodbridge, a practising vegetarian; frequent visitor to his friend George Crabbe; bur. in monumental tomb, Boulge. PI DNB OCEL RAF FDA
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Works
A. M. and A. B. Terhune, eds., The Letters of Edward Fitzgerald,
4 vols. [1830-83] (Princeton 1980), 712pp., 629pp., 753pp. & 653pp,
a monumental collection of 1,000 unpubl. letters to Carlyle, Thackeray,
et al.
Two Suffolk Friends, by Francis Hindes Groome (Blackwood 1895) [with] ‘A Suffolk Parson, Robert Hindes Groome and Edward Fitzgerald, an aftermath’ [Eric Stevens Cat. 1992]; Do., Stevens 1995]
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Commentary
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn [English Version 1998] (London: Harvill 1999), pp.200-01, p.214.)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988), rep. in Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman, ed., & intro., Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1993.
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Notes
D. J. O’Donoghue, The Poets of Ireland: A Biographical
Dictionary (Dublin: Hodges Figgis & Co 1912) lists Six Dramas of Calderon (1853); Euphranor (1851), Omar Khayyim (1859), Agamemnon
(1876), The Mighty Magician ((1877); Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,
(many eds from 1872); b. Suffolk 1809, son of Irish parents, John Purcell
of Kilkenny and Mary Fitzgerald, his father changing his name; acquainted
with Tennsyon, Thackeray, Carlyle, Crabbe, et al.
Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English, The Romantic Period, 1789-1850, (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1980), Vol. I; , Irish connections ‘extremely tenuous’. Joanna Richardson, Fitzgerald, Selected Works (1962) 755p.
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2: counted by Thomas MacDonagh among those ‘whose relations with Ireland and Irish life were slight’ but included in Anglo-Irish anthologies (Literature in Ireland, 1916), [990]
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)