Famously, the neglect came first. Born in 1809, Edward FitzGerald was approaching his fiftieth birthday when he started translating some of the rubáiyát or quatrains attributed to the twelfth-century Persian mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyám to whom his younger friend Edward Cowell had introduced him a few years earlier. In May 1857 he told Cowell, who had gone to Calcutta as Professor of History at Presidency College, that ‘Omar breathes a sort of Consolation to me! Poor Fellow; I think of him, and Olivier Basselin, and Anacreon; lighter Shadows among the Shades, perhaps, over which Lucretius presides so grimly.’

These were particularly grim times for FitzGerald. He had need of consolation in the wake of his miserable marriage to Lucy Barton the previous November, a grievous error at least partly provoked by Cowell's departure for India; he would soon have need of more when William Kenworthy Browne, another younger friend, was fatally injured in a riding accident. By the end of 1857 FitzGerald had sent 35 of the ‘less wicked’ stanzas to the editor of Fraser's magazine John Parker (Letters II, 419). Still too wicked for Parker, they languished with him for a year until the author took them back and, along with 40 more quatrains, had them printed privately and anonymously. There was no rush to buy the slim brown pamphlet from Bernard Quaritch's bookshop in the spring of 1859.