It is one of poetry's happier stories that, some fifty years after it had fallen dead from the press on its first publication in 1859, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám had become one of the most famous translations of all time. It has been generally assumed that the fortunes of the poem did not pick up until after the third edition of 1872 and that the name of its author was not known beyond a small circle until two or three years after that. Little or no attention has been paid to the 1862 Madras pirate edition of the Rubáiyát which was the next to be published after the failed 1859 first edition. A look at the story of the Madras pirate, and the key figures behind it, leads us to question the conventional view of Rubáiyát history and sheds light on an early part of the Rubáiyát story that has been untold until now.

1861

Everyone familiar with the story of the Rubáiyát knows that a literary figure named Whitley Stokes, stopping by the bookshop owned by FitzGerald's publisher Bernard Quaritch one day early in July 1861, salvaged a copy of the poem from the penny box outside, at once recognised its value, bought further copies and gave away at least one of them to his good friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the poet, who in turn alerted Swinburne and others among the Pre-Raphaelites, who also acclaimed the poem.