What the Victorians Read
The Victorian reading public had access to a vast array of classical literature from Asia in multiple translations by experts and amateurs. What did they read, and why?
In the Mitchell Library in Sydney is a very small book, about three inches by four, small enough to slip into a breast pocket. The pocket it belonged to was a soldier’s, Thomas Ambrose Palmer, who was sent from Australia to the Western Front in 1916. The rain of France has left its mark on the cheap leather cover and discoloured the title page, which reads: ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald’. Scant solace, you might think, would this poem have afforded Corporal Palmer in the trenches, where, in lulls of tedium between bursts of chaos, he may have digested the 11th-century Persian’s résumé of the human condition:
Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays.
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
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