Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Fitzgerald)

In this fourth and final edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to be published in the translator’s lifetime, Edward Fitzgerald asked his publisher Bernard Quaritch to include, in the same volume, his translation of the story of Salaman and Absal, from the Haft Awrang (Seven Thrones) of Jami (1414-1492). This book’s former owner, John Bright (1811-1889), Radical MP for Birmingham Central, known for his advocacy of free trade and opposition to the Corn Laws, has not annotated the Rubaiyat at all, possibly because he was already familiar with it. However, he has highlighted in pencil a nineteen-line passage in Salaman and Absal concerned with governance, which begins:

In thy provision for the Realm’s estate,
And for the Honour that becomes a King,
Drain not thy People’s purse—the Tyranny
Which Thee enriches at the Subject’s cost,
Awhile shall make thee strong; but in the end
Shall bow thy neck beneath thy People’s hate,
And lead thee with the Robber down to Hell.

On the final page of the poem he has written ‘4/10/81 JB’, indicating the date on which he finished reading. The timing is significant since just a few months earlier, in August 1881, Parliament had passed the second Irish Land Act. Bright had long campaigned on behalf of Ireland’s distressed tenant farmers, whose impoverishment not only held back the economic progress of the whole country, but had also lately given rise (in a manner comparable to Jami’s cautionary tale) to the period of agrarian unrest known as the Land War.

The book contains a cluster of somewhat confusing dedicatory writing. On the front free endpaper is inscribed ‘The Right Hon. John Bright M.P. / from one of his constituents’, while on the verso we find ‘With the Publisher’s Compliments / August 1879’. Lastly, pasted on to the title page is a letter from Bright addressed to the nonconformist minister W. Newman Hale, dated 12th February 1865 and promising to call on Hale at his home in the Finchley Road, London. My supposition is that the publisher, Bernard Quaritch, presented this (possibly as review copy) to someone in Birmingham, who then gifted it to Bright. Later, after Bright’s death, it came into possession of Hale, who pasted the letter into the book as a memento of his famous friend.