" The only son of a navy tailor, he lost his mother at the age of 5. He continued his secondary studies (1842-1844) in Germany, in Neuwied, near Cologne. He began to write as soon as he was employed by a London lawyer and in 1849 married the daughter of the satirical writer Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Ellen Nicholls, a widow seven years his senior. In the 1850s, he published verses which made him famous, then two semi-parodic entertainments, Shagpat rasé (1855) and Farina (1857). The infidelity of his wife with the painter Henry Wallis in 1857 is at the origin of his first great novel, L'Épreuve de Richard Feverel (1859). Follows in 1860 Evan Harrington evoking his adolescence."