The reputation of Sir Edwin Arnold is today in almost total eclipse; but in his adult lifetime, during the last five decades of the nineteenth century, he enjoyed great popularity as an influential London journalist and a best-selling poet of the Orient. One of his long narrative poems, "The Light of Asia," achieved astounding commercial success in England and America and, in translation, throughout the world. Little read now, Arnold's books deserve serious study if only to discover why and how such phenomenally popular literary works failed to survive even a modest test of time.

Edwin Arnold was born on 10 June 1832, in Gravesend, near London, the son of Robert Coles Arnold, a Sussex magistrate. He attended King's School in Rochester, King's College in London, and, as a scholarship student, University College, Oxford. Arnold's career at University College was brilliant. He earned a B.A. degree with honors in...