Edmund Yates

Born in 1831, Edmund Yates was an English novelist, journalist, and editor whose career flourished in the middle and later Victorian period. He is especially remembered for his long association with popular journalism and for writing fiction that reached a wide general readership.

Yates worked in government service early in life before becoming deeply involved in literary London. He wrote for periodicals, published novels, and later edited The World, a society paper that helped make his name familiar to a broad audience. His writing was known for its readability and for drawing on the social world around him.

He died in 1894. Today he is often remembered as one of the energetic literary personalities of Victorian England: a writer who moved easily between journalism and fiction, and who helped shape the tone of popular print culture in his era.