Birth, early life, and education

Edmond Malone was born 4 October 1741 in Dublin to Edmond Malone Sr....MP of the Irish House of Commons and judge of the Court of Common Pleas in Ireland...and Catherine Collier, the niece of Robert and Henrietta Knight, Baroness Luxborough. Edmond Malone Sr. was a successful lawyer and politician: educated at Oxford University and the Inner Temple in London, and called to the Bar in England in 1730, where he had a legal practice. But in 1740, a year before Edmond Jr. was born, his practice in England failed and he returned to Ireland. He took up residence with his wife in the family's country estate, Shinglas, in County Westmeath, and began a more successful legal practice there.

According to Peter Martin, Malone's main biographer in the 20th century: “Virtually nothing is known of his childhood and adolescence except that in 1747 he was sent to Dr. Ford's preparatory school in Molesworth Street, Dublin, where his brother Richard had already been enrolled for two years.” The next record of his education is 10 years later, in 1757, when he...not yet 16 years old...entered Trinity College, Dublin; where his brother went to study two years earlier and where his father had received an honorary LL.D. the year before. Malone excelled at his studies, “an exemplary student, naturally diligent, consistently at the top of his class”, and was awarded with books stamped with the College Arms. In the very first examination, of four in the academic year, he shared top honors with James Drought and John Kearney who later became Fellows of the College.

As an undergraduate he wrote some poetry and literary history. Of the latter, a noteworthy example is a prose translation of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles with annotations and explanatory notes that Martin describes as “surprisingly erudite”. The translation is accompanied by a twenty page “ Essay on the Origin and Progress of Tragedy & on the Office & Advantages of the Antient Chorus” where he provides a brief comparison of Sophocles and Euripides and argues in favor of the restoration of the Chorus in modern drama.

the Antient Chorus has been entirely rejected by all the modern tragick writers few but those who converse more with the dead than the living, have any ideas of its use & advantages.

—Edmond Malonegiven in Martin (2005: pp.2—3)

His studies were interrupted when, in the summer of 1759, he and his father accompanied his mother to Highgate in England. Catherine's health had been deteriorating for some time and she now had increasing difficulty walking. After a short stay in Highgate she moved to the Roman Baths at Bath in Somerset, where the waters where supposed to have health-giving properties. Malone and his father returned to Ireland in October, too late to resume the winter term, so he elected to stay at Shinglas until the new year and study on his own. Not wishing to leave his father solitary, he nearly did not return to Trinity, but eventually resumed his studies in January 1760. The expenses for Catherine's stay at Bath put a strain on the family finances, but it was alleviated somewhat when, after a special examination on 2 June, he won a scholarship at Trinity and became a Scholar of the House.

Malone's final examination at Trinity was in the Michaelmas term in 1761, and he received his BA degree at the following Commencement on 23 February 1762. As only one of three, he achieved the top mark (). The decision to study law was an obvious choice: his father, uncle, and grandfather had all been Irish Barristers. He'd received...on payment of £3 6s 8d...admittance to the Inner Temple in London in 1761, but did not begin his law studies until the new year in 1763. The interval was spent in Dublin reading, and he quickly applied to become a Reader of the Trinity College Library. Martin speculates that he spent his time reading “possibly law although probably also literature”.

Malone probably entered the Inner Temple in January 1763, but few records survive of his studies there; except that he was “invited to come to the bench table” in the commons...an honor Peter Martin describes as comparable to becoming a Warden in a guild...on 10 May 1763. Outside schoolwork he published satirical articles about the government and on the abuse of the English language, and made corrections to the text in his copy of a new edition of Jonathan Swift's correspondence. He was admitted to the Inner Temple the same year as James Boswell...a coincidence Martin thinks “literary historians cannot fail to wonder at”...but there is nothing that indicates that they ever crossed paths there.

More significantly, in 1764, Malone's close friend Thomas Southwell and his father Edmund