IT IS NOT IN the least surprising that Fitz-James (sometimes spelled Fitz James) O’Brien (1828–1862) was taken into New York social circles almost immediately upon his arrival from Ireland. Like Lord Byron in England, O’Brien was a charming, handsome playboy, poet, and soldier. Born Michael O’Brien in County Cork, he attended Dublin’s Trinity College, then moved to London where he squandered his very considerable inheritance in a little more than two years. It was here that he began to sell stories and poems. When the money ran low, he moved to America in 1852 and changed his name. He quickly sold stories, essays, poetry, and reviews to several newspapers and such major periodicals as the Lantern, Harper’s Magazine, Putnam’s Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Atlantic Monthly, which published two of his most inventive and famous stories. In “The Diamond Lens,” which appeared in the first issue of Atlantic, a man looks through a microscope and discovers a whole world in a drop of water and falls in love with a woman he sees there—a story which undoubtedly inspired the famous story by Joseph Cummings, “The Girl in the Golden Atom.” “The Wondersmith” tells of a villainous toymaker whose creations come to life and kill their owners. He also wrote several plays, one of which, The Gentleman from Ireland (1854), reputedly was performed for twenty years. When the Civil War broke out, he joined the New York National Guard in January of 1861 and died of wounds incurred in a minor skirmish a little more than a year later.
“What Was It?” was first published in the March 1859 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It was collected in his only book, The Poems and Stories of Fitz-James O’Brien (Boston, J. R. Osgood, 1881), a posthumous collection of forty-three poems and thirteen stories compiled and edited by his friend William Winter.