Few people deserve the laurel as the Victorian era’s most accomplished, yet overlooked, polymath more than Sir Edwin Arnold. An educator, author, poet and journalist – editor of The Daily Telegraph from 1873 to 1888 – Arnold spoke 19 languages including Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit and Persian, and wrote books on education and a two-volume history of Lord Dalhousie, the Viceroy of India, as well as memoirs of his travels in America, India and Japan.

But the achievement Arnold is most notable for is, perhaps, the most unlikely. In 1879 he wrote The Light of Asia, an epic poem about the life of the Buddha, the first English poem on the subject. At a time of growing interest in Asian religions, the book enthralled Victorian society, going on to sell more than a million copies.

Arnold – who is the subject of a diverting new biography, The Light of Asia: The Poem that Defined the Buddha, by Indian author and politician Jairam Ramesh – developed an interest in Asian religions while serving as the principal of a college in Poona (now Pune) in India. Returning to England, he wrote the epic while working as editor of The Telegraph, between scribbling leader columns on everything from blush roses to the Prusso-Danish war. Queen Victoria was so enamoured of the book that she recommended Arnold to succeed Tennyson as poet laureate; but political machinations resulted in Alfred Austin being given the post.

Gandhi, who met Arnold when he was a young barrister studying in London, wrote that the book had helped form the basis of his belief in renunciation as “the highest form of living”. The King of Siam initiated Arnold as an Officer of the Order of the White Elephant, and in what was then Ceylon he was presented with the yellow robe and begging bowl of a Buddhist monk – the first, and so far as one can determine only, editor of a Fleet Street newspaper to be accorded this honour.

Comprising some 5,300 lines of verse, and told in the voice of a narrator described as “an imaginary Buddhist votary”, the poem recounts the story of Gautama Buddha, from his birth to a royal family to his attainment of Buddhahood, meditating in the shade of the Bodhi tree in what is now known as Bodh Gaya. Arnold’s lapidary language, his luxuriant descriptions of the Indian landscape and his depiction of the Buddha as a figure of unimpeachable virtue sounded a resonant chord for an audience enamoured of high romantic poetry. One could almost imagine his descriptions of the Buddha’s enlightenment rendered as a series of paintings by those pre-Raphaelite arch romantics, John Everett Millais and Holman Hunt.