His father, Thomas Philip Le Fanu, was a Protestant clergyman in the Church of Ireland who married Emma Lucretia Dobbin. Their first child, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, was born in Dublin. A year later he went with his parents to live at the Royal Hibernian Military School, where his father was chaplain. Here he and his younger brother and sister witnessed the maneuvers of the Irish military and absorbed much of the character of nineteenth-century Dublin. Le Fanu set most of his early fiction in Ireland, and the particular sensibility of the Irish crept into his early ghostly tales.
Irish folktales influenced his writing as well, and Le Fanu heard these stories from the Irish peasants at Abington, County Limerick, where his father was appointed rector in 1826. He was educated by a private tutor and later took honors in classics at Trinity College, Dublin. He went to London to study law at King's Inns and was called to the Irish bar but decided not to practice. Instead, he entered journalism and purchased a leading Irish Protestant newspaper, The Warder. He acquired part interest in other Irish newspapers, and his newspaper work dominated most of his life.
