Machado was born in 1839 and brought up for the first ten years of his life on a country estate on the outskirts of Rio owned by the widow of a senator, Maria José de Mendonça Barroso Pereira, who became his godmother. Machado also had a sister, but she died when only four years old. Although he did go to school, he was far from being a star pupil. It seems, however, that Machado helped during mass at the estate’s chapel, and was befriended by the priest, Father Silveira Sarmento, who may also have taught him Latin. Machado’s mother died of tuberculosis when Machado was only ten. He then moved with his father to another part of Rio, and his father remarried. Some biographers say that his stepmother, Maria Inês da Silva, looked after him, and that Machado attended classes in the girls’ school where she worked as a cook. Some say that he learned French in the evenings from a French immigrant baker. Others describe Machado as showing a precocious interest in books and languages. What is certain is that he published his first sonnet in 1854, when he was fifteen, in the Periódico dos Pobres (the Newspaper of the Poor). A year later, he became a regular visitor to a rather eccentric bookshop in central Rio owned by journalist and typographer Francisco de Paula Brito, which was a meeting place for all kinds of people, including artists and writers.

At seventeen, Machado was taken on as an apprentice typographer and proofreader at the Imprensa Nacional, where the writer Manuel Antônio de Almeida encouraged him to pursue a career in literature. Only two years later, the poet Francisco Otaviano invited him to work as writer and editor on the Correio Mercantil, an important newspaper of its day and one that is often mentioned in these stories. He wrote two operas and several plays, none of which met with great success, but he loved the theater and became involved in Rio’s theater world from a very young age. Indeed, by the time he was twenty-one, he was already a well-known figure in intellectual circles. He worked as a journalist on other newspapers and founded a literary circle called Arcádia Fluminense. During all this time he read voraciously in numerous languages—it is said that, as well as modern literature, he set himself the lifetime goal of reading all of the universal classics in their original language, including ancient Greek. He built up an extensive library, bequeathed to the Brazilian Academy of Letters (of which he was cofounder and first president). Between the ages of fifteen and thirty, he wrote prolifically: poetry, plays, librettos, short stories, and newspaper columns, as well as translations from French and Spanish and all or most of Dickens’s Oliver Twist. It would appear that his reported ill health, notably the epilepsy described by several of his biographers, did not in any way hold him back.