Pinheiro Chagas is a good example of a nineteenth-century historical and intellectual popularizer, who cultivated multiple genres, from history to novels, including drama, journalistic chronicles and serials. The son of an army major who had been in the Liberal Wars and became secretary to King D. Pedro V, Joaquim Pinheiro das Chagas, started out following in his father's footsteps. He attended the Military College, Army School and Polytechnic School. He received training as a journalist at Rodrigues Sampaio’s newspaper A Revolução de Setembro (The September Revolution), and later worked in several other periodicals, where he wrote serials, literary and artistic critiques and political commentary. Although he was a soldier, he never served, and did not move beyond the rank of captain.

He directed several Lisbon periodicals. Chagas earned much prestige and was widely read in political, literary and academic circles (witnessed in the large number of reprints of some of his works), but he also had his critics, including some of the most prominent intellectuals and artists of his time, the so-called 'Geração de 70': Antero de Quental, Eça de Queiroz and Oliveira Martins. Chagas was highly revered while alive and then fell quickly into oblivion. However, the memory of the author of A Morgadinha of Valflor is occasionally revived today.

One of his first publications was a lyric and nationalistic poem, the Poema da Mocidade or 'Poem of Youth' (with afterword by Castilho), which served as a pretext to the controversy of Bom Senso e Bom Gosto (Good Sense and Good Taste, 1865-66). Protected by the poet António Feliciano de Castilho, as an exponent of the official romanticism of Lisbon elite, Pinheiro Chagas resisted the literary innovations of his time – as in the Odes Modernas (Modern Odes, 1865) by Antero de Quental – criticising the style and particularly the poet's independent and irreverent attitude in defence of the autonomy of the writer. This was not surprising, as he had strongly criticized the Casino Conferences supported by Antero (1871), socialism, and realism in art.

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