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Rebelo da Silva was the author of an extensive body of work covering the fields of the novel, drama, literary theory and criticism as well as historical studies. Descended from a family of liberal jurists who had left their mark on Portuguese culture and politics, he was the son of Luís António Rebelo da Silva, a Court of Appeals judge, and Ana Joaquina da Conceição Lima. Little is known of his studies as a child but it is probable that they were carried out under the supervision of his uncle, Manuel Rebelo da Silva.
At the end of the 1830s, when he was only seventeen years old, he became an active participant in the Scholastic-Philomatic Society (Sociedade Escolástica-Filomática), a sort of formal tertúlia set up on the initiative of students of Lisbon’s Higher Schools. Its statutory aims were to inspire through study and to spread knowledge about science, history, philosophy and literature. In order to achieve these aims it planned to organize lectures as well as to establish a library, a museum and a journal. The official publication of the Scholastic-Philomatic Society was called O Cosmorama Literário, a periodical in which Rebelo da Silva appeared for the first time as an author of historical novels. In it he published, albeit in an unfinished form, his narrative Tomada de Ceuta (The Taking of Ceuta). In the soirées organized by this literary group he had the chance to fraternize with Almeida Garrett, Andrade Corvo, Vieira de Castro, Tomás de Carvalho, António da Cunha Sotomaior and António Pedro Lopes de Mendonça. In the lectures he gave, he revealed his remarkable talent as an orator “although still somewhat hesitant” (Bulhão Pato, Sob os Ciprestes, 1986, p. 168). His oratory would come to be one of the distinctive hallmarks of his civic participation, political intervention and academic practice.
As both his father and his grandfather had been educated at university, it was considered perfectly normal that Rebelo da Silva would also go on to further studies in Coimbra. In order to comply with this assumption, he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy in 1840, but he later gave up without having passed in any subject. Bulhão Pato said that the academic rigour and the exact sciences did not capture the historian’s attention and “having arrived in Coimbra he never went further than the Patio, or rather he did leave it, […] chased by the pointed teeth of three implacable foxes.” (Sob os Ciprestes, 1986, p. 168)
