He was born in 1844 in the Tophane quarter of Istanbul. His father, Süleyman Ağa, was a cloth merchant; his mother, Nefise Hanım, had come from the Caucasus. Losing his father early, he went to work rather than to school, apprenticed to a herbalist in the Spice Bazaar. His elder brother's posting took him first to Vidin, then to Niš, where he finished middle school. Hired as a clerk in the offices of the Danube province, he caught the eye of Midhat Pasha, who gave him his own name. In Ruse he began writing for the newspaper Tuna and soon rose to chief editor. In 1869 he followed the pasha to Baghdad and ran the paper Zevrâ. Back in Istanbul in 1871, he set up his own press and launched the journals Dağarcık and Kırkambar. An article in Dağarcık brought accusations of irreligion, and in 1873 he was exiled to Rhodes, where he went on teaching. He returned to Istanbul in 1876. His work as a novelist opened in 1874 with Hasan Mellah and found its own stamp the following year in Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi. Tercüman-ı Hakikat, the newspaper he founded in 1878, became one of the longest-lived in the Ottoman press; it was he who brought Fatma Aliye into literature. He wrote plainly, as though leading the reader by the hand, never hesitating to break off the story and explain. With more than two hundred and fifty books to his name he was called “the writing machine” and held to be the people's first teacher. He carried the novel to a broad Turkish readership. In 1889 he attended the congress of orientalists in Stockholm. In his last years he taught at the Darülfünun, and on 28 December 1912 he died at Darüşşafaka, where he gave lessons as a volunteer.
Late 19th-century Istanbul, Ottoman intellectual attire, wearing a fez, full beard, middle-aged with a sharp and scholarly demeanor.