He was born in Edinburgh to the actor and theatre manager Frederick Henry Yates and was educated at Highgate School in London from 1840 to 1846,[1] and later in Düsseldorf.

As a contributor to All the Year Round and Household Words, he gained the high opinion of Dickens, who was a friend; in the 1850s, Yates lived at No.

On his retirement from the Post Office he went to the United States on a lecture tour, and afterwards, as a special correspondent for the New York Herald, travelled through Europe.

[3] Back in London, Yates was perhaps best known as proprietor and editor, under the pen-name of "Atlas", of The World society newspaper, which he established in 1874 with Eustace Clare Grenville Murray, and which for a time was edited by Alexander Meyrick Broadley.

"[7] According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "He had been the typical flâneur in the literary world of the period, an entertaining writer and talker, with a talent for publicity of the modern type—developed, no doubt, from his theatrical parentage—which, through his imitators, was destined to have considerable influence on journalism.