Edward and Sarah had four children, all born in Brighton:[3] Sellon joined the army at age 16 and served in India for ten years, eventually being promoted to captain.
Here, after two years, his wife rejoined him, but now Sellon was keeping a mistress in another part of town, and had seduced his fourteen-year-old parlour maid, a girl called Emma.
Hard times followed after the family fortune was lost and Sellon was constrained to work as a stagecoach driver on the Cambridge Mail for two years and afterwards as a fencing master.
These included The New Epicurean (1865) and a memoir entitled The Ups and Downs of Life (1867) which featured his erotic escapades in India.
[further explanation needed] In April 1866, at the age of forty-eight, he shot himself fatally at Webb's Hotel, Piccadilly[8] (now the site of the Criterion Theatre).