[1] Lal Behari Dey was born on 18 December 1824 to a Bengali Suvarna Banik[2] caste family at Sonapalasi near Bardhaman.

After primary education in the village school he came to Calcutta with his father and was admitted to Reverend Alexander Duff's General Assembly Institution, where he studied from 1834 to 1844.

In 1842, a year before his baptism he had published a tract, The Falsity of the Hindu Religion, which had won a prize for the best essay from a local Christian society.

Later he became Professor of English and Mental and Moral Philosophy in Hooghly Mohsin College of the University of Calcutta and stayed with it from 1872 to 1888.

Lalbehari also wrote two novels, Chandramukhi, A Tale of Bengali Life (1859) and Govinda Samanta, which portray the suffering of peasants under the zamindari system.

Charles Darwin wrote a letter on 18 April 1881 to the publishers saying, Lalbehari Dey was perhaps the first collector of Bengali fairy tales and compiled Folk-Tales of Bengal (1875).