Edward Reeve was educated at Bristol College before travelling to Sydney on the Earl Grey. He was married to Margaret Hennessy on 21 March 1847 , and worked as a teacher for over eight years before becoming a clerk in the Immigration Department in 1848 and later in the Police Department in 1854, when he married his second wife Catherine, née McVeigh.

By 1857, Reeve had found a position as a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald. He was associated with the literary periodical The Month, and its founder, Nicol Drysdale Stenhouse (q.v.). In 1860 he became the first curator of the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney, and compiled and printed a Catalogue of the Museum of Antiquities of the Sydney University (1870). In 1871 he was a founder and honorary secretary of the New South Wales Academy of Art, and in 1888 resumed his position as curator of the Nicholson Museum.

A journalist with wide-ranging interests, Reeve (who sometimes used the pseudonym of 'Yorick') wrote a series of articles on education in New South Wales for the People's Advocate and contributed to Australian Era, the journal of the New South Wales Professional Literary Association of which he was a member. He was also involved with his friend Frank Fowler's literary magazine The Month. Failing in health, Reeve left the Herald and became police magistrate at Gosford and coroner at Brisbane Water in 1875. He continued to contribute to Sydney papers, and his well-received romance 'Friends and Foes, or, The Bride of Bernback', was serialised in the Sydney Mail from January to May 1882.

(Source: Australian Dictionary of Biography Online, Accessed 8 May 2007)