Alexander Ireland (journalist)

Alexander Ireland (1810–1894) was a Scottish journalist, man of letters, and bibliophile, notable as a biographer of Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as a friend of Emerson and other literary celebrities, including Leigh Hunt and Thomas Carlyle, as well as the geologist and scientific speculator Robert Chambers. His own most popular book was The Book-Lover's Enchiridion, published under a pseudonym in 1882.

Ireland was born at Edinburgh on 9 May 1810; his father was a businessman. As a young man he had as friends Robert Chambers, William Chambers and John Gairdner. His friendship with Gairdner led to his acquaintance with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in 1833 came to Edinburgh: theirs was a lifelong friendship.

In 1843 Ireland moved to Manchester as representative of a Huddersfield firm. In the same year Robert Chambers gave him a confidential task, to have the later highly controversial Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation published anonymously. The secret was well kept until 1884, when everyone else involved in it was dead, and Ireland revealed it in a preface to the twelfth edition.

In 1846 Ireland succeeded Edward Watkin as publisher and business manager of the Manchester Examiner, a paper founded the year before by Watkin, John Bright, and William McKerrow to compete with the Manchester Guardian, on behalf of the Anti-Cornlaw League. The first editor was Thomas Ballantyne. Soon the Examiner absorbed the Manchester Times of Archibald Prentice, and as the Manchester Examiner and Times lasted for 40 years.

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