ABSTRACT
John Nicholson Ireland was bom on 13 August 1879 in Bowdon, a prosperous Manchester suburb. He spent the large part of his childhood and adolescence in this area. His first home was a big Victorian detached house, ‘Inglewood’, St Margaret’s Road. His father, Alexander Ireland (1809-94) (Plate 1), was bom in Edinburgh, his family having moved from Orkney some generations earlier. He married Eliza Mary Blyth in 1839, but this partnership was cut short by his wife’s death. He moved to Manchester in c. 1846 to become manager and publisher of the recently established Manchester Examiner, the rival paper to the Manchester Guardian. In 1865 Alexander Ireland married for a second time. His new wife, Anne (Annie) Elizabeth Nicholson (1839-93) (Plate 2), was of Cumbrian descent, and was herself an author and critic. Her father, Dr John Nicholson, was a scholar of oriental languages at Queen’s College, Oxford; her brother Alleyne Nicholson a Professor in Aberdeen. The atmosphere in the Ireland-Nicholson household was therefore a literary one, and Alexander Ireland was acquainted with Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard le Gallienne, Leigh Hunt and Walt Whitman. In addition to his role as a newspaper businessman, he published his own writings, including his recollections of Emerson and two works extolling the virtues of literature: Cheap literature and the love o f reading (1882) and The book-lover’s enchiridion (1883).
