SOURCE: "Alexander Somerville and the Irish Famine," in Letters from Ireland during the Famine of 1847, by Alexander Somerville, edited by K. D. M. Snell, Irish Academic Press, 1994, pp. 7-24.

The following is an introduction to Scottish writer Alexander Somerville's Letters from Ireland (the letters were originally published at the time of their composition [1847 in newspaper reports in the Manchester Examiner, and later as part of Somerville's The Whistler at the Plough [1852]). Snell offers a brief biography of Somerville—explaining the writer's sympathy with Ireland and the Famine victims—then makes use of quotations from Somerville's writings to depict the candid and often poetic nature of his account of the Famine and of Ireland's political and economic situation.]

At an early point in his investigation of Ireland during the great famine, Alexander Somerville found himself one morning in Clonmel, on the 29th January, 1847. He had decided to accompany a...