Ferguson and Blackwood's: the Formative Years

Our awareness of Samuel Ferguson's presence in the history of Anglo-Irish literature has inevitably been filtered through Yeats's several acknowledgements of his contribution - and Yeats's perception of the nineteenth-century poet was colored both by his own aspirations as a writer and by his emerging vision of how an Anglo-Irish literary tradition might develop. The principal source for biographical information about Ferguson in his wife's 'Sir Samuel Ferguson in the Ireland of his day' which , while aiming at comprehensiveness, naturally places the emphasis on the later decades of his life. This was the period best known to Lady Ferguson herself, for the couple first met in 1847 when he was already in his late thirties and with a considerable part of his writing career already behind him. The Ireland of Ferguson's day, as it emerges from the biography, is very much the high Victorian Ireland of the later nineteenth century, in which Ferguson had attained eminence in several spheres of cultural and social activity