Abstract
In late 1853, William Thornton was putting finishing touches to his first book of verse: Zohrab; or, A Mid-Summer Day’s Dream: and other Poems (1854a). Following the publication in the 1840s of two political economy tracts calling the public’s attention to the harrowing economic distress that had accompanied the Irish potato blight of the mid-to-late 1840s, Thornton had come to be seen as an influential social reformer and economic commentator (see Thornton 1846, 1848; Donoghue 2007). What impelled Thornton to branch away from the entanglements of political and economic debate that had occupied his “leisure time” during the previous decade was the wrenching loss of his eldest daughter, Ellen Aird, who had finally succumbed to pulmonary tuberculosis.
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