author
Samuel Ferguson
1810–1886
A leading voice in 19th-century Irish letters, this Belfast-born poet brought Irish myth and early history to English-language readers with energy, scholarship, and imagination. His work helped lay groundwork for the later Irish Literary Revival.
1 Audiobook
Father Tom and the Pope : Or, a night in the Vatican
by Samuel Ferguson
About the author
Born in Belfast in 1810, Sir Samuel Ferguson built an unusually wide-ranging career as a poet, barrister, antiquarian, artist, and public servant. He studied at the Belfast Academical Institution and Trinity College Dublin, was called to the Irish bar, and later became deputy keeper of the public records in Ireland.
He is best remembered for poems and prose that drew deeply on Irish mythology and early Irish history. That blend of literary ambition and historical curiosity made him an important precursor to the Irish Literary Revival, and later writers including W. B. Yeats are often linked back to the path he helped open.
Ferguson died in 1886. Alongside his writing, he was also respected for his antiquarian and scholarly work, which gave his books a sense of depth as well as storytelling power.