Alexander Ireland (1810–1894) was a Scottish journalist, man of letters, and bibliophile, notable as a biographer of Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as a friend of Emerson and other literary celebrities, including Leigh Hunt and Thomas Carlyle, and the geologist and scientific speculator Robert Chambers.

In the same year Robert Chambers gave him a confidential task, to have the later highly controversial Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation published anonymously.

[1] Eventually Liberal support swung from the Examiner to the Guardian when the latter's editorial line came down in favour of William Ewart Gladstone's Irish Home Rule proposals in 1886.

A collection of Ireland's books was presented in 1895 to the Manchester Free Reference Library by Thomas Read Wilkinson, and a catalogue was issued in 1898.

[1] Ireland prepared a bibliography of Leigh Hunt's writings, with a similar list of William Hazlitt's, and printed in a limited edition in 1868.

A well-known publication was The Book-Lover's Enchiridion, a collection of passages in praise of books selected from a wide range of authors.

She was the biographer of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1891), and the editor of her correspondence with Geraldine Jewsbury (1892); her recollections of James Anthony Froude were published posthumously in the Contemporary Review.