Thomas MacNevin (1814 – 8 February 1848) was an influential Irish writer and journalist, who died under "peculiarly sad circumstances" in a Bristol asylum.
[1] Charles Gavan Duffy in his Young Ireland: a Fragment of Irish History, 1840–45 described MacNevin as being "below the middle size but well made, well poised, and agile" with auburn hair and clear blue eyes, "which he believed he inherited from Danish ancestors."
His face was "mobile, and possessed the power not given to one man in ten thousand, of expressing a wide range of feeling without exaggeration or grimace.
[1] The society had been founded by Edmund Burke nearly a century before, and had trained three generations of Irish orators and statesmen.
[2] At Trinity College, MacNevin studied elocution under John Vandenhoff and Sheridan Knowles.