Williams, Richard D'Alton (1822–62), poet, medical doctor, and nationalist, was born 8 October 1822 in Dublin, the illegitimate son of Alexandre Count D'Alton (1766–1859), an officer in the French army and land proprietor in Co. Tipperary, and Mary Williams, the daughter of a Tipperary farmer. When he was six years old he was brought to his mother's home at Grenanstown, Co. Tipperary, and was reared there. He was educated at the Jesuit school of St Stanislaus at Tullabeg, Rahan, King's Co. (Offaly) (1832–9), and St Patrick's college, Carlow (1839–43). In March 1843 he went to Dublin to study medicine and train at St Vincent's hospital, St Stephen's Green, under the Sisters of Charity. While a student he became a regular contributor to The Nation from 1843 under the pseudonym ‘Shamrock’. He also wrote verse for the Evening Tablet, and for James Duffy's (qv) Irish Catholic Magazine, employing several pseudonyms and the initials ‘D. N. S.’ (the last letters of each of his names). A founder member of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, he helped treat cholera victims in Dublin during the famine of 1845–9. His experiences with the sick inspired two of his most poignant and humane poems, ‘The dying girl’ and ‘The sister of charity’. In a series of humorous poems entitled ‘Misadventures of a medical student’ he wittily fused medical terminology with Greek and Latin constructions, and displayed a flair for parody. He also wrote religious poetry, including translations and paraphrases of the ‘Dies irae’, ‘Adoro te devote’, and ‘Stabat mater’, which were published in the devotional Manual of the Sisters of Charity (1848).
Throughout the 1840s he continued to write nationalist ballads and war songs for The Nation, many of them inspired by celebrated battles of Irish history; ‘The pass of plumes’, for example, recounted the battle at Barnaglitty, Co. Meath, in 1599. He became a regular at Young Ireland weekly suppers, at which much of the work of The Nation was done. Although shy at first, he soon grew in confidence: Charles Gavan Duffy (qv) noted that he never ‘became easy in his manners, but he shot out, at uncertain intervals, sayings of wonderful humour and depth, which shook the table with applause and laughter (Young Ireland, 298). As the famine grew worse, his politics became more extreme, and his poetry, particularly ‘Kyrie eleison’, ‘Lord of hosts’, and ‘Extermination’, was fuelled by a conviction that the famine represented a deliberate British policy of genocide. He met James Clarence Mangan (qv) at St Vincent's when Mangan was admitted there in 1848, and wrote a ‘Lament for Clarence Mangan’ after his death in 1849.
In January 1847 Williams became a council member of the Young Ireland Irish Confederation. Seeking to replace the recently suppressed United Irishman of John Mitchel (qv) (in which he had published), in June 1848 Williams became joint editor and proprietor with Kevin Izod O'Doherty (qv) of the militant Irish Tribune. The paper lasted for five issues (10 June to 8 July) before Williams was arrested on 16 July 1848, at his residence at 35 Mountpleasant Sq., Ranelagh, Dublin, on the charge of treason felony. Imprisoned with O'Doherty and Duffy in Newgate gaol, he was acquitted at trial the following November, having been represented before the commission by Samuel Ferguson (qv), who gave an eloquent speech in his defence. (Duffy maintained that Williams owed his acquittal to his father's friendship with the crown solicitor William Kemmis (1777–1864), who concealed the only incriminating document against him.) He worked for a short while in the Museum of Irish Industry on St Stephen's Green, before going to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he completed his studies and received his medical diploma in 1849. Returning to Dublin, he worked in Dr Steevens's hospital. His verse published in The Nation in 1851, such as ‘Come with me o'er Ohio’ and ‘Adieu to Innisfail’, expressed his disillusionment with the course of nationalist politics.
In 1851 he emigrated to America, becoming professor of belles-lettres in Spring Hill College, a Jesuit institution in Mobile, Alabama (1851–6). He married (1856) Elizabeth Connolly, of New Orleans, Louisiana, where he moved and resumed medical practice. They had three daughters and one son. He contributed occasionally to American magazines, and to The Nation, but wrote much less prolifically than in his earlier career. Suffering poor health, he sought a more salubrious climate by moving to Baton Rouge in 1860, and then to Thibodeaux, Louisiana, where he died of tuberculosis on 5 July 1862. His last poem, ‘Song of the Irish-American regiments’, written shortly before his death, was a sentimental pæan to troops fighting in the American civil war. Irish-American members of the 8th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry erected a monument of Carrara marble at his graveside when passing through Thibodeaux later in 1862.
In the 1876 Christmas supplement to The Nation, Timothy Daniel Sullivan (qv) contributed a biographical sketch and a critical appraisal of Williams, accompanied by a selection of his poems; the following year Sullivan published a selection in book form, which went through several editions. The D'Alton Williams Students' Association was established in Dublin in 1885, its aim being to cultivate nationalist convictions among students. A complete collection, The poems of Richard D'Alton Williams, was edited, with a biographical introduction, by P. A. Sillard (1894).