Scottish journalist, poet, and translator (1834–1882)
James Thomson (23 November 1834 – 3 June 1882) — pen name Bysshe Vanolis — was a Scottish journalist, poet, and translator. He is remembered for "The City of Dreadful Night" (1874; 1880), a poetic allegory of urban suffering and despair. His pen name derives from the names of the poets Shelley and Novalis; both strong influences on him as a writer. Thomson's essays were written mainly for "National Reformer", "Secular Review", and "Cope's Tobacco Plant". His longer poems include "The Doom of a City" (1854) in four parts, "Vane's Story" (1865), and the Orientalist ballad "Weddah and Om-El-Bonain". He admired and translated the works of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi and Heinrich Heine. In the title of his biography of Thomson, Bertram Dobell dubbed him "the Laureate of Pessimism".
Life.
Thomson was born in Port Glasgow, Scotland, and, at the age of eight (after his sister died and his father suffered a stroke), he was sent to London where he was raised in an orphanage, the Royal Caledonian Asylum on Chalk Road (later Caledonian Road after the asylum) near Holloway. At around this time, his mother died.
He was trained as an army schoolmaster at the Royal Military Asylum in Chelsea and served in Ireland, where in 1851, at the age of 17, he made the acquaintance of 18-year-old Charles Bradlaugh, who was already known as a freethinker, having published his first atheist pamphlet a year earlier.
More than a decade later, Thomson quit the military and moved to London, where he worked as a clerk. He remained in communication with Bradlaugh, who was by now issuing his own weekly "National Reformer", a "publication for the working man". For the remaining 19 years of his life, starting in 1863, Thomson submitted stories, essays and poems to the "National Reformer" and other periodicals. From 1866 onwards he lived in a single room, first in Pimlico and then in Bloomsbury.
Thomson's most famous literary work, the poem "The City of Dreadful Night", was composed from January 1870 to October 1873. It was first published in serial form in the "National Reformer" in the spring of 1874. The poem was reprinted in "The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems" (1880) and elicited encouraging and complimentary reviews from a number of critics.
Thomson died in London at the age of 47, from a broken blood vessel in his bowel, and was buried in the east side of Highgate Cemetery in the grave of his friend, the freethinker, Austin Holyoake. The inscription on his grave states that he was born in 1831, not 1834.
Legacy.
In 1889, seven years after Thomson's death, Henry Stephens Salt published the first biography of Thomson, with a selection of writings, "The Life of James Thomson ("B.V.")". In 1910, Bertram Dobell published a second biography, "The Laureate of Pessimism: a Sketch of the Life of James Thomson". In 1993, Tom Leonard's biographical study "Places of the Mind: The Life and Work of James Thomson ('B. V.')" of Thomson was published by the London publisher Jonathan Cape. In recent years, Thomson's poems have rarely been anthologised, although the autobiographical "Insomnia" and "Sunday at Hampstead" have been well-regarded and include some striking passages.
References.
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