James Thomson (1834-82)

James Thomson 1834-82, Scottish poet and essayist. He is remembered for his darkly pessimistic poem The City of Dreadful Night. He was raised in an orphan asylum and became (1851) an army teacher at Ballincollig, Ireland. In 1862 he was dismissed from the service for a very minor offense, became a clerk in London, and contributed (using the signature B.V.) to the National Reformer, the magazine of his friend Charles Bradlaugh. Thomson's life in London was lonely and impoverished, aggravated by insomnia, his own incredibly melancholic disposition, and periodic bouts with alcoholism. His greatest poetical work, The City of Dreadful Night (1880, first published in the National Reformer, 1874), gives brilliant, haunting expression to his despair. The poem "Sunday up the River" (first published in Fraser's Magazine, 1869) is an example of his lyric gift. Vane's Story (1880) and A Voice from the Nile (1884) are later collections of his poems. Thomson also wrote many essays and criticisms. His collected poems appeared in 1895 and a volume of prose in 1896.

Bibliography: See biography by H. S. Salt (rev. ed. 1914); study by I. B. Walker (1950).

Thomson, James (1834–82), trained as an army schoolmaster, in which capacity he was sent in 1851–2 to Ireland, where he met Bradlaugh. For his early work he used the pseudonym ‘B.V.’ Signs of growing alcoholism appeared in the late 1850s and in 1862 Thomson was discharged from the army, probably for drunkenness. He came to London, took various jobs and wrote for several magazines, publishing among other work ‘Vane's Story’, ‘Sunday up the River’, and ‘Sunday at Hampstead’. ‘Weddah’ (1871), a long poem relating a tragic Arabian love- story, led to friendship with W. M. Rossetti. For part of 1872 Thomson was with a gold company in Colorado, and in 1873 in Spain as a war reporter; on his return he completed his best-known poem, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, which appeared in Bradlaugh's National Reformer in 1874. This long poem, which much influenced the mood of fin-de-siècle poetic pessimism, is a powerful evocation of a half-ruined city, a ‘Venice of the Black Sea’, through which flows the River of the Suicides; the narrator, in vain search of ‘dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope’ encounters tormented shades wandering in a Dantesque vision of a living hell, over which presides the sombre and sublime figure of Melancolia (based on Dürer's engraving of 1514). His first volume of verse, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (1880), and a second volume in the same year were well received. Essays and Phantasies appeared in 1881; Satires and Profanities in 1884.