New Biography on Thomson

ELT 38: 1 1995 mg, errata slips and publisher's advertisements. Nine plates of titlepages , Ulustrations, bindings and wrappers follow the text and each portrays some point discussed, with a not always accurate index completing the slim volume, the preparation of which obviously has been a labor of love. Edwin Gilcher ______________ Cherry Plain, New York New Biography on Thomson Tom Leonard. Places of the Mind: The Life and Work of James Thomson ÇB.V.'). London: Jonathan Cape, 1993. xv + 407 pp. £25.00 TOM LEONARD has rendered a very real service by rescuing the Victorian poet James Thomson (1834—1882), author of the long poem The City of Dreadful Night, from "undeserved obscurity." In this fascinating study of the tragic, self-defeating Thomson—the product of 16 years research that included materials hitherto unavaüable—Leonard attempts "to tell of James Thomson's work without assuming prior knowledge Ui the reader___" His biography now replaces Henry S. Salt's IUe of Thomson published over a century ago (1889) and adds much to what has been published on the works of Thomson by Bertram Dobell (1895 and 1910), Anne Ridler (1963) and W. D. Schaefer (1967). James Thomson (who published much of his work under the pseudonym "B.V.", short for "Bysshe" and "Vanolis," based on Percy Bysshe Shelley and Friedrich Novalis) was born Ui 1834 at Port Glasgow, the son of a merchant seaman and his dressmaker wife. Thomson's parents were devout adherents of the mUlennarian Irvingite sect, a religion that preached the inevitable end of the world. It was a cosmology that would greatly influence the poet Thomson. In 1840, the poverty-ridden famUy moved to the East End of London where the father, disabled by a stroke, succumbed to complete paralysis, and the mother, unable to support the famUy, was constrained to place the eight-year-old boy in the dismal Royal Caledonian Asylum in Islington. The experience would prove to be the seminal one Ui Thomson's Ufe and would not diminish his millennarian-rooted fatalism. On leaving the orphanage, he trained as a schoolmaster and then taught British army garrison chUdren and soldiers at army posts until he was dismissed in 1862, apparently for an offence which Leonard identifies as the beginning of his life-long addiction to alcohol. Following his departure from the army, Thomson secured employ144 BOOK REVIEWS ment as a clerk in the business office of the renowned free-thinker and secularist, Charles Bradlaugh. While working there, he became a regular contributor of poetry, essays and reviews to Bradlaugh's short-lived paper, the Investigator, and weekly National Reformer which was the organ of the National Secular Society. On his own initiative, Thomson mastered French, German and Italian so well that he rendered excellent translations of the verse of Heinrich Heme, Novalis and Giacomo Leopardi and published essays on them in the National Reformer and other journals. But having spent almost two decades of his ltfe Ui institutions, Thomson, although a very personable young man, lacked the self-discipline to function as a free spirit and succumbed ever more deeply to drink. When Bradlaugh's commercial business enterprise faUed in 1870, Thomson worked as a proofreader and secretary Ui two companies until he became secretary to the London headquarters of a gold and süver mining company Ui Colorado. MeanwhUe, with encouragement from Austin Holyoake, the sub-editor of the National Reformer, Thomson continued to contribute to the paper, even after he was dispatched by the mining company Ui late AprU 1872 to Colorado on pressing business. During his six months sojourn Ui Colorado, where he greatly enjoyed the louche, hard-drinking environment of the American West, Thomson contributed a series of colorful articles on his experiences to the National Reformer and, on his return to England Ui January 1873, quickly resumed his contacts with such old friends as Bradlaugh and WUUam Michael Rossetti. Having terminated his association with the mining company, Thomson (with the help of Bradlaugh) secured employment as a special foreign correspondent for the London office of the New York World Ui July 1873. This involved covering the Carlist revolt Ui Spain, but his reports on the civ...