Thomson, JAMES, the poet of despair, was born a sailor's son at Port-Glasgow on the Clyde, 23d November 1834, and educated in an orphan asylum, where he was trained for service as an army school-master; but through his friend Bradlaugh (q.v.) he became from 1860 onwards a contributor to the National Reformer, in which many of his sombre, powerful, and sonorous poems—including 'The City of Dreadful Night' (1874)—first appeared. In 1862 he became a lawyer's clerk; he went to America as a mining agent; was war-correspondent with the Carlists; and from 1875 to the end of his life depended for livelihood largely on contributions to a monthly published by a tobacconist firm. Afflicted in body and profoundly gloomy in mind, he suffered sorely from the seductions both of narcotics and stimulants; and he died in the University College Hospital, 3d June 1882. The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems was published as a book in 1880, praised by the critics and read by the public; and was followed by Vane's Story, Essays and Phantasies, A Voice from the Nile (1884, with memoir by Bertram Dobell), and Shelley, a Poem (1885). Thomson's pessimism was not academic, but the only too real and dark despair of a morbidly gloomy soul; his monotonously melancholy verses, not seldom tediously verbose, are occasionally varied by a burst of sarcasm or a brief dash of preternatural brightness. He wrote under the pseudonym 'Bysshe Vanolis' (often represented only by the initials B. V.), Bysshe being in honour of Shelley and Vanolis the acrostic of Novalis.
See the Life by Salt (1889); the edition of the poems by B. Dobell (1895); and the Biographical and Critical Studies (1896).