Everything about James Thomson B V totally explained
James Thomson (
November 23,
1834—
June 3,
1882), published under the pseudonym
Bysshe Vanolis, was a
Victorian-era British poet famous primarily for the long poem
The City of Dreadful Night (1874), an expression of bleak pessimism in a dehumanized, uncaring urban environment.
Life
Thomson was born in
Port Glasgow,
Scotland and raised in an orphanage. He received his education at the
Royal Military Academy and served in
Ireland, where in
1851, at the age of 17, he made the acquaintance of the 18-year-old
Charles Bradlaugh who was already notorious as a
freethinker, having published his first
atheist pamphlet a year earlier.
More than a decade later, Thomson left the military and moved to
London, where he worked as a clerk. He remained in contact 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 various publications, including the
National Reformer, which published the sombre poem which remains his most famous work.
The City of Dreadful Night came about from the struggle with alcoholism and chronic depression which plagued Thomson's final decade. Increasingly isolated from friends and society in general, he even became hostile towards Bradlaugh. In
1880, nineteen months before his death, the publication of his volume of poetry,
The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems elicited encouraging and complimentary reviews from a number of critics, but came too late to prevent Thomson's downward slide.
Thomson's remaining poems rarely appear in modern anthologies, although the autobiographical
Insomnia and
Mater Tenebrarum are well-regarded and contain some striking passages. He admired and translated the works of the pessimistic
Italian poet
Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), but his own lack of hope was darker than that of Leopardi. He is considered by some students of the Victorian age as the bleakest of that era's poets. He died in London at the age of 47.
Thomson's
pseudonym Bysshe Vanolis derives from the names of the poets
Percy Bysshe Shelley and
Novalis. He is often distinguished from the earlier Scottish poet
James Thomson by the letters
B.V. after the name.
Further Information
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