Biography James B.V. Thomson

Poet Biography

James Thomson (1834-82) was born in Port Glasgow. He was posted to Ireland in 1851 to work as a schoolmaster in the Army, there he met Charles Bradlaugh, the publisher of the National Reformer which later featured Thomson's work. In 1862, he was dismissed from the Army due to increasing bouts of depression and drinking. He returned to London where he wrote for the National Reformer, whose radical stance matched his own free-thinking and atheistic convictions and latter, when he fell out with Bradlaugh, he wrote for the Secularist, and a house journal from Liverpool called Cope’s Tobacco Plant. None of the journalistic and business jobs Thomson undertook in these years lasted very long and he found it difficult to get his creative work published. Thomson died as a result of a final drinking bout in 1882.