WE’RE ALL JAMES THOMSON’S BAIRNS
The story of the popular Scottish poet
Who was the most widely read, popular, critically acclaimed and best-selling Scottish poet of the eighteenth century? It is not Robert Burns; nor is it James Macpherson, whose Ossian epics were so beloved of Goethe and Napoleon. It was, in fact, James Thomson, a poet with whom Scottish writers and critics would latterly have something of a problem.
Thomson was born in 1700 in the parish of Ednam in the Scottish Borders, the son of the local minister. The family moved when he was young to Southdean, and James was educated there and then in Jedburgh. He does not seem to have impressed his schoolmasters, who said he was ‘really without a common share of parts’, but nevertheless went to the University of Edinburgh in 1715 to study divinity. While there he became a member of the ‘Grotesque Club’ and made a lifelong friend in another writer, David Malloch.
In 1716, Thomson’s father died in rather mysterious circumstances. Although he was a Presbyterian, he apparently attempted to exorcise a malign spirit. According to the earliest biographers, his head was engulfed in a supernatural flame and he succumbed to his injuries shortly thereafter. Whatever credence one puts on this peculiar anecdote, it does capture something of Thomson’s strangeness, caught between a superstitious age of folklore and the emerging Enlightenment.
In 1725, Thomson followed Malloch – who had anglicised his name to Mallet – to London. Despite the efforts of writers such as Alan Ramsay, a literary career could only really be pursued in the capital. Thomson had already been writing and a few pieces were published in the Edinburgh Miscellany, but he does not seem to have been satisfied with his poetic productions to date, and made a ritual of burning his year’s work on New Year’s Day.
Thomson’s entry in London literary life was not propitious. He had letters of introduction to various potential patrons and a small sum of
money. But, Dr Johnson tells us, ‘as he passed along the street, with the gaping curiosity of a newcomer, his attention was upon everything rather than his pocket, and his magazine of credentials was stolen from him’. At the point where he sold the first of his masterpieces to the publisher Millan, he did not even have a pair of shoes.
The poem in question was called Winter. It became a word-of-mouth success, especially through t he enthusiasm of a minor poet but major networker, Aaron Hill. Although Thomson had dedicated Winter to Sir Spenser Compton, the aristocrat paid little attention to it; verses published in the newspapers by Hill were censorious about patrons who neglected ingenious men, and Compton took the point, rewarding Thomson with twenty guineas. Johnson writes that ‘the poem, which, being of a new kind, few would venture at first to like, by degrees gained upon the public; and one edition was very speedily succeeded by another’. Winter was indeed a new kind of poem. It opens: See, Winter comes to rule the varied year, Sullen and sad, with all his rising train —