James Thomson

1700–1748 Because the long, reflective landscape poem The Seasons (1730) commanded so much attention and affection for at least a hundred years after James Thomson wrote it, his achievement has been identified with it. Thomson, however, was also a political figure through other poems and through some of his plays, standing strongly for a kind of republican ideal against what he saw as the vulpine individualism and oligarchic government of Robert Walpole. As a Scot who spent his adult life in England, he embodied in his work a comity between the two lands and traditions. Partly with these sociopolitical interests in mind, partly to complement the sweep and poignancy of The Seasons, he wrote five tragedies and a patriotic masque of some distinction. Finally, his Spenserian allegory, The Castle of Indolence(1748), stands as the finest in English other than Spenser’s own. The son of the Scots clergyman Thomas Thomson and Beatrix Trotter Thomson of Berwickshire, Thomson was born on 11 September 1700 in Ednam, Scotland, a few miles north of the River Tweed, which marks the Scots-English boundary. On this poor, isolated, hilly territory, country people scratched out bare livings. Critics eager to spy out biographical influences on The Seasons have found the goads to Thomson’s pictorial imagination in this border landscape, with its slopes and streams, skies heavy with clouds above the moors, and the constant play of light upon natural objects in such a changeable, assertive climate. Thomson’s own family was large—he was the fourth of nine children—and, tucked away in barren country, he must have spent a great deal of time in familial games, tasks, and learning. His household, as one would expect from that of a clergyman father and a mother whose “devotional exercises,” according to Patrick Murdoch, were raised by her warm imagination “to a pitch bordering on enthusiasm,” gave him intimate knowledge of the Bible, that prime source of literary sublimity in the eighteenth century. Again, one can fancy that his early life was grist for The Seasons, in which love and family take on a rosy gleam and where God in His majesty pervades the text. As to his later life, as opposed to his poetry, he left the wild scenery of Scotland for London streets, never married or raised a family himself, and though he remained a profoundly religious man, lapsed from his Christian faith.
Beginning at the age of twelve, Thomson was sent to school, first for three years at Jedburgh, eight miles from home, and then, in 1715, at the College of Edinburgh, some fifty miles north. He was to be in Edinburgh for ten years. After a short time his family embosomed him again, for in February 1716 Thomas Thomson died, allegedly by being struck on the head by a ball of fire while exorcising a ghost at Woolie. Since Beatrix Thomson could, of course, no longer live in the manse, she chose to bring her family to the capital. Thomson may have once again enjoyed the comforts and suffered the constraints of home, but he now found himself in a culturally exciting environment. While at Jedburgh, his learning and writing had been fostered by interested neighborhood gentry, including Robert Riccaltoun and William Bennet, the latter a frequent host to the prolific, charming Scots songwriter, patriot, and poet Allan Ramsay, whom young Thomson may then have met. In Edinburgh he was exposed to new literature, such as the periodical work of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and the poetry of Alexander Pope, and to new doctrines, including those of Isaac Newton. Those with common interests formed clubs and societies in which they could discuss readings, debate one another, share the pleasures of the taverns in which they met, and exchange criticism and support for their own work as writers. Thomson became a member of the Grotesque Club. He had not been a stellar student and, according to his fellow club member and lifelong friend David Malloch, did not shine in the club either. Nonetheless, as a member in early January 1720 he did publish his first verse, three mediocre but not desperately weak poems in The Edinburgh Miscellany. All three are in couplets, and all bear the marks of a gentlemanly idleness, a refusal of focus and commitment.
In 1719 Thomson finished his arts course without taking a degree, a common procedure, and entered divinity studies as a scholarship student (in Scots terminology, a bursar); he held the bursary for four years. This new course of study was not very exacting; it certainly did not impede Thomson from continuing in his literary career. The annals of eighteenth-century poetry include a good deal of verse by clergymen, fancifully or earnestly whiling away their bucolic hours, and perhaps Thomson would have ended up in earned obscurity if he had been an Englishman. His talents were ill suited for casual verse. Fortunately for literature, however, the Scots church was hostile to poetic effusions. According to Murdoch, when Thomson performed an exercise in divinity class, the paraphrase of a psalm, in too florid a way, Professor William Hamilton at Edinburgh “told him, smiling, that if he thought of being useful in the ministry, he must keep a stricter rein on his imagination, and express himself in a language more intelligible to an ordinary congregation.” In general the Scots at the time seem to have tended toward respect for the practical and snorted about the poetical. As he became less willing to give over his life and skills to the church, Thomson came progressively to realize that as a writer he would never revel in a large audience if he stayed in Scotland. By 1724, when a poem probably his, “The Works and Wonders of Almighty Power,” appeared in Aaron Hill’s London periodical The Plain Dealer, he seems to have made up his mind to go south, as his friend Malloch (by then anglicized to “Mallet”) had done the year before. Armed with letters of introduction to well-placed Scots in London, Thomson sailed from Leith early in 1725, never again to set foot in Scotland.
After a few months of unhappy floundering, made more painful by his mother’s death in mid May, his contacts found him a job as tutor to the son of the minor poet Charles, Lord Binning, who was himself the son of a minor poet, Thomas Hamilton, Earl of Haddington, and the son-in-law of the poet and songwriter Lady Grizel Baillie. At Lord Binning’s country house at East Barnet, some ten miles north of London, Thomson set about teaching his pupil to read; he also taught himself to write a new, blank-verse poetry, as he worked on Winter. How much of this remarkable poem was written in Scotland and how much in England is not known, but at the end of the winter of 1725-1726 it was complete, and it appeared in April 1726. The second edition of Winter was published in July, and two further reimpressions came out the same year. To Thomson’s eventual pleasure, his dedicatee Spencer Compton, speaker of the House of Commons, found that he could not continue to ignore the young Scot, and an interview between them ended with Thomson twenty guineas richer. Confident and on his way to being famous, Thomson began work on Summer, which appeared in February 1727, two years after his arrival in London. It confirmed the success of the poetic mode first deployed in Winter.
“Blank verse,” wrote Raymond Dexter Havens, “seems to have been regarded in 1725 much as the telephone was in 1875, as a remarkable toy which it was interesting to experiment with but of which only a few enthusiasts expected to make any real use.” Bell did not patent his phone until 1876, however, whereas by Havens’s count, some 150 post-Miltonic blank-verse poems (some very short) preceded Winter. Unlike those 150, though, Winter is sustained, serious, and skillful. The earlier blank-verse corpus, which led Thomson to write and the public to accept this new poem, included Milton’s epics Paradise Lost(1667) and Paradise Regained (1671) as its most distinguished nondramatic examples. It also included every tragedy current on the London stage, and Thomson couched Winter as a prolonged soliloquy or dialogue with oneself and one’s surroundings. The speaker does often launch into imperatives that in some other poem, in another idiom, might address a reader directly: “See! Winter comes”; “Behold! the wellpois’d Hornet, hovering, hangs”; “Now ... let me wander o’er the russet Mead”; “Oh! bear me then to high, embowering, Shades.” Here, though, they represent an inner urgency on the part of the speaker as his eye lights on the hornet or a keen wish strikes him. To some extent like soliloquists in drama, Thomson’s speaker draws readers in to his inner state, but through indirect address. A combination of sympathy with the alert, urgent speaker and the resonance of the imperative form makes Thomson’s reader a tacitly summoned participant in the speaker’s excitement.
This roundabout way of talking to the audience makes apropos the analogy with blank-verse dramatic soliloquies, including those in Paradise Lost. Yet there is a difference. In Thomson, the effect is, by intention, psychologically shallow: whereas the self-absorbed Satan, the leading soliloquizer in Milton’s poem, acts—busying himself making a hell of heaven—Thomson’s speaker cultivates pure reaction. For example, he welcomes the “Vapours, and Clouds, and Storms.... that exalt the Soul to solemn Thought” and become “kindred Glooms” and “wish’d, wint’ry, Horrors.” As the scenes in Winter typify that season, so the speaker as onlooker must typify responses to it, and this interplay of what is common, open, broadly available in the world and in the speaker helps to express the sense of community that is central not only to this poem but to all Thomson’s mature work. Nature in Winter is objective, “out there,” and Thomson’s speaker, through typification, becomes an analogue to this objectivity, though with a difference. Thomson typifies winter kaleidoscopically, by adding and mirroring new scenes one after the other; in contrast, his uniformly responsive speaker hardly develops a personality at all. Still, however standard the responses, Winter requires that they seem to emerge from experience. They could plausibly be framed in a blank verse that had strong generic associations with the drama. For Thomson himself, in whose mind the I, “nurs’d by careless Solitude”, was probably not pure textual fiction, the use of dramatic monologue allowed him to accommodate his Scots experience to his new, English life: a young emigré author might be jarred in moving from Edinburgh to London, from a city of about thirty-five thousand people tightly nested in rural land to a city of about six hundred thousand, with room for urban sprawl. A dramatic self-projection, which is a self-reduction, allows him to be personal and at the same time to rise above the merely personal.