Thomson, James, the poet of pessimism, born, a sailor's son, at Port-Glasgow, and brought up in an orphanage; was introduced to literature by Mr. Bradlaugh (q.v.), to whose National Reformer he contributed much of his best poetry, including his gloomy yet sonorous and impressive “The City of Dreadful Night,” besides essays (1834‒1882).
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Thomson, James * Thomson, John