Tom Leonard - Places of the Mind:

Surely I write not for the hopeful young,
  Or those who deem their happiness of worth,
Or such as pasture and grow fat among
  The shows of life and feel nor doubt nor dearth,
Or pious spirits with a God above them
To sanctify and glorify and love them,
  Or sages who foresee a heaven on earth.

For none of these I write, and none of these
  Could read the writing if they deigned to try:
So may they flourish, in their due degrees,
  On our sweet earth and in their unplaced sky.
If any cares for the weak words here written,
It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten,
  Whose faith and hope are dead, and who would die.

Yes, here and there some weary wanderer
  In that same city of tremendous night,
Will understand the speech, and feel a stir
  Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight;
"I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
  Travels the same wild paths though out of sight."

This is from the opening of James Thomson's long masterpiece poem "The City of Dreadful Night", which appeared for the first time in the atheistic, republican weekly The National Reformer in 1874. The book Places of the Mind , written over a period of 16 years and published in 1993, is the only full-length study of Thomson's life and work to have been published in the twentieth century.

A mass of information relevant to Thomson's life and work is published for the first time: the millenialist fervour in the West of Scotland into which he was born (including the first printing of a letter written by his mother at the height of that fervour); the world of the Royal Caledonian Asylum in London into which he was placed when he was eight years old; the British Army Corps of Schoolmasters, which he entered as one of the early recruits of this new institution; Ireland in the 1850's, where he served - and where he briefly befriended Matilda Weller, whose gravestone inscription is recorded; Charles Bradlaugh, the leading freethinker whom Thomson first met in Ireland and with whom he lived in London after his discharge from the Army in 1862; London and the freethought movement, including the periodicals for which Thomson wrote much of his subsequent life; his break with Bradlaugh, and the power struggle in the freethought movement that led to splits and rival newspapers; Thomson's nine months in Colorado, and his six weeks in Spain; "The City of Dreadful Night" and its reception; Thomson's struggle for money to survive, and the difficulties caused by his alcoholism; his freethought friends in Leicester; his death, and the letters of friends that chronicle the poet's last days as they try to keep in touch with him.

Two Reviews

"Leonard tells the tale with great skill. He does not indulge hypotheses about Thomson's feelings and motives; he lets the poet speak for himself, setting his words against a meticulously researched description of Victorian Britain's wars of religion and the literary and free-thinking alleys of Grub Street.
This is the kind of biography which Francis Steegmuller and others have perfected: the documentary life, the "Jackdaw" folder which presents the reader with material on which to base his own judgment. Yet it makes a gripping story, and a harrowing one, which shows the cost that the productions of the mind exact, and how much human agony goes into their making."

A.C.Grayling: Financial Times

Leonard suggests that his own book is also something other than a "causal" narrative, and it is in fact written with a skill and invention that lift it beyond the common run of biographies. It is also distinctive in the copious use it makes of Thomson's own writings. This can be a painful and unnecessary practice but, in the case of a poet as undeservedly obscure as Thomson, it is instructive: he was a vigorous and elegant journalist but, more importantly, he was a poet of real authority and vision.

... this is not, in the end, a terrible story. Places of the Mind begins with a quotation from Swedenborg, that unjustly neglected visionary, and if there is one lesson to be learned from his writing it is this: there is an intrinsic and eternal resemblance between God and man. Thomson annotated this passage on the "God-Man" and the poet himself - this drunk, this blasphemer - had a stronger sense of the sacred than any of his more pious contemporaries. And, even in the midst of all the horror, he was able to give expression to it: that is the real triumph of a life which, to his contemporaries, seemed stricken and wasted. He kept faith with his vision, and Leonard's biography is to be welcomed for the care and art with which it is restored."

Peter Ackroyd: Sunday Times

A guide to the Manuscripts for Places of the Mind now held by Glasgow University

A short critical comment on the poem The City of Dreadful Night

Download City of Dreadful Night (free from project Gutenburg)