Thomson was born in
Port Glasgow,
Scotland, and, at the age of eight (after his sister died and his father suffered a stroke), he was sent to London where he was raised in an orphanage, the
Royal Caledonian Asylum on Chalk Road (later Caledonian Road after the asylum) near Holloway. At around this time, his mother died. He was trained as an
army schoolmaster at the
Royal Military Asylum in
Chelsea and served in
Ireland, where in 1851, at the age of 17, he made the acquaintance of 18-year-old
Charles Bradlaugh, who was already known as a
freethinker, having published his first
atheist pamphlet a year earlier. More than a decade later, Thomson quit the military and moved to
London, where he worked as a clerk. He remained in communication with Bradlaugh, who was by now issuing his own weekly
National Reformer, a "publication for the working man". For the remaining 19 years of his life, starting in 1863, Thomson submitted stories, essays and poems to the
National Reformer and other periodicals. From 1866 onwards he lived in a single room, first in Pimlico and then in Bloomsbury. Thomson's most famous literary work, the poem
The City of Dreadful Night, was composed from January 1870 to October 1873. It was first published in serial form in the
National Reformer in the spring of 1874. The poem was reprinted in
The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (1880) and elicited encouraging and complimentary reviews from a number of critics. Thomson died in London at the age of 47, from a broken blood vessel in his bowel, and was buried in the east side of
Highgate Cemetery in the grave of his friend, the freethinker,
Austin Holyoake. The inscription on his grave states that he was born in 1831, not 1834. ==Legacy==