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(Sabin 95597.)
Sabin 95597.
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Thomson was born on September 2, 1832 in Riga, Monroe County, N. Y. He was the elder of two sons of Edwin and Sophia Thomson. The Thomsons were prominent old settlers there, the grandfather, Joseph Thomson, having held minor public offices.
In 1841 the family moved to Ann Arbor, Mich. , where the father set up in the practice of law.
Thomson matriculated at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1849, but was expelled during the winter because of membership in a secret society.
Subsequently he tramped--playing at times, it is thought, with various strolling stock companies--to New York City, where he became a clerk in a jewelry store and rapidly explored the gayeties of Gotham.
His first humorous letter, "Doesticks on a Bender, " a hilarious sketch of a trip to Niagara, won immediate popularity and was copied widely by the newspapers of the country. In rapid succession (September 22, 1854 - May 30, 1855) there followed a series of twenty-nine humorous letters, most of them appearing in the Detroit Daily Advertiser, others in the New York Tribune and the Spirit of the Times (New York). These letters, collected and published as Doesticks: What He Says (1855), made "Doesticks" a national figure.
In 1855 Thomson joined the staff of the New York Tribune, writing police-court sketches (later published as The History and Records of the Elephant Club, 1856) in a way they had never before been done, and a series of feature articles on fortune tellers (The Witches of New York, 1859). With Thomas Nast he covered such special assignments as the famous Heenan-Morrissey prize fight, October 20, 1858, and reported dramatically and with devastating effect the great auction sale of slaves held in Savannah in 1859.
When William Allen Butler's famous poem, "Nothing to Wear, " aroused New York, Thomson was offered one dollar a line for a parody. In less than a week he had produced a poem of eight hundred lines, a satire on snobbery called Nothing to Say (1857), which was probably more popular than the original.
The popularity of "Doesticks" had already been considerably enhanced by the tremendous sale of an earlier piece of parody in verse, Plu-ri-bus-tah, a Song That's-by-No-Author, which had appeared in May 1856. With this book-length mock-heroic, precipitated by the wave of interest in Longfellow's Hiawatha, he achieved a national hit, taking telling hits at American follies, especially American love of money. Although it was probably begun as parody, it soon achieved independent position on its own merits as social satire.
In addition to regular staff duty on the Tribune, Thomson ventured in 1858 to edit the New York Picayune, the best comic weekly of the day. Later he became dramatic critic for the Tribune and wrote a play, The Lady of the Lake (1860), a travesty of Scott's poem.
During the Civil War he served as staff reporter for the Tribune, as well as chaplain to a regiment.
After the war Thomson continued the humorous lectures he had begun in 1859. For a short time he was an associate editor of the Minneapolis Tribune, but in 1873 he returned to New York to become an editor of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly. In this position he continued until his death.
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Quotes from others about the person
"A New Patent Medicine Operation", was anthologized in Mark Twain's Library of Humor, an introductory paragraph described Thomson as a figure whose "dashing and extravagant drolleries" had quickly passed from fashion.
He was twice married. His first wife, Anna H. Van Cleve, an old friend, whom he married on October 24, 1857, died in childbirth late in 1858, leaving a son. In July 1861, while home on leave, he married again, this time Grace Eldridge, daughter of Sara Payson Willis Parton. Again his happiness was short-lived, for his second wife died twenty days after the birth of their daughter.
