Background
Thomas Phillips Thompson was born on November 25, 1843, in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England. He was the son of William and Sarah Thompson. In 1857, Thomas immigrated to Canada with his family.
Thomas Phillips Thompson was born on November 25, 1843, in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England. He was the son of William and Sarah Thompson. In 1857, Thomas immigrated to Canada with his family.
Thompson read law in St. Catherine’s, Ontario and in 1965 he was admitted to the bar of the province of Ontario.
Thompson began his career as a journalist in his native St. Catherine’s, Ontario, working for the St. Catherine’s Post. He was only twenty-one when he published a well-considered polemic entitled The Future Government of Canada (1864), in which he took issue with two of the most important features of the Confederation scheme.
In 1867 he became a police reporter for the Toronto Daily Telegraph, owned by the conservative John Ross Robertson. Around 1870 he began working for the Toronto Mail and Empire.
Thompson came to his career as a social reformer relatively slowly. He began with satire. Perhaps his best-known publication was his series of articles collected and published under the title The Political Experiences of Jimuel Briggs, D.B., at Toronto, Ottawa and Elsewhere.
The author had published the individual pieces as letters in the Toronto Daily Mail under the pseudonym Jimuel Briggs, D.B. (standing for “dead beat”), a professor at fictional Coboconk University. In the letters, the journalist poked fun at well-known personalities, politicians, and the orthodoxies of the age. George Brown of the Globe was a favored target.
Thompson also contributed to various pro-labor periodicals, where he attacked the conservative policies of politicians associated with the young Canadian government. Between 1876 and 1880, Thompson lived and worked in Boston, writing articles for American and Canadian publications, but by the time he returned to Toronto, his lifetime preoccupation had been defined - the labor question. He had become a labor reformer and an antimonopolist.
Thompson found work with the Mail, a Liberal-Conservative newspaper, then moved to George Brown's Globe, the organ of the Liberal party. In 1881 The Globe sent him to Ireland as a special correspondent to cover the land campaign of Charles Stewart Parnell. After returning to Toronto he was given an editorial position with the Globe from 1881–83, then with the News from 1884–88.
Thompson published The Politics of Labor in 1887, an influential critique of the labor movement. For a short period (1890–91) he edited the radical weekly Labor Advocate.
In the later 1890s and in the early 1900s Thompson was employed by different provincial government departments as a writer, and also wrote for the legislature. In 1900, due to his reputation as a labor spokesman, he was made the Toronto correspondent for the Department of Labour's Labour Gazette, published in Ottawa, holding this position until he retired in 1911.
Thompson championed a curious mixture of social liberalism and conservatism, drawn from his Quaker background, his later adherence to Theosophy, his opposition to British imperialism, and his socialist principles.
Thomas Phillips Thompson was Canada’s first systematic, radical intellectual of the industrial age. To the end of his life, he remained what he called a class-conscious socialist.
Thompson insisted that the Canadian confederation should have a republican government, rather than a monarchical one, which was a liberal idea. At the same time, however, he objected to the recognition of French-speaking Canadians’ right to their language. He considered the French a defeated, backward people who should not be allowed to stand in the way of the progress that the English symbolized. Thompson later revised this opinion when he discovered that the French Canadians shared his anti-imperialism, and he took up their defense.
Between 1880 and 1896, Thompson assisted in the struggle to secure the rights of working-class people in Canada. With George Wrigley, he became a leading figure in an effort to form a political coalition between the Knights of Labor and the Patrons of Industry, the farmers’ organization. The effort ultimately failed and the election of the Liberals in 1896 and the gradual return of prosperity left the ground for social radicalism somewhat barren. Above all he remained a dissenter, opposing Canadian participation in the Boer War and criticizing the Robert Borden government’s policies during World War I.
Thompson married Delia Florence Fisher in 1871. She died in 1897, and Thompson married Edith Fisher.