Author: Thomson, Charles
Biography:
THOMSON, Charles (fl 1829)
The new Royal Brunswick Theatre on Wells Street near Wellclose Square in Shadwell in the east end of London had been open for only three days when its iron roof fell in about noon on 28 Feb. 1828, killing about a dozen people and causing serious injury to about 20 more. A year later, Charles Thomson published his poem on the subject, three cantos in the spirit and the ottava rima verse form of Byron’s (q.v.) Don Juan, to which he pays tribute in the first stanza. It treats of the excitement over the theatre despite its unfashionable location (“A dingy land, half Birmingham, half Wapping”); of the day of the collapse; and of the tragi-comic aftermath, with body parts being pulled from the rubble, sightseers descending, and the clearing of the site. No reviews have been traced but in a review of something else a decade later, Thomson’s poem was praised as the best of Byron’s imitators (Dublin Review). The author declares that this is an experiment, his “first sketch,” but he does not seem to have published more in this vein. Several writers of the same name (a traveller, a divine, a politician, a lexicographer) have been eliminated from the search for his identity. It is possible that he was the Charles Thomson, Esq., described as a popular writer for Youth, whose work was included in The Zoological Keepsake for 1830 (1829), but it is also possible that The Brunswick was, as internal evidence suggests, the jeu d’esprit of someone in a completely different line of work. (ancestry.com 27 Aug. 2024; findmypast.com 27 Aug. 2024; SJC 1 Mar. 1828; Dublin Review 4 [1838], 398; Sheffield Independent 14 Nov. 1829; Allibone 3: 2398)