Introduction: Thomson's ‘fame’

Summary

Thomson's life, unlike that of some of his literary contemporaries, did not generate a great number of anecdotes, and the most famous one in which his name figures relates to a posthumous incident concerning not so much the author himself as his most celebrated literary work, The Seasons. Hazlitt tells of how, rambling in North Devon with Coleridge, the two of them stopped off at a country inn. Finding a battered copy of The Seasons lying in the parlour, Coleridge, so Hazlitt recounts, picked it up with a flourish and then pronounced: ‘That is true fame’. Coleridge's meaning is not entirely certain, since fame at this time was something of an amphibian concept, but he is probably paying homage both to the breadth and to the longevity of Thomson's post-mortal reputation. Although Coleridge's exclamation springs directly from a palpable piece of evidence for the book's endurance and wide dissemination, it also caps a sequence of early critical responses to Thomson in which the poet's fame is prophesied, remarked upon or celebrated.

The prediction of Thomson's fame goes back even to the appearance of ‘Winter’ in 1726, an event which led Aaron Hill, later the poet's friend, to inform him of his premonition that ‘Time … shall lend her soundless depth, to float your fame’. When Sir Gilbert Elliot of Minto, an early patron of Thomson's, received a copy of the first edition of The Seasons, he also felt sufficient confidence to assert that ‘There's a book that will make him famous all over the world, and his name immortal’.