The True Face of Francis Thompson.

[Richard Patterson]

This biography is full of factual errors. Thompson, for example was not a boy when he his mother died. On December the 19th, 1880, in the family home at Ashton, after suffering a complaint of the liver, Mary Morton Thompson, Francis' mother died. Mary was aged fifty-eight. It was the day after Francis Thompson's twenty-first birthday.

This is what Thompson, a knife carrying, surgeon trained, Providence Row living, drug addict said about prostitutes. 'These girls whose Practice is a putrid ulceration of love, venting foul and purulent discharge- for their very utterance is a hideous blasphemy against the sacrosanctity [sacred ways] of lover's language!'

[Pcdunn]

From the Catholic Encyclopedia re Thompson

"Poet, b. at Preston, Lancashire, 18 Dec., 1859; d. in London, 13 Nov., 1907. He came from the middle classes, the classes great in imaginative poetry. His father was a provincial doctor; two paternal uncles dabbled in literature; he himself referred his heredity chiefly to his mother, who died in his boyhood. His parents being Catholics, he was educated at Ushaw, the college that had in former years Lingard, Waterton, and Wiseman as pupils. There he was noticeable for love of literature and neglect of games, though as spectator he always cared for cricket, and in later years remembered the players of his day with something like personal love. After seven years he went to Owens College to study medicine. He hated this proposed profession more than he would confess to his father; he evaded rather than rebelled, and finally disappeared. No blame, or attribution of hardships or neglect should attach to his father's memory; every careful father knows his own anxieties. Francis Thompson went to London, and there endured three years of destitution that left him in a state of incipient disease. He was employed as bookselling agent, and at a shoemaker's, but very briefly, and became a wanderer in London streets, earning a few pence by selling matches and calling cabs, often famished, often cold, receiving occasional alms; on one great day finding a sovereign on the footway, he was requested to come no more to a public library because he was too ragged. He was nevertheless able to compose a little — "Dream-Tryst", written in memory of a child, and "Paganism Old and New", with a few other pieces of verse and prose.

"Having seen some numbers of a new Catholic magazine, "Merry England", he sent these poems to the editor, Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, in 1888, giving his address at a post-office. The manuscripts were pigeonholed for a short time, but when Mr. Meynell read them he lost no time in writing to the sender a welcoming letter which was returned from the post-office. The only way then to reach him was to publish the essay and the poem, so that the author might see them and disclose himself. He did see them, and wrote to the editor giving his address at a chemist's shop. Thither Mr. Meynell went, and was told that the poet owed a certain sum for opium, and was to be found hard by, selling matches. Having settled matters between the druggist and his client, Mr. Meynell wrote a pressing invitation to Thompson to call upon him. That day was the last of the poet's destitution. He was never again friendless or without food, clothing, shelter, or fire. The first step was to restore him to better health and to overcome the opium habit. A doctor's care, and some months at Storrington, Sussex, where he lived as a boarder at the Premonstratensian monastery, gave him a new hold upon life. It was there, entirely free temporarily from opium, that he began in earnest to write poetry. "Daisy" and the magnificent "Ode to the Setting Sun" were the first fruits. Mr. Meynell, finding him in better health but suffering from the loneliness of his life, brought him to London and established him near himself. Thenceforward with some changes to country air, he was either an inmate or a constant visitor until his death nineteen years later."

Richard, I respect your persistence, but I think a number of your examples of Thompson's comments reflect a certain wry humor more than hatred of the human race. The man had mental issues, addictions, and yet managed to survive and overcome them. He had friends, too, and they did assist him to recover from his destitution. If he was such a vile person, why would they care or bother? He is recognized as a great poet, among Catholics, if nowhere else, and I think you really are joining the ranks of Ripperlogists who pick a random famous artistic person and try to pin the Whitechapel crimes on him, for no other reason than because his work "seems" to offer "clues" of varying degrees of vagueness.
It is no more than the "Royals" theory in a new disguise, when you think about it. Why on earth should the Ripper be a famous artist, poet, musician, author, etc.?

[Richard Patterson]

Don’t let anyone tell you my Ripper suspect was a nice guy. Here is the true face of Francis Thompson. This is what he said about his classmates,

‘a veritable demoniac revelation…these malignant school-mates who danced around me with mocking evil distortion of laughter...devilish apparitions….testimonies to the murky aboriginal demon in man.’

Here is what he thought of his readers,

‘‘The public has an odd kind of prejudice that poems are written for its benefit….’

In particular his London readers,

’…that infectious web of sewer rats called London...the villainous blubber brained public.’

And here he is about, all Londoners,

'We lament the smoke of London-it were nothing without the fumes of congregated evil, the herded effluence from millions of festering souls. At times I am merely sick of it....Nothing but the vocabulary of the hospital, images of corruption and fleshly ruin,...The very streets weigh upon me. These horrible streets with their gangrenous multitudes, blackening ever into lower mortifications [shame] of humanity! The brute men; these lads who have almost lost the faculty of human speech, who howl & growl like animals, or use a tongue which in itself a cancerous disintegration of speech…Seamed & fissured with Scarred streets under the heat of the vaporous London Sun, the whole blackened organism corrupts into foul humanity, Seething & rustling through its tissues.'

This is what he felt about leaving a woman in a home that he had set alight,

'A house on fire is no place for tarrying'

Here is what he wrote kept him up awake at night,

‘the dearest child has made friends with me in the park; & we have fallen in love with each other… I rather fancy she thinks me one of the most admirable of mortals…And now I am in fever lest…her kinsfolk should steal her from me. Result- I haven’t slept for two nights… Of course in some ways she is sure to vanish…’

Speaking of children, He didn’t forget the Downtrodden,

'…they are brought up in sin from their cradles,... the boys are ruffians and profligates, (Sexually unrestrained] the girls harlots in the mother's womb…, For better your children were cast from the bridges of London than they should become as one of those little ones.’

He contrasted them with himself when he was rescued from the streets,

‘As though one stirred a fusty rag in a London alley and met the eyes of a cobra scintillating under the yellow gas lamps.'

Even the little things like why he needed a razor,

'Dear Mr Meynell...Can you send me a razor?...Any kind of razor would do for me; I have shaved with a dissecting scalpel before now...I would solve the difficulty by not shaving at all., if it were possible for me to grow a beard, but repeated experiment has convinced me that the only result of such action is to make me look like an escaped convict.'

or the big things,

‘The world-the Universe-is a fallen world.’

Were not nice.