The poet James Thomson was author of the pessimistic masterpiece The City of Dreadful Night, which Hermann Melville described as a modern Book of Job. Born into a millenialist family, reared in a London Scottish orphanage, Thomson was an early member of the Corps of Army schoolmasters. Expelled from the Army for insubordination, he wrote for the weekly freethought National Reformer where he published pioneering translations of Leopardi, versions of Heine, prose satires on Church affairs and biting criticism of the narrowness of contemporary British literature.