Edward John Thompson

Edward John Thompson (9 April 1886 – 28 April 1946) was a British scholar, novelist, historian and translator. He is remembered for his translations from Bengali into English and his association with Rabindranath Tagore, on whom he wrote two books including a critical biography.

Thompson was born in Hazel Grove in , England, the eldest of six children of the Wesleyan missionary couple John Moses Thompson and Elizabeth Thompson who had served in South India. His father died before he was 10 and his mother brought up the children under financially strained circumstances. Thompson was educated at the Kingswood School and later worked at a bank in Bethnal Green to support his mother and siblings. He joined Richmond Theological College, was ordained a Methodist minister and gained a degree from the University of London. In 1907 he published his first collection of verse, The Knight Mystic.

He was sent to India in 1910 to teach English literature at the in Bankura, Bengal and he went on to serve there as Vice Principal of the college and Principal of the mission's school located on campus. During the First World War he served with the 2nd Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment as an army chaplain in Mesopotamia from 1916 to 1918, and his services to the wounded earned him a Military Cross. His experiences during the war found expression in his memoir, The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad and The Mesopotamian Verses, both of which were published in 1919. The latter work earned him repute as a poet.

In Bengal, he began learning the language and came to know Rabindranath Tagore. Thompson was with Tagore at Santiniketan when news of his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature broke. Thompson translated many of Tagore's writings, including Megh o Raudra, and wrote two books: Rabindranath Tagore: His Life & Work in 1921 and Rabindranath Tagore, Poet and Dramatist in 1926, a critical biography of Tagore's that led to bitter recrimination with him. Although Thompson argued that Tagore was underappreciated and misunderstood in the West, some of his criticisms of Tagore in the latter work led to much tension and misunderstanding between them.

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