SOURCE: "Last Years: The Castle of Indolence and Coriolanus, 1746-1748," in James Thomson, 1700-1748: A Life, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1991, pp. 248-84.

Sambrook is one of the world's leading authorities on Thomson and the author of a major biography of the poet. In the following excerpt from that work, he offers a closely biographical and source-related interpretation of The Castle of Indolence, Thomson's final work.

[Having been deeply disappointed by a long delay in seeing his play Coriolanus produced] Thomson has a happier fate to report to [William] Paterson concerning an even longer-gestated work:

know that, after fourteen or fifteen Years, the Castle of Indolence comes abroad in a Fortnight. It will certainly travel as far as Barbadoes. You have an Apartment in it, as a Night-Pensioner; which, you may remember, I fitted up for you during our delightful Party at North-Haw. Will ever these Days return...