Thoughts and Suggestions on the Social Problem and Things in General (1888-1889)

Abstract

MY GRANDFATHER, PHILLIPS THOMPSON, was one of the best-known journalists of his era. He could write just about anything. He wrote newspaper columns, books, magazine artticles, skits, poems, and even songs. I'm sure if there'd been TV and radio he'd have appeared in those mediums. As it was, he was famous as a platform lecturer. He worked for the Mail and Empire, the Globe, the Toronto News, John Ross Robertson's Telegraph, and many other newspapers. He was a leading light in the press galleries at Queen's Park and Ottawa. He was an editor as well as a writer, he founded a political weekly, the National, and was associate editor of the famous magazine Grip. He reached the heights of success as a humorist writing, under the pseudonym of Jimuel Briggs, a police court column that caught the public fancy and made his name a by-word. In it he poked fun at both the law and its victims and sometimes barely escaped charges for contempt of court. In 1881, the Globe sent him as its special correspondent to Ireland for two months to cover the land campaign of Charles Stewart Parnell. He left Canada