John Stuart Thomson (1869-1950) is an author about whom relatively little is publicly known: his nationality, education and personal career are not clearly documented, and only two of his works are currently held in the collection. Judging by their titles, his interests spanned two quite different fields. China Revolutionized is a documentary account of the transformations in modern China, an early twentieth-century Western observer's record of Chinese social change; Fil and Filippa: Story of Child Life in the Philippines focuses on children's life in the Philippines and is written in a more everyday, story-like manner. Taken together, the two books suggest an author who presented foreign societies and daily life in a documentary style, choosing subjects close to the changes of the age and the circumstances of ordinary people, in plain language aimed at general readers. Given the limited public information, biographical details and the full range of his writing remain to be verified, and readers may chiefly come to know him through the subjects and narrative style of his surviving works.
