The City of Dreadful Night is a long poem by the Scottish poet James "B.V." Thomson, written between 1870 and 1873, and published in the National Reformer in 1874, then, in 1880, in a book entitled The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems. The poem is noted for the pessimistic philosophy that it expresses. It has been argued that the city described in the poem is based on London.
The poem, despite its insistently bleak tone, won the praise of George Meredith, Rudyard Kipling and of George Saintsbury, who in A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature wrote that "what saves Thomson is the perfection with which he expresses the negative and hopeless side of the sense of mystery."
References
- Sullivan, Dick. ""Poison Mixed With Gall": James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night – A Personal View". Retrieved 29 September 2008.
- Thomson, James (1880). The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems. London: Reeves and Turner.
- Salt, Henry S. (August 1896). "Among the Authors: The Poet of Pessimism". The Vegetarian Review: 360–362.
- Cheng, Chu-chueh (27 April 2016). "The Importance of Being London: Looking for Signs of the Metropolis in James Thomson's City of Dreadful Night". Literary London Society. Retrieved 22 May 2020.
- Saintsbury, George (1906). A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature (1780–1895). London: The Macmillan Company. p. 298.
External links
Works related to The City of Dreadful Night at Wikisource
Quotations related to James Thomson (B.V.) at Wikiquote
- The City of Dreadful Night at Project Gutenberg
The City of Dreadful Night public domain audiobook at LibriVox
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