The City of Dreadful Night and Other Writings

By turns allegorical, visionary, and satirical, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Writings combines Thomson's poetic magnum opus with selections from his poetry and belletristic prose pieces, written for The Secular Review, National Reformer, and Cope's Tobacco Plant in the 1860s and 70s. Harrowing and musical in its nightmarish visions like "Insomnia" and in the title poem, wryly comic and philosophical in his prose essays, here is an unheralded voice of a Victorian generation, which came of age with the publicization of Darwin's findings, and saw humanity definitively condemned to a godless globe.

"It is long since I have been so interested in a volume as in that of the Essays and Phantasies… The motions of his mind in the best of the essays are utterly untrammeled and independent, and yet falling naturally into grace and poetry." — Herman Melville

James Thomson, penname "B. V." (23 November 1834 – 3 June 1882) was a Scottish writer of visionary verse and belletristic prose, and a translator from German and Italian. After some years as a military schoolteacher, while living in London in the 1860s and 70s he earned a living as a journalist. His long poem The City of Dreadful Night was serialized in National Reformer in 1874 and later published in book form with other poems in 1880. Several prose volumes collect his satirical, belletristic, and critical writings. These include Essays and Phantasies (1881) and Satires and Profanities (1884). Posthumously, a volume of his translations of Leopardi was edited and published by his friend, the literary scholar and editor Bertram Dobell.

Table of Contents: Note on the Text. James Thomson, by Amy Levy. Selected Verse. The Doom of a City, excerpt. The Cypress and the Roses. A Recusant. Two Sonnets. Vane's Story, excerpt. Sunday at Hampstead. Shameless. Art. Philosophy. Sonnet. In the Room. The City of Dreadful Night. I Had a Love. Childhood. Despotism Tempered by Dynamite. Proem. Insomnia. Selected Prose. A Walk Abroad. Christmas Eve in the Upper Circles. A Word on Blasphemy, excerpt. Proposals for the Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery. Religion in the Rocky Mountains, excerpt. Great Christ Is Dead!. Our Obstructions, excerpt. Fragments, 1861-1878. In Our Forest of the Past. Bibliography.