The City of Dreadful Night
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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,[1] then, in 1880, in a book entitled The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems.[2] The poem is noted for the pessimistic philosophy that it expresses.[3] It has been argued that the city described in the poem is based on London.[4]
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."[5]