The City of Dreadful Night

For the short story by Rudyard Kipling, see Rudyard Kipling bibliography.

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]

Illustration of 19th-century London slums by Gustave Doré

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]