About the Book

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.

Themes and Reception

The poem is noted for the pessimistic philosophy that it expresses. The poem, despite its insistently bleak tone, won the praise of George Meredith 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."