The City of Dreadful Night

James Thomson, who wrote under the pseudonym Bysshe Vanolis, was a Scottish Victorian era poet famous primarily for the long poem "The City of Dreadful Night", first published in 1874, an expression of bleak pessimism in a dehumanized, uncaring urban environment.

He struggled with depression, insomnia and alcohol-abuse throughout his short life and his work frequently reflected the bleakness and despair of his life’s experiences.

Raymond Williams calls "The City of Dreadful Night": ‘a symbolic vision of the city as a condition of human life’. Williams asserts that, by the Victorian-era, the city had become a new form of human consciousness. The city of Thomson’s poem is clearly an imagined London. But it is not the dynamic hub of Empire of the popular imagination: for him it is a city of death in life. A place permeated by loss of belief, loss of purpose and loss of hope.