Description:
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 Plantin 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… Read More
