Hell is a city: symbolic systems and epistemological scepticism in The City of Dreadful Night

Abstract

Curtis Dahl’s pioneering 1955 essay, ‘The Victorian Wasteland’, singles out James Thomson’s poem The City of Dreadful Night for special comment since it ‘expresses an unrelieved and hopeless pessimism deeper even than the sometimes posed gloominess of Swinburne’ (Dahl, 1962: 39). Without ever explicitly suggesting an influence on T.S. Eliot, although this has now been established beyond doubt (see Crawford, 1985), Dahl finds that Thomson’s pessimism is surprisingly modern in being so total. A label like ‘pessimist’, however, tends to hypostatise a general tone without examining the symbolic procedures of the work in question. Dahl does not mention a crucial fact about The City , for instance: it grew directly out of Thomson’s atheism, which had in turn been shaped by his contacts in the 1860s with Charles Bradlaugh, the free-thinker and editor of the National Reformer where The City was first published in 1873. 1 Thomson demonstrates in this poem an awareness of the need to engage sceptically with the system of symbolism which he saw as underpinning Christianity and which was coming under increasing pressure from contemporary developments in evolutionary thought. The City , then, is far more complex than an expression of hopelessness. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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