The City of Dreadful Night

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File:London slums Wellcome L0000877.jpg
Illustration of 19th-century London slums by Gustave Doré

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,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> then, in 1880, in a book entitled The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The poem is noted for the pessimistic philosophy that it expresses.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> It has been argued that the city described in the poem is based on London.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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