It is for his great poem “The City of Dreadful Night” that James Thomson (“B.V.”) is remembered. He began the four-year work on this his masterpiece early in 1870. Two months earlier as his 35th birthday loomed in November 1869, he had burnt all his private letters and papers. It was all he could do "after this terrible year", he wrote in his diary.
His situation alone, poor and alcoholic in lodgings, was no better and perhaps worse than the single lodger characterised as a suicide in Thomson’s 1867 poem “In the Room”. Thomson did not commit suicide. But when on November 4th 1869 he burnt all his private letters, papers and old manuscripts, which took him five hours, he destroyed everything but the manuscripts of those poems he had gathered with a view to publishing a book. It was as if he set about systematically destroying his personal identity as worthless, leaving only the literary identity contained in the poems he felt able to keep: with this literary identity alone the future could be faced uncluttered. “I could do no less than consume the past. I can now better face the future, come in what guise it may.” Then in January 1870 he completed the first two verses of what was to become “The City of Dreadful Night”. The twenty-one sections of the poem, with prefatory “Proem”, were published in the National Reformer over four instalments in 1874.
The even-numbered sections are in the past tense, and describe things heard and seen on a past visit to this strange city: a man circling round visiting three places wherein, he says, died Faith, Hope, and Love; an open-air speaker describing his travel through a hallucinatory landscape, till he arrived at a shore where his body had split in two and he watched his other self consoled then borne away by a woman who carried her heart in her hand; people overheard saying they had been refused entrance to Hell because they had had no hope left to abandon to get in; people discussing how God would have to be vile to make such a vile world, but the world is empty of any creator or director; a young man’s visit to a secluded mansion where he pays homage to a "Lady Of the Images" - a dead woman lying in state; a queue of people entering a cathedral, renouncing their previous commitments to religion, art, drugs, politics; an orator telling a congregation there is no God or life after death; a member of the congregation complaining that this does not make a presently-unhappy life any happier; a man crawling on the ground trying to find the thread that links his present with his past, so he can go back to infancy; a stone angel disintegrating in three stages - wings, sword, trunk - before a sphynx.The odd-numbered of the 21 sections are in the present tense, describing the city and its inhabitants: its situation, its people, their insomnia; its darkness and strange sounds; that people don't know how they got there, but once there they are fated to keep returning; that no-one is sane, that reputed ghosts may be madmen; that traffic on unknown business is heard passing; that the inhabitants though outwardly mad are brothers, "the saddest and the weariest men on earth"; how time seems interminable; that the inhabitants all affect - and infect - one another by sharing and breathing the same air; that the cosmos has no personal attributes other than those mistakenly projected upon it by humans; how a "River of the Suicides" runs through the city; that an image of a woman overlooks the city, described as the figure of Melencolia engraved by the German artist Albrecht Durer. With the city’s inhabitants looking up to this figure of Melencolia, the poem ends.
“The City of Dreadful Night” was attributed to “B.V.”, the pseudonym Thomson had adopted for years after first using the pen-name “Bysshe Vanolis” twenty years before. Bysshe for Percy Bysshe Shelley; Vanolis as anagram of the German poet Novalis, alias Friedrich von Hardenberg. Shelley was a favourite of Thomson’s from youth. Thomson thought that Shelley more than any other English poet had written poetry one felt was “not self-possessed but God-possessed”. He was to be numbered amongst those celebrants of the higher cosmic harmonies whose words “shall for ever to the great mass be as one who is speaking in an unknown tongue.” The phenomenon of people speaking in “unknown tongues” was something as it happens that Thomson’s mother, a follower of the millenialist preacher Edward Irving, would have been been familiar with. Glossalalia, people speaking supposedly possessed by the Holy Spirit, was a feature of Irving’s congregation, of which she had been a part. Irving died two weeks before Thomson’s birth. But his books on the Prophecies were read by the young Thomson "for the imagery" as he later wrote, and Irving’s portrait was displayed in the family homeThe early Irvingite background cannot be discounted in considering the backlights to “The City of Dreadful Night” itself. The Irvingites—and again the millenialist preacher John Cumming, closely connected with the Royal Caledonian Asylum wherein Thomson was placed on his eighth birthday—thought of themselves as living in the last days before the Second Coming of Christ and the establishment of the New Jerusalem, that City of God foretold in Revelations. That the child Thomson was significantly exposed to belief in the imminent coming of the City of God, a city of perpetual light where God would be ever-present, a city traversed by the River of Life—is hardly immaterial to his composition, in mature adulthood, of an epic poem describing a city where God is known
For the Irvingites, Corinthians Book One was especially prized. On the opening of Chapter 14 rested the Biblical basis of their glossalia: “Follow after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy. For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto man but unto God: for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he speaketh mysteries.” The need to follow after charity was consequent on the verse immediately preceding, which closes Chapter 13: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” “The City of Dreadful Night” reverses this. It is “dead faith, dead hope, dead love” that is memorialised in the endlessly circling figure of section two. The triple negation is built into the continuing pattern of the even-numbered stanzas in the poem. Sections four, six and eight can be taken as instancing dead hope; section ten, dead love; sections twelve, fourteen and sixteen, dead faith.Not only Revelations and Corinthians are qualified negatively. Dante is a significant presence. It was to read Dante that Thomson first taught himself Italian. “The City of Dreadful Night” has as opening epigraph the first line on the gates of Hell in Canto Three of Dante’s Inferno : Per me si va nella citta dolente—“Through me you pass into the city of woe”. But line nine of that inscription “All hope abandon ye who enter here” proves insoluble entrance fee for the citizens of Thomson’s city, in section six: they have no hope left to abandon with which to gain admittance. In section four, the narrator left at the water’s edge contrasts with Canto Thirty-One of Purgatorio, where Matilda draws Dante across the waters of Lethe towards Beatrice. The narrator’s abandoned self in Thomson’s poem, watching the self that is borne away, concludes “But I, what do I here?” This can seem a bitter counterpoint to "Surgi, che fai?"—“Arise, what dost thou?” which Dante hears when he wakens from sleep on Lethe’s other side. Lastly, instead of the beatific vision of the Queen of Heaven in Canto Thirty-two of Dante's Paradise, Thomson has Dürer's down-to-earth Melancolia. Dante's Divine Comedy is a background to the poem: but it is purged of what hope and faith are there.
Thomson’s reading was wide and international. He can be seen as the first British writer from a poor background who arrived at a sense of literary identity with the significant help of a public library. He was a frequent visitor to the British Library reading room while still in his teens in the Royal Military Asylum; and it was his favoured place of reading and study in adult years after he had left the Army.Spenser was another favourite. Where the scene at the water’s edge in section four of Thomson’s poem can as mentioned recall Dante, the female observed recalls the Lady in the "Mask of Cupid" in The Faerie Queene Book Three. Thomson’s figure carries "her own burning heart": Spenser's “dolefull Lady, like a dreary Spright,/ Cald by strone charmes out of eternall night” has a wounded breast where “At that wide orifice her trembling hart / Was drawn forth, and in silver basin layd.” Spenser's enchanted palace of Busiraine, with tapestries and altar to Cupid, seems both echo and reverse of Thomson’s section ten where a young male, turning to stone, keeps vigil in a mansion by the corpse of the woman he loved. Thomson's reversal of Revelations and Corinthians can also be seen as reversal of Spenser’s endorsement: in Book One Canto Ten of The Faerie Queene the knight is welcomed by Faith Hope and Charity (Fidenza, Speranza, Charissa) in the House of Holiness before being led to behold the vision of the New Jerusalem “Wherein eternall peace and happiness doth dwell.”
Having quoted Dante and Leopardi at the outset Thomson begins the poem by quoting Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus—“In the dust I write/ My heart’s deep languor and my soul’s sad tears.” The verses, the narrator maintains, cannot be properly read by the hopeful, the happy, those without doubts, nor the pious. But someone else wandering in the city will understand; in other words, the city-state encompasses the possibility of the unknown reader being presently living within it themselves. But not every reader will know what he’s talking about: the “uninitiate” can never divine the “secret”. This is an echo of Novalis: “If you wish to communicate some secret to just a few people in a large, mixed company and you are not sitting next to them, you have to speak a special language… Whoever understands it is automatically and justly an initiate.” 1Like Novalis—and Spenser—the special language that Thomson speaks is allegory. The allegory of “The City of Dreadful Night” is an allegory on the condition of ontological insecurity 2 on the one hand (presented as the oddnumbered stanzas of the poem), and on the narrator’s arrival into this state through self-engulfing instances of despair (bodied as the even-numbered). As an allegory on ontological insecurity it is in the European existential tradition: a tradition encompassing such as James Hogg’s The Confessions of a Justified Sinner , Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, De Moussett’s The Confessions of a Child of the Century, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Barbusse’s Hell, Sartre’s Nausea.
That is the secret. The loss is configured as adjunct to and consequent on a sense of total despair: the total loss of faith, hope, and love. Section eighteen presents the allegory of a man whose only way forward, he thinks, is to find the path back to infancy, which he might accomplish could he only "reunite my present with my past". His ordinary consciousness of self securely being-in-time has been fractured, lost. He is trapped in an unchanging Present. Section Twenty objectifies the instigatory triple loss in a process visited on one image: the angel who disintegrates in three stages before the Sphinx.
Antecedent to Thomson would be Kierkegaard’s “angest” —“dread”, as in the title of Thomson’s poem itself. Or again one might think of Sartre’s “nausea”: the protagonist in Sartre’s novel Nausea reflects, “Things have broken free from their names.” But there is Leopardi, whom Thomson was reading and translating before writing the poem. The consciousness “worse than woe” 3 depicted might be understood as the precipitate of what Leopardi called noia—“life weariness”—together with “the affliction which derives from the certitude of the nullity of all things ”. “Nullity” is otherwise translated as “nothingness”. 4 A state of consciousness finally beyond naming as part of its essence. Even names can no longer do their comforting work. Only art could gesture to that place where the question might at least be most exactly asked. An allegory about that which can not be named, but is recognised only by those who have experienced it. These are the initiate.The city of the poem can also to an extent be seen itself as image of the nineteenth century city like the London Thomson was living in: its dense fogs to which he referred miserably in his diaries, its actual suicides, its pestilential atmosphere, its capacity to make a lone person alone feel overwhelmed by human number but unconsoled by human intimacy. One might even speculate that the “dead faith dead hope dead love” theme is perhaps not irrelevant to the statement by the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous in their founding volume that “. . . we have been not only physically and mentally ill, we have been spiritually sick.” 5 The city’s inhabitants can, given this speculation, be taken as the despairing community of alcohol dependants that haunted the London streets on which Thomson was to end for the last time homeless and drinking in the weeks before his death. Perhaps a lonely universe of male repetitive-compulsive behaviour: of men who have rejected a God obsessed with sex and physical retribution - but for whom self-diagnosis is not the same as cure and release; and whose lapses into compulsion can be seen as the private ritual of a futile quest.
One could go further back. One might consider that the narrator’s statement of the city in section one that “how one arrives there none can clearly know” might be precisely what the eight year old Thomson felt on his arrival in the Royal Caledonian Asylum in 1842. Two years previously he had been at home 400 miles north in Port Glasgow, living with a healthy mother and a little sister, the father largely working at sea. Now his only little sister was dead, from measles “caught from me” as he later wrote; a death which he felt had contributed to his mother’s having had “a cloud of melancholy hanging over her.” His father was ill from a stroke, and incapable. His mother was dying: she died six months after he entered the asylum—but for six whole months this woman with her “cloud of melancholy” was alive outside the London institution into which the child Thomson had been placed. It is impossible not to reflect however briefly on this woman, who had struggled on as a dressmaker to keep the family alive, when considering the lone figure of Melencolia working on outside the city at the close of Thomson’s epic. And whilst Thomson was put into the Royal Caledonian Asylum, a newly born brother, John, was taken to Port Glasgow to the family of an aunt. Thomson was alone.“I suffer mute and lonely, yet another
Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother
Travels the same wild paths, though out of sight.
Possible references to Thomson’s life are, though, not always so deeply buried. A consistent presence from 1851 had been the figure of Charles Bradlaugh. The two first met in the Army in Ireland, when Thomson was trainee army schoolmaster near Cork for eighteen months. After parting they maintained correspondence, and Thomson’s first published poem was in a shortlived journal edited by Bradlaugh in 1858. Thereafter, when he left the army, Thomson lived with the Bradlaugh family for several years. Bradlaugh was the country’s foremost public atheist, founder and president of the National Secular Society, and editor of the society’s weekly journal the National Reformer, whose stated founding objectives included “antagonism to every known religious system, and especially to the various phases of Christianity taught and preached in Britain.” Thomson became a regular contributor. Yet it is a remarkable fact that whereas the atheistic “The City of Dreadful Night” was thus published in what was probably the only weekly journal in Britain that would have published it, nonetheless the poem presents (section sixteen) a significant qualification of the optimism of the first principle—"That the promotion of Human Improvement and Happiness is the highest duty"— on which the National Secular Society was founded; and it thus clearly replies to the atheist preacher (section fourteen) who can surely be interpreted as representative of none other than the campaigning president of the society and editor of the paper, Charles Bradlaugh himself. Reversal indeed.
This figure of the atheist preacher in his cathedral pulpit of section fourteen is itself counterpoint to the figure seen declaiming his history, alone in the open air in section four: this latter recounts his travels through the desert of a disintegrating hallucinatory universe, all cohesion and reassurance of the familiar visible world denied; the ensuing split in his sense of self, the thinking conscious being watching the corporeal self borne away in the arms of the evidently deceased female figure. And this written by a poet who described himself as “Ishmael in the desert from my childhood.” The split in the self embodies the split throughout the poem as a whole. The implicit sense is that it is the past actions of his own corporeal self whom the watching, thinking narrator describes. The even-numbered stanzas represent the futilely-felt actions of the body. The odd-numbered stanzas present the stasis of the mind.Whilst the source of the poem's description of the final figure of Melencolia might contain elements of the poet’s memory of his mother, the image itself is one chosen by Thomson from the world of art. This figure contrasts not only with the Queen of Heaven at the end and summit of Dante’s Paradiso, but also with the Queen of the World addressed beyond the veil of liberating Night in Novalis’s Hymns to the Night. The choosing of the name “Novalis” in Thomson’s pseudonym, shortened to the “V” of “B.V.”, was likewise the choosing of a symbol, a concealed statement of literary intent and identity.
The third section of Novalis's Hymns to the Night presents the experience of a vision of the deceased that the poet claimed to have had revealed to him at the grave of Sophie von Kühn. She was a young girl to whom he had been betrothed before she died aged only fifteen: the section describing Novalis’s vision concludes, in Thomson’s translation, “since then have I everlasting immutable faith in the Heaven of the Night, and its glory the Beloved.” In 1858 Thomson quoted Novalis’s poem in a footnote showing his having by then read Hymns to the Night. The following year he wrote “Mater Tenebrarum”, which contains the plea for an “adorable child” to come down from heaven and show that “the soul with its love never dies”. In 1860 a sonnet to Joseph Barnes and his wife Alice recalled the “Good Angel” he met when living with them in the early 1850’s, and whose death “how soon” had left him ever since wandering “lost in blackest stormy night". This “Good Angel” has been taken to be a girl called Matilda Weller.Like Novalis, Thomson met this young girl when she was 12 or 13; Weller died a month before her fifteenth birthday, Thomson then being aged 19. Early biographers made much of this death, suggesting that Thomson’s alcoholic excesses that climaxed at his death were caused by a lifelong broken heart. Such a simplistic view was naturally open to criticism. When interviewed by Thomson’s first biographer Henry Salt, Charles Bradlaugh, who was there at the time, dismissed the notion of a love affair, saying Weller was too young. He added however that it was only later Thomson "built, bit by bit, a poetic romance about her memory." But if this is indeed what he did, then Thomson the poet chose a literary strategy in relation to Matilda Weller akin to that of Novalis in relation to Sophie von Kühn.
More even than Novalis, Heinrich Heine was central to Thomson’s belief that modern German literature was the greatest in Europe, and the sundry quotes from Heine in “Vane’s Story” represent an open tribute to him. The tone of Thomson’s more than 1,200 line poem varies between seriousness and irony. Vane stands his sceptical unChristian ground against the female visitant from Heaven when she asks about his reputed lack of piety acquired since she last knew him on earth. First called “Gray’s Story” in draft, the belief-versus-unbelief dialogue could possibly be based in part on Thomson’s experience with Helen Gray, daughter in a Scottish family he regularly visited in his childhood in London; and to which he made a last visit when an army schoolteacher in 1860. Helen Gray though did not die in youth, she lived on after Thomson’s acquaintance with her, and later married. Whatever if any source of the dialogue, the poem is another supernatural female visitation myth: the visitant once known in youth has now come from a heaven containing Heine as well as Shelley.In “The Naked Goddess” of 1867 a mother-goddess, discovered by townspeople living naked on a hill over the town, can only save people effectively by removing them as children from the baleful influence of body-repressive priests and overthinking philosphers, before they grow up. Adulthood is too late.
And it’s too late for the suicide in “In the Room” of 1868. No visitation for him. The end of the line has been reached. The protagonist of this particular journey has nowhere left to go. To continue, Thomson’s literary persona would have to make a new start. The fresh start made was explanation and explication of how the protagonist had arrived where he was. The leap of faith was that the protagonist was not a wholly isolated and individually exclusive persona, but a member of a community. Leopardi was part of this. The trappings of exclusive individuality had to be destroyed, burned, for the leap of faith to be made. “The City of Dreadful Night” presents the protagonist finally as a member of a community of males: the beloved dead, the source of hope beyond and outside. Unlike in Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, the darkness not energising, and no gateway to religious conviction.Four years after publication of “The City of Dreadful Night” in 1874, the unpublished “I had a love” states the narrator would not even request the Beloved any more to come back from the grave, had he his life to live over again. “Far more truth than poetry,” Thomson wrote in the margin of the manuscript. Four years later again, and some months before Thomson’s own death, then even the female muse, that myth, complains she is dead, he should leave her alone. Finally, the poem “Insomnia”— and the visitant is ungendered. The “hour”, time itself, is become an “It”.
All this logic. But poetry doesn’t really work so neatly, the line is not really so absolutely straight, but this is a discernible thread. It takes no great imagining to think that in Thomson’s personal life he probably followed the Novalis myth of the young Beloved as an echo of his grieving for his young sister, for whose death when he was about five and she was only three, he felt responsible, and to whom the young Beloved, be she rooted in reality or not, stood as representing that time when he was still a member of a family, a member of a family home, with a mother who was not sad. This is what makes his placing of Heine’s poem “To his sister” at the end of his second and last collection of poems to be published in his own lifetime, so poignant.Past, past, are the sports of our childhood,
And all rolls past in sooth,—
The World, and Time, and Money,
And Faith, and Love, and Truth.
Her subjects often gaze up to her there:
The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance,
The weak new terrors; all, renewed assurance
And confirmation of the old despair.
Thomson’s work is that of an essentially European writer whose work can be seen in the context of other European literature. It should be understood that pessimism in literature does not necessarily entail gloominess of social personality. Thomson’s alcoholic bouts grew more frequent towards his death; but between them he was known as a genial man who was excellent with children, a favourite with Bradlaugh’s children for instance whom he would entertain with stories recalled with fondness many years later. He was hard-working all his life, teaching himself German, French and Italian, and his reviews over the years included works by such writers as Flaubert, Balzac, Gautier, and Baudelaire, before their translation to English.
Much of his criticism of the prudery of contemporary British writing and the bracing physicality of Burns and Whitman for instance, is refreshing. Refreshing also, to this reader at any rate, the satire and criticism of religious practice and convention. Some of “Religion in the Rocky Mountains” was too hot even for Bradlaugh, who held it back from the pages of the National Reformer in case it led to imprisonment for blasphemy. It is difficult, early in the twenty-first century, to understand easily the amount of public piety that was taken for granted in contributions to the respectable mainstream literary magazines.Seeing his work in the round helps one to see the position of the man who burned all his private papers on November 4th 1869. A man who felt he had nothing left to declare but his Being. Neither through birth certificates nor old letters nor anything else of an individually isolating nature could that be made clear. Only through art, through literary art, could it be declared. In that declaration, however contradictorily and absolutely negative the content, neither faith, nor hope, nor caritas—caring—were dead. Someone else could be out there. Someone to whom he could declare: “I, too, am human.”
1 From the Preface to his collection of aphorisms, Glaube und Liebe as translated in Haywood, B: Novalis: The Veil of Imagery, Mouton, The Hague 1959 pp 12-13. Back to Text
2 “Ontological insecurity” would be a term unknown to Thomson, used by the Scottish existential psychiatrist R D Laing in his The Divided Self of 1959. Laing, in contrasting it with security of sense of self and being, describes ontological insecurity thus: “The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question. He may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.” (Laing, R D: The Divided Self Tavistock 1960, Penguin 1965 p 42.)Back to Text
3 “worse than woe” is “the dreadful strain/ Of thought and consciousness which never ceases” mentioned in section one of “The City of Dreadful Night.” Back to Text
4 Thomson translates Leopardi’s “noia” as “life-weariness”, and the phrase “the certitude of the nullity of all things” in the letters to Pietro Giordani and Carlo Leopardi printed in this anthology. Prue Shaw translates the latter as “the certainty of the nothingness of things” in The Letters of Giacomo Leopard 1817-1837 Northern Universities Press, Leeds 1998. Back to Text
5 Alcoholics Anonymous AA World Services New York 1955 {“The Big Book”). Back to Text
The biographical facts contained within the Introduction can all be found with sources referenced where appropriate in my biography Places of the Mind: The Life and Work of James Thomson (“B.V.”), Cape 1993.
