The Dual Perspectives in James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night

This paper will deal primarily with Thomson's interesting dual perspectives employed in portraying the Victorian life's crises depicted in his masterpiece The City of Dreadful Night. Each of these perspectives will be analyzed according to its face value first, and then according to what might a gifted writer, like Thomson, had in mind and yearned symbolically to declare by adopting such a method in writing the poem. The City of Dreadful Night has earned justly the Victorian poet James Thomson (B. V.) a distinct place in English literature. It is a unique poem in its insightful earnestness, force of thought and its pointed verses; that turned it into a truly remarkable poem, deserving to be considered a predecessor to T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland. The City of Dreadful Night is an extremely intriguing poem; not just for the dark vision of humanity and its future the poem presents, but precisely for the multiplicity of levels with which its poet handles such an enigmatic topic.