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The Two Cities of Dreadful Night

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William D. Schaefer
William D. Schaefer*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles 24
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Extract

Although “The City of Dreadful Night” has long been recognized as James Thomson's masterpiece, a good many critics have insisted that it is an uneven piece of work, inconsistent as an allegory, confused as to intellectual intent. I believe that the solution to many of the problems in this minor classic can be found if the poem is read and studied in its original order of composition, an approach made possible through the Morgan manuscript, a final copy of the poem in which Thomson meticulously recorded the date on which each stanza had been written. It has long been known that Thomson wrote the poem in two stages, part in 1870 and part in 1873, but the exact order of composition has never been established, and even Salt's careful biography only records Thomson's statement that “about half of it, not the first half as it now stands, was written in 1870.” The Morgan manuscript, however, makes it possible to chart the step-by-step progress of the poem's composition (see Table on page 616) and, for the first time, to read the poem in the order in which Thomson wrote it. I believe that if it is read in chronological sequence, a good deal of the confusion surrounding the poem can be understood through the realization that “The City of Dreadful Night” as we know it today actually combines two separate poems. Moreover, as I shall attempt to show by treating them separately, the 1870 “City” and the 1873 “City” are unquestionably two very different poems in concept and intention.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 5 , December 1962 , pp. 609 - 616
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

Note 1 in page 609 The Pierpont Morgan Library describes this autograph copy as “the original manuscript of his best poem ‘The City of Dreadful Night,‘ written on 62 pp. in two 12mo Memorandum books, with his corrections, variations of reading, etc.” The copy was probably made shortly after the last date indicated, 29 October 1873, although minor grammatical corrections, word changes, and a few additions were made between that date and the poem's publication in March 1874 (important variations from the published version are noted herein; as would be expected, most revisions occur in the sections written in October 1873). Thirteen letters accompanying the MS reveal that before his death in 1882, Thomson gave this copy to his friend, G. G. Flaws of Bedford (also known as Oliver H. Leigh and “Geoffrey Quarles”) who sold it to E. C. Stedman in 1896. The Morgan Library acquired it in 1911, shortly after the Stedman sale. I am indebted to Mr. R. J. Dobell, grandson of Thomson's friend and publisher, Bertram Dobell, for calling this MS to my attention. I also wish to thank the authorities of the Pierpont Morgan Library for permission to examine the MS and to publish material contained in it.

Note 2 in page 609 Henry S. Salt, The Life of James Thomson (London, 1914), p. 78.

Note 3 in page 609 I see no reason to question the accuracy of Thomson's dates. He was a precise and meticulous man who carefully dated everything he wrote, whether a stanza of verse, an essay, or an observation on clouds. Two other MS copies of the poem, also written in small memorandum books, are at the British Museum (Add. 38532), both versions having been copied after only fifteen sections had been completed, both containing dates which agree with the dates for the same fifteen sections in the Morgan MS. In the earlier of the two copies, written in pencil, the first seven sections occur in the exact order of composition (2-18-20-1-5-11-7), which suggests they may have been entered in 1870, while the last eight sections (4-3-10-19-6-9-8-Proem), apparently entered sometime between 11 June and 3 July 1873, retain the order of composition while simply alternating narrative and descriptive sections. In the other Brit. Mus. MS, which is an ink copy of the revised pencil MS, likewise written prior to 3 July 1873, the arrangement of sections (1-2-5-18-11-20-7-4-9-10-3-6-19-8-Proem) also supports the order of composition indicated in the Morgan MS, for it is to be noted that the first narrative group is 2-18-20, the first descriptive group is 5-11-7, and the second narrative group is 4-10-6.

Note 4 in page 610 Salt, p. 46.

Note 5 in page 611 In the earlier of the two Brit. Mus. MSS, this passage originally read “scorns to wreak itself in idle words,” with “scorns to” crossed out and “cannot” written above it, an even stronger indication that Thomson considered his 1870 city to be a place of silent sufferers.

Note 6 in page 611 Several critics have suggested that these mountains were inspired by the American Rockies, but since the MSS indicate that the passage was written almost two years before Thomson's trip to Colorado, this suggestion now seems unlikely.

Note 7 in page 612 In the Morgan MS, the Leopardi epigraph of the published poem does not appear, although the Dante quotation does. In addition to the Marston and Dante quotations, Thomson included two other epigraphs in this MS: “A land of darkness, as darkness itself, and of the shadow of death; without any order, and where the light is as darkness” (the passage is taken from Job x.22); and, attributed to Aeschylus, “And evermore shall the burthen of the agony of thy present evil wear thee down; for he that shall (can?) deliver thee exists not in nature.” In the Brit. Mus. MS (ink copy), the Dante and Job quotations appear, along with the lines from Titus Andronicus which now introduce the Proem, and a quotation from Shelley's “Triumph of Life”: “And others mournfully within the gloom / Of their own shadow walked and called it death.”

Note 8 in page 612 It is, of course, reasonable to assume that during this two-and-a-half-year period Thomson reread his early sections, polished a few lines, and even, it would seem, added a stanza, for in the earlier Brit. Mus. MS, the fourth stanza of Section 4 is inserted at the end of that section and dated 13 August 1871. This date does not, however, appear in the later Brit. Mus. MS, nor in the Morgan MS, and is, in fact, the only instance where the three copies are not in perfect agreement on dates.

Note 9 in page 612 The footnote, referring to the last line in Section 1, reads: “Though the Garden of thy Life be wholly waste, the sweet flowers withered, the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang ever the rich dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within easy reach of thy hand, which may pluck of them when it will.” As regards the degree to which Thomson saw this 1870 poem as a personal allegory, it is worth noting that the MS version of this footnote originally read “my” instead of “thy.”

Note 10 in page 613 Where stanza 11 of Section 1 now reads “A night seems termless hell,” the MS originally read “A night is termless hell.”

Note 11 in page 613 In stanza 2 of Section 2 the cemetery is once referred to as an “old God's-acre,” but my point here is that the 1870 poem is clearly not concerned with God's presence or absence in the universe.

Note 12 in page 613 Readers of Thomson's prose will recall the climax of his 1871 satire, “Proposals for the Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery,” where he wrote, with possibly greater seriousness than he suggests in the essay, that “the human race, so long as no other is ready to supersede it, can compel nature to do what it pleases, by resolving on instant universal suicide in case of her refusal.”

Note 13 in page 614 The early Brit. Mus. MS indicates that even while copying the first fifteen sections, Thomson had already planned to write additional sections for the poem, for on the last page of the MS, he listed brief descriptions of six sections, three of which (19-9-Proem) appear in the MS and were, therefore, crossed off the list. The other three (12-14-17), not crossed off, became the first sections written after the June 1873 interval, when the Brit. Mus. copies had been completed.

Note 14 in page 614 Besides this reversal of Sections 13 and 17, the only other variation from the published order is the position of the Proem which, as in the Brit. Mus. MSS, is placed at the end. Three stanzas (4, 6, 8) in Section 12 were added after the Morgan MS was completed, and stanza 10 of Section 14 was added to the poem after its March 1874 publication in the National Reformer, but the rest of the Morgan MS, as revised, essentially agrees with the published poem.

Note 15 in page 614 Thomson had written an early six-stanza version of this section (Bodleian MS. Don.d.104), which he radically revised while expanding it to twelve stanzas for “The City.” The Morgan MS reveals that Thomson was still revising this section after 29 October 1873, and a letter to W. M. Rossetti (quoted in Salt, p. 77) shows he was still working on revisions as late as 30 January 1874. Most of the revisions are minor word changes (e.g., in stanza 6, “low sun” was changed to “comet,” “arched” to “curved,” “hamlet” to “village,” “wiggling imp” to “snaky imp”), but one major change occurs in the final three lines of the poem which is important as regards my suggestion that Thomson, in writing the 1873 “City,” considered himself both crusader and warrior. As the poem now ends, strong men turn to Melancholia “to drink new strength of iron endurance,” but originally Thomson had written that they turn to her “to drink new strength of stern defiance.”

Note 16 in page 615 According to Henry S. Salt in Seventy Years Among Savages (New York, 1921), p. 106, the anonymous reviewer in the Athenaeum was Theodore Watts-Dunton. The Melville statement is quoted by Salt in Company I Have Kept (London, 1930), p. 108. See also Edmund C. Stedman, “Twelve Years of British Song,” The Century Magazine, xxxiv (October 1887), 909–910, and William M. Rossetti, Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti, i (London, 1906), 500–501.

Note 17 in page 615 On the back cover of the small memorandum book in which Thomson wrote the early pencil copy of “The City of Dreadful Night,” there are a group of miscellaneous passages apparently written in 1870, which include several lines of verse, the opening lines of proposed poems. One of these lines reads: “I had a love—it was so long ago.”

Note 18 in page 615 “James Thomson” (anon. rev.), The Saturday Review, lxxix (16 February 1895), p. 215. Arthur Symons is, however, the author of this excellent article, since it is reprinted in his 1897 Studies in Two Literatures.

Note 19 in page 616 The omission of certain stanzas in Sections 12 and 14 is explained in note 14.