The City of Dreadful Night

By: James Thompson B V

Narrated by: Tom McLean, Ghizela Rowe

James Thomson was born in Port Glasgow, Scotland, on the 23rd November 1834.

At the age of 8 his sister died and his father suffered a stroke. Thomson was now sent south to be raised in a London orphanage, the Royal Caledonian Asylum, on Chalk near Holloway. Shortly thereafter he was given the news that his mother had also now died. It was a bleak beginning to the next chapters of his life and would undoubtedly go a long way towards shaping both his character and his future.

Thomson trained as an army schoolmaster at the Royal Military Asylum in Chelsea and served in Ireland. After a decade of Army life, he left the military and moved to London to find work as a clerk.

What Thomson also possessed was a powerful and unique writing gift. Unfortunately, his own demons curtailed him from leaving a larger literary legacy. But what he did leave are works that can be difficult but very rewarding, allowing us to observe, to understand and make sense of themes and issues that we might at first shy away from. He also used the suffix B V (Bysshe – taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley and Novalis – the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg); this was to avoid confusion with the earlier Scottish poet of the same name. For Thomson life always had a complication.

Stories, essays and poems were submitted to various publications during his life and undoubtedly the creative high point of his life is ‘The City of Dreadful Night’. Within its bleak verse are the struggles of Thomson’s own chaotic tortures with depression, insomnia and alcoholism in the uncaring world that surrounded him. It was published to favourable reviews from the critics but by now Thomson’s health was rapidly declining.

James Thomson B V died, in London, at the age of 47, on 3rd June 1882, from a broken blood vessel in his bowel.

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