James Thomson's response to Dante in The city of dreadful night

Abstract

From 1814, the year of the publication of Henry Francis Cary's translation of the Divine Comedy, later praised by Coleridge as the most faithful translation of Dante's masterpiece ever, and throughout the nineteenth century, the influence of Dante on Victorian poets and novelists is well known and fully recognized. Dante's allegory had a profound impact on the Victorians because it offered them a mode ofrepresenting the condition of metaphysical and geographical exile as well as a spiritual solution to contemporary dilemmas of transcendental matters. One of the most famous work to draw inspiration from Dante's Divine Comedy is certainly James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night (1874, 1880). The poem describes a modern pilgrim's quest which unfolds at night for meaning and coherence in a world that seems senseless and devoid of coherence. This article reads Thomson's city that re-enacts the obscure and powerful energy characterizing the Inferno and the trope of the city as the condition of human life.