By turns allegorical, satirical, and visionary, this selection of the best of James Thomson’s writings shows a fascinating poet and essayist who has largely been left out of syllabi and anthologies. His is one of the great, premonitorily decadent voices of the mid-nineteenth century, a voice kin­dred with those of Baudelaire, and Poe.

“The motions of his mind in the best of the essays are utterly untram­mel­ed and independent, and yet falling naturally into grace and poetry.”
–Herman Melville

James Thomson, pen name B.V. (November 23, 1834–June 3, 1882) was a Scottish-born poet, journalist, and translator from German and Italian. An orphan at the age of eight, he attended the Royal Cale­donian Asylum in London for poor children of Scottish military families. He train­ed and worked as an army schoolmaster until 1862, when he moved to London and immediately began to contribute articles to National Re­former. “The City of Dreadful Night” (1874; 1880) has long been re­garded as the most masterly of his poetic works. Thomson wrote steadily for the London press until his death.