ABSTRACT
'Per me si va nella città dolente' [Through me the way to the city of woe] (Inf., III. I): so sounds the first of the three epigraphs which preface the greatest visionary poem of the Victorian age, written between 1870 and 1873 by James Thomson, 'poet and pessimist' as he was described in the Dictionary of National Biography. 1 That single line simultaneously proclaims its author's allegiance to Dante and announces the journey upon which his readers are about to embark. This chapter will explore the ways in which this doleful journey draws down from Dante's in the Inferno and those in which it swerves away from its model without ever quite losing sight of it. I begin from the opening cantos of the City itself with an introduction to the poem's structure and general direction and to Dantean allusions which are not difficult to spot. In the second part of the paper, we double back to an earlier stage in Thomson's career, and discover that although the Scottish poet revered Dante and placed him securely in his pantheon of poetic greats, he interpreted the master narratives which he took from the Italian in distinctive ways. In these reworkings, the presence of other poets whom he admired, nearer to him in time and temperament, older brothers of this only son, played an important mediatory role. The first of these master narratives, in keeping with the fashion of the times, was the Beatrice story, revisited in its most plangent manner with the help of Novalis, and in decidedly more desecratory mode m homage to the waspish humour of Heinrich Heine. Between the writing of Thomson's best poem before The City of Dreadful Night, 'Vane's Story' (1864—65), and the City itself came a literary encounter of decisive importance both for Thomson and his poem, that with Giacomo Leopardi. Thomson was the first person to translate the entirety of the Operette morali [Short Moral Works] and the Pensieri [Thoughts] into English, and his reading of Leopardi gave him both 'renewed assurance' 2 and a modern take on the second of Dante's master narratives, the structure and disposition of the afterlife (or 'after-death', as Thomson preferred to call it), especially those of Hell. The work on Leopardi explains why the other two epigraphs which introduce The City of Dreadful Night were borrowed from the Canti, 3 and why the first published edition of Thomson's poems, The City of Dreadful Night, and Other Poems (1880), was dedicated 'To the memory | of | the younger brother of Dante | GIACOMO 211LEOPARDI | a spirit as lofty | a genius as intense | with a yet more tragic doom'. The third section of my paper will chart this encounter, before we return finally in the fourth to Thomson's poem and explore what more or less explicit effect Leopardi may have had on his recasting of Dante.
