“The City of Dreadful Night”

“‘The City of Dreadful Night’” first appeared in the Civil and Military Gazette in September 1885, three years after James Thomson’s death, and the inverted commas of the title are the 19-year old Kipling’s immediate acknowledgement of a debt to the poet. Thomson’s two most famous poems “The City of Dreadful Night” and “Insomnia” contain so many elements pertinent to Kipling’s own frame of mind when the young journalist found himself rather peripheral to Anglo-Indian society, at a time in his life when questions and anxieties about the future must also have weighed on his mind. Contrary to Thomson, who gives his City an apocalyptical, hallucinatory and phantasmagorical dimension beyond space and time, Kipling’s is strongly anchored in reality, both geographical and historical. The dark, surrealistic fantasy of the poet has been replaced by the journalist’s harsh, naturalistic realism, as his reference to Zola makes clear.