First published in 1874, "The City of Dreadful Night" is an extended poetic meditation on melancholy, or what is generally termed today as depression. Thomson's "city" is the "città dolente" of Dante, the domain of souls trapped in a round of ceaseless misery. However, the inhabitants of Thomson's world endure a torment more subtle and more devastating than the acute and picturesque tortures of Dante's Inferno - a complete loss of purpose and a relentless draining of energy, a desperate and ever wakeful ennui, in which the soul cries for a restful slumber that will never come.

James Thomson was raised in an orphanage, and after serving in the military, worked as a clerk in London. "The City of Dreadful Night" was written during the last decade of his life, during which he struggled with alcoholism, insomnia and depression.

In his biography of Thomson, Henry Salt observed: "Thomson was unable to take any but a despondent view of the destiny of mankind. The sense of a Doom mysterious, incalculable, immitigable, broods darkly over his genius almost from the first, and makes him perforce a necessitarian in his philosophical creed."

I find no hint throughout the Universe
Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;
I find alone Necessity Supreme.

So he wrote in a notable section of the "The City of Dreadful Night" and the same doctrine of necessity dominates the greater part of his writings.