The gloomiest poet of the Victorian era, the “laureate of pessimism,” as literary historians characterize him, James Thomson (1834–1882) was practically unrecognized during his lifetime. Part of the reason for this was the character of Thomson, who led a lonely existence, suffering from insomnia, depression and alcoholism. A monument to this painful state is Thomson’s main work, the philosophical poem “City of the Terrible Night” (departmental edition 1880), marked by hopeless despair, horror of industrial progress, and rejection of religion. The “City of the Terrible Night” in the poem is both London and, at the same time, a generalized image of a world hostile to man. The poem had a strong influence on R. Kipling and gave impetus to the creation of one of the most important literary works of the 20th century - “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot. For the Russian reader, Thomson's poem is a missing link in urban poetry of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries (C. Baudelaire, E. Verhaerne, G. Heim). The book publishes the first complete translation of the poem into Russian.