The City of Dreadful Night is a long poem by the Scottish poet James "B.V." Thomson, written between 1870 and 1873, and published in the National Reformer in 1874, then, in 1880, in a book entitled The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems. The poem is noted for the pessimistic philosophy that it expresses. It has been argued that the city described in the poem is based on London.