Victorian Poetry

JOHN LUCAS

Follio (1863) and translated into English in 1891 - was, as George L.
Mosse observes, "one of the principal sources of inspiration for Degenera-
tion." 39 Mosse usefully remarks that at the heart of Lombroso's argument
is the belief that "a man's mode of feeling and his conduct of life are
determined by his physical constitution which is reflected in his bodily
structure... The human being was conceived as a unity - both in himself
and with his environment - on the basis of physical, determinate factors"
(xx). The qualities that Watson claimed were "strenuous and virile"
support the kind of sanity that in Lombroso's view resists all of the factors
of modern life that make for degenerate types. Building on Lombroso's
work, Nordau insists that degeneration is both a feature and consequence
of the modern city - a place whose "atmosphere" is "charged with organic
detritus" (35).

IV

But during the later years of the nineteenth century it is of course the city
that becomes the focus for much imaginative writing, including poetry.
Fletcher makes this point extremely well in his discussion of lyric poets of
the century's last two decades: "The idiom is nocturnal... shifting colours
and lights, ladies of pleasure, music halls, the Cafe Royal. The influence
comes from Whistler and [Walter] Sickert rather than from the French
Impressionist painters, but the poets themselves write as if they were all
eye, abstaining at their best from moral comment... Any attempt to sense
the city as a total organism or to search for some transcendental signifi-
cance is now simply abandoned" (xix-xx). Fletcher rightly wishes to
contrast this fin-de-siecle response to the city with that of James Thomson
("B.V."), whose urban epic The City of Dreadful Night (1874) voices a
more considered, thoroughgoing pessimism - if not nihilism - in the way
that it registers alienation as the condition of city living.

That this was indeed how the city felt to many writers, and had indeed
done so from the late eighteenth century on, has often been noted. What is
new in Thomson's remarkable poem is its sense of the city as fit image of a
purposeless universe. In the 1790s, William Blake had radical politics and
his own version of God to oppose to the horrors of man-made London. By
comparison, Wordsworth had God and the natural world. Dickens, far and
away the greatest of all writers about the city, had a sense of community -
community endlessly defeated, it is true, but just as endlessly reasserting
itself. Yet for Thomson "the bitter old and wrinkled truth" is one "Stripped
naked of all vesture that beguiles, / False dreams, false hopes, false masks
and modes of youth." 40 Although Thomson represents "The City of

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