James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night and the Forms of Secularist Congregation

James Thomson’s secularist poem The City of Dreadful Night, serialized in four parts in the National Reformer from March 1874 to May 1874, includes narrative and formal elements that exhibit what Michel de Certeau terms a “logical tact” or “ceaseless creativity” through which the poet balanced radical openness with a congregational impulse. While members of various religious denominations could meet in designated spaces of worship, secularist publications were necessarily peripatetic since they had little expectation of a physical “home” and were largely reliant on a virtual congregation. In this essay, I argue that Thomson’s City illustrates how the radically unstable spaces of secularist publications mobilized a productive tension between alliance and rupture in order to construct a sense of community and to embrace productive epistemological fractures.